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If you see a website now without a Twitter or Facebook button you will probably agree it looks a bit bare. It has become almost a guaranteed feature and it is not just because it looks pretty. Sharing works, both for your social media and now also for your website listing too with Google placing a high emphasis on social sharing in terms of ranking your site in its listings. Remember it is social media and being social means sharing, so how best to share? Here’s our six tops tips to sharing success:

1. Content is King

This is definitely true for sharing. If it isn’t any good people won’t share it, so if you come up with something unique and interesting people are more likely to share it. Be the first and your link could become viral in a matter of hours. When creating new copy, think how it can be shared. Don’t just think the obvious ways, such as via sharing buttons, but think could this be presented in a more sharer friendly way?

2. Support sharing and reap the benefits

People are by nature lazy. The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more likely they will. So make sure that your sharing buttons are not just limited to your home page. You want people to share specific parts of your site so they will need a button for each interesting article or feature.

3. Don’t forget the other networks

Facebook, Twitter, yes, but don’t forget LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+ etc. To avoid massive load times and to keep your design cleaner and simple consider using purpose built tools like sharethis and addthis to help.

4. Create canned tweets

Rather than simply share your link, use a sharing tool that allows you to add some content to the Tweet or Post it generates. So if they click your Share on Twitter link as well as the link, the box pops up with some pre-inputted words such as “This is the best sharing article I have seen…”

5. Share content from others

You will find sharing content from others, not only makes them sit up and take notice of you – and therefore more likely to share your content, but it will also do wonders to your own social media presence and help you pick up followers and fans. Remember it is social media, not just media and social needs a two-way relationship, so your sharing shouldn’t just be your own stuff.

6. Infographic – yes please

If ever there has been a trend in the past year in terms of social sharing, the infographic is it. Put simple words in pictures are infinitely shareable. It gives the information you are sharing a new slant and in a much more user-friendly way. If you have something to say, or even if you want to re-say something you have seen elsewhere with a new approach, then an infographic infinitely more likely to be shared than any comment you can cram into 140 characters.

Sharing is the key to success simply because it is at the very heart of the ethos of social media. If you forget the social side of it, you forget the sharing and you will never make a success of it.

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We’ve highlighted the SEO value in YouTube before, as the second largest search engine in the world, you are fool not to be featuring your brand, but it appears few people know about a YouTube feature that not only expands your reach but can also improve your SEO.

For every video uploaded you have probably optimised the description and Keywords fields but have you used every tool available?

YouTube has a helpful transcription facility designed to help you reach out to the hearing-impaired audience but which also acts a great SEO tool too. YouTube’s closed captioning service can literally put words to the pictures as they appear in the video.

The machine transcription system effectively works via voice recognition and actually is not one of the most accurate of its ilk but even the experts appear to have been stumped at creating total accuracy in this field. However, the automated processing can be easily overridden and edited, so spending a few extra minutes can make your transcription word perfect and the effort will bring a big boost to your organic search.

Here’s how to use the tool:

1. Upload and save your video to your YouTube channel

Remember to include an engaging headline, relevant keywords and a full description of what your video is about

2. Use YouTube’s Machine Transcription

Once your video uploads select it from your list of videos and click click the edit link. Next click on the Captions and Subtitles tab. You should now be presented with “Available Caption Tracks” with a checkbox beside “English: Machine Transcription”. Click the download button and let the system work it’s magic.

You may be presented with the following message “Machine Transcription is available for the videos in this Channel. To enable Machine Transcription for this video, please ‘Request Processing’. We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”. In which case click the “Request processing” button and allow the system time to try to carry out  the transcription.

3. Edit your transcription

Once you have transcription you can download the same and edit it in any text editor. You can amend any errors and typos and event arrange the correct words with the correct video sections. Be careful to ensure the time coding is kept intact and is accurate to the location of that text in the video. You will see the formatting is fairly logical but this is usually the part that creates problems for people.

