Social media and social networks are an incredibly popular way to communicate and connect with people. Ever since the birth of Facebook, there has been several powerful social networks that sprouted up, and each network offers different services and tools tailored to how people communicate. The latest social network evolved from Google, the search powerhouse we are all so familiar with, and it is called Google Plus.
This relatively new social network is catching a lot of buzz as of late, and here’s a few reasons why.

5 Reasons Google+ Is a Great Social Network

1. The Circle function. Instead of posting to all of your contacts, you can cater different links and posted to different groups of people. It’s a tool for precise communication to your followers or clients, VIPs, or any group name you want. Up to 10 different ones.
2. As far as businesses go, people can only follow you if they search for you and find you. This could be seen as a deficit, but can also mean that people who are following your Google+ page are genuinely making an effort to follow and will probably stay up to date with the page and its updates.
3. The ‘Hang out’ feature. Google+ offers video chat with up to ten people at the same time. No other social media is currently doing this. You can also group chat from your mobile device, which isn’t possible with facebook or twitter.
4. Content searching is fast and easy. Since Google runs Google+, you can search for anything right from the site. There is no need to search find it in someone else’s shares, only to be linked to another site. There is an embedded YouTube search link on the right hand side of the page. This makes any type of search quick, easy, and effective.
5. When you verify your business page, you get a check mark next to your name, and Google search gives preference to pages that have been verified. You can verify your page by proving that it has a brand website. There is a great tutorial here: http://www.virante.com/blog/2011/11/15/how-to-verify-your-google-brand-page-with-google/

This really is a matter of opinion. Our opinion here at Snap In Media is yes, and here’s why.

After years of trying different looks with various sites of our own, we have found that a website that is graphically appealing has positive results. For one, it can help reduce your bounce rate, as people tend to stay on a site that is pleasing to the eye.

You stand out above your competitors. And you will have people complimenting the look as they talk with others. All of the above are positives in our book.

Having your company logo above the fold on your site is important for brand recognition, and using social buttons whenever applicable are good to use if trying to make connections on a larger scale.

You may want to avoid putting too many distractions on a site; this could potentially lead to distractions that unintentionally will make viewers go elsewhere. We have found modern, crisp, clean graphics work well on informational sites, business sites and educational sites.

As mentioned at the beginning, this is a matter of opinion, due to the fact that depending on the topic of your content; a lot of graphics may be what works best for your audience.

Whatever your needs may be, we have the expertise in-house to help you create the design you need, the feel you want, and the concepts needed to keep bringing clients to your site for the first time or back for more!

Please feel free to contact us now to provide a Free analysis on your site, offering solutions to your graphic needs!

In the online world, keywords have always been an important function for your website’s content. Without keywords, it can be a really difficult process to make your site visible to search engines and customers that might be searching for your business. If you are trying to bring in more business to your company, having a website is a great first step, but it’s not the end of the process. Without keywords, having an online presence will not be as helpful. Without keywords, you will probably only have website visitors from people who already know about your company’s website. Keywords can help you bring in more traffic to your site, and if they like what they see, you will find that you get more customers to support your business.

However, keywords are not a cure-all. Overloading your site with keywords will not help your customer market find your site. In fact, this strategy can sometimes even hurt your website’s ability to draw in visitors. The important thing to keep in mind is to provide relevant content based on what your customers are searching for, and to keep these keywords scattered throughout the content on your site, in appropriate proportion. You don’t want to have a webpage where every other word is a keyword.

When you have content that is focused a little more around keywords that customers may be using to search for your business, it also makes the search engines like Google and Yahoo more aware of the content on your site. When your content is relevant, reliable and consistent, it will strengthen your content in the eyes of the search engines. As a result, your site will become indexed higher in the search results, making it easier for customers to find.

Having good keywords also helps customers relate to or understand the product or service your company provides. For example, you would not use the keyword phrase “boating equipment” if you are a seafood restaurant! Customers who are looking for businesses online are constantly trying to find places that are relevant to what they are searching for. Basically, if you say that your business offers one thing, but you don’t actually provide that product, customers will feel misled. The best strategy is to find several keywords that are specifically related to your business and the service or products you provide, and use these keywords to draw in customers to your website that are looking for a company just like yours.

