Merlin Entertainments Group Appoints Tug To Manage Its International SEM Campaign For The Dungeons

admin    SEO Marketing     Appoints, Campaign, Dungeons, Entertainments, Group, International, manage, Merlin

Merlin Entertainments Group Appoints Tug To Manage Its International SEM Campaign For The Dungeons

Merlin Entertainments Group, the World’s second largest visitor attraction operator, with brands such as LEGOLAND, Chessington World of Adventures and Zoo, and Madame Tussauds among its portfolio, will be working with Tug to increase revenue across its Dungeons venues in UK cities (London, Edinburgh and York) as well as The Dungeons in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Tug will initially be optimising the Dungeon’s new websites in the first steps to improve natural traffic volumes. The new sites are scheduled to go live in December 09. Tug will then roll out an SEO and PPC campaign across the five venue sites. The campaign will focus on driving sales through its online channel on lower attendance days while reducing promotional activity for busier days. Prime audiences will be peopl Merlin Entertainments Group Appoints Tug To Manage Its International SEM Campaign For The DungeonsMerlin Entertainments Group, the World’s second largest visitor attraction operator, with brands such as LEGOLAND, Chessington World of Adventures and Zoo, and Madame Tussauds among its portfolio, will be working with Tug to increase revenue across its Dungeons venues in UK cities (London, Edinburgh and York) as well as The Dungeons in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Tug will initially be optimising the Dungeon’s new websites in the first steps to improve natural traffic volumes. The new sites are scheduled to go live in December 09. Tug will then roll out an SEO and PPC campaign across the five venue sites. The campaign will focus on driving sales through its online channel on lower attendance days while reducing promotional activity for busier days.  Prime audiences will be people who live within a 2 hour drive of the Dungeons venues. Caroline Hepworth of Merlin Entertainments Group said: “The Dungeons continue to be one of Europe’s most visited attractions since The London Dungeon first opened its doors to the public in 1975. We want to make it easy for people to find us online when searching for exciting days out but also manage the flow of visitors to our venues. Tug will be using its expertise in leisure industry digital marketing as well as knowledge of the UK and European markets to help us achieve this.” Nick Beck, Managing Director of Tug said: “This is a very exciting project. Merlin Entertainments has developed the Dungeons into an established and recognised brand. The team at Merlin understand the importance of digital marketing to help drive sales and target markets. They have given us a very specific brief and we are looking forward to working with them over the coming months.”

Merlin Entertainments Group, the World’s second largest visitor attraction operator, with brands such as LEGOLAND, Chessington World of Adventures and Zoo, and Madame Tussauds among its portfolio, will be working with Tug to increase revenue across its Dungeons venues in UK cities (London, Edinburgh and York) as well as The Dungeons in Hamburg and Amsterdam.

Tug will initially be optimising the Dungeon’s new websites in the first steps to improve natural traffic volumes. The new sites are scheduled to go live in December 09. Tug will then roll out an SEO and PPC campaign across the five venue sites.

The campaign will focus on driving sales through its online channel on lower attendance days while reducing promotional activity for busier days. Prime audiences will be peopl

Merlin Entertainments Group Appoints Tug To Manage Its International SEM Campaign For The DungeonsMerlin Entertainments Group, the World’s second largest visitor attraction operator, with brands such as LEGOLAND, Chessington World of Adventures and Zoo, and Madame Tussauds among its portfolio, will be working with Tug to increase revenue across its Dungeons venues in UK cities (London, Edinburgh and York) as well as The Dungeons in Hamburg and Amsterdam.

Tug will initially be optimising the Dungeon’s new websites in the first steps to improve natural traffic volumes. The new sites are scheduled to go live in December 09. Tug will then roll out an SEO and PPC campaign across the five venue sites. The campaign will focus on driving sales through its online channel on lower attendance days while reducing promotional activity for busier days.  Prime audiences will be people who live within a 2 hour drive of the Dungeons venues.

Caroline Hepworth of Merlin Entertainments Group said: “The Dungeons continue to be one of Europe’s most visited attractions since The London Dungeon first opened its doors to the public in 1975. We want to make it easy for people to find us online when searching for exciting days out but also manage the flow of visitors to our venues. Tug will be using its expertise in leisure industry digital marketing as well as knowledge of the UK and European markets to help us achieve this.”

