Responsive web design is all about making sure that no matter where your customers come from, they get the information they need on your website. The days of a standard web template and simple, small business design are over.

The facts are simple: Most people are using the internet to find the services they need. More than ever before, people are using mobile devices for on-the-go information about products and services. And this trend isn’t going away. Reports state that mobile web is the internet of the future, which makes responsive web design all the more important for your company.

What is Responsive Web Design?

In principle, responsive web design is simple. It’s a design mode in which your business website is developed in a way that makes it automatically respond to the device being used to access it. That means that whether a customer accesses your site on a PC with a wide, flat screen monitor or an iPhone with a small, vertical window – your website will automatically adjust to present the most appealing view to that user.

Responsive Web Design Makes a Difference

At first glance, the difference between you and a competitor is quite often the accessibility of the information on your website. From the way your website displays information to the images you choose to use, customers will get an impression of your business as soon as they view your web pages. For people using a mobile device, your website can be a nightmare if not properly designed for their particular device. Scrolling from side to side, hunting to get the information they need, and then trying to use a thumb to click on a tiny link is enough to send them to your competitor.

The good news is that responsive web design solves all of that. With a properly built website, your customers and potential buyers will always see the very best version of your website – regardless of the device they may be using. Buttons and links resize based on their device, photographs are compressed, and pages are aligned vertically instead of horizontally. A website using responsive web design can automatically detect the type of device in use and its capabilities, presenting the best possible version of your site to the end-user.

Why Responsive Web Design Benefits Small Business

It may sound counterintuitive to say that a small business should spend even more on its website. But in the long-run, responsive web design is a smarter investment. Even though a responsive web design takes longer to build – and is often more expensive – the facts are simple. With more people accessing information on mobile devices, it is simply impossible to keep up with the multiple versions of a website that will suit them all.

Imagine creating a new website version for every new device that comes to the market – smartphones, tablets, and PCs. The variety of screen sizes and user interfaces will drive your developer crazy just staying on top of the latest trend in electronics. Not to mention how much more expensive this approach will be over the years. This is where responsive web design becomes a necessity for small businesses.

Will Peters | @bizstrategist

The Anstad Group

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Tim discusses designing for outcomes and actual use verses for manufacturing and distribution.

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Image Credit | socialmediaexaminer.com

Examine Traffic Coming from Referrers

There are other tools available but Google Analytics is the most effective one if you want to measure your social media efforts. Google’s Analytics works well with their search engine and their Plus service.

In Analytics, you can check out the “Traffic Sources” tab and then click “Referring Sites”, then you can type in the url of the social network you are targeting in order to see the amount of traffic you are receiving from said network. Obviously, a steadily increasing traffic from social sites indicates that you are doing something right.

Assess the Quality and Relevance of Your Content

The Internet has always followed the adage “content is king”. Despite what others say, content really is king. Examining your content is the best way to measure your social media efforts. Examine how visitors are responding to your post. Which content get the most traffic? Which content gets the most time from visitors? Are you writing about the actual contents that are being “proposed” by people in your social network?

Additionally, irrelevant content could get in the way of gauging the success of your social media efforts, since they don’t attract “organic” hits. They only attract vanity hits that mislead marketers into thinking that their content is generating leads for their brand or business.

You should monitor the content based on unique page views, time on page, and total pages viewed. That’s another effective way to measure your social media efforts. Instead of going by stats, analyze the success of a content based on human factors. Find out which content is relevant and useful to your target audience. Google Analytics also has a good tool for this purpose, found on their Content tab and choosing “Overview”.

Assess the Share of Voice

Share of voice is a major tool you can tap if you want to measure your social media efforts. Share of Voice is the amount of conversations about your brand or company compared to the ones that are about your competitors/market. The value of online prospect and customer interaction can be gauged with the Share of Voice metric.

The calculation of Share of Voice is easy – you just need to divide the number of mentions of your brand by the total number of conversations about other brands in the market.

Monitor the Total Size of the Community and Engagement

Monitoring and assessing the size of your collective communities is crucial if you want to gauge the amount of value you are adding through your social media efforts. Don’t take this for granted when you measure your social media efforts. For this part, you can use a social CRM tool such as Sprout Social, which will let you integrate social profiles and interactions with customer data while tracking engagement levels and growth.

Measure Sentiment

Last but not the least, make an effort to analyze sentiment manually. There are tools that track this, but no AI or code will be able to properly gauge the human element of sarcasm or simple context. You need to manually go through the mentions and categorize them as neutral, negative, or positive. Measure your social media efforts over time in order to see if the good and negative mentions are decreasing or increasing.

