If Facebook and Twitter weren’t doing a good enough job for you, then you have another social media platform to jump on. Google has now entered the realm that is social media and with their own version of it. Is it better? I can’t truly say, but it is different in its own right. They didn’t necessarily change social media the way Facebook did, but they did incorporate a more personal feeling and intimacy.

At first glance it may seem that Google stole Facebook’s ideas and just renamed them as their own. They probably did, but they won’t admit it. Since Facebook is the social media giant, you have to incorporate some of their attractiveness into your own version of social media in order to gain any users. Google did this with Google Plus. However, there is a difference in how you interact with friends, co-workers, and random acquaintances you may have. Instead of having a mass of friends anywhere between 100 and a couple thousand all viewing your page and updates, you can now limit each person to what they see; and it doesn’t require you to manually change everyone’s privacy settings for your page.

Google Plus built its entire site around the idea of circles. These circles are based off of the friend groups that you already have established in your social life. Now you can organize your closest friends into a circle, your family into a circle, and other professionals that you may associate with into another circle. This way you can share whatever you didn’t want your parents to know with just your friends, and then the professionals don’t see it either and you aren’t kicked out of your profession for something ridiculous.

It is almost a social hierarchy. The most important people in your favorite circle and those you hardly know but want to keep around so that it looks like you have more friends, in a larger but less acquainted circle. Its about who you want, where you want them, and what you want to share with them.

If you are an organizing guru then you will most likely enjoy Google Plus, because that’s exactly what it provides you with. This is just another way for Google to take over the Internet and keep a hand in everything you do on the Internet. If you are like me, you will want to take advantage of every force in the social media world. When you’re in the business of social media marketing you want to do everything you can to tell the world all about your clients. I think Google Plus is the next big weapon in the world of internet marketing.

In a world of war, turmoil and insecurity, if there are three things that people need the most, these would be God, human connection and resources. The interactivity that social media allows for provides some of the most basic human needs to be spiritually met.

Social media in churches is not new, but it is rapidly growing.  Some even say that the concept of social media originated in, and was developed by, the Catholic Church. The theory is that churches focused their teachings around social communications to reach many who use new media to spread the good news and be positively affected.

Perhaps religion best demonstrates how the role of social media in the world has transformed how the church should engage and participate in all forms of media. It appears that not only has the church been active in using, adapting and exploring modern communication technologies for a while, but that the concept of social media for churches seemed to predict the current usage of the term ’social media’.

It’s a trend that the religious populations of churches worldwide absolutely cannot miss. The social media opportunities for churches has soared post millennium. During the work times in America and many other nations across the world, individuals and businesses are relying more heavily on social media in order to function and cope.

Amidst natural disasters and other threats, the evolution of social media in churches has come to symbolize hope and support. The network among worshipers offers a sign of unity and progress – that we will survive and life will improve. Active social media in churches sends out a message that there is a helpful and prominent presence at work, and enjoying the benefits doesn’t depend on going to a building on Sunday.

Through a variety of social media networks, churches can update parishioners and reach out to new ones. It can also share what upcoming charity events are being offered by a local parish, or if a particular local parish has a youth group, or what thoughts the minister offered at today’s Mass celebration.

For certain periods on the Christian calendar, social media for churches can mention when the next holy day is, and what its significance is. It can say if there is a particular prayer or biblical passage that Christians should keep in mind during particularly challenging times. Using social media, churches can answer any “God” questions.

Written by Shane Nasby

The world of the internet has its own language and trying to learn it and find your way around can be a challenging task. Unless you are a teenager or a computer freak, chances are you will be completely in the dark about most terminology used.

A perfect example is WordPress. Released in 2003, this is a program used in the writing of blogs (or web logs) on the internet.  For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, it is a website, often interactive, which is used by an individual to make comments or commentaries on various topics. Blogging is thought to have started as long ago as 1994, with people putting their daily diaries online. Nowadays, they are used for numerous purposes, including obtainment of feedback or links to other sites.

Wordpress is what is known in the internet world as a blogging tool, and it is a fairly advanced one. All the user basically needs to do is write the article or blog and WordPress will do the rest for them. It has many features such as a link manager, which assists in creating links to other web pages. It also enables other users to post comments on your blog site.