Nick Beck, Managing Director of Tug said: “This is a very exciting project. Merlin Entertainments has developed the Dungeons into an established and recognised brand. The team at Merlin understand the importance of digital marketing to help drive sales and target markets. They have given us a very specific brief and we are looking forward to working with them over the coming months.”

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Five Tips to Create and Manage Brand Equity

admin    Website Tips     Brand, Create, Equity, Five, manage, Tips

Five Tips to Create and Manage Brand Equity

Design Lots recently updated their corporate image and a new update in their own website is due soon. Add to this a new face or two and one might not even recognise us anymore. This is an all to common scenario in business, as the corporate culture of your business changes, your identity sometimes fails to.

As your company grows, so should its corporate identity. If you are a new business, developing a corporate identity is crucial. A corporate identity includes your logo, relevant branding, a style guide and a set of best practices for using your logo, fonts, etc when communicating with customers. Consistency between employees is crucial in developing a set of standards for effectively managing customers and clients as well as your brand.

Keeping your website and corporate image up to date is an important aspect for any business. When first impressions last; having the foresight to recognise where potential customers first make contact is important. Then, implementing tools to both convey the correct message and draw those potential customers through the door is paramount.

Below is a set of five tips to help you make the best first impressions and convert potential customers into real ones as well as managing change within your brand.

1. Invest in developing brand equity. Branding assists in developing brand equity and brand equity is very important to business.  This is because it is the value consumers are willing to pay for your product or service based on a set of factors like, name awareness, perceived quality, and brand loyalty.

In 2004, Coca-Cola’s brand (not their assets) was worth 2.55 bn, Microsoft was worth 1.64 bn and Toyota was worth .27 bn. That is simply the price someone would pay to own that companies name; why? Because they’ve successfully built a brand, they have positioned themselves as leaders in their respective fields.

When you strengthen the factors that contribute to brand equity, like name awareness, through consistent branding, then you slowly build and strengthen your brand equity, which in turns leads to a more profitable business for yourself.

2. Develop a corporate identity and use it. Included within a corporate identity is your company’s name, logo, specific font sets, email signatures, letterheads, invoices, and business cards, just to name a few.

The corporate identity is the first step in branding your business. These both lead to increased sales, loyalty and eventually, a better price point for your products or services. Branding is the basis of marketing your company, and even small business can begin to harness its potential power by using consistently branded and formatted emails, letters, business cards, and even your company’s website.

3. Develop a website and use it. According to the Sensis 2007 eBusiness Report, 92% of businesses in Australia utilise online services when running their business but only 51% of businesses have a website.

While these statistics will have changed marginally over the past two years, they still show that Australian businesses utilise the Internet to find information and make purchases as well as showing that Australian businesses are not fully embracing the Internet as a medium to disperse information and sell products.

Increasingly, we use search engines like Google to help us find what we are looking for. Slowly, phone books and telephone information services are disappearing, giving way to a new medium for conveying accurate and useful information; the Internet.

4. Use a professional graphic or website designer. Below are three websites examples (linked), one site is a D.I.Y., one site is designed with a web template, and one site is one of our recent projects.

DIY website | Able Roofing
Web template website | R&T Home Insulation
dlc website | Impact Insulation

Take notice of the quality of the three different designs, and ask yourself how long you would give each site when browsing them as a potential supplier of home insulation for your home; 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute?

The time it takes to dismiss a potential supplier of a product has decreased in the past two decades as a direct result of our over exposer to marketing messages. Meaning, those businesses who can capture your attention and hold it for 30 seconds to a minute are already well ahead of the competition.

5. Finally, if you have a website or corporate identity, update it. The vast majority of sites that we build are built with Content Management Systems (CMS). That said, only a small minority of our clients fully utilise this invaluable tool to update their sites with current and useful information.

One simple thing that you can do to help your site improve its page ranking is update the information on it. Google (and other search engines) occasionally ‘crawl’ your site looking for updated content. If it finds updated content, that works for you, if not, it works against you.