Another benefit to choosing the right keywords is that it is an excellent way to link to other webpages, both within and outside of your site. You can link to other pages on your site that talk about a related topic, or you can link to an external site that is a good informational resource for your customers to have.

The moral of the story is: choose your keywords wisely. Whatever type of business you are, there are plenty of keywords that can help you promote your company more and help you build a stronger online presence that will bring in more local customers.

Email is one of the most reliable ways to build lasting customer relations around your product or service. Although technology and the ability to share information has evolved immensely over the years with platforms like Twitter and Facebook, email can be just as effective with your customers.

In order for your business to get the most return on email marketing, there are a few things to keep in mind that will strengthen your campaigns so you can build and grow your company. Here are 5 simple tips towards effective Email marketing for your small business.

5 Email Marketing Tips For Small Businesses:

• Spelling- This is one of the most basic  areas email marketing that is imperative to grasp, but it is also the area where it is easy to make mistakes. Any misspellings, grammatical errors, or HTML coding errors in an email can negatively influence your readers, especially with blatant errors. Make sure to check, double check, and check again that the email message is perfect before blasting it out.
• Design- Email marketing not only has to have good content for your readers, but it also has to look appealing. It is very important to carry over any branding or graphics from your company and incorporate them into your email so that your readers make the connection immediately that the email was sent from your company.
• Punctuality- Respond and react to your customers through email right away. Customers see that you are actually interacting through email, not just sending a bunch of spam that you hope they will read. The more you stay on top of email marketing, the more effective it will be.
• Testing- Nothing is more embarrassing than sending an email out to a contact list with over 5,000 contacts, only to find out that the email looks like a finger painting from a preschooler. Make sure all parts of the email function correctly by running a few tests. Send the email to yourself and click through all the links. Oh, and then test it again.
• Ask Questions- You have the ability to capture valuable information from your customers using email. You can find out what the customers like seeing in every email, or not. You can even find out what products sell best through email marketing, or you can even find out which day of the week is best to send emails. Ask your customers questions and grow your contact list even more.

Email marketing can be a complex matter, but by sticking to the basics, you will be able to confidently market to your customers in a way that they will respond to. Get creative with your email marketing and find out which parts of the email work best for your company. As soon as you find what works, your email contact list will practically grow on its own.

With the start of the New Year comes the start of new plans for your business. Social media is becoming increasingly popular among large corporations and small businesses alike. Currently Facebook has a user base of 800 million and people are sending an average of 200 million tweets per day through Twitter. That is enough to make a book with 10 million pages of tweets. So whether big or small, it’s important to have your foot inside the marketing arena to reach not only your consumers but partners and other businesses as well.

There are 5 ways to ensure that social media with take your business to the next level.

1.  Know your demographic- In Colorado, Fort Collins specifically, there is a wide range of demographics. Anywhere from the college student, the young family, avid outdoorsman or middle-aged businessman. All these demographics seem to use social media, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, it’s important to know who you are reaching out to. By using analytics programs to measure who is buying or interested in your product, where they are from, what kind of money they have to spend and how often they buy, you are likely to get a much more accurate idea of what groups to target.
2. Hire a social media person- No more than two or three years ago the idea of hiring a person on your staff to sit around on a computer and play on Facebook and Twitter, seemed not only like a waste of money but also a wasted effort. Today with 1 in 3 people in the world being active on social media, this is your time to reach corner of the world and people you never thought you could. By hiring a person to directly manage social media will save uninterested parties a lot of time and it will keep your social media fresh, exciting and interactive.
3. Realize Social Media is BIG Business-Years ago, when Myspace first launched followed by Facebook and Twitter seemed to be superficial outlets for hormonal teenagers to gossip and flirt without being face-to-face. Now businesses have started to catch onto the social networking phenomenon, by realizing that your local business can reach the same people large corporations can, people will flock to businesses pages in search of information, coupons, updates and links.
4. 140 Characters or Less- Twitter, which is considered micro-blogging, updates consumers, businesses and competitors with your information in 140 characters or less (including spaces!). People are busy; they don’t have time to read pages full of information so it’s important to start to de-clutter your information, making it concise and easy to read.
5. Fresh and Regular Exposure- The key to making social media so successful is to update it regularly. Pages that lack constant updating and interaction with fans; tend to lack credibility as well. Make sure that the social media person you hire stays consistent with updates and interactions with fans that keeps people interested and wanting to come back.