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1. Choose the right platform 

First, understand your audience and where they are, then use the social media community that best engages current customers.  Spend some time listening to conversations to understand what valuable messages to communicate.  Facebook is great for sharing healthy living tips, uplifting stories from medical or pharmaceutical breakthroughs, and getting feedback from people in general. Twitter would best suit those who want to send out really short (remember, less than 140 characters) but attention-grabbing headlines with a link to a webpage or blog that will share more details. If you need to show visuals, Instagram and Pinterest are your best bets. Pinterest is a digital pin board that is built on a social network, while Instagram is a social media platform for sharing enhanced photographs. Listening and understanding your current best customers will let you know the right platform to use to reach more like them.

2. Collaborate…don’t dictate

These days, anyone with access to the internet on their cell phone has access to an incredible amount of information at their fingertips. Anyone can become an “expert” through the information revolution! Don’t try to fight this…you can use it to your advantage. Join the conversation and share your expertise. Sooner or later people will begin to gravitate towards you because they will not feel threatened or intimidated. Before you know it you will have a ‘healthy’ (no pun intended) community of friends who will look forward to interacting with you.

3. Have fun!

Now don’t get me wrong…healthcare is serious business but you have to find a way to lighten the mood a bit. Show that you are an ordinary person…that you are human and you have warmth. People will feel more comfortable in interacting with you if they see you as one of their own. Share fun stories and encourage your followers to do so as well. Show the benefits of healthy living as opposed to scaring your audience with fear inducing tactics.

Social media is most effective when you take time to invest in building relationships through which you will experience word of mouth growth. Invest in getting professional help if you do not have the time it takes to make a meaningful impact. You will be able to engage a valuable audience and ultimately help people to live healthier and more fulfilling lives.

By Bior Bropleh | @biorbrops

The post 3 Ways Healthcare Providers Can Benefit from Social Media appeared first on The Anstad Group.

Share Your Resources

Distribute your content and other resources with your customers, fans, and prospects using various social media platforms. For example, photography studios are a dime a dozen on the Internet. But there have been a number of them who gained a lot of following because they shared what they know for free. They gave Technique tutorials, free texture assets, lighting tips, and other useful information will bring in fans who may end up becoming customers. It develops a personal relationship with possible customers. When your customers know they can count on you for help, they will also go to you when they have money to spare.

Consistent Branding

Social media is that it allows you to reach a large number of audience over different media platforms, but it’s not going to be of much use if your branding is all over the place. Build your brand, and make sure it’s consistent over your social network profiles, your podcasts, and all the apps you develop. If you are edgy on one platform, be edgy on all platforms.

If you do this, you’ll realize that the media will work as a revolving door of recommendations and favorable reviews, as one plaftorm drives its fans towards the other, all the while ensuring that your customers are encouraged to build a deeper engagement with your brand.

It’s a Visual Web

Instagram and Pinterest are clear proof that the web is becoming more visual. It is a waste if you won’t take advantage of it. Learn how to take decent pictures. iPhone and other cameras already offer different applications that can instantly convert your photos to look better. Say it picture and say it a lot.

Be Interactive

Make use of Contests and Activities in order to build a deeper relationship with your fan base. People love interactivity. People already love to participate in fun activities but if you add the element of reward, it ups the ante.

Let Your Community Meet Each Other

Give your visitors a chance to interact and connect with each other. This is the perfect way of making sure that your fans keep returning to your site. In fact, majority of the most successful brands on the Internet only became big because a community has built itself around them. Encourage visitors to socialize and build relationships with each other, and before long you’ll find yourself benefiting from a loyal community that will support, promote, and even defend your brand without being asked to.

Make Them Play

Build Gaming Mechanics Around Your Site or Brand. It doesn’t even merit a lengthy explanation, but it’s common knowledge that people LOVE games, with the Internet becoming a huge “thing” because people used it to distribute games and eventually, to play games with each other. A lot of mobile apps have done this recently, resulting in massive successes. For example, GPS apps building location-based alternate reality games, even offering real life rewards for winners.

There you have it, the effective social media strategies for small businesses. Now it’s your choice to apply them or not.

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BY JASON FALLS

Reaching your Facebook fans is no easy feat, but you can increase the odds of being seen and connecting by strategically playing to the social network’s “Edgerank” algorithm, which decides what content appears in News Feeds.

