Get Familiar With The Latest Google Update – Data Highlighter for Event Data

December 21 2012

The reach snippets in search results are very important to Google. If your site contains an event listing and you have Google Webmaster Tool account you will have the opportunity to use the latest update from Google – Data Highlighter for event data. What is a Data Highlighter? If you visit Google Webmaster Tool Learning Centre you will read that Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool for teaching Google about the pattern of event-related data on your website. This means that you will use this tool in order to highlight parts of your website through Google Webmaster Tools simply with your mouse and without having to change any of the code on your website.Great tool, isn’t it?

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How it works?

In order to start using this tool, first you must log in into your Webmaster Tools account or sign in if you don’t have one. If your site is added and verified then select your site, click the “Optimization” link in the left sidebar and click “Data Highlighter”. The link will drive you on a page where you can learn more about this tool. After reading all the information you can click on Start Highlighting button and that you need to enter the URL of a typical event page on your site.

Data Highlighter for event data can extract data about your events, such as concerts, festivals, shows, sport events, business conferences etc. See below how Google search results display a rich snippet from a multiple events.

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Before you start using this tool note that Data Highlighter can access only on the pages that have been crawled by Google recently. You cannot use this tool for pages that Google hasn’t crawled or can’t crawl particular page/s.

Twitter – a Guidebook, How to, Instructions and few Tweet-marketing tips!

December 14 2012

One of the three most powerful social media tools – the Tweet! Volume one

Twitter – An online social networking service and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages known as “tweets”, is the short explanation given by Wikipedia. It is much more than that. Since the first launch Twitter has become one of the most visited websites on the net. It represents a place where you can support and strengthen your online presence only by becoming a part of a powerful tool for social media marketing strategy.

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If used properly, this social media can help you develop and promote your brand and products, it can be a place where you can monitor what common people or customers have to say about your business, promote with leadership and industry expertise, develop direct relationships with other similar brands, products or partners, create a buzz about upcoming promotions, discount or event, interact with your fan base, bloggers and journalists for PR. By my opinion this is sufficient as for an introduction to the benefits and the power of this social media tool. On the other hand and in short terms Twitter is a communication tool that helps in the interaction with people around the world in these ways:

– Sending a short msg to a bigger mass of people – other users of this media 

– Sending a short msg to a specific auditorium – groups of users of this media 

– Sending a short msg to a certain person privately – a user of this media.

Tweets are publicly visible by default, but as shown above the tweet – senders can restrict the message delivery just to their followers – users or groups. Users can tweet via the Twitter social media website, some external applications for smartphones or by SMS available in certain countries.

Twitter terminology for beginners – Get to know Twitter!

If you are new to this media you will definitely need a vocabulary to explain some of the phrases commonly used by users and this community. You will need a guide that will help you keep up with the online brands, the products and the businesses that use such social groups for marketing purposes. Therefore here are some that will surely help you become a part of the three most powerful social media tools – Turn into interactive user of Twitter, learn it and finally use it for some online presence and branding.

Tweets – short text-based messages of up to 140 characters known as “tweets” – the character limitation is due to the mobile phones big usage of this social media in order to make it compatible with them and because of the fact that you are allowed to write and receive concise information from the community users.

Handle – the Twitter handle is the username that you have selected to use, read and write tweets with. It is the name that everybody recognizes you by in the community and the name you have selected to be your representative in the community.

Following – to follow some person, brand or user in this community it means that you are subscribed to its updates, tweets and posts. Just click on the follow button and you are already following that user by getting its updates on your twitter home page.

Home page – it is the place where you can read all of your followers and following user’s updates so that you will know what are they buzzing about, what are they doing and where they were by seeing photos from places around the world and the place where you can manage your twitter profile.

Follower – it is the user who is subscribed to your updates. You can view your total number of followers on your Twitter profile page.

Status updates – this is a “tweet” that you posted on your profile page. It can’t be longer that 140 characters. And also can be posted under the white box “What is happening?”

@Reply – An @ sign in front of a Twitter handle is a message sent from one user to another by putting @username- anywhere within the line of a tweet and can be publicly seen by other users. These replies don’t appear in a user’s stream.

Retweet – is re-posting someone else’s Tweet, which usually appears on the home timeline and can be done only by user which you follow or you are followed by. The retweets look like normal tweets but with author’s name of the user who retweeted the tweet and with the acronyms RT at the end to indicate that its re-posted content- tweet.

Stream – A Twitter stream is the list of a person‘s real-time updates. Every time you post an update, it goes into your Twitter stream – it usually can be found on your home page.

Hashtag – is a tagging method used to associate and combine the chats about an event or theme. Hashtags can easily be created by combining a # with a word or phrase (#WORD) and used as a tag within the tweets.

Tweet-up – an event specifically organized for Twitter users to meet up and network.

 

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42% of Twitter users follow brands – is your business one of them?

What is it and what it can do for your business?

As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. It is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends, friends or subscribers. At the beginning the things weren’t like this.

For the first time launched in July 2006, with 400.000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007, the rapid progress of the media was getting higher day by day and year-by-year so it grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. Nowadays and lately known data as from March 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday stating that it has 140 million users and 340 million tweets per day. The highest tweet record was accomplished during the 2011 Women’s World Cup Final between Japan and the US, when 7,196 tweets per second were published.

Are you among the 42 % of Twitters followed brands?

After these facts and many others that will follow, imagine the power of this media and the contribution to your brand if used properly. Using the worldwide trending topics shown on the right –side of your Twitter homepage, such as topics are words, phrases, or hashtags organized by location and in real time, or the pay-per-click of Twitter – the paid promoted tweets. The good thing about this connection -building and connecting-maintenance tool is that it can be used on a personal or a company level as per the most obvious business uses – meeting potential customers and marketing on the same way you would advertise your brand at networking events or exhibitions. Having a company account it means that you can:

  • Keep your customers up-to-date on your events and discounts
  • Promote recent blog articles, news or pricing opportunities
  • Update your consumers about products/services/ events
  • Keep informed the audience – real-time updates at seminars and events
  • Offer customer service
  • Expand your business‘s network follow and be followed.

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Remember, before even starting a profile whether if it is personal or company profile do the research needed for engaging customers, know how they use this community, find out if there are any conversations trending about your brand, product or service and read what are they saying about you.

Next, determine the organizational goals. It’s extremely important to think about what you are trying to accomplish when using Twitter before allocating your time and resources to it. You’re likely to get the best income that way.

Follow Webski on twitter, network with us and be the first to know the news!

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