Last week I started using the GeoLocation Based Social Media site Gowalla to check in while out and about and I like its features that allow me to update not only my Gowalla profile, but also Facebook places, Twitter, and my Tumblr. I also like the feature of being able to post pictures to my profile and add the pics to the spot that I am visiting as well as posting to my Twitter and Facebook profiles if I desire.
Gowalla and FourSquare
Gowalla and FourSquare are not the only players in the GeoLocation Based Social Media game, but they are the two major players. FourSquare being the bigger of the two, but Gowalla, which was established in 2007, is the older of the two.
Who Uses GeoLocation Social Media sites?
Users of these GeoLocation social services tend to be tech savy, young people who have disposable income. If I had a business that relied upon foot traffic, I would strive to get these users of both Gowalla and FourSquare into my establishment.
For more info on using GeoBased Location Social Media for Business check out the following SlideShare presentations:(I will be doing a post on this subject in the near future)
Gowalla is into the Geocaching Game vs the Social aspect of FourSquare
Both now allow posting of pictures.
Choosing not to update followers for a particular check-in on Gowalla requires up to four taps on my iPhone vs FourSquare which it can be done with one tap.
Design wise I think they are about equal, both are pretty easy to navigate.
I am not going to go into any more detail in this post. I encourage you to check out both GeoLocation Social Media sites and compare the two. I myself, will be keeping an eye on both, and will be looking for ways that I can use them to enable my local Search clients to drive foot traffic to their businesses.
Every Thursday at 3:20pm I get a Google Alert that at 330pm EST, I will be participating in an online Tweetup called Travelers Night In (#TNI Twitter hashtag). I first found out about the Tweetup when I noticed #TNI appearing in the Alltravelsites Twitter stream. I then asked one of the people what the Hashtag #TNI stands for, and I was sent to the Travelers Night In page and told to follow it on Tweetgrid.com, which is a cool site that allows you to follow numerous Twitter streams and post to your own stream to connect to the Twitter conversation.
TNI is from 330pm to 5pm and it consists of 10 questions about some area of travel, this upcoming week for example is on the topic of “Festivals”.
Healthy Travel from ChooseCherries
Several weeks ago, when I participated in the Healthy Travel TNI, which was sponsored by Choosecherries, I actually won a Choosecherries travel pack. One lucky TNI participant won the grand prize which included a cherry iPod. Good thing I didn’t win that, or it would have made three iPods I have won and don’t use. But anyway, I would like to thank ChooseCherries for the cherry travel pack..I loved eating the dried cherries on my oatmeal in the morning..yum..
ChooseCherries.com does not sell or represent any one cherry company, so I guess you could call them a Cherry Coalition. Their site has lots of great info about cherries, including many cherry recipes and cherry health and nutrition information. You can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
If you did not know, I am a big fan of the cherry as a fruit. I also love lots of different cherry candy..see the Cherry Mash Needs SEO blog post..Thinking about cherries reminds me of one of my favorite dishes at a local restaurant, the Landis Store Hotel, Duck with Cherry Sauce…oh, I need to stop thinking about food.
Who Should participate in #TNI?
Back to TNI, now who should participate in TNI? If you have a travel interest that is personal or professional, you may want to consider following and participating in TNI. Who already participates in TNI?
Travel bloggers
Travel agents
Travel enthusiasts
Travel photographers
So if you find yourself being o of these four types of travelers, or if you find yourself being a person that would like to network with these types of travelers, why not tune in on Thursday and give TNI a try?
If you are interested in Sponsoring TNI like ChooseCherries.com did, you can visit ZipSetgo below for more info.
Examine TNI
TNI and other similar Twitter Chats have the potential to be awesome marketing events. Thinking about your own little niche, be it automotive, financial, home improvement or what have you. Do you think you could use a Tweetup like this to drive business to your site or your physical location?
TNI Resources
ZipSetGo TNI Post -These wonderful ladies are responsible for starting and maintaining TNI. I am sure if you have questions about starting a Tweetup or questions about sponsoring TNI, this is the place to go.
Wow, it has been almost two months since I posted. Why? I am not exactly sure. It must be summer. What have I been working on?
Well lots of stuff. But what have I been thinking about?