4. Upload your captions

Once you are happy with the transcript simply upload it to the video under “Add a Caption Track”. Before you set the video live check the captions are in sync and correct by watching the video through. Click the cc symbol on the bottom right of the video screen to kick the captions in. If there are any errors you can easily correct any errors by repeating the process above. If it works send the video along with the captions live.

Now sit back and watch the traffic roll in. As well as providing vital subtitles to the hard of hearing your captions will now provide a transcript for search engines to trawl. It effectviely provides them with a complete catalogue of every word used in the video including any vital keywords. To add extra value download the completed transciption file and save it to your computer. On this version strip out the timecoding references and then use the text to create a blog article to support a page you might embed the video on.

Have you used YouTube captions to good effect?

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The key to successful social media use, is knowing why you moved into the field in the first place. At the hub of your social media strategy should be communication. It is important too that you remember communication is a two-way tool, so by all means spread your message but also listen too. The best way to get started, and continue to approach your social media output is:

* Speak to your customers *
* Listen to your customers *
* Help your customers *
* Take on board advice from your customers *
* Encourage your customers to spread the word *

Remember it is all a continuing circle too. Successful social media evolves it doesn’t just happen.

Timing is everything

You also need to think about what you are looking to get out of social media. Dan Zarella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book has spent years analysing frequency and timing and how it affects social media success for Business. He suggests that different businesses should post their tweets, their Facebook comments and even blog posts up at different times, unique to them to get the best value. Use the knowledge you have about the rest of your business and online offerings to help set a calendar for your social media too. If Google Analytics shows your website gets more traffic late afternoon, then that is obviously the best time to be posting news, blogs and information that will hook the customers. It is also likely to be the time your potential customers are most active online so it may also be the perfect time to try and interact with them via Facebook and Twitter.

Plan your content

Consider your social media output like an interactive newsletter about your company and what it does. You can use it to let people know about new lines, new promotions, new people within your business but you also want it to engage too, so you will need to balance promotion with just general conversation too. In a busy work environment that can be difficult so it pays to set out a calendar of what you would like to and what you will need to cover over the next few months via your social media accounts. You can set up templates, even schedule posts way in advance, all help take the pressure off but also all need to be properly managed so that at least once a week you take a step back and look at the overall picture about what your company did and how it worked on social media. Some things will work, others won’t but learn from everything you do and re-adjust with that knowledge while also referring back to what your original social media goals were.

Finally, remember social media is supposed to be fun. It is informal by nature and engages best with a little bit of humour. That’s not to say be unprofessional, just remember even the dullest subjects can be handled well with the right approach.

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The phrase quality over quantity is nothing new – even in business – but the first thing to point out is that even if you do follow this old adage you will have to preach hard to almost everyone you meet that that is the right approach.

It’s human nature that we want answers, quantifiable results, etc. The modern marketing world is dominated by ROI (return on investment) stats but social media works best in ways that are more difficult to quantify. There are methods that claim to help evaluate improvements in brand awareness, customer opinion and loyalty but even those are difficult to relate back directly as a result of social media. So many people turn to the number of followers and fans as a symbol of how well they are doing in social media terms.

As we pointed out back at the start of this guide – B –Buying fans and followers – there are plenty of places offering you the chance to boost your follower and fan numbers if you are prepared to part with some cash, but that’s like holding a party and inviting loads of people you don’t know and who don’t know you. Sure some will come, curiosity for many others just looking to see what’s in it for them, others because they have nothing better to do. In which case they are of very little value to you as the party host and you are highly unlikely to ever see or hear from any of them again. The same is true of this un-natural fan or follower.

Quality of fan and follower should be your focus and that means someone who appreciates what you are doing, is likely to be inspired to spend some money with your business and hopefully may even want to spread the word about how good you are. One fan telling their own set of 500 fans how great you are is likely to be so much more productive in the long run than you just buying in 500 fans.