Consider these statistics: The average Facebook user has 262 friends whose content populates the user’s news stream, and only half of all users check their Facebook account more than once a day, according to the latest social media usage data from Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Research’s The Social Habit. Chances are slim, therefore, that most fans ever look at content from most companies they follow.

Even Facebook itself says most fans aren’t seeing companies’ content. In March, Facebook reported at it’s own marketing conference that, on average, only 16 percent of company brand page posts are actually seen by its fans. This statistic might have been meant to scare brands to buy into Facebook’s new advertising opportunities, which include sponsored stories and in-stream placements that increase the likelihood of being seen. But that requires a company to spend even more money on Facebook — and for advertising, not organic content.

The good news is that Facebook uses its Edgerank algorithm to decide what organic content, including that of a particular user’s favorite brands, is seen. The bad news is that Facebook doesn’t offer a way for brands to check their Edgerank score or position. That’s Facebook’s secret sauce.

But companies that know the factors that go into the ranking should be able to get more than just 16 percent of their content through to their followers. Here are five things you need to know about Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm:

Related: Facebook’s Marketing Tools You Might Not Know About

1. How the Algorithm works: According to Facebook, Edgerank is determined by three key factors:

• The closeness of the user to the brand — or person, if the content is posted by a friend rather than a business. This involves an analysis of the relationship based on such factors as the time spent on a particular brand page and the number of shared messages or comments. The more your audience interacts with you, the higher their affinity score for you will be.

• The weight of the content. This factor ranks comments and sharing higher than “likes” because they require more action on the user’s part.

• The time decay factor. This measures the age of your content. If it’s older than other content, it doesn’t get as high a score.

2. The more engagement the better: How many of your posts on Facebook contain an instruction or call-to-action? If not many do, start asking your fans to share or “like” the content. You also can pose questions to spur comments that will help your Edgerank score.

Coca-Cola, for example, often posts pictures with a product on a beach or similar setting and asks, “Coke Check-In: Where are you?” A recent post like this garnered 7,700+ “likes” and more than 1,000 comments.

3. ‘Heavy-lifting’ interactions help a lot: Based on the algorithm, driving your fans to upload pictures, videos and engage in lengthy discussions can help you rank better in their News Feed than other sources. Most Facebook users want to engage with friends and family, so your challenge is to make them want to do the same with you.

Video and photo contests can spark more interaction, as can simple calls for content. The Straz Center in Tampa once promoted the musical Cats by simply asking fans to post pictures of their cats on its Facebook page. Several dozen people did just that.

Related: 3 Little-Known Metrics That Can Help Optimize Your Facebook Page

4. Consistency is imperative: The algorithm’s time-decay factor means that if your last Facebook post, compelling or not, was a week ago, it’s likely not being seen by anyone now. Successful brands on Facebook are posting content that drives the audience to react on a daily basis — maybe even several times each day. You’ll need to test to see if your audience will respond to more than one post a day, but posting content once daily is one way to start.

5. Content is king: The one sure-fire way to get attention and interaction is to write and publish great content. When your fans find the content so good they have to share it, you win and your Edgerank rises.

Take a few minutes each day and ask yourself what you can post to make your audience say, “Holy Smokes! That was awesome!” If you filter what you post through that litmus test, the other tips here should fall in line.

Beyond the Edgerank factors, you have to decide what you really want to get out of Facebook. If you want to drive sales, your content has to lead your audience to a purchase point. If your goal is developing leads and prospects, you need a strong call-to-action to persuade people to register or download something. You also might simply want to build awareness and positive feelings about your brand.

Remember that users are generally focused on personal connections. It’s not that they don’t want to or won’t connect with a brand or company. But there must be a strong incentive, meaning the brand needs to deliver strong content and engagement to break through the clutter.

Disclosure: Jason Falls serves as an editorial advisor for The Social Habit in conjunction with Edison Research and consultants Jay Baer and Mark Schaefer.

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What Statistics Say About Going Social

The statistics provided by the Domo survey reveals that while more than half of the US population has already established a presence on Facebook, and a third is already using Twitter extensively. Only 7.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a Facebook account, and worse still is the number of Fortune 500 CEOs with a Twitter presence – 4%. That means 70% of big company CEOs have failed to establish an online presence via social networks.

Graph Credit | marketingprofs.com

Going deeper into the study about CEOs going social, out of the Fortune 500 social index, only 9 CEOs in a 100-day period tweeted. HP CEO Meg Whitman was only active online when she was running for office, which meant that she has ignored 100,000 online employees and millions of customers.