A common mistake is to say we built it, they will come. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Having a website and having a website that gets found are two very different things. Developing a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is a more comprehensive way to effectively market your website online through search engines. It does cost money because it takes time to do effectively, but when done correctly, the pay off is huge.

When it comes to a logo or corporate identity, fonts and colour schemes come and go over time. What was hot in the 80’s and 90’s isn’t so much anymore. Embrace change and make it work for you and your business.

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Social Media Marketing: How To Manage Accounts Efficiently And Stay Sane

admin    Social Media     Accounts, Efficiently, manage, Marketing, Media, Sane, Social, Stay

Social Media Marketing: How To Manage Accounts Efficiently And Stay Sane

Many organizations and businesses are joining the social media marketing wave, but some are holding back. There is a lot to consider, not the least of which is time management. Is it really worth the time and effort to build such a presence for your group? The answer is probably yes- you just need to go about it the right way.

There are many forms of social media that you can choose to participate in. The first step to get started is analyzing what your group needs, how social media can help you meet these needs, and what end-goals you want to accomplish. There are lots of resources, on-line and in print, that can help you determine the answers to these questions and help you lay out the basis for your social media marketing plan. I’d recommend checking out David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR as a start. There are also courses and seminars that train individuals in effective social media marketing, such as the New Media Drivers License course at Michigan State University.

Once you’ve determined the ways you want to use social media, you need to determine what social media tools you should use. There are a lot of options, and they won’t all be right for you. Do some digging and find out which tools will meet your needs. You must keep your target audience in mind as well. If you build a large presence on Facebook but your professional clients are all on LinkedIn you are missing out.
Once you have your plan, and you’ve chosen your tools and set up your account(s), how do you keep the process work from overtaking your life? The trick is to keep a balance. Start slow- don’t take on more than you can handle at the start. Do some “listening” and monitoring, getting into the routine of checking account activity, before committing yourself to particular numbers of periodic posts. To avoid having to visit individual sites for listening consider using a web aggregator, such as Google Reader. This will bring all the traffic involving keywords and phrases you designate to one place, allowing you to read it in a more time-efficient manner. Then use an account management tool, such as Hootsuite, to run your accounts. A tool like this will allow you to post to multiple accounts from one site, as well as set up some monitors on social media traffic.

By setting up these tools you’ll free up time and avoid unnecessary redundant behavior (such as logging in to multiple accounts.) This will allow you (or your employees) to work on other important tasks, instead of wasting time waiting for pages to load. Social media marketing is a great tool for your organization, but you should take care to manage accounts in a time-efficient way so as to optimize your efforts.

For more information on the resources mentioned above, please visit these websites:

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR: http://www.davidmeermanscott.com

New Media Drivers License course at Michigan State University: http://newmediadl.com

Hootsuite: http://www.hootsuite.com

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Are You Using These 5 Time Management Tips to Manage Your Time & Make Money?

admin    Twitter Marketing     manage, Management, Money, These, Time, Tips, Using

Are You Using These 5 Time Management Tips to Manage Your Time & Make Money?

Do you also want to be take charge of your life once again, manage your time, be more productive and earn more money?

Implement these 5 Time Management Techniques Today for fast results!

The good news is this is easy!

We all know the Internet and the age of information overwhelm is here to stay!

Just when you thought your head could not hold any more information after being blasted with current events news items on the television and then the Internet then came the world of social media:

If Facebook messages and Twitter tweets are not distracting you, your inbox may be rapidly filling up with emails you have little time to read and making it even harder for you to manage your time!

Despite the obvious value of social media, it is easy to end up juggling too much at the same time as you run your business.

You may even be ’spinning your wheels” with your business just as I was…..

But you can take back control of your life and your ‘head-space’ by learning how to manage your time and redefine your day! You will love the outer and inner peace you will feel.

So here are 5 easy time management techniques you can use right now:

1) Become at least 20% more productive by working in chunks of time – Plan every hour of your day using a spreadsheet to manage your time:

*Monday to Friday, then Saturday, Sunday across the top

*Times of the day run on the left from top to bottom (hour by hour and smaller chunks of time)

You will be amazed how much more focused you become and how much more you will get done IF you take action!

