The short reason why you, as a business Website owner, should pay attention is that if you don’t serve up a mobilized site to mobile users, your site may find itself sitting in Google’s search engine penalty box. In short, it will be tough, tough for your customers to find you.

This is especially true for Google advertisers (whose listings generally appear on the right side and sometimes the top of your computer screen) but what goes for advertisers usually applies to Websites who want to show up in organic search (the nonpaid, left side of the screen).

Search engines like Google reward Websites who offer a good user experience.  So do customers!
After one major international jeweler recently optimized its mobile Website, sales of jewelry on its mobile Website reportedly grew by 125 percent!

What constitutes a good user experience?

It isn’t a “squished down” version of your Website. If you offer services to the public in Detroit