Home Improvement SEO
What I have been thinking about are Niches of SEO. We have multiple websites that focus on various niches, such as real estate, travel, food, and home improvement. Since I have these niche sites, I have decided to focus on these areas from an SEO perspective. So for example our home improvement site, which does have some home improvement articles and home improvement info, I will now focus on doing blog posts that put some SEO type info that include info on how other home improvement webmasters can optimize their sites to improve their results. So maybe some home improvement company owners will find some useful info, and realize how time consuming SEO is, and request a proposal for our Home Improvement SEO services. I have already started out contacting these types of sites via Twitter and Facebook.
Restaurant SEO
For our restaurant review site, I would like to be seen as an authority in the field of resaurant SEO, so I have started adding articles for restaurant owners that will help with their online marketing. Restaurants, much like Home Improvement contractors, should be more concerned with their local search results. Restaurants don’t necessarily need to rank in the natural listings, but do need to show up in the local listings. We can help them with that for sure.
Travel SEO
For our travel site, we will be positioning ourselves as an authority in the travel seo field. We are already getting some traffic for the term Travel SEO. The blog currently has some articles which are aimed at travel agents who would like to increase their marketing. But I believe I can do more than help travel agents. This SEO niche, would seem to be the one that has the most potential. Travel SEO clients could include hotels, airlines, restaurants at popular vacation destinations, destination travel bureaus, hospitality industry web advertising agencies that do not have in-house SEO staff, resorts, and more.
First, we have already positioned ourselves as a reputable SEO firm. Secondly, we have the sites, which we can use to focus on these other SEO niches. Third we need to spread the word and get more clients in the focus niches.
My efforts as the Social Media Director will be to make contacts with potential clients via Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, by using tactics such as those discussed by our former intern in Using LinkedIN, Twitter and Facebook to to find a Job.
I will be using the rule of 8 touches and tracking my efforts by noting dates and times of contact.
Next, I am in the process of creating landing pages on Baldydog.com for the three SEO Niches, and I will then build some links to the said landing pages, which should help them in the SERPs for these SEO terms which should be far less competitive than SEO terms such as SEO, SEO company, SEO contractor, SEO firm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization Company and the like.
So, what is your seo niche, and how can I help you?
This is a blog post for Joe Fava of Clothes2Home.com, which is a garment care company in Boyertown, Pa. I would classify Clothes2home as a dry cleaning service, but the truth is they do much more than just dry cleaning.
The other day I was in picking up some dry cleaning and Joe was telling me that he would like to increase the activity on his Facebook page.
So I did a little brainstorming and this is the video and blog post that resulted.
Clothes2Home Social Media Ideas
Give aways for doing something like signing up for the Clothes2Home newsletter, leaving comments on posts such as “Your Favorite Fava Page”.
Potential Contest Prizes
5 suit drive cleanings(I like the number five, as in a weeks worth of suits dry cleaned)
a free tux rental
free Fathers Day gift
A comforter dry cleaning
other
an iPod
To encourage those who get your email updates to follow you on various networks, give them an entry for adding you on each network. Also give an entry for each valid comment. Give additional entries if someone refers more friends.
Coupons- have weekly specials, and vary them to include listing different specials on each of the Social media outposts. Be sure to let your fans on Facebook and/or Twitter know about the special that is available on the other outpost.
Obtain foot traffic patrons email addresses and ask them if you can send them email or newsletter updates of specials and notifications when items are ready to be picked up.
Include links to your social media sites in your email correspondence.
Overall, I think Clothes2Home is doing a great job with their Social Media Optimization(SMO). The main thing is you are doing it, and you are not going to quit.
General SEO Suggestions for Clothes2Home
Add content to your site and do keyword research to find out what possible keywords to optimize.Use the free Google Adsense Keyword tool.
Create landing pages for your main keywords and include text links to them in your bottom navigation.
Bottom Navigation should be text based not graphic. Include links to landing pages, site map, disclaimer, contact page, directions, coupons..etc..
Optimize title tags with keywords..Clothes2Home does not need to be in every title tag or at the beginning of each title tag. Example Home page title tag might be
Make sure you use the same alt and title tag for pictures.
