Jun 20

Have you noticed that some users have Facebook profile URLs like http://facebook.com/manishc whle most people have URLs with a bunch of numbers like http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=100000824186403&ref=ts

Now you can get your own Facebook URL. It’s quite easy. All you need is a cellphone. Facebook requires you to activate your cellphone for the Facebook Mobile service, before you can create a profile URL. If you haven’t already activated your Facebook mobile service, you can do so by following the steps below or if you have already activated your Facebook mobile service, you can skip ahead to step 9.

  1. Log on to Facebook
  2. Go to your Account settings
    Facebook Account Settings
  3. Go to the Mobile tab
    Facebook Mobile settings tab
  4. Click on “Register for Facebook Text Messages”
    Register for Facebook Text Messages link
  5. A dialog box will pop up. Select your country and your cellphone network provider and click the “Next” button
    Select Facebook Mobile country and network provider
  6. Follow the instructions on the screen and send a text message containing the letter “f” (without the quotes to the number shown on your screen. Click the “Next” button.
    Send a text message to activate Facebook mobile
  7. An activation code will be sent to your cellphone.
    Enter Facebook Mobile activation code
  8. Select the options for your Facebook mobile.
  9. After activating your phone you can go to http://facebook.com/username and create your own Facebook profile URL.
  10. If you liked this post – please leave a comment.
Jun 17

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences. This is typically done via the Internet and mobile communications networks. Today this practice is being enjoyed by executives and professionals for brand exposure and marketing.

Do you make these mistakes to market your brand or services?

  • Use Yellow page ads that cost thousands of dollars, yet bring in little new business?
  • Spend money on direct mailers that also have limited results.
  • How about money spent on print advertising. How effective is it?
  • Are you spending lots of money optimizing your website but still have little traffic.
  • Spend money on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns, with limited results.

Can you improve your business if you know:

  • What is being said about you.
  • What your customers think about your product or service.
  • What your customers really want.
  • What your competitors are doing.
  • How to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments.
  • How to make your business more profitable.

Nothing provides a better return on investment than having a network of people raving about you and it doesn’t matter what product or service you sell. So let’s have a look onto the benefits of social media viral marketing.

The value of Marketing through Social Media Channels

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships. It is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

What are the benefits?

It’s natural. No doubt you get natural links, your website is exposed to a large number of people. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.

It’s defensible. Social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.

It’s low-cost/high returns. Costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.

It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again. If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time.

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May 29

This post shows you how to add Facebook comment boxes, on your WordPress blog, similar to the ones you see on this site.

  1. In your WordPress Dashboard, go to the Plugins section and click on Add New
  2. Click on the “Facebook” tag under “Popular Tags”
  3. Find the one called “WordPress Connect”. It’s a collection of widgets.
    Wordpress Connect - Facebook plugin for WordPress
    Click on the “Install” link to install the plugin. On the screen which pops up – click on “Install Plugin”.
  4. After WordPress installs the plugin, click on “Activate Plugin”
  5. If everything goes well, WordPress will create a menu on the left menu bar, for the Connect plugin
    Facebook Connect plugin menu
  6. The plugin that you just installed, needs a Facebook API key, in order to work. Before you can start using the widgets and modules, you will need to create a Facebook application, in order to get the API key. In case you don’t already have a Facebook Application, go to http://www.facebook.com/developers to start building it.
  7. If you are visiting the Facebook developers site for the first time, Facebook will ask you to add the Facebook Developers application, to your Facebook profile. Click on the accept button, to add the application to your Facebook profile.
  8. Once you have added the Facebook application, on the top of the screen you will see the Set Up New Application button. Click on the button to start building your first Facebook application.
    Set Up New Application button in Facebook
  9. Enter an application name for your application. You can name it anything you want.
    Name the Facebook application
  10. On the next screen you will find the Facebook API key you need.
    Getting the Facebook API key
    But there are a few more steps before you can start using the plugin.
  11. Go to the Connect tab and change the Connect URL to your site’s name.
    Facebook Application Connect URL
    You need to make sure that you are entering the right URL. There is a difference between http://manishc.com and http://www.manishc.com – websites are often configured so that both these URLs display the same webpage, it makes a big difference to applications like Facebook. To overcome this problem enter the base domain. If your website is http://www.yourwebsite.com – your base domain will be yourwebsite.com
  12. You will also need to make sure that your connect URL ends in a trailing slash like http://manishc.com/ or Facebook will give you an error.
  13. Click on the Save Changes button on the bottom of the screen and your Facebook application is ready.
  14. Return to the WordPress dashboard and open the settings for the  Connect plugin, by clicking on the Connect plugin menu, on the left menu bar of your WordPress dashboard
    Wordpress Facebook Connect plugin menu
  15. Enter the Facebook API key into the field called APP ID
    Facebook Connect plugin settings - the APP ID
    You can fill out the other settings too, but in this case we’ll just leave them blank.
  16. Your plugin is ready. You can go to the Widgets section, under the Appearance menu of your WordPress dashboard, and  add the widgets to your WordPress theme.
  17. You can also add the Facebook Like button and the Facebook Comments box, to your blog posts like you see on this website. In order to do that, go to the comments section, under the Connect plugin settings
    Comments box settings for the WordPress Facebook connect plugin
  18. Activate the check box which says “Add the Comments Module to your posts”. You can also configure how many comments should be displayed and the width of the comments box.
    Comments box settings window for the WordPress Facebook connect plugin
    The Comments box includes the Like button – so if you activate the Comments box, you don’t need to activate the Like button separately.
  19. If you want just the Facebook Like button, you can go to the Like button settings in the Connect plugin menu
    Facebook Like Button Settings menu in WordPress Facebook connect plugin
  20. The Facebook Like button has several settings you can configure, like enabling the display of user’s profile pictures under the Like button
    Facebook Like button settings in WordPress Facebook connect plugin
  21. If you are logged in to Facebook, the Comments module will also display an Administrate Comments link at the bottom of the module, which will let you add Administrators and Morderators for the comments. It will also let you configure the module to allow anonymous comments.
    Administrate Comments