That brings me to:

2) Take a 10 minute break every hour – a lot to squeeze in? I challenge you to try this for a few days!

Step OUTside every hour for a brisk 5 minute walk to get your brain humming again and get a laser focus – see how fast your thinking is now as you plan the details of the next hour.

Drink a glass of water as you return to your desk, then spend the final 5 minutes of your 10 minute break by closing your eyes and try to see yourself happily achieving your goal for the next hour.

Do not fall into the trap of pushing on through the fatigue barrier, take breaks, suck in the oxygen and create amazing results!

3) You have guessed it, turn OFF your cell phone message alerts and social media for most of the day – schedule time for social media and email once early morning and once in the evening and manage your time by limiting the time you spend to 30 minutes tops!

Absolutely do NOT check email repeatedly during the day.

Urgent emails can be set up as alerts on your cell phone using email filters – but only out of necessity for those key business, time-sensitive actions.

4) Get your business partners and family on the same page by having them manage them implement these 5 time management tips to manage their time- everyone must share your vision, understand your focus, and I guarantee will truly appreciate the extra QUALITY time you have for them!

5) Find a business model that gives you time freedom and allows you to leverage your time and generate true wealth where you have both money and time for the things and people you care about.

Take action right away to implement the above – give yourself a 5-day challenge !  Congratulations on all the extra time you have just gained for the things and people you care about most!

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Ten Tips to Manage Your Blog

admin    Twitter Marketing     Blog, manage, Tips

Ten Tips to Manage Your Blog

Blogging has helped countless businesses develop an impressive and immediate line of communication between the employees and clientele (both current and prospective).  We talk a lot about driving traffic to your blog and/or site with quality content and interesting topics.  We have talked (and will talk more) about how to track your sites statistics.  However, the most basic key to having a successful blog is effective management.

Managing a blog, in a lot of ways, is like managing a business – start with a solid base and branch out.  Take a look at these 10 quick tips to manage your blog:

1. Make A Plan — It’s important that you start out (or continue) your blog that you establish a viable plan or schedule.  Some things to consider as you create this organizational tool is: (1) how much time is needed to be consistent with the blog, (2) who is going to be involved in writing/editing the blog content, (3) what is the overall goal.

2. Be Flexible — As important as it is to stick to the plan, it is important that you can adapt that plan to achieve the same overall goal.  For example, if you are getting lots of traffic and interest on a specific topic, stray from the original schedule to elaborate on that topic for your audience.  Remember that this blog is not just for you to get your name out, but you are providing quality content that your audience/clientele want.

3. Categories and Tags — One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make is using categories and tags inappropriately.  Categories should be broad descriptions of what your blog post; think about them as a handful of navigational drawers for your blog posts.  Along with this, only use one or two categories per post.  Tags are additions to your categories, and you should always try to use the same tags repeatedly to help searches for specific topics.  Typically, under ten tags are suggested per post to maximize search possibilities.

4. Use Your Blog Stats — It’s important for you to check your blog stats daily.  I will, however, preface that statement with don’t just sit there and stare at your stats.  You have great information in your stats through the blog as well as through Google Analytics.  Take advantage of the reports and adapt your current plan to take advantage of the knowledge you have in front of you.

5. Create Time for Social Networking — The bottom line is that blogging isn’t just about writing posts; it is also about networking through other sites.  Set aside some time for you to visit these sites (like Twitter), and spread the word of your blog by adding quality networking experiences with the rest of the blogosphere.

6. React to Positive or Neutral Comments — Obviously you are going to want to respond to your comments if they are positive…after all, it’s a pat on the back for you.  However, let those positive comments build off of each other and you can respond to all of them as a group at the end of the day.  The only time that I would suggest you respond to a comment immediately is….

7. React to Negative Comments — It’s almost inevitable that you will receive some sort of criticism during your blogging experience; you can’t make everyone happy, right?  Respond to this type of feedback immediately and efficiently.  Make sure that you remain positive (don’t get defensive), clarify and unclear points that are pointed out by the comments, and assure the visitor that you will look into the issue and respond if you do not know the immediate answer.

