Twitter has recently rolled out advertising for small businesses through their business portal, Twitter for Business.  If you are a small business looking to gain more followers and grow your presence on Twitter, perhaps you should consider allocating some of your marketing budget here.

How can you engage with your customers and put Twitter to work for your business.  Advertise on Twitter with these 2 new paid advertising products:

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Facebook is rolling out a new retail initiative that will mirror some of the unique features of Pinterest, a social photo sharing website. Facebook plans on offering some brands the option to post pictures of products on its newsfeed with actions including ”like,” “want,” and “collect.”  Products within a collection will also have a Buy link, which will enable users to click through to websites to purchase products.  Facebook is currently working with Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, Michael Kors, Wayfair, Neiman Marcus, Fab.com and Smith Optics on the effort, which it calls “Collections.”

These photos will only appear if the brand has been liked by a user, or any of the user’s friends.  The images pop up on the newsfeed.  And from there, users can comment, like and share products and collections.  They can also click through and buy items directly from Facebook.  The main feature that will differentiate Facebook’s new initiative from Pinterest is the “Buy” component.

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Instagram is a very popular photo sharing mobile social platform.  The Instagram app is transforming the way people share experiences.  There are currently over 100 million registered users worldwide, only two years after its October 2010 release on the iOS platform.

Here are some tips from Vanessa Au of Spring Creek Group on using Instagram to bring your brand closer to your customers.

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Facebook’s Promoted Posts will cost users around $7 each.  This new feature allows Facebook users to pay $7/post to promote their posts and bump important news/announcements, links and photos to higher, more visible positions in their friend’s news feeds.

Facebook first called the Promoted Posts feature “Highlight” when it was initially tested in New Zealand.  Prior to it being available in the United States, Promoted Posts were actually offered in 20 other countries.  It was available to users who had 5000 or less friends and subscribers.

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Search is a big deal! In fact, there are 18.2 billion searches daily.  Following are some important facts and research about search and search advertising.

Search is big. Very big.:

Search is one of the most popular online activities. There are more than a billion searches a day worldwide – more than half come from outside the US.  People are constantly looking for new information online.  There are billions of searches each day on Google.  16% of the searches we see are new.  In 2012, there was $11 billion incremental US advertising dollars of which $8 billion is incremental digital dollars, of which $4 billion is search.

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The latest news is reporting that on October 6, 2012, Facebook proposed a revised 20 million settlement in a class-action privacy lawsuit. The lawsuit was first filed in 2011. “We believe the revised settlement is fair, reasonable, and adequate and responds to the issues raised previously by the court,” said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes.

The settlement is essentially offering up to $10 each to nearly 125 million affected users, reports Reuters.  If there is any money left over from the settlement (after the $10 or less claims, legal bills and other claims are paid), the residual money will most likely be donated to various internet privacy groups.
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With today’s emerging technology, smart businesses should consider kick starting their business on Google+.  Google+ is Google’s main social platform, and it integrates seamlessly with other Google properties, such as Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.  The collaborative search results make it possible to actively search for the types of people interested in your products/services by using the same Google search terms.  Google+ also provides real time social engagement and interactions to support its social efforts.

Google+’s Hangouts on Air use audio and video to show live streams as a form of communication via social media.  Hangouts can be streamed publicly to your Google+ profile, YouTube channel and website.  With Google Hangouts, businesses have a unique and engaging way to communicate with their customers.  Hangouts are also a cool way to deliver and share information. Businesses can include different communities and bring community into content creation itself.  The way that users communicate, behave and participate with others is unique to Google+ and great for businesses.  With Hangouts, businesses can both communicate AND listen to their customers.

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It’s hard to believe but it’s been a year since Steve Jobs passed away. Eweek came up with a list, Steve Jobs Left a Lasting Void in The IT Industry: 10 Reason Why. We can’t help but agree.

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A study from Shareaholic that Pinterest is now the 4th largest traffic source in the world.

Some interesting things to note:

• Since May, Pinterest traffic has more than doubled in size.
• Since January, Google, Yahoo and Bing organic traffic has decreased by 15.63% on average.

These are some interesting trends. While organic search engine traffic is still very important, social media has definitely risen and requires attention in any marketing efforts.

Search Engine lands has brought up an interesting bit on AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (or RFSA) in their article, Enter The Cookie: How RFSA Will Affect SEM.

The new feature in AdWords will allow a marketer/advertiser to create segmentations based on cookies or user-specific behaviors. Some examples for what you could do are:

• Exclude users who have already converted on your site from seeing your ad in their search results
• Bucket users based specific page visits, time spent on site, and/or other behaviors trackable by analytics and then boost bids or lower bids based on those behaviors
• Create user-specific messaging for ad text based on user behavior on your site
• Remarket or upsell new products to users who have already converted on another product

These are just some examples, but there are a lot more you can do based off cookie information.

If this model takes off, as an advertiser, it’s time to get to acquaint yourself with cookies as things in AdWords just go a lot more complicated.