social media

How To Change Your Twitter Profile Header

Twitter recently unveiled a Read more »rtise/enhanced-profile/" target="_blank">design change that lets you add some more personality to your Twitter profile page.  The change is similar to the cover photos introduced recently on Facebook.

Twitter has made the process very easy:

1. Log into Twitter, click on the gear icon at the top of the screen, and click on Settings.

2. Click on Design on the menu that appears on the left side of the page.

Twitter and Social Media as News Sources

Twitter is not even 6 years old but has become a major source of breaking news.  When many of the major news stories of the last year have broken, we have found ourselves on Twitter to get up-to-the-minute news.

Shortly after 8:00pm ET tonight, I received a text message from Chad that Whitney Houston had died.  Of course, I didn’t believe it at first and immediately opened Safari to check online to see if was really news.  But, instead of checking any of the traditional news sites, I found my fingers typing twitter.com and then doing a search for Whitney Houston.  Within minutes, all of my trending topics were also related to the news.  Read more »

Send Button Joins the Facebook Like Button

Will the 'email to a friend' functionality featured on many websites be coming to an end?  The new Facebook 'send' button hopes so.

Facebook announced yesterday that a send button has joined the like button.  According to Facebook, "the Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual."  A big advantage over the traditional 'email to a friend' option is that you don't need to leave the page you are reading or fill out any forms.  If you want to send a page to someone who is not on Facebook, you can still enter an email address with the send button.   Read more »

Social Media for Restaurants - 5 Ideas to Get Started

The top benefits of social media marketing, as identified by the Social Media Marketing Report 2011 released this week, are generating more business exposure (as indicated by 88% of marketers), increased traffic (72%) and improved search rankings (62%).  The report also indicates that those who invest the time (at least 6 hours per week) and have the experience (3 years or more) find the greatest benefits.

We know what you are thinking:  (1) I am busy running a restaurant, how can I find the time to fit social media into an already chaotic schedule and even if I did, (2) how do I do it and (3) what do I get out of it? Read more »

3 Things Small Businesses Need to Know About Social Media in 2011

We attended “State of the Social Media Marketing Industry” Webinar presented by Social Media Examiner and HubSpot this afternoon where the results of a new study of more than 3,300 marketers were shared. Tons of great statistics were presented about every aspect of social media, and it all was very relevant to small businesses – almost 80% of respondents are either self-employed, work for small a businesses, or own a business. 

In our opinion, here are the three key take-aways for small business owners:

Make Time for Social Media

The survey reports that: Read more »

Resolutions - Q1 Check-In and Measurement

April 1.  That means we are finished with the first quarter, finished with 25% of the year.  That seems like a good time to take a look back at our goals and measure how we are doing so far.  Remember the Resolutions series from January where we said we'd help you stay accountable?  Well, it's accountability time!

As you may remember, one of our resolutions for the year was to blog more around the topics of technology, social media, and marketing for business owners.  Our plan included 1 blog entry per week, sticking to the 3 categories we selected, and staying on track with the topics we had planned.  Since we told you we'd hold you accountable for your goals, we know we are accountable to you for ours so here's how we are doing: Read more »

Top 20 Things We Learned From "The Science of Timing"

We just attended “The Science of Timing” Webinar presented by HubSpot and it was one of the best webinars we’ve attended in a long while with so much great information shared (thank you, @Danzarrella).  Here are some key take-aways:

Twitter

1. Highest number of retweets (RT) occurs between 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm ET, and the lowest is between 8:00 am – 10:00 am.

2. The end of the week is more retweetable than the beginning of the week.

3. Click-through rate (CTR) is highest on Tuesday and Wednesday, and lowest on Monday.

4. CTR does not dip on the weekend.  In fact, weekend CTR is actually higher than on Monday and Thursday.

5. CTR also spikes around 11:00 am and 5:00 pm.

6. People who tweet 22 times per day have the most followers. Read more »

Resolution #3 – I will do more with social media or, I will try to learn about this social media thing.

Week 3 of resolutions!  We are committed to our resolutions (goals) this year, and we are happy to have you with us.  While our competitors and your competitors forget about their resolutions, we have plans to achieve ours and positively impact our businesses.  If you missed the first 2 resolutions about email and using technology more productively, make sure you go back and check those out to keep up.  This week, we are taking on a topic that seems overwhelming to many people – social media.

Read more »