Your Facebook comments box is ready. Whatever users comment on will be synced to their Facebook profiles.

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Apr 28

If you use Twitter you’ve probably come across TrueTwit. When you add users you sometimes get a DM from the user (actually it’s sent by TrueTwit) asking you to validate yourself by typing out a captcha. If you sign up you will get some tools to manage your users.

The biggest worry with True Twit is that it send DMs to users who try to follow me. That’s not good. Some users resent it a lot. It’s a kind of spamming - sending unsolicited DMs. If you don’t want to send the DMs and still be able to manage your users you need to sign up for thier service.

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Apr 24

At a time when most companies are trying to figure out how to leverage social media to their advantage - some companies like Name.com are well ahead of the game and are already using social media to gain a competitive advantage.

I experienced this myself, a couple of days ago. I had a problem with some Name.com domains that I own and I wrote a blog post about it. Next morning I was pleasantly surprised to find a comment on the post from Lesley, a “Community Manager” at Name.com. She left an email address and asked me if I could drop her an email describing the error. I managed to tinker around a bit and solve the problem (it was the DNS settings caused by activating Google Apps on the domains). I haven’t gotten around to writing the email, but I must admit I like Name.com much more than I did before. What a great effect a small comment on a blog post can have.

I’ve always thought that Name.com is a great company (I buy all my domain names from them), but it’s great to know that they are using social media to reach out to their customers and to help them with their problems.

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Apr 20

I have more than 4000 followers on Twitter, and except for a small core group of interesting intelligent like minded human beings – the rest – the majority are spammers and porn bots.

So what are these followers worth – really?

It’s very simple – they add credibility to my profile. When you visit my Twitter profile and see 4000+ followers – you probably feel that I am an authority in my field or a celebrity. Just because 4000 other people are following me – you are almost convinced that I know what I am talking about. Maybe I am – maybe I am not.

It’s like a fairy tale I read when I was a kid – eat coat eat. A person is known by his appearance and this eons old  rule holds true for Twitter too.

I do not Tweet anything really special – all my tweets are mundane and almost boring. Informative and innovative maybe – but far from exciting. So how did I get the 4000+ followers on Twitter? I used a flaw in Twitter. Many people (especially those who use Twitter as a marketing medium) use an autofollow mechanism. This basically means that they will follow you if you follow them. So I used a Twitter spam technique called Follower Churn. I followed and subsequently unfollowed large numbers of users. And I kept doing that till my follower count reached the 4000 mark.

But looking back at it now – what did I gain – nothing. All I have to show for it is a lot of followers who are spammers and auto-followers. Chances are that someone who auto-follows you isn’t really interested in you. But I have some degree of credibility – because I have 4000 followers a lot of people are easily convinced that I am an expert at what I preach.

It’s a catch 22 situation. But given a choice – I’d suggest you do not go the 4000+ route. It’s more fun to do it the organic way.

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