Better quality fans can be advocates for your business by spreading the word, but also can be your ear to the ground. The chances are they are already your customer. Their opinion could be an indication of how other customers are feeling too, so if they make suggestions or start grumbling…pay attention. Use social media to get to know your customers not just to gain statistics you can show off without meaning.

An example of why quality of followers over quantity works, is the celebrity twittersphere. Almost every pop-star, football player even politician has a Twitter account with 10,000 or more followers, yet very few actually interact with those fans who have chosen to follow them. In fact, often they are the worst Tweeters and people to follow. If they tweet at all, it is usually inane references to their unreal lives. The fact that most celebrities with large numbers of followers only themselves follow a handful of others on Twitter, also shows they don’t care for the interaction, it is more self-promotion and while it has worked for some Twitter is more about relationships than just one-way PR. The better quality your follower the easier you will find it to interact with them – there will be more shared ground and knowledge and desire to interact.

Your aim should be to develop relationships, interact with your followers and become an influencer over their habits. That will help drive sales back to you and that will also help improve your status as a social media guru.

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When building a site, people focus mainly on choosing a catchy domain name and on designing a nice look for it. Deciding what type of hosting a site needs seems to be less important, although it should be a priority.

Most people, when choosing a hosting plan, go with either shared or dedicated hosting. However, there is also a cheap alternative– and this is VPS hosting or Virtual Private Servers hosting. VPS hosting offers similar benefits to those of a dedicated server, but unlike it, it’s a cheaper solution to host multiple sites on a server. On top of that, it’s more flexible and secure.

Thinking of switching to VPS hosting? Here are 6 reasons to help you decide:

1. It’s scalable, handling heavy traffic easier than shared hosting

Although VPS share the resources on a server, each Virtual Private Server is private and independent from one another. It’s scalable which means that if your site receives a lot of visitors (more than usual) between 5PM-7PM for instance, the VPS frees up resources so your site performs as smoothly as possible, with no downtime.

2. It’s flexible, allowing your site to grow

VPS hosting is perfect for those sites that are constantly growing. That’s because, unlike shared or dedicated hosting, VPS hosting is more flexible. You are not forced to share server resources with other site owners, making these resources easier to access and manage.

3. Ideal for e-commerce sites

Virtual private servers are the perfect hosting solution for e-commerce sites because no matter how much they grow, the server will accommodate to the change. For shopping sites, VPS hosting means more space and resources that are easier to access.

4. It’s more budget friendly than dedicated or shared hosting

VPS hosting is a cheaper alternative to dedicated or shared hosting, however each VPS owners has its own private space and resources. It’s like having your own servers, minus the extra costs. So, if you’re on a budget, hosting your site on a VPS is the way to go.

5. Full control over your VPS

This is one of the strong points of a Virtual Private Server. Unlike shared hosting, where you can’t access a lot of features, with VPS hosting you can easily modify your VPS specs or install new software via the control panel, whenever you need to.

6. One of the most secure hosting platforms

VPS hosting is one of the most secure hosting platforms currently available on the web, considering each user’s files and installed software is private and secure, preventing hacker attacks.

All things considered, VPS is the perfect hosting solution if you want to save money yet still allow your visitors to enjoy the benefits of a fast-loading site. So why not start now with our new VPS hosting solution from 123-reg? It starts at £9.99 a month but you can choose to configure your VPS freely to fit your needs.

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Sharing and hosting images on the internet is by no means a new concept, in fact even in the early days of the internet it was possible to view images on web pages. But for a long time the only real way to host an image was to have that image directly on your website which meant manually creating your website and uploading the image.  People would then visit your website and see your image. The whole process was possible but not easy for anyone as back then the internet was a much more unforgiving place for novice users.

Now things are much different, it is easy for anyone to easily share their images over the internet thanks to social media or photo sharing sites. Sites like deviantArt, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, Zooomr and even Facebook allow users to easily upload and share images.

But how easy is it really to upload your images and share them with the world? The real answer is very easy, most smart phones allow a one click upload of images onto your favourite social media site.  What that actually means is you can take a photograph, press one button then within 30 seconds have your photo online.