Facebook stats is also laughable, with only two CEOs having more than 500 friends and the most social one being Rupert Murdoch, who is arguably one of the oldest guys in the industry.

Implications

The result of the study about CEOs going social is alarming because social media isn’t just a passing fad. Social media has become entrenched in the culture and daily lives of people all over the world that it is now the primary venue for interacting with customers. Even if businesses don’t want to use social media to close business and interact with customers and prospects, it is still important to maintain an online presence as it will allow businesses to keep up with and understand big changes in the industry. The lack of engagement is akin to half of the world using email while the CEOs still use snail mail exclusively, or half of the world’s customers doing their shopping online while CEOs still refuse to try it.

Tony Shieh, CEO of Zappos, is one of the few CEOs who are active in Social Media

What Social Media Stands For

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn have become big parts of the daily fabric of life. CEOs should be going social and embrace it. CEOs owe it to their shareholders to be visible. Those who shun social media are also defiantly choosing to lose touch with some of their most lucrative and influential customers and prospects.

Social media allows CEOs to have a more direct relationship not just with customers, but also with their employees. Domo’s CEO puts forth an example, where he recently tweeted about a feature that he would like to see in their product. It was just a random idea he had and no memo was given out, but an engineer from his company soon showed him a version of their product that contains the features he wanted. An online presence saved them a lot of time usually spent on meetings, and also boosted the productivity of key people. Social media has the power to change the way corporations do things for the better.

What’s the Problem?

But what’s getting in the way of CEOs from going social? Domo posits that it’s because social media takes significant time and commitment, and requires an entirely new way of engaging with the world, which is odd because out of all the people in an organization, it is the CEO who can ask people from the organization for help in dealing with the more time-consuming aspects of social media, such as filtering tweets and facebook messages – something that is already happening with their email and voicemail messages.

It’s true that going social can be intimidating and can open up a can of worms, but it can’t be denied that the world has changed and the industry has shifted, and it is one of the CEO’s obligations to the company and its shareholders to adapt to changes in the industry, so that the company won’t be left behind in the dust. It is also important that CEOs serve as the champions of innovation wherever it may exist.

At the end of the day, Fortune 500 CEOs are risking their companies by NOT embracing social media channels, as they make it significantly easier for competitors and other companies to out-innovate them and take over their brand’s presence in the marketplace.

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by Mike Elgan
Sure, you could send regular email, but why?

As a sender of email, Google+ gives you control over the message. Let’s say you use Google+ to send email to your boss in the evening. You sleep on it, and wish you had added a few additional comments.

Because you sent via Google+, you can!Just open the post and make your changes. When your boss gets around to reading your email, it will show the edited version, not the original.

You can edit as often as you like.You can edit email even after the recipient has read it.You can also delete emails after you’ve sent them.When the recipient opens the e-mail after you’ve deleted it, they can see the first few words. But if they use Gmail, the body of the email becomes “This post no longer exists.”If they’re not using Gmail, they get a link to a Google+ page that says “This post could not be found.”

(Pic props to Paramount Pictures)

There are services that let you delete messages after sending. For example, a site called Burn Note allows you to write a note to someone on their site. They get a link to that note in their email. Once the recipient starts reading the message, a timer starts and the message is deleted when the timer runs out. Messages can be read only once.

Burn Note is nice, but you have to decide in advance that your message is going to be deleted and choose in advance to use Burn Note.

If you send email via Google+, you can decide to delete the whole conversation after the fact. And you can do it without the pressure of a timer. Just delete it when you want to delete it.

Neither you nor the recipient nor anyone else will have access to the email conversation after you’ve deleted it.One caveat, though. If you send an email via Google+ to someone who does not have a Google+ account, they will not be able to comment on the message. (Even they create an account, they won’t be able to, because the message was not addressed to their new Gmail account.

You can, however, tell them in their email that by clicking on your name and going to your profile, they’ll be able to send you an email from there if they’re logged in.)To send an email to a Google+ user, just use a + mention in the body of the post. That will trigger Gmail to send them an email version.

To send an email to a non-Google+ user, or to any non-Gmail address, just + mention the whole email address in the body of the post.Sure, you can send regular email. But why not take advantage of the total control Google+ gives you?UPDATE:  +Jannik Lindquist pointed out that Hotmail, and presumably many other e-mail systems, will receive the full message, rather than just a link. This full message will remain the same, even after you edit the post.

Here’s a work-around: Post only the words you would like to appear in the Subject of your email, then send. After it has been sent, edit the post by adding the “body” of your email message. That way, recipients on Hotmail and other systems will get just a Subject, plus a link to the full message, which you can edit or delete. 