Bloggers also have ways of connecting their blog site with another, by way of a system which lets their post appear as a teaser with a link on another blogger’s site. This is open to abuse in that anyone can post a completely unconnected comment and link on your site, just for the purpose of creating that link. This is known as comment spam and WordPress has tools that can help combat this. WordPress also has a feature that enables you to email your post directly to your blog instead of having to enter it on the site.

For those starting out in blogging WordPress would seem to have all you would need to start a blogging site from scratch, starting with a web page design and layout. There are hundreds of themes to choose from which effect the presentation and look of your website and you can use these to customize your site to suit your needs. The program guides you through a step by step process of how to set up individual pages, posts, archives and categories, and how to receive comments if you want. It explains how to manage all aspects of your site and how to add new features or change its appearance.

Blogging is a critical aspect to a quality social media marketing campaign. I would highly suggest using a blogging platform such as WordPress and it will make your life much easier. And if you really want to make your life easy, you could always outsource social media and hire a blogging service to do everything for you.

I’m always looking for ways to help market my Social Media Marketing services. Thumbtack is a good way for me to help me share my knowledge and experience in Internet marketing, social media, and web design. Check out my listing to learn even more about what I do!

The question is, how many people have heard of Myspace? It’s a social networking site that was launched in 2003 by various members of an internet marketing company, who were already members of another networking site themselves. They saw the potential, and due to their experience and knowledge, had little trouble in setting up the new site. It is based in California and owned by a large media network. It was in fact the most popular networking site in the United States from 2006 until 2008, constantly beating all its competitors.

In 2006 Myspace launched a UK version to try to get into the UK music scene, which was successful. They have since done the same in China and other countries. The site has continued to stick to its focus on the entertainment and music industry, building an audience around this. Consequently they attracted many teenage members, and this was a contributory factor to their decline in membership starting in 2008. Their competitors such as Facebook were developing sites that were easier to use and aimed towards the general population, thereby attracting more age groups and users.

In an attempt to win back popularity, Myspace stopped trying to compete with the other sites and instead promoted itself as a social entertainment website, going as far as to provide links with the other networks’ sites. It has completely redesigned its look and has provided more categories on the site. In common with other networking sites users can create profiles, find or add friends, belong to groups or communities who share the same interests, and keep updated on events and news. One disadvantage of Myspace seems to be that users can actually create their own pages, even inexperienced web users. This has caused problems on the site, causing it to freeze often. However, all networking sites have had security problems at some time.

Myspace is therefore a more specialized social network site used mostly by teenagers, musicians and other artists. Many people who signed up for MySpace in its early days have since either closed their account or simply do not use it. They have instead gone over to other network sites that provide a broader range of opportunities. It would appear that the number of MySpace users is considerably less than its major rival, and in the beginning of 2011 it was put up for sale. Whether in this age of ever-changing fads it is dead, is another question.

Regardless of the social media site. Savvy Giraffe will always be ahead of the game! If something is deemed “dead” you can bet we’ll already be gone. If you hire Savvy for your social media marketing, you never have to worry about where to spend your time.

In this day and age, the internet is used by millions of people throughout the world. Most of us are fairly proficient in surfing the net to find the information we need, but that is as far as we go. For most internet users, this tool is a wonderful, magical thing that we couldn’t do without, but we have absolutely no idea how it really works.

There is so much terminology involved in the world of the internet that learning it can seem like trying to learn a whole new language. There is a world of words out there that have absolutely no meaning to the average internet user.

One such example is “backlink”, also known as inbound link, incoming link, inward link and inlink. As indicated by its name this is a manner of linking one website with another. It is basically any link received back to a web page from another web page. It is a great marketing tool as a link in. For example, website x can lead directly to your own website, hence directing more visitors there.

Most of us do actually know what a search engine is – you use it for looking up something you want to know and the search engine finds as many sites as possible that contain the words you entered into it. The use of backlinks to a site is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Companies try and get as many backlinks to their site as possible, sometimes even using links on sites that are totally unconnected with them or their line of business. The important thing for them is the link, as this is what leads the internet user to their site.

Search engines have a system of ranking. They send out what are called spiders or bots to search around the net for links to a site. The more links the site has, the more important the search engine assumes it is, and it will therefore appear higher in the ranking than other sites. We all know that when enter search words into a search engine and the results come up, we usually click on the sites that appear at the top of the page first and then work our way down the page. Obviously if a company is trying to get clients, they want their site at the top of the list above their competitors, hence the more backlinks they have the higher up they will rank, and the more visitors they will get.