One main advantage of these sites is that the images are hosted on their servers which means you do not need your own web space. Some people use this to their advantage and use these free services to host the images they used in their blogs and even in their eBay auctions. Instead of needing to do the whole process yourself these photo sharing services meet you half way and take care of the difficult bit allowing you to just share the images and not needing to worry about the technical details behind it.

Most photo sharing sites offer two different types of accounts; the first is free and allows users to upload a limited number of photos. The second type is a premium service that allows an unlimited amount of uploads. The images can be made private to a select group or made public so the whole world can see. If a photo is publicly available anyone can see it without needing to sign up for the sharing service. This gives restricted access which is very good for sharing but can pose possible issues as well.

Online theft and fraud has become major issues in the photo sharing market as when certain images are made public they can be misused. When using such sites it is important to be warned of the dangers of posting personal pictures to public sites. But really you should just use your common sense, remember if you are posting a picture publicly it can be viewed by anyone so if you don’t want everyone to see if just don’t post it.

Sharing photos through social media networks has become increasingly popular. In August 2011 it was reported that Flickr was hosting more than 6 billion images and by the end of September 2011 Facebook was hosting more than 100 billion photos.

The internet is growing all the time and it is making sharing media much easier than it has ever been but as it is so easy we need to use our common sense and only post what we feel happy for the world to see.

What do you think? Are photo sharing sites a good thing or do we need to be cautious?

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If you believe the hype, 2012 could be the year of new domain names. That’s because plans for the liberalisation of the domain name market – which were discussed and debated for years – are finally being put into practice.

This month saw applications open for the creation of new domain name extensions. Think .london, .microsoft, .coke or .sport – anyone can apply to create a new domain name suffix.

New domains, but not for everyone

Applications close in April, after which ICANN (the organisation that manages the domain name system) decides who should be able to set up and run new domain names.

Of course, it’s not for everyone. The application process is complex and expensive. It costs $185,000 just to put an application forward, and applicants also have to demonstrate that they can effectively set up and run the new domain name extension.

For cost reasons alone, expect to see applications limited to big name corporations. Some pundits have suggested Facebook could be among them, simply in order to give every Facebook user their personal web address: http://yourname.facebook.

Industry experts Verisign reckon there could be 1,500 applications. Of most interest to smaller businesses and individuals will be any non-branded terms that are opened up for public registration. Perhaps your business would like a .london or .local address.

Are they better than .com?

The truth is it’s too early to say what impact these new domain names will have. Some big brands have confirmed that they’re definitely not interested, preferring to stick with their tried, tested and highly-recognisable .com domain names.

That’s fine if you already own the .com domain name of your dreams. But with prime domain names becoming rarer, new extensions could be the best way to ensure there are enough good domain names for everyone.

Of course, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this over the next few months. It’s too soon to say what new domains will be created or how they’ll be used. But we plan to expand the range of domain names we offer to include any exciting new extensions – so you can still enjoy the wide choice you’ve come to expect from 123-reg.

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Social media sites are no longer just for social communication between friends. Many organisations have turned to social media to capture a rapidly growing audience.  Social media is the perfect medium for charities and other non-profit organisations as not only are they free but it also means you can reach out to a staggering amount of people.

Many organisations are reaching out to people through social media sites and are increasing awareness for their cause. Social media sites like Facebook give a platform where these organisations can give details of fundraising events; they can give back ground information on their charity work and allow followers to exchange their experiences and ideas.

By using social media the organisation is no-longer a faceless organisation, in fact by utilising the different social methods of social interaction the organisation can spread their message and appeal to a larger demographic.

Social media sites are very good at spreading news and quickly. It is now possible to circulate a message to your followers almost instantly and arrange a fundraiser or demonstration at the drop of a hat. You are always connected to all your followers.

But has social media really made a difference to these organisations or is it just another medium for their fundraising? Well the truth is some organisations are using social media as just another medium and maybe have a Facebook page just to have a presence. Others are more socially active and use social media to fully engage their audience and make the most of the medium.

