If you are not social media savvy and looking for personal branding or want to promote your business. The time management and your strategy on social networks will be your primary concern. Your good online presence and building professional and business relationship would not be possible by just creating basic profile, adding few friends and by publishing few posts and photos. I would like to share my personal secrets with you which can beneficial to start building your social media empire.

Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. , Social media have been modernized to reach consumers through the internet. Social media have become appealing to big and small businesses. Credible brands are utilizing social media to reach customers and to build or maintain reputation. As social media continue to grow, the ability to reach more consumers globally has also increased.
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Facebook

1. Post status message daily on specific intervals with something engaging and interesting.

2. Respond to all comments on your walls with concise and precise words.

3. Comments on at least 7-10 known people’s status or updates within your network.

4. Share upto 3-5 interesting updates that you find worthy for your friends.

5. Wish birthdays to your friends, participate in discussion of groups or comments of fan pages you are following.

Twitter

1. Reply all mentions with full responses and details rather just saying thanks.

2. Find 7-10 interesting and worthy things for retweeting in appeared in your timeline.

3. Admire and recommend few people from your network, it shows your interest, mindsets and you will get same response back.

4. Follow back at least 10-20 followers and avoid who are just seems to promote their websites and businesses.

5. Spend 10-20 minutes to find out tweeples of same interest and manage them in your lists.

Blogs

1. Write the occasional post promoting the good work of a blog in your community

2. Visit your blog’s comments section and comment back on at least 5 replies.

3. Visit the blogs of the commenter if you have a few minutes more in hand and read a post or two and comment back.

4. While on those sites, use a tool like Digg and StumbleUpon to promote their good work you will get same favor back.

5. Share your blog’s important posts on your Facebook profile and twitter.

LinkedIn

1. Accept any invitations that make sense for you to accept.

2. If you’re growing your network invite folks whom business cards you received recently.

3. Participate into Q&A and see if you can voluntarily help to answer 2-3 questions.

4. Recommend every few days for people you can honestly and fully recommend.

5. Add any relevant slide decks to the Slideshare app there, or books to the Amazon bookshelf.

Maintaining your online presence takes time. If you look at all I’ve listed above, that’s easily more than an hour of work. But it depends what the value of that presence is to you, if you’re doing this as an individual, or to your organization, if you’re doing this on behalf of a brand or product.

We’ve traded dollars for time, in lots of these equations, as we see the return on our advertising spend diminish. It’s your choice whether you want to maintain an active online presence, or if you want to get away with a bit less.

Please share thoughts and feedback below.

courtesy: yaminmalik.com

If you want to optimize your company website through social media optimization it is important to expose your company through social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. With Facebook you can either create a fan page or group that users can follow and communicate through. But a lot of people out there do not know how to set up a Facebook group and how to plan it in such a way that it will drive traffic back to your website. I decided to write about the tips and hints I that would be helpful to build credibility and drive quality traffic back to your website through your Facebook group.

When you start your Facebook group make sure you fill in as much information as possible. The more information you have the better. Followers who join your group will want information about your company such as history/background, the services and products it offers and how to contact you if required. Social media optimization is based upon the fact that consumers would possibly want to get in touch with your corporation. So if they have any queries, comments or complaints they can use the contact details listed on your Facebook group or leave a comment on the wall. This is why having all the information filled out is essential. daniedizledani

Initiate activity on your Facebook group by uploading pictures affiliated with your company and products. People like to comment on pictures and see what others are up to. Give them a reason to visit your Facebook group by uploading pictures of staff members, products, services, events you recently had, etc. There are companies out there who regularly upload pictures of products and services in the pipe works before they are officially released. Giving followers a sneak preview of new products and services gives them a reason to visit your company Facebook group and also builds interest and excitement.

Not only should you update followers through your status but you should also send out a personal message to those following your group. A personal message acts as a reminder and keeps them notified about important events or product information about your company. However make sure you don’t come across as annoying. Personal messages should be sent out to your followers only for important news and should not be used to send information every day. It is recommended at most only once or twice a week. Some brand names will send out personal messages to their followers only at the end of the month almost like a newsletter to highlight upon the important events that took place for that month.

People miss out on the simplest of things. Proof read the information that you insert into your Facebook group. Nothing makes a company seem more unprofessional than spelling mistakes and grammatically incorrect language. Any social media optimization campaign requires a little experimenting, trying different things to see what works for your company and what doesn’t. Offshore SEO companies offer social media optimization services to help companies set up their social network accounts, groups, fan pages and much more. Offshore SEO companies maintain social network accounts in order to increase credibility, improve brand name awareness and attract quality traffic back to client websites.

Make an effort to devote at least a couple of hours a day to do social media marketing, as this is appropriate in getting the most out of your social media marketing efforts. If you are a little bit pressed for time, you always have the alternative to reduce your work proportionately.

Extend yourself and give value to your social contacts by providing them content, notes, free reports, quotes, videos, and appealing pieces of data. People in general have a thirst for information and you are in the best position to give them what they want. Remember, providing them with regular information keeps your social media efforts active also.