Interaction, exposure and credibility come with time, and what better time than a fresh start and a new year to get your company recognized as a social media mogul.

Technology is running rampant across local businesses who are striving to develop an online presence to capture more business. Many small businesses struggle to decide which tools and services they should use to represent their business online, but the fact is there is no single answer. A wide variety of online tools and resources are available for little to no cost to your business, and can drastically improve your online presence in little time.

The tools and resources that are available online are capable of accomplishing a wide spectrum of tasks including billing and reporting, lead generation, email, accounting, social media, and all the way up to ordering snacks for the office. So which tools are essential for your small business?

5 Essential Online Tools and Resources:

Gmail:
Google’s Gmail is an incredibly versatile, free e-mail application that provides more than enough storage space, seamless integration into your web search, and can be accessed remotely (from smartphone, tablet, or remote desktop). Gmail is also very handy if you have to create several online accounts. For example you can use your Gmail address to sign up for the resources below.

YouTube:
The customers you would like to reach online love to watch and interact with video. With YouTube, you can broadcast your product or service with video to give your customers a chance to get a visual perspective of your product or service. This type of interaction around your brand creates a huge impact on your customers, and it’s free.

Twitter:
Word of mouth is an extremely powerful resource to have in your arsenal for both marketing and customer service purposes. Give your customers a more inviting way to access your customer service using Twitter. Twitter allows instantaneous interaction and feedback between you and your customers, word-of-mouth marketing, online promotion. Twitter is also free to use.

Google Docs:
Staying organized online is extremely important as your customer base begins to build. Google Docs allows you to store and access online documents all in one place. You can also share these documents with both your clients and employees, so that business runs smoothly and you are all on the same page.

Google Analytics:
When developing an online presence for your small business, it is important to measure and record which efforts pay off, and which do not. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful resource online that allows you to track and record even the most finite changes to your website. Sign up with a Gmail account and this free program will do wonders for your website.

These 5 essential tools and resources for your business online are just a few of the many resources that will help you do what you do best. If you need help getting started with building your business’ presence online, give us a call today and we will have you up and running in no time.

We know the “Print Screen” button.  The button located on the top towards the right hand side of the keyboard. Press the button to capture what is on your screen.  Once the screen is captured, you need to paste into a document editor (like Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint) or photo editor (like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Paint) and save it as a image. In the editor, you can add text or graphical annotation to describe or explain the image.

Simple, right?  But what if you want to get an image that contains an entire web page of the website?  To do that with “Print Screen” button is possible, but you would need to press “Print Screen” and paste several times into the editor.  The hardest part is lining up the screen prints and cropping all the screen prints to the correct size in the editor.

An easier way is to use an extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Chrome called “FireShot”.  There is a free version and a pro version. You can download FireShot from their website.  Once downloaded, a FireShot icon (a red square with the letter “S”)  is displayed near the address bar of your web browser.  Click on the icon dropdown menu to capture the entire page or what is visible.  From the dropdown submenu, you can choose to save as one of the following file formats, PDF, PNG, GIF, JPEG, and BMP, or you can copy or open it in FireShot editor to add text and graphics.  Voila! Your entire web screenshot!

If you want the pro version, all you have to do is to click “FS Pro!” icon in the FireShot menu bar.  The advantages of the pro version are that it has a multi-editor interface, unlimited undo, project saves, image hosting engine uploads, printing, and more.  You can try Fireshot Pro free for 30-days.  If you don’t want to pay for the FireShot Pro, the program will switch into the free version in 30 days.  The free version is really sufficient for most needs.

To learn more about FireShot, visit the web address below:

http://www.screenshot-program.com/fireshot

Scribe is a plugin that you can install on your WordPress website to help you optimize your content for the search engines. If your content is optimized for certain targeted keywords, you can begin to rank higher in the search engines so that more online users are able to find your website when they type in those keywords. This is a huge help if your market is specific to a certain local area, since online users looking for your business or service will likely enter the local city or region.

If you are new to SEO, Scribe is a great tool for beginners to learn a little more about how it works. While it is no substitute for a person who specializes in SEO services, it is a good way to learn a little about how the search engines find the content on your site, and how you can make it easier for your local customer base to find your business online.

