How to Promote Your Online Business with Facebook Apps

Many businesses are yet to fully leverage Facebook's potential as a marketing tool. Nowadays almost everybody has an account on Facebook and most of these folks log into their account at least once a day. That means any business that has a presence on Facebook gets an opportunity to reach potential customers on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, many businesses still haven’t launched an effective social media campaign. If you feel that your brand is yet to take advantage of the massive popularity of Facebook, the first thing you need to do is to launch a fan page for your business. The next step is to get people to like your pages. Businesses can consider offering discounts or special prizes to users who like their Facebook page. Post regular status updates. Your updates must be engaging enough for people to interact with them.  So for example, if you run a restaurant, you can post updates featuring the day's menus or specials. Of course, these are the most basic things. Building a commendable presence on Facebook takes a great deal of time and effort. Fortunately for us, plenty of apps are now available to make this job easier.

Why do you need Facebook apps?

Facebook apps can be a great way to create engagement with your fans. Apps can be used to promote online sales, incentives, competitions, and more. Since they create engaging content, they make sure that your users interact with your brand.

Small businesses don't have to create their own apps. Instead, they can choose some of the available apps. A successful app can go a long way in establishing and strengthening your social media presence. While selecting apps for your business, choose the ones that are simple, quick, and user-friendly.

Here is a list of some Facebook apps that you can use to promote your business:

If you run a restaurant, you should use Heyo. This Facebook app comes with mobile widgets that allow your customers to redeem gift coupons on their mobile phones.

North Social is another company that builds apps for Facebook. It offers apps for mobile promotions, contests, coupons, sweepstakes, and more. These apps allow businesses to launch limited-time promotions almost every day.

Woobox is another app popular with local retailers. It allows small stores to create and launch contests. The most popular feature of this app is its photo contest feature which allows users to upload their own photos and let other users vote the best. A clothing store can take advantage of this feature by encouraging its fans to post photos wearing their latest clothes for a discount or a prize.

If you offer a professional service, you can use an app like FaceItPages to improve your social media presence. This app creates ads that will only show up to users who might need a service like that.

Whatever may be your business needs, there are plenty of Facebook apps to make your job easier. Since the number of people who interact with your Facebook page is far more important than the number of people who like it, creating customer engagement should be your goal and apps make it possible.

The Impact of Mobile on SEO

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We as internet marketers constantly look out for ways we can get the most out of search engines. Search engines in turn constantly look for ways in which they can make their searches fair. So search dynamics are constantly evolving. This is also very relevant in the mobile search scenario. Whether we’re building mobile apps for using websites or trying to optimize mobile websites for SEO, there are lots of things to take into account.

Here are the factors currently influencing mobile SEO:

The Role of Page Speed

Since processor speeds and internet connections of mobile phones aren’t as fast as those of traditional computers, mobile searches are slower. Even if there’s 3G or 4G internet on a phone, the speed cannot measure up to DSL and satellite speeds on computers.

So to get a good search engine ranking, it’s crucial for mobile websites and apps to load quickly. For this, you might want to use fewer images on a mobile website, make use of HTML5, or design a special app for running the site to address speed issues and improve SEO.

Size Is Important

Mobile users generally want information instantly and they tend to use shorter phrases for searching. Also because it’s less convenient to type on a smartphone than a standard computer, search phrases stay short. This indicates that short content that’s keyword rich is important for improved SEO.

Additionally, consider writing smaller text blocks for mobile sites. Mobile users have limited space for reading text and if there’s too much text, they’ll move off. Most of the larger cell phone models are not even one fourth the size of a regular laptop screen.

Local Results Do Better

Typically, people use cell phones to hunt for things close by when they’re moving around. For example, they might need information regarding where they could go for dinner or want to look for coupons of a store they are visiting. This indicates that local results have a greater tendency to show up in the search results of mobile search engines.

To improve mobile SEO, the way to go is the provision of content that’s likely to appeal to an increasing quantum of people who are working with their devices whilst they’re on the go. I agree that it’s difficult to rank well for all locations, but you can carefully zero in on areas that you want to target and optimize keywords accordingly. This will help drive local user traffic to your mobile site.

More Traffic with Social Media

One more important mobile SEO aspect to keep in mind is that people using smartphones are more likely to engage in social media than those who don’t. Studies have shown that mobile users spend much more time on social networks than on search engines. So to improve mobile SEO, stay active on various social media platforms and add social sharing buttons to gain extra traffic.

As user behavior changes, mobile searches are going to keep evolving and it’ll hold us in good stead to adjust our strategies accordingly.