You can check out this TechCrunch article which gives several methods for embedding links. If you decide to use Blackbird Pie, be sure not to use the https version of your tweet links. Also, you must click on the time link below the Tweet which says something like “about 1hr ago” and copy and paste that link into the Blackbird tool to get an embedded tweet like the one on this post.
Other Twitter Stuff
You do know that many of the search engines are using Twitter results for part of their real time search results right? Well tweets do often show up in the SERPs.
Something that makes me go hmm
As you may or may not know, as part of the Baldydog.com company, we not only do SEO, but I as the Social Media Director, do manage several other blogs.
In addition to all the blogs, as part of the Baldydog network, we have multiple sites to include directories such as Pixelheadonline, Online Legal Directory, Home Improvement Directory, and of course Alltravelsites.com to name just a few. If you want a complete list of our directories, leave a comment, and I will send you an email with the complete list of our directories.
Anyway, while reviewing and publishing travel site submissions on the travel directory, as part of the submission process, I usually send out several tweets about the newly added travel resource. I usually say something like the tweet below.
I also send out a tweet with the individual page for the listing and may include a direct link to the url of the listing if it is a short url.
Link Building Tip
What I have noticed is that links that I tweet, such as individual listing pages, will then be cached in Google. If I don’t Tweet them, they won’t get cached, and as you know, an un-cached page is as good as invisible to Google because it doesn’t know about the web page.
Does this mean you should go and send thousands of spam links to Twitter so they get cached? I wouldn’t recommend it. I think it is ok occasionally. What I try to do when I do these types of “resource addition” tweets, is to sandwich them between tweets that seek to share, communicate, rt, or be genuinely helpful.
Even these types of tweets, I feel are helpful and not spammy, as I am only tweeting about travel related resources, and most of the 2000+ followers have some sort of travel interest.
So How Can You Use Twitter for Link Buiding
Twitter links as you know are nofollow type links, so they really don’t count for much Google Juice, but they do serve to notify the search engines of your resource, which may otherwise have been uncached.
If you do link building as we do, when you get accepted into a directory, send out a Tweet for the actual listing page of your resource or the category page that your listing appears if it is not too heavily populated with other similar resources.
Try to get as many cached links pointing to your site as possible. Cached with PR is better, but cached at the very least.
So have you noticed similar results using Twitter, or do you think I am erroneous?
**note – to get the box around my tweets, I put the tweets into a table. <table border=”2″><tr><td>Tweet code</table></tr></td>
At my first PBN networking event (mentioned in my Networking blog), I briefly spoke to Kristen Kane, from Kane Partners, about an event she was holding at NBC10 studios about using social media to find jobs. She told me where to sign-up online and it was free!
Last night, I drove to the studios of The 10 Show in Bala Cynwyd for Kristen’s presentation called, “Jobs on Social Media.” Anchor and consumer reporter Tracy Davidson was there to greet the guests as they arrived for the event. She encouraged each of us to send her an email when we get a job (not if- when!). We sat in the studio while Kristen explained the benefits of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook–if you use them correctly. I have an account on all three of these sites, but until now I did not know how to use them for my job search.
Which social media site is the most helpful for job searching?
LinkedIn and Twitter seem like the most promising social media sites if you’re looking for inside information about job openings. I wrote down everything that caught my attention during Kristen’s presentation, and you can read about it in my blog post titled, ”Using Social Media to Find a Job.”
The importance of having a clear and effective resume:
At the conclusion of the evening, I had the chance to meet with a consultant from Kane Partners named Jessica and she reviewed my resume. Jessica gave me some helpful tips about formatting and she encouraged me to be as descriptive as possible in the bullet points under each job or internship–if anything is too general, it could be misunderstood by an HR representative or anyone else glancing over the resume. Kane Partners offers resume reviews or redos if you make an appointment.
Have you made any meaningful connections on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook?
won a Choosecherries travel pack. One lucky TNI participant won the grand prize which included a cherry iPod. Good thing I didn’t win that, or it would have made three iPods I have won and don’t use. But anyway, I would like to thank ChooseCherries for the cherry travel pack..I loved eating the dried cherries on my oatmeal in the morning..yum..
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