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Negative Effects of Social Networking Sites for Students

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social networking
(Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The popularity of the social networking sites increased rapidly in the last decade. This is probably due to the reason that college and university students as well as teens used it extensively to get global access. These social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become a raging craze for everyone nowadays.

The negative effects of these social networking sites overweigh the positive ones. These sites have caused some potential harm to society. The students become victims of social networks more often than anyone else. This is because of the reason that when they are studying or searching their course material online, they get attracted to these sites to kill the boredom in their study time, diverting their attention from their work. Other negative side effects of social networking websites include the following: [Read more…] about Negative Effects of Social Networking Sites for Students

Top 10 ways to create a social media dashboard

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Social media and all of the noise these sites create can take up a lot of your time if you are managing a social network, and if you are keeping tabs on multiple networks, this gets even more difficult. The hardest part is finding important conversations and vital comments that require action among all of the noise and other junk clogging up social sites.

A great way to help manage these accounts is through a social media dashboard. The dashboard isn’t another network, as some tend to think, but it is a tool to help you get and stay organized, productive, and efficient.

A social media dashboard can be a fantastic tool for day to day social network use that can help to make more meaningful connections and to engage more fans and followers. Instead of having to hop from network to network to keep up on all the conversations, you can access them all, easily and conveniently from a single location. These can be used to monitor your presence on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, and more. [Read more…] about Top 10 ways to create a social media dashboard

How to Conduct Multiple Social Media Searches with One Lookup

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The social media search engine normally lets a person carry out searches of multiple of dozens of social networking sites. Social media can be described to be the social networking system  where people get to interact on a social forum. It is meant to keep the friends updated about their social affairs. The social media may also be used by companies to to communicate about their products, recruiting new hires, receiving feedback about their products among many more. There are huge companies which have enrolled so many employees through the interaction on the social media. There exist numerous search engines today which are free that gives one the opportunity to search several search engines with just one look up. So just how does this happen? [Read more…] about How to Conduct Multiple Social Media Searches with One Lookup

20 Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog Across the Social Web

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One of the key points I explain in my book, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, is that for a business to succeed in building a brand and growing, it needs to surround consumers with branded online experiences, so those consumers can self-select how they want to engage with the brand.  The same theory holds true for bloggers who want to grow their own blog brands and audiences across the social web.

Following are 20 easy things you can do to promote your blog across the social web.  You’ll notice that many of the suggestions listed below require a one-time set-up and you’re done.  Some of the suggestions don’t even happen online!  Others require you to do a bit more work, but the end result is worth it in terms of directly and indirectly promoting your blog to a wider audience.  Take a look and try to implement as many of the suggestions listed below as possible to jump-start your blog promotion efforts.

  1. Feed your blog content to your Twitter profile, Facebook profile and page, LinkedIn profile, and so on.  Use tools like Twitterfeed and the tools incorporated into social networking accounts to do this.
  2. Publish eye-catching social media icons in a visible location on your blog’s sidebar, so visitors can easily connect with you on your other social media profiles.
  3. Make sure your various social networking and other online profiles include current links to your full spectrum of online profiles, blogs, and so on.
  4. Feed your blog content to any LinkedIn groups that you belong to that allow you to do so using the News feature in LinkedIn.
  5. Include the URL to your blog, Twitter profile, and so on in your offline correspondence.
  6. Include links to your various online profiles and blog in your email signature.
  7. Make sure links to your key online profiles and blog are included in the signature line in any forums you participate in.
  8. At the very least, the URL for your blog and Twitter profile should be on your business card.
  9. Make sure your blog content gets in front of as many people as possible by syndicating your content through services like Demand Media Blog Distribution Network and Newstex.
  10. Use widgets and social tools offered by Twitter and Facebook (such as the Facebook Like button) to publish your other social web activities on your blog.
  11. Continually publish comments on other blogs and link back to your own using the same keyword phrase in the name box every time.
  12. Hold a blog contest and be sure to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.
  13. Make sure you offer sharing links on your blog and other online content using tools like the TweetMeme Retweet button.
  14. Write guest blog posts for other blogs in your niche and be sure to include links back to you blog, Twitter profile, and so on.
  15. Hold a tweet chat or tweetup with people attending the same events or conferences that you plan to attend.
  16. Create an email newsletter to go with your blog and be sure to include links to your Twitter profile and other social networking profiles in it.
  17. Be retweetworthy in an effort to get more of your tweets that include links to your content retweeted.
  18. Publish press releases about your blog with links to your blog and social media profiles.
  19. Brand your Twitter profile background and provide more URLs than the standard profile allows.
  20. Keep publishing amazing, shareworthy content and organically interlink your branded online destinations!