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by Jolie O’Dell

Introducing The Google+ History

Stop the dadgum presses! Googler Louis Gray just told us about a new Google+ feature that you won’t read about anywhere else.

Called Google+ History, this new API will let you add past statuses, updates, purchases, pictures, and more to you personal Google+ timeline from a variety of social and mobile services. These objects are displayed in pretty tiles called “moments.”

This feature wasn’t included in the Google+ update announcements at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference happening this week in San Francisco. But it ties Google+ to existing social networks in some interesting ways, and it may soon have some ties to the just-announced Google+ Events as well.

With History API-enabled apps, you’ll be able to browse through your Google+-linked accounts on a range of social services and apps — Gray mentioned Foursquare and Twitter as examples. You can then pick and choose from past events, images, updates, and checkins, pulling those items into your Google+ profile.

Basically, for users it’s a more or less convenient way for you to beef up your shiny, (relatively) new Google+ profile with rich content from your past and to give your profile a more Facebook-like, comprehensive snapshot of who you are. It’s comparable to similar Facebook Timeline features that allow you to affix earlier dates and location tags to statuses and photos.

For developers, it’s a great way to push your app’s content into the Google+ stream — and with any luck, create a Facebook Timeline-like bump in usage similar to how you’d useFacebook Actions for your app’s structured data.

And while other-network updates can’t yet be tied to Google+ updates and events or grouped together themselves (think of linking a collection of Flickr pictures with a Foursquare checkin, or grouping all updates from an app à la Timeline’s structured-data groupings), don’t be surprised if features like that pop up soon.

You can check out the new API and documentation for yourself. For now, this is API is in developer preview mode. “Take that, puny users, mwahaha,” said a fictional Google rep.

Stay tuned for lots more from Google I/O today — the fun and news are all just getting started.

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Multi screen behavior is definitely a growing trend among American TV and moviegoers. Various studies conducted on entertainment lovers show some surprising results:

• 70% of tablet owners admit to using their tablets while watching TV
• 66% of laptop owners admit to using their laptops while the TV is on
• 52% of people who only own 2 screens (TV and computer) admit to surfing the Internet while watching TV
• An astounding 86% of TV and moviegoers are on their phones while watching their preferred entertainment

These numbers are only expected to grow. Still, some advertisers are worried about the high risk of marketing through placing expensive ads during prime time TV hours or on high-traffic websites. There’s a genuine concern that with so much happening on multiple screens, consumers will be distracted and not pay any attention to the ads. The studies show otherwise:

• 46% of multi screen behavior consumers were able to easily distinguish between multiple advertisers, one on each screen
• Consumers with four screens were better able to distinguish between advertisers than those with two screens
• Among consumers under the age of 44, 61% of them were able to clearly recall one of the advertisers later on

The studies also uncovered three different kinds of multi screen behavior. One is commercial behavior, i.e. people browsing through online stores to buy consumer goods. The second is regular surfing of the internet and the third is the pursuit of more information related to media and entertainment.

Multi Screen Behavior Key Takeaways

There has been a lot of talks about traditional TV being on its way out. Fact is, TV ownership has hardly declined even with the growth of different digital devices. Instead, TV audience are using digital media to complement their traditional media experience.

It may be argued that advertisers are talking with a distracted audience. However, it is important to consider that multi screen behavior stats also show that viewers:

• browse about the products or other contents they see on TV especially during ads
• share information about what they see on TV or other contents they come across with through their social networking sites.

Graph Source | Nielsen

To create a truly complete product experience, marketers must use this multi screen behavior which entails using all media but that’s just the first step.

There is also a need to understand how viewers use each medium. TV, for example, is still reserved for grand experiences. Laptop and Computers are used for research. “Research” comes in different sizes and shapes, of course. Some prefer to ask their social networking sites friends about whatever product or content that interest them.

Recommendations

Some entrepreneurial media companies are using the qualities of smart phones to advance the development and use of smart televisions—TVs that can receive and display web content without help from other devices.

However, that is the future. We cannot afford to wait for technology to develop before we start rolling marketing plans. Multi-screen viewers are real and they are here right now. It is true that advertisers who have the money to advertise on traditional media have the edge but it doesn’t mean smaller advertisers can’t take advantage of these phenomenon.

Remember that the audience research for information and there are creative ways on how you can connect your brand to those contents seen on traditional media and make yourself available and visible when viewers start searching for more content.

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