Tax season is upon us; there is no denying that. While the standard print ads and authoritative TV ads have been making their appearances for weeks now, they seem to be less prominent than in recent years. With increasing regularity, accounting firms countrywide are turning to social media in unparalleled numbers to ramp up their marketing efforts. It seems that CPAs and do-it-for-you tax companies are finally recognizing the power of social channels, and are talking action accordingly.
According to survey results from Robert Half Management Resources, 22% of CFOs interviewed by telephone cited active participation in Social Media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter. A 22% usage percentage may seem unimpressive relatively, but for a professional service such as this it does reflect a high adoption rate.
To reap the largest yield from your Social Media Marketing efforts, take a 3-pronged approach:
- Focus — Define a clear focus, including desired target market(s) and ultimate goals for visibility and conversion.
- Educate — Take every opportunity to share helpful information with clients (current and potential) via blog posts. Well-written and helpful content is oft-shared content, and will help establish brand authority.
- Optimize — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be used in conjunction with Social Media Marketing, also known as Social Media Optimization, to gain increased exposure and better ROI.
Your credit score carries significant weight in your financial life. Want to rent an apartment or buy a car? Good luck doing so with a bad credit score. The same logic applies to landing a job if you have a negative online reputation. So says MyWebCareer, an early stage startup that has developed algorithms to run your “Career Score,” a credit check for your professional web persona.
The most-frequently cited reason Facebook users give for “unliking” a brand is that it posts too frequently, according to a new report from Exact Target and CoTweet. Data from “The Social Break-up” indicates 44% of Facebook users list this as a top reason for unliking a brand they once liked on Facebook.
Infographics are nothing new; presenting data in a graphically-appealing manner has been around just about as long as the data itself. Anyone spending a reasonable amount of time of the internet as of late however will note the sudden and perplexing popularity of these graphics however. An “insider” who got a little tired of seeing these graphics pop up everywhere revealed the truth; infographics are an advanced keyword-spamming tactic.
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/*On February 24, 2011 Google has announced a major algorithmic change to its search engine. This change targets content farms – low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content, usually by either producing large amounts of low-quality text or by copying it from websites [...]
On Friday, February 11, 2011, the United States government made another huge domain seizure. The Cyber Crime Centers of ICE seized a slew of domains acting on behalf of “Operation Save Our Children,” an anti-child pornography initiative. As has become all too common with these types of seizures however, a mistake was made and innocent sites were targeted.
David Segal of the New York Times takes a look at the use of “blackhat” SEO techniques behind the ubiquitous presence of J.C. Penney at the top of Google’s search results over the last few months.
When it comes to link building, the strategies are wide; numerous; and often time-consuming or expensive, yet widely accepted as a necessary aspect of SEO. Jeremy Bencken, proposes a unique alternative method to build links and establish presence.
One of the long-standing dilemmas any search engine has to grapple with is how to rate their own products in search results. Various rumors have been circulating that a particular engine or another is playing favorites by giving a search ranking boost to their own products. Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and search engine “bird-watcher” of sorts aims to shed some light on these rumors via his recently-published study.
You could say Bing is taking a cue from its competition, but it seems to be more literally taking search results as well. Google Fellow Amit Singhal is claiming so much and has provided some amusing (if not totally clever) results from its “Bing Sting.”