5 Ways to Drive a Buzz about Your Events Using Social Media

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Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or individual with an event to promote, you can spread the word and drive an online buzz about it using the free tools of the social Web.

Some tools integrate directly into popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn while others not only let you promote your event but also let you search for events, people who might want to attend your own event, and more.  Suffice it to say, the social Web offers everything you need to create a successful event buzz at your fingertips!

Following are five easy-to-use and free social media tools that you can use to promote your online and offline events across the social Web: [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Drive a Buzz about Your Events Using Social Media

Why WickedFire is a Great Forum to Learn Online Business and Marketing

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Look, if you’re interested in joining a forum where everyone is polite but nobody is making serious money, try WarriorForum or DigitalPoint. Those two, for example, have very strict etiquette rules but only one “minor” problem. Simply put, lots of WarriorForum and DigitalPoint members talk the talk but few of them walk the walk.

Do you know why most people are extremely polite over there? The answer is almost obvious: it’s because a lot of them are trying to sell you something. Maybe an e-book, maybe a coaching problem, maybe some other semi-useless product.

WickedFire is different. Nobody’s there to sell you anything. Well, almost nobody and those who are just trying to sell you on something you don’t need, usually get “loved tenderly” (a commonly used WickedFire term, just like “making monies”, that represents anything but the pleasant idea the phrase conveys) by the community. This forum is what it is and there’s no other community out there that’s even remotely similar. Let’s try to look beneath the surface and determine what exactly makes WickedFire so special. [Read more…] about Why WickedFire is a Great Forum to Learn Online Business and Marketing

Would You Pay to Read Someone’s Tweets?

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Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? For some time now, enterprising individuals have been trying to find the holy grail of Twitter monetization. Some have been blatantly spamming advertisements through @replies. Some have indirectly monetized their Twitter accounts by using it as a viral marketing tool. Still, others have created Twitter clients that are funded by advertisements.

Will you dare to venture into Twitter monetization by limiting your audience to paying subscribers? This is what TwitPub aims to do. It’s supposed to be a

marketplace made for Twitter so users can buy and sell premium tweets.

Is this a viable business model? It could be, if you are in the business of dispensing important, expensive advice.

While TwitPub’s activity may not be all that impressive, their service may have potential within the political and financial realms (as people would pay to access gossip and financial advice, especially in this economy).

I come from a school of thought that says the moment you set a price to your content, you would have already devalued it. For one, you are limiting your audience severely. Secondly, you won’t have as much interactivity and viral marketing potential if your content is closed. Of course, this may not necessarily be true in all cases, but unless you’re really famous and powerful, I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in paying to read your tweets. And if you’re already famous and powerful, you probably don’t need anyone paying a few bucks to read your tweets or to send you direct messages.

Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? And would you pay to get your direct message sent into someone’s inbox?

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter

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We’ve all heard of how awesome Twitter is for social media marketing, but you may not know how to get started. One of the most important and basic things for Twitter marketing is finding people to follow.

Here are a couple ways to do that, so you can start networking with active people in your industry.

1. Search Twellow.

With the popularity of Twitter, Twitter profile directories have started popping up. Twellow is my favorite one. It’s pretty easy to use. Just enter the name of your niche in the search box and you’ll get a list of profiles that are interested in your niche. The profiles will be ordered by followers so you can easily follow the most popular ones.

2. Search Twitter itself.

You can use Twitter’s search function to see which people are currently talking about your industry. Simply search for the name of your industry or other related keywords. Then, check out the profiles and see how often they actually tweet about your niche. The ones that are big fans of your industry are great candidates to follow.

3. Check out bloggers.

Check the active blogs in your niche to see if they have a Twitter feed or a link to a Twitter account. Many bloggers have become active on Twitter, so this method is an easy way to find people to follow.

4. Find out who other people follow.

Once you’ve found some quality Twitter profiles, browse through their friends and see who they follow. I’ve found great people through this technique. Oftentimes, there are quality Twitterers that are under the radar because they don’t follow a lot of people. However, you can find out about them with this technique since many people usually follow them.

If someone follows a lot of people and you don’t want to wade through all their friends, you can ask them for the top 10 people they like to follow.

Over to You

How have you found people to follow on Twitter?

This is a guest post from TwitQA.com, a twitter tool where you can ask and answer questions.