8. Links to the Chain — Inbound and outbound links are some of the most important aspects of running (and managing) a blog.  How you link things can significantly alter a visitor’s experience with your site, though.  Make sure that all of your internal links (links that connect to other pages or posts in your site) stay within the same page while the external links (links that connect to other sites) open in another browser window.  Allowing external links to open in a separate browser allows your visitor to easily maintain their experience with your site.

9. Spread the Word — As a blogger you need to stay abreast to the top industry blogs out there.  They will show you all of the industry trends and deliver some of the most relevant up to date news that is pertinent to your clientele/audience.  However, don’t try to reinvent the wheel – repost or post about the wheel and link to the source.  I will emphasize this point – link to the source.  Your audience will appreciate that you took the time to relay information that you have found to them.  You have just made their lives easier.

10. Be Consistent — Managing a blog can be a very daunting task.  Between sticking to the plan, altering that plan, reading other blogs, maintaining your links, and everything else you will have to be very consistent with your blog.  This will also help you establish and maintain a solid audience that will keep returning for more.

Overall, managing a blog can be challenging, but if you can implement the above tips your life will be much easier.  

Who Should Manage Your Social Media Marketing?

admin    Social Media     manage, Marketing, Media, Should, Social

Who Should Manage Your Social Media Marketing?

In the light of the soaring popularity of Facebook and Twitter with consumers, most businesses know they had better get involved. In fact, we have moved past the early days of questions challenging the validity of social media as a marketing medium — it’s for real folks. Now the question on everyone’s mind is “Who.”

As in, “Who should manage our social media marketing?”

And almost before they have finished the question, 10-20 “social media experts” will chime in with the answer (while possibly raising their hands):

“Ooohhh, ooohhh, pick me! Let me do it!”

In fact that is just the kind of thing giving social media consulting a bad name right now. Just as there were a lot of hacks in Web site design 10 years ago and a lot of overnight SEO experts 5 years ago, today there seems to be a proliferation of “Social Media Consultants.”  A recent USA Today poll revealed that there are more Social Media Consultants in the United States than there are Republicans. And last weekend I was driving through rural Ohio and saw an interesting image: http://is.gd/5imkV. A small bait shop operating out of a trailer and offering “storm doors, live bait and social media consulting.”

In an effort to help wade through the many options of social media consulting, I spoke with some respected social media folks and got their take on the question: “Who Should Manage Your Social Media?” Are you hoping for a simple answer? Sorry, there are 4 firmly entrenched camps on this one.

1. Your Public Relations Firm Should -

I have a bit of a bias here. In the 90s, I left Bowling Green with my newly minted Public Relations degree and started working at a dot com startup in the energy industry. I thought it would be a good idea to pitch people on Geocities who wrote about energy topics to get them to cover what we were doing at Energy.com. No one called it social media marketing then, it was just applying public relations and media relations skills to the Internet. I have had both Internet marketing gurus and public relations experts tell me that your PR firm should not be in social media and that the two tactics are fundamentally different.

I disagree.

In both media relations and social media communications, your PR firm is working to influence an influencer to say good things to an audience. I asked a highly regarded social media influencer and PR pro about this. Here is what they told me:

“Working with an established agency for social media strategy makes sense because of the talent, expertise and resources we can bring to the table. For example, we have tools and relationships with vendors that a solo practitioner or smaller agency simply wouldn’t have access to. We also surround each client with the best minds for the job, bringing together a good mix of senior and junior staffers for ongoing brainstorms. An agency with a strong reputation for great ideas, client service and results-driven, award-winning campaigns is also in the best position to attract, recruit and retain the very best talent from around the country. Ultimately, whether you’re talking about traditional PR or social media and PR2.0, it’s all about the people.”

2. Your SEO Firm Should -

After all, it all is about online traffic and search engine rankings, right? At least, that is what a lot of SEOs will tell you. And to a large degree this holds water. A strong social media presence means credible and diverse in bound links, which is great for search rankings. That being said, I do find that some SEO companies view social media with the same analytical eye they use in writing title tags and miss the human aspect. I would argue that social media is about human relations and has a secondary benefit with search engines, not the other way around.

