Facebook, Twitter, Blogs : 4 To-Dos for Social Media Marketing Online

Social Media Marketing has stepped into the big league of both, online as well as offline advertising. The businesses adopting the many Social Media platforms for advertising are growing in their conceptual scale and sophistication with which they approach the medium. More small and medium businesses are beginning to perceive methods, in theory and practice, on how to best leverage online tools to build a credible community and recognize that transparent engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing.

The question though is what does one do with the platform and their presence on it? What comes after understanding and creating an identity on these far-reaching platforms?

Let’s move ahead with a brief run-down of 4 secondary strategies meant to incite a greater response from your existing community and thus, make it actually work for you.

Add-on Un: Rich-content packed Multimedia additions

Videos, images, tickers, presentations and so on…The glaring fact of effective Social Media Advertising is to consistently stay in the “stream” of the users. A video could very well be about “how-to” or even portfolios in their context, but the essential need of a social network is to discuss, interact and interact. To satisfy this desire, pitching your products and services to the right people at the right time on the right platform becomes a matter of logical strategy as opposed to mismanaged impulsive actions.

Add-On Dos: Contextual Marketing

With growing complexities in marketing on the internet, due to rapid expansion, there is an obvious need of penetrating into the minds of the user. But this user isn’t going to “take the bait” all that easily. For this purpose, it becomes primary for every Social Media campaign to incorporate “personalized” contextual advertising methods to cater to the needs of a particular platform. For example, Facebook caters to a more vibrant and interactive society whereas a social networking platform like Orkut consists of users only interacting owing to the absence of applications and micro-blogging. These two sets of users warrant a different approach to initiate an effective Social Media Campaign.

Add-On Tres: Merge Offline and Online Advertising

The internet is modeled on the real, tangible people contained in a society. To isolate the online world from the offline world, while acceptable in the 90s, cannot be passed off as holistic advertising. Here, the mention of a symbiotic relationship, between online and offline, becomes fundamental to building a campaign capable of reaching out to a wide audience.

Including your Facebook Page, Twitter feed or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to recognize your community and increase goodwill in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles to witness interaction with other customers and users means they may join your community now and very well end up buying later.

Add-On Cuatro: Go Local In Targets

Social networks are a media platform with the capacity for users to feel at home. For this, a local neighborhood appeal comes as a necessary step in building a brand from the ground up. Listings and participation on a local level goes a long way in establishing a brand through the very effective method of word-of-mouth, in which your audience exponentially grows in size by doing the work for you.

1- Line brief: Implementing the above methods and incorporating them efficiently and effectively in your Social Media Marketing campaign will do wonders to strengthen your community and its basis.

---

Redesigning Google Forms

Form creation is an easy process with the subsistence of Google Forms[GForms] but the fact remains is what a programmer loves may not be loved by a designer. The easy of creation of form is so flexible and functional yet themes sometime don’t blend with the looks of website, also sometimes the complete professional look of site is lost just by the tiny icon at the bottom of form which says powered by Google or by the Thanks page which shows the confirmation and give option to others to create a new form.
We at Unyscape’s Geeks’ Lounge do all such activities to explore beyond the obvious and in same quest we have this small hack to

• Redesigning a Google Form [Remove Powered Google Icon/Google Logo]
• Creating a custom Thanks Giving Confirmation Page.

Images Illustrating The Following Steps

• Step 1.

Sign-in to your Gmail and then in top left options check for Documents option or otherwise Sign up for a Google Docs account if you haven’t already done so.

• Step 2.

Click New and choose Form from the drop down menu.

• Step 3.

Create your form .

• Step4.

When you have finished compiling your form, click the link at the bottom of the page titled: ‘You can view the published form here’

Here’s an example of what it should look like: http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=t8uHbL2ea0294ysBCAMeYdw

• Step5.

Right click anywhere on the page and click View Source to look at the code behind the form.

• Step6.

Copy all the code between <form> and </form> tags and paste it into the new form page on your web site.

• Step7.

Now you have a beautifully styled form but it still sends users to an ugly Google confirmation page.

• Step8.

Replace

<form action="YOUR-EMBEDDED-GOOGLE-SPREADSHEET-LINK" method="POST">

With

<script type="text/javascript">var submitted=false;</script>
<iframe name="hidden_iframe" id="hidden_iframe"
style="display:none;" onload="if(submitted)
{window.location='http://YOUR-THANK-YOU-PAGE-URL';}"></iframe>
<form action="YOUR-EMBEDDED-GOOGLE-SPREADSHEET-LINK" method="post"
target="hidden_iframe" onsubmit="submitted=true;">

Done!

If this helped you in any way do leave us with a comment or if you know any other good way to achieve this please do share your approach with us.

---