Image is everything in today’s brand culture. Everybody wants to stand out and dazzle their audiences with a brilliant, slick look with high visibility and mass appeal.

There are times to budget safely and there are times when budgets should be blown. Figuring out what to pay for web design is one of those moments to consider breaking the bank a bit. After all, your website is the experience that people will have of you, your business or your cause. It’s an investment with a long shelf life.

Pricing and billing structures will differ from one designer to the next. However, a reliable rule of thumb is to give the service provider an outline of your required base work and then a list of your upgrades, adjusting along the way to suit the purpose of your website.

There is also the option of paying per hour, but most talented and professional web designers are less inclined to go this route. An easy to justify payment structure for web design often works out best for both the clients and the web designer, ultimately.

Once both parties have agreed to a base rate and sketched out the volume and quality of work to be undertaken, draw up clear spreadsheets and begin scheduling every upgrade and programming modules. The initial price should include the static template graphic design, HTML coding and CSS, content for a few static pages, basic search engine functions, and perhaps a blog. Later, you can include shopping carts and flash headers as upgrades after standard development.

Deciding on what to pay for web design also brings up the issue of piecemeal work which most of the good designers avoid. Although a website is often developed in stages, pay-by-piece jobs can create mind-numbing duties tasks that eat away time, creativity and productivity. Avoid trying to take over an already-established website which you want a designer to simply spruce up and upgrade. It hardly ever works.

Don’t spend too much time wracking your brain over payment processes and pricing structures. Keep it simple. A good web designer, whose services you are willing to pay well for, will win your business because of desirability. Price is seldom what influences a client’s final decision in the selection process. Professionalism, good organization and an appropriate product design are what score points.

Savvy Giraffe offers sharp websites for a low monthly fee. The ability to pay a monthly rate is very useful for small businesses. Just fill out our contact form and we’ll help you figure out a solution that works within your allotted budget.

There’s a bunch of useful literature on what to pay for web design. Get some and understand the ethical and payments guidelines better. Many cover pricing structures for a simple identity web design, as well as acceptable industry practices.

Being able to track, monitor and optimize interactions with one’s customers is one of the most outstanding advantages of using Facebook for business. Remarketing is a superb example of how it is possible to use information from previous interactions with consumers to maximise return on investment.

Utilizing Facebook as a business tool will allow a business to survive and thrive for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that advertisers all over the world increasingly transferring money from their print and television budgets and reallocating them to online advertising. The digital world offers a low barrier to entry. Online postings are often affordable and based on a proven model. Facebook offers a host of benefits for business brand advertising over offline media, including the ability to engage with consumers at a more intimate level and the measurability it offers.

Modern thinkers and innovators in the world will all tell you the same: Facebook is definitely now a viable solution for business because the very foundation of business is relationships—business requires social networking. Commerce is alive, humming and social, and that’s precisely what Facebook is about. It’s a match made in heaven.

Facebook has certainly evolved along with the time and new business practices. However, most people in online communities still incorrectly make a distinction between banner postings and rich media advertising. What they overlook is that display adverts are able to contain a range of rich media elements, including audio, video and Flash. Furthermore, we are witnessing evidence of the technology for targeted ads and measuring their performance – all the while improving, and performing at optimal levels. As a result, business through Facebook looks vibrant and promising.

With an experienced Facebook expert at the helm of your Facebook business page, you can fast-track your company’s growth by creating scripts to facilitate the actions required by people ‘liking’ business pages. This way, your business will increase sales, accumulate ‘likes,’ increase customer requests, and improve the viral appeal of its Facebook business page, and assist the businesses to succeed online.

Facebook is an inexpensive direct response media with plenty of opportunities for businesses to run spectacular and lucrative brand campaigns, too – significant online advertising at its best.

Twitter is actually extremely simple in its ideology but has remarkably powerful applications.  The public is only starting to tap into Twitter’s potential.  Twitter, in effect, is micro-blogging with the capabilities of being a social messaging service, a business tool, a marketing utility, news reporting service, an event coordinator as well as anything else you can think of.  It can be used by a family to keep in touch, by the media to keep people informed, by a company to coordinate business as well as by a writer who wants to build a fan base. Twitter is one of the top used platforms for social media marketing.