Once you have installed the Scribe plugin on your site, you can begin learning how to best utilize it. Scribe works best with content that is within their parameters, for example, a page or post with content should be at least 300 words in length, and there should be a link included for every 150 or so words of content. But there is more to your content than that, and Scribe knows it. It also tracks your in-text keywords and the SEO Details and Additional Style text that you enter in the text boxes below your page or post content. The Custom Title Tag and Meta Description must be filled in for Scribe to be able to search your page.

The best thing about Scribe is that it has guidelines to point you in the right direction. It tells you how many characters of text are best to use for the SEO Details and Additional Style sections, and when Scribe runs, it gives you a report that shows green checkmarks when you have correctly met all of the optimal SEO recommendations for this particular page.

If you have any “errors” in your content, based on Scribe’s SEO recommendations, it tells you what they are and how to fix them. Scribe is a great resource to help you find which keywords are found in your content, tags that can help users find your content, and other SEO details you may not have thought of which will help your webpage get indexed and found more by local customers using the search engines.

Scribe helps you:

1. Learn which keywords you use and which alternatives you may want to use to reach your target market
2. Optimize your content based on keywords and search practices so local customers can find your business
3. Understand the general SEO recommendations for your content through a few simple guidelines

With Scribe, you can learn how best to target your local customers using keywords that they might search. Scribe can’t automatically fix your SEO for you, but it is a great tool to help point you in the right direction!

When appealing to a local market, it is important to create a sense of relevancy and connection with your market. The quickest and easiest way to do this is through the use of local imagery.

Shop owners should take an exterior picture of their building, be sure to include some of the surroundings. Service providers, take pictures of your employees interacting with customers; there is a good chance that people will recognize those customers or that the customer themselves will let their immediate social circles know that they are on a website, which is free advertisement and promotion at its finest.

Adding local pictures shows your market that you are a part of their community, and that you acknowledge that their community is also a part of your business. This relationship is key to building your customer base. It makes you seem more trustworthy and dependable, like the neighbor next door that is able and willing to help them out.

If you are a new company and you don’t have a logo yet, have your designer try adding some local elements into your logo.

Things to add:

• Geographic landmarks that are unique to your area and popular with the community and tourists.

• Historic buildings that are both prized in that community and relevant to your business. Don’t have that historic old bank in your logo when you own a landscaping company. Also make sure that there isn’t a conflict of interest in reproducing said building, or any legal issues.

• Local animals or plants that the local area has a history with or an affinity for.

The main thing is to do your homework on the local community, and market yourself as a part of that community.

The hardest part of this is to fully embrace that community–don’t just slap the local flower in your logo and throw some pictures of your building on a website and think it will all work out. Once this approach is started, to get the full effect, there needs to be an interaction with the community to build the sense that you care about the local market and that they need to care about your business.

In today’s technology-filled world, social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) has become something more than an online hobby or cure for boredom. Social media has evolved to become an incredibly important mode of communication across the globe. So why is this important for your company?

If your company has an online presence, there’s a good chance that people will see and interact with your company. With social media, you have a direct channel of communication where you can provide feedback, resolve issues, and offer further services.

Here Are 5 Ways Your Small Business Can Benefit From Social Media:

•    Customer Service & Feedback- Strengthen your product or service by providing timely customer service and personal feedback that your customers will respond to. Put the customer at the forefront of customer service.
•    Promotional Opportunity- Social media attracts the eyes of millions of people who are looking for ways to save money and find great deals. Put out a few offers and discover a whole new channel of customers.
•    Branding- Your brand has potential you might not know about! Social media allows for a more visual and interactive experience around your brand, which might reveal even more value and purpose for your customers.
•    Accessibility- Your customers are searching for you online via search engines, social media, and blogs. Why not make your product or service as easy as possible to access?
•    It’s REAL! – Automated responses?!?! No way! Social media is real people, with real words, real ideas, real experiences, and above all, real feelings. Give your company and your customers a place to communicate with each other. It works!

Social media is a fantastic communication tool for your product or service. No, social media is not a cure-all marketing strategy or a complete business solution. It is simply a valuable tool that provides you and your customers with a voice.

Join the conversation, or start one! Strengthen your small business’s online presence with social media for the simple benefit of communication.

Contact us today, and we’ll set you up with social media and help you build a better online presence!