Facebook Becoming A Good Social Media Strategy For Businesses

Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 6, 2007

Most of you already heard the news, Facebook has opened its profiles to search engine indexing. What does this mean? Your profile will start showing up in the search engine listings for certain keywords. If you have a Myspace profile, you will find it indexed mostly by the name you choose as your domain, such as Myspace.com/nameyouchoose.

Myspace still dominates in my mind as far as building a profile for your business and spreading the word, but Facebook is slowly getting there. This was a big step in the process.

David Wilson from Social-Media-Optimization has a good post titled, “8 Reasons to Start Using Facebook For Business Today.” Facebook is the social media networking site with the most information on its users and if you choose to run a campaign through Facebook itself, campaigns can be highly targeted. We’ve also seen the same with Myspace campaigns where ads are targeted based on Race, Location, etc.

The growth of Facebook in the past 3-6 months has been incredible. Apps have changed the face of the site and has generated such a big buzz with users that Facebook has become the largest player in the social media space next to Myspace.

I have a friend that has a dealership and started putting his cars in the “marketplace” section of the site, and sure enough, messages began to come through asking about the cars. Just another avenue for marketing his product. Like any other site, if you get creative, you can make it work for you.

FireFox Becoming a Contextual Advertising Hazard?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 5, 2007

Looking at my analytics trend for the past couple of months, the Firefox browser has gained tremendous momentum vs. the explorer browser.

[Source: http://ff.asbjorn.it/pages/dlgraph.php]

Firefox has come out with a plugin called Adblock Plus. What does this do? Basically it will block out ads, and more importantly to many of us, block contextual advertising ads such as Adsense.

If the New York Times reports about AdBlock, than it has to have some meaning, atleast to the company it may affect most…Google.

“For now, however, the big players have decided to ignore the phenomenon. Neither Google nor CNN.com, for example, would comment on ad-blocking programs, which can also be added to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. (The Internet Explorer add-ons are not necessarily free and do not necessarily work as seamlessly as Adblock Plus working with the open-source Firefox browser.)

Wladimir Palant, developer of the open-source Adblock Plus project, wrote in an e-mail message that he had not heard anything from large companies like Google, because, he suspects, the program “isn’t popular enough yet. Attacking it would be a waste of time for these companies.” He estimated there were 2.5 million users of Adblock Plus around the world.

“The numbers are rising steadily,” he wrote, adding that his figures do not “show exponential growth any more (luckily, the server has limited traffic), but there are still 300,000 to 400,000 new users each month.”

“Link Baiting” Offline

Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 4, 2007

You haven’t become a serious online marketer until all you can see, hear, and breath is marketing ideas online as well as offline. I’m not sure if this is the right title for this post, but as a web marketer, I’ve given an idea to apply a strategy I use online, offline.

Before the long Labor Day weekend, my brother and I got the idea to go surf up north somewhere and needed to find out the surf report for a certain city in the north of Florida. I called the surf report here down south but they had no information on the north of Florida.

A friend of mine opened up a skate/surf shop in Palm Beach, Florida and always looking for new ways to not only drive traffic, but keep the customers coming and checking out the new merchandise in the store. It got me thinking…how can you bait the people back besides the traditional forms of marketing? What service can you provide them to keep them coming back or checking out/keeping up-to-date with new merchandise, etc.?

A SURF REPORT. It’s simple as 1,2,3. The surf report can also be found online (I just found a good website while doing this research) but most everyone calls their local shop for the surf-cast. Have a line just for the surf report, leave it every morning, and have start promoting that number around town for the locals. Now, even other local surf shops since they don’t provide that service, will tell customers about the new surf report in town.

Ever since Friday he has been telling everyone at the store that a new surf report will be available soon and the feedback has been amazing for him so far.

If you have an offline business, try to come up with a service that’s free of charge for ANYONE (not just customers) that can find it useful and use it…and the word will spread.