Social media has spawned another method of fundraising and advocacy that was not seen before. Organisations like Causes expand on the concept of social interaction and use that to showcase their causes and raise funds. Causes was founded in 2007 as an online advocacy and fundraising application within Facebook and with over 100 million users it has helped to raise over $30 million. Causes enables users to create groups that take action on a social issue or support a specific non-profit organisation, these groups are called a “cause” and are the foundation for fundraising activities. The more engaging the cause the more likely it is to gain a user-base willing to support it. Causes is one of the largest applications on Facebook and has an huge user base.

There is a lot more interaction now on the internet and getting support or funding for one of your ideas can be much simpler than it has ever been. Kicker is an online pledge system for funding creative projects and has been responsible for funding a huge array of projects including new technology, films, music and even food. The way it works is you share your idea with Kickstarter users, then if any of the users feel your idea has any weight behind it they will give funding so you can work on your creative project.

Social media is not just another way for organisations to get our hard earned cash by quilting us into giving; it is so much more than that. It has become a place that people can exchange ideas and that can enable anyone to make a difference.

Has social media made a difference to your cause?

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So the year has settled in – too quickly for our liking – and no doubt you’ve already broken all those resolutions you made on December 31st. So we thought two weeks in would make a time to set some more resolutions to keep this year and some that are more business specific and designed to make your business more successful in 2012. So here’s six from us:

1 Make contact with an old client

Don’t do the hard sell, just see what they are up to and say hello. It may come to nothing but in two, three even six months time when they need some help or perhaps somebody they know needs help of the kind you can supply, you are more likely to feature in their thoughts.

2 Only hold meetings when needed

Not every problem deserves a meeting and far too often not every meeting deserves a meeting. So be strong, be realistic and ditch the meetings that you know aren’t likely to move anything on. Calling a meeting to solve a problem is the easy way out, solving it is the hardest bit.  Instead of all that wasted time to create space for a meeting, spend the time productively trying to solve the problem.

3 Re-tweet two articles per day

Not only will it help your own Twitter presence and following – although only if it is relevant and interesting information you are retweeting – but it will also encourage you to read a bit more and widen your own knowledge.

4 Join a new business group or networking organisation

This could be signing up to a trade or industry organisation or it could just be signing up to an online group such as the many thriving on LinkedIn. It is a great way of keeping up with the buzz in your industry but also of making new contacts who you can bounce ideas off of or learn from.

5 Learn when to move on

If a project keeps stalling or a product just isn’t moving, stop and take a step back. Putting more and more effort into solving the issues may be making it more diffuclt for you to see the whole picture. If you can put it on hold, or pass it to a colleague. A fresh set of eyes can be the fastest way to solving consistent stumbling blocks and more effective and efficient in the long run.

6 Manage your finances better

Invest in a suitable accounts package and put it in the hands of somebody suitably qualified to use it. Then make the most of it. As well as tracking all the ins and outs – make sure you chase invoices as they become overdue – us it to plan properly too. Look at cashflow and projections and flag up early any potential issues.

That’s just six from us what are your resolutions?

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Whether it was people trying to overcome party hangovers or kids finishing school in the middle of the month, YouTube is celebrating December 2011 as its busiest month of traffic ever.

According to Experian Hitwise,  YouTube now accounts for 1 in every 4 visits to a social network in the UK and 1 in 30 of every visit online.

The importance of social media in business was also shown in the report that revealed social media was the third biggest source of traffic to online traders in the Christmas season, with 8% of all visits to online retail websites in the month of December coming from social media referrals.

BBC iPlayer also reported a bumper viewing months with Christmas catch-up proving popular but YouTube still headed the field making up 65% of all visits to video websites in the UK during December.

With 2012 the year of the Olympics, Paralympics and Euro 2012 plus the expected year for fully internet connected TVs to take off, expect the December 2011 figures to be just a small drop in the ocean.

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