Micro-blogging is a quick update on a particular subject or person that contains an extremely limited number of characters.  Twitter utilizes 140 characters.  It has been designed for people who want to blog but don’t want a blog.  Personal blogs have extremely reliable benefits but not everyone wants to commit an hour of their time writing and then posting a beautiful blog about an event that has happened in their life, which instead could be summed up in Twitter’s 140 character spectrum. Twitter is a great tool for promoting blogs for business as well.

Twitter as Social Networking

Even though Twitter did begin as a micro-blogging service, it has grown exponentially into being more than just a simple tool to express quick status updates.  Even though it’s not the full explanation, one viewpoint is that Twitter is a cross between instant messaging and blogging. Twitter enables people to have followers as well as follow people and with Twitter’s relatively new capability of cell phone interaction, it has become the quintessential social messaging tool.  It is particularly handy for quickly communicating a message to a large group of people. It’s great for internet advertising purposes.

Twitter as a News Reporting Device

Traditional media outlets are beginning to accept Twitter as a comprehensive media tool for the extension of news virtually throughout the world.  Compared to a blog, Twitter is extremely fast and more immediate.  Turn on any news reporting source in this digital world and the ticker seen at the bottom of the screen is either a Tweet or a Twitter-type message. Traditional media is using Twitter to send their message into digital media.

Twitter Within the Social Media Market

Twitter, in all of its forms, has become exceedingly popular for social media marketing.  This new form of transmitting a message to a massive amount of people has been used successively for many applications, such as by President Obama throughout his campaign.  Also, everyone from movie stars to magazines can use Twitter as a quick way to connect with an audience.

So, Where did Twitter’s Popularity Come From?

One of the main reasons people like to Tweet is because the 140 character limit can be liberating in itself since writing blog entries can consume an immense amount of time.  Also, this limit lends itself to quick thoughts which may not justify a full blog entry.  The only negative to this is that 140 characters force a person to focus their thoughts and write succinctly. Twitter has become so popular throughout the world because it is an immediate source of information for the prevailing technologically advanced world.  It is micro-blogging at its finest in that it allows people to keep up with others’ ideas in the shortest amount of time possible.

Without brand identity or a comprehensive logo, it would be impossible for people to distinguish between the millions of companies out there. Of course, most people have very strong opinions concerning their favorite brands. Studies have shown that these opinions are more based on emotion than on rationality. People will end up forming emotional attachments with their favorite brands while often dismissing better services and products for businesses with higher brand or logo recognition and visibility.

In fact, some brands become interchangeable with a product and a customer will begin to recognize the product as a whole by its brand name (i.e. Xerox, Kleenex).

A powerful identifying marker is extremely important for a company because consumers find it easier to recall images rather than text. The logo will represent the entire company and will be identified with more easily than having thousands of words describe the company. Consider Savvy Giraffe when choosing a logo design firm.

A logo is not a businesses identity, nor does it define its brand. Branding, identity design and logo design each has their own distinctive roles, combining to form an image for a product or a business. What is the difference between a business logo, identity and brand? Essentially: A logo identifies a business, using a specific icon or mark in a simplistic and easily recognizable matter. An identity uses visual aspects to form the overall brand. A brand is the emotional image that a business is perceived to be as a whole. The foremost image of a company is its brand. Even though branding is more complicated as a whole, it is basically a personality that is shaped by audience perception. Typically a brand further simplified, is a corporate image.

The concept behind a corporate image is that everything a company produces, owns and does should reflect the aims and values of the business. Consistencies in a companys values are important because it drives the company itself and shows what it stands for. A brand will never just be as simple as a slogan, a logo, some typefaces and some colors. The identity of a business plays a major role in its corporate image, or brand. Identity design is composed of visual devices which are used by a company to identify it. Identifying markers allow a brand to be recognizable. Typically, visual devices are an integral part of making up an identity to support the branding of a company. These visual devices can include:

• A logo, which is the entire symbol of a companys brand and identity.
• Stationary such as envelopes, letterhead, business cards, etc.
• Marketing collateral such as website design, books, brochures, flyers, etc.

The logo is the companys brand and corporate identity all wrapped up into one easily identifiable mark. Essentially, the logo is the overall symbol of the company. The logo of course, is the simplest form of identification for a company. As an example, everyone recognizes the logo of an apple with a small bite out of it as a famous IT company, Apple. A logo, like Apples or Coca Colas, only begins to function as a total branding design when it becomes extremely familiar. If you’re looking for a branding consultant consider Savvy Giraffe, an Indianapolis based marketing firm.