Social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can expect more attention from cybercriminals in 2010, according to a new report released Tuesday by McAfee Labs. Also at risk are users of Adobe Systems products including Acrobat Reader and Flash. And move over Microsoft; the security firm predicts that Google’s Chrome OS will “create another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users.”

The company also anticipates smarter and more dangerous Trojans that “follow the money,” as well as a “significant trend toward a more distributed and resilient botnet infrastructure that relies much more on peer-to-peer technologies.”

In a recorded interview (scroll down for audio) David Marcus, McAfee Labs’ director of security research and communications, said that he expects “an explosion of Facebook and other services targeted by cybercriminals.” In addition to malware like Koobface that spreads among Facebook users’ friends list, Marcus expects an increase in rogue Facebook applications.
“When you click yes to ‘do you want to allow this application to access your Facebook account,’ you’re giving that application access to all the data in your Facebook account,” he said. Facebook vets the third-party applications that it distributes, but rouge developers are finding other ways to get people to install unauthorized apps. daniedizledani

“A lot of the spammers and scammers will send fake Facebook application requests to users’ inboxes,” he said. Marcus recommends that you only install apps from within Facebook by clicking “browse more applications” in the Facebook application installer.”

According to McAfee, Twitter is vulnerable mostly because of URL-shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com. There’s nothing wrong with Twitter or these services, but when you click on a shortened URL you have no idea where you’re going until after you get there. I would like to see a URL-shortening service that vets each URL for security and rejects those that are potentially dangerous. Twitter, according to the McAfee report is “also serving as a control vehicle for botnets.”

Criminals are now being more surgical in their attacks, singling out individuals and corporations as targets. The report points to the 10-month investigation of “GhostNet,” which McAfee Labs describes as a “network of at least 1,295 compromised computers in 103 countries” that “primarily belonged to government, aid groups, and activists.” The malicious code was delivered by e-mail with subject headings related to the Dali Lama and Tibet, according to the report.

The report also sites “a very targeted wave of attacks against the management of major companies,” as well as attacks carried out against “journalists from various media organizations, including Agence France Press, Dow Jose and Reuters based in China.”

All the way back in March, I wrote about how Facebook could rival PayPal by creating a virtual currency and making it usable for financial transactions, essentially making Facebook Credits the currency of the web.

Since then, we’ve seen several developments that have clearly pointed that FacebookFacebook is heading in this direction. They introduced Facebook Credits in April as a way to simply give friends spending money in the virtual gift shop. It’s now part of the Facebook gift marketplace, where you can use Facebook Credits to buy real gifts. PayPal’s concerned enough that last month they announced PayPal ID, a project to make your financial identity portable and secure across the web.

Now that Foursquare has money in the bank, the New York-based startup is starting to quickly launch updates to its increasingly popular mobile location-based game.

The service recently released their API, paving the way for nifty apps that reimagine location data, and they’ve pushed their app into 50 new cities around the globe. Today, FoursquareFoursquare is cozying up to the world’s most popular social network, enabling users to automatically share their check-ins, mayorships and unlocked badges with FacebookFacebook.

Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.

In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.

Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.

Purdue University Adds Twitter and Facebook to Class Participation. Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.

The Hotseat software allows students to use either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or SMS to post messages during classes, or they can simply log in to the web site to post to and view the ongoing backchannel. Right now it’s only being pilot tested in two courses, but has already become a fast favorite for both teachers and students. Professor Sugato Chakravarty, whose personal finance course is one of the pilot tests, said, “I’m seeing students interact more with the course and ask relevant questions.”

And although it’s been optional for students to participate, so far 73% of the 600 or so in the pilot classes have used the software. We’ve seen Twitter become mandatory for journalism students at Australia’s Griffith University to some negative reaction, but this is a less structured implementation which may perhaps account for its more favorable reception.

volunteers to translate into more languages Twitter . Thanks to these enthusiastic volunteers, Twitter is now officially available in Spanish. You can change the language or visit Twitter.com Settings and change the language setting in the option at the bottom right corner.

This note shows twitter was seeking volunteers to help translate its service into other languages….

Today, the first of those is ready to go, as Twitter has formally unveiled support for the Spanish language.

Spanish joins Japanese as the only languages besides English that Twitter currently supports. But more are coming soon, as Twitter previously noted that they’d like to have the “FIGS” languages. The “S” in there is Spanish with the others being French, Italian, and German.

Official support for other languages should undoubtedly help Twitter continue to grow after stalling a bit in recent months. And this Spanish support should also kneecap Meme, Yahoo’s Spanish Twitter clone (which is now also in English).

SwingVine is adding Real-Time functionality to trend discovery platform. SwingVine.com is a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.

SwingVine competes with other small yet well-funded niche social search engines like OneRiot and Blekko, that also offer users a way to see the chatter, and make sense of trends, on the web. And of course, Google Trends and Twitter’s trending topics sites like Topsy (which just launched new features today)TweetMeme also serve a similar purpose as SwingVine.