As social media needs increase, more businesses are looking to hire a dedicated individual to carry out the work. Gone are the days of assigning random employees to – on occasion – post an article on Facebook or send out a tweet. The time is now to get serious about creating a social media strategy and sticking with it. Doing it without a designated employee who is held accountable for its execution just won’t cut it. Hiring someone just because... Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Twitter
As social media needs increase, more businesses are looking to hire a dedicated individual to carry out the work. Gone are the days of assigning random employees to – on occasion – post an article on Facebook or send out a tweet. The time is now to get serious about creating a social media strategy and sticking with it. Doing it without a designated employee who is held accountable for its execution just won’t cut it. Hiring someone just because... 
If your small business has been active on social media, we’ll make the assumption that you’ve seen your company grow because of it. Whether it be an increase in orders or an increase in staff to produce content, the time might be right to consider creating a social media policy. Beyond managing the social media activity that takes place on your company’s behalf, it’s wise to have a method in place for handling employees who might abuse their access to... 
Free: It’s one of the best four-letter words in the English lexicon. When people see it, their interest is immediately sparked. And it gets even better when that something free is tied into a contest. Not only is there a prize involved, but there’s also a win. Every day,hundreds of businesses tap into the psychology of winning and getting something for free. And they do it through social media contests. Take BMW, for example. The venerable German automaker put... 
It’s not all that uncommon for a shopper to cruise past an intriguing storefront and think, “I’m going to check them out online when I get home.” In fact, those same consumers might just pull out their smartphone right then and there to bookmark the website. But what happens when they’re a block or two away – or at home later that evening – only to discover that the store doesn’t offer online shopping? As you can imagine, there are... For anyone who’s noticed the dog-eared “view summary” paper icon located at the bottom of a tweet, you’ve probably wondered how it got there and why it only appears on some status updates. The same goes for the staggered “view image” icon.
As it turns out, the expandable content is what Twitter refers to as a card, an added-value feature that makes it possible for Twitter users to attach additional media to their tweets. To include a card on a status update, it’s necessary to add a few lines of HTML to the web pages where the original content can be found.
Twitter rolled out its cards in mid-2012, initially delivering summary and image offerings. This week, however, the social media giant revealed three new cards – one of which that will have a substantial impact for online retailers active on Twitter.
“The product card is a great way to better represent retail items on Twitter, and to drive sales,” explains the Twitter development site. “This Card type is designed to showcase your products via an image, a description, and allow you to highlight two other key details about your product.”
The video above walks users through the process of adding Twitter cards that will appear every time a tweet references some aspect of their website. Currently, however, Twitter doesn’t allow for just anyone to use the product portion of the service. Businesses and individuals will need to apply for the ability to do so. In the meantime, the video does a good job of explaining how to add meta tags to tap into the pre-existing portion, which will be similar to the functionality of the product cards when they become available system-wide.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has more than 6,000 reviews on Amazon.com, and the movie Mean Girls has nearly 5,000. In addition to proving the popularity of J.K. Rowling or Lindsay Lohan, it just goes to show how much consumers like sharing their opinions on the things that they buy. And thank goodness for consumer reviews because how could consumers possibly shop without them? These days, it seems almost impossible to purchase something without first consulting with... 
There are so many things that get swept under the rug when our precious time doesn’t allow for their attention. When dirty laundry starts piling up, the classic excuse is that we’re just too busy. If we realize that we haven’t called an out-of-town friend or family member, it’s usually because time just didn’t allow for that overdue chat. Even something as trivial as creating an account to make an online purchase falls under the there-aren’t-enough-hours-in-the-day syndrome. But for an... Recently, we here at NetSphere Strategies reported on the suspension of Guy Adams’ Twitter account. Adams, who published the corporate e-mail address of Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, caused a ripple throughout the entire Twitterverse. Whether you were on Adams’ side (Zenkel’s e-mail address is publicly available, after all) or whether you were on Twitter’s side (who stepped in when an individual’s privacy was in jeopardy), the debate opened up the public’s eyes to the idea of Twitter etiquette....
Don’t like the way NBC is giving coverage to the Olympics? Well then don’t tweet about it – as long as Twitter and NBC are partnering up, that is. According to an article published on London’s Telegraph website, Twitter and NBC got together before the Olympics to enter into a partnership wherein Twitter would feature highlighted tweets from sports insiders in return for on-air promotions. Everything was going according to plan until Twitter users caught wind of the suspension of Guy... 
If you were to take a brief survey of the people in your social circles to ask them what the benefits of LinkedIn are, you might get a wider variety of responses than you’d imagine. For some, LinkedIn is all about landing a new job with the website serving as an online resume of sorts. For others, LinkedIn is a tool for garnering sales leads. And still others will say that LinkedIn is just as social as Twitter and Facebook, acting...