3. A Specialized Consultant Should -

In Columbus, Ohio there is a guy named Bob. He works for a used car salesman. Recently, Bob was laid off from the car lot, heard a story on NPR about Facebook and is now a social media consultant? Beware of Bob.

With a careful eye and some background research, you’ll find there are some great consultants focusing on social media who have proven their worth. In Columbus, Ohio there is a guy named Lewis Howes who is the man when it comes to LinkedIn. You would have no trouble finding a whole lot of people who would endorse his work. I asked Lewis why his clients like him so much, he explained:

“The reason individuals should work with a specialized consultant with regards to using LinkedIn is because the opportunity cost for learning how to effectively use the networking tool to achieve your professional goals is much greater when one spends hours watching video tutorials, reading blogs, and going through the etiquette mistakes of not knowing how to contact others, or become actively involved.  Using a specialized consultant will be more beneficial because they can work with you on a personal level and provide specific instructions on how to achieve your goals.  An individual also usually charges less than a larger firm, and is usually more personal.”

My advice in working with an individual consultant? Check references and look at their past employment history. Having 1,000 followers on Twitter doesn’t mean a person can help your company build a social media communications plan.

4. You Should -

A growing number of people in the Internet marketing world are stressing the idea that the best person to manage the social media interaction and marketing efforts for your company and brand is YOU.

Grassroots social media efforts work well for brands with limited budgets, those who may have complex business models, or those with rules and regulations that prevent them from implementing and executing large scale strategies and tactics.  It boils down to having the right people within your organization who are passionate about building relationships and educated about doing so in the online space.  After all, your customers are doing business with your people first and foremost, not your logo.  

These employees are going to intimately know your business inside and out as well as who your customers are and what they expect from you.  Consider the ramp up time and monetary resources it would take to bring a large PR agency or independent consultant on board to learn about your business and your customers.  To put it into perspective, think about what it takes to do this with a brand new employee.  It’s a very similar process.

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Best tool to manage your Social Media Collections – News Aggregators

admin    Twitter Marketing     Best, manage, Media, Social, Tool

Best tool to manage your Social Media Collections – News Aggregators

One of the questions most asked of me, is how do I manage this complete mind blow that is Social Media?

Blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, MySpaceing, Deliciousing, StumbleUponing, Digging, YouTubing, Flickring… It can all get a bit too much – especially if you’re serious about monitoring the behaviours of your potential market on all of these channels…
Luckily, there are several solutions for you out there.

Aggregators are time-saving, Social Media management tools, designed to let you say something once, and to spread the word for you on all of your registered channels.
They work by becoming the ‘middleman’. All you do is register, hook in all of your accounts, and presto, you’re in complete control.

Here are some of the more popular ones:

Ping.fm: One that I use most often. It’s fast and extremely powerful, and can do much more than just plain spread your words. There’s an absolute goldmine of tools in Ping.fm

TweetDeck.com: One of the most popular, and another that I use (especially because of it’s awesome iPhone app). This actual program (you have to download and install for it to work), displays columns from all your major Social Media accounts and allows for you to to say something one, and it is posted to all… Missing here is the ability to send Blogs out…

Seesmic.com: Another popular Social Media management too, quite similar in functionality to Tweet Deck, but without the requirement of an install.

There are plenty of others out there (which have not had as much coverage as the major ones), but the most important thing to look for in an Aggregator is its functionality. Find one that serves your purpose better, easier, faster, and commit to it.

For more information about social media marketing expert Brisbane, Social media expert Brisbane, Digital Marketing Consultants, Digital marketing consultants Brisbane visit – http://socialmediabrisbane.blogspot.com

Best tool to manage your Social Media Collections – News Aggregators

admin    Twitter Marketing     Aggregators, Best, Collections, manage, Media, News, Social, Tool

Best tool to manage your Social Media Collections – News Aggregators

One of the questions most asked of me, is how do I manage this complete mind blow that is Social Media?

Blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, MySpaceing, Deliciousing, StumbleUponing, Digging, YouTubing, Flickring… It can all get a bit too much – especially if you’re serious about monitoring the behaviours of your potential market on all of these channels…
Luckily, there are several solutions for you out there.

Aggregators are time-saving, Social Media management tools, designed to let you say something once, and to spread the word for you on all of your registered channels.
They work by becoming the ‘middleman’. All you do is register, hook in all of your accounts, and presto, you’re in complete control.

Here are some of the more popular ones:

Ping.fm: One that I use most often. It’s fast and extremely powerful, and can do much more than just plain spread your words. There’s an absolute goldmine of tools in Ping.fm

TweetDeck.com: One of the most popular, and another that I use (especially because of it’s awesome iPhone app). This actual program (you have to download and install for it to work), displays columns from all your major Social Media accounts and allows for you to to say something one, and it is posted to all… Missing here is the ability to send Blogs out…

Seesmic.com: Another popular Social Media management too, quite similar in functionality to Tweet Deck, but without the requirement of an install.

There are plenty of others out there (which have not had as much coverage as the major ones), but the most important thing to look for in an Aggregator is its functionality. Find one that serves your purpose better, easier, faster, and commit to it.

For more information about social media marketing expert Brisbane, Social media expert Brisbane, Digital Marketing Consultants, Digital marketing consultants Brisbane visit – http://socialmediabrisbane.blogspot.com

How to successfully manage your Twitter followers

admin    Twitter Marketing     Followers, manage, Successfully, Twitter

Twitter is all about having followers and follow people. For Twitter users who have several thousands of followers and follow several thousand, it is critical to be able to have Twitter applications that can help them manage their Twitter stream. Obviously, it is impossible to give the same amount of attention to all followers.

A really cool desktop application that segments followers into distinct groups is TWEETDECK. TweetDeck has a simple and straightforward interface that is easy to use and understand. With TweetDeck a Twitter user can create groups of family, friends, colleagues etc. and manage instant conversations and direct messages with them. TweetDeck has the ability to tweet directly from its interface to share photos and web links, to follow topics in real-time and to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Besides, TweetDeck has multiple URL shortening services and the good news is that developers keep on updating it on a regular basis.

Similarly to TweetDeck, SEESMIC DESKTOP allows a user to create user lists (groups) and manage multiple accounts. Seesmic Desktop provides multiple URL shortening services, has unlimited ability on the number of accounts that can be managed and it fully integrates with Facebook. Besides, it provides the normal ability to manage conversations and instant messages by tweeting and re-tweeting messages. Design-wise, Seesmic Desktop has a simple interface, yet extremely elegant and intuitive, with built-in delicate designs and colors.

SPLITWEET is a web-based application designed to manage multiple Twitter accounts and brand monitor. Splitweet can be used to view a streamline of tweets from all accounts, to post tweets to multiple accounts and to follow brand mentions. Although Splitweet is positioned as an instrument for brands, it does not really deliver on that promise. Splitweet is mostly suitable for individual users. Companies should better use EasyTweets, or HootSuite.

EASYTWEETS is a great tool for marketers as it offers support for the management of multiple accounts and allows a user to post to multiple accounts, to get SMS alerts, and to have Google Analytics data on links.

HOOTSUITE is positioned as a marketing tool with neat platform that allows a user to manage multiple accounts and to view the link stats within the dashboard view of tweets when using the URL shortening services.

Two other popular web-based applications are TWITTBOT and TWEET3.

TWITTBOT allows multiple users to publish on a single Twitter account and a single user to post to multiple Twitter accounts. In that way, the service aggregates tweets from different sources and allows for a great control over who posts on a Twitter account. The owner of the account many follow as many people as he/she likes, but has complete control over who is posting on his/her account.

TWEET3 supports grouping and management of multiple accounts, integrates with Facebook, and provides a dashboard view where the user can customize color settings, add pictures, and follow other users. Besides, Tweet3 tracks the performance of stats in the analytics tab.

The above list of applications is not final, nor comprehensive. It is almost impossible to keep track with all the Twitter applications, especially with the speed that they build up. The more people use Twitter both for personal and professional reasons, the more applications need to be developed to match their needs. Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal choice to find which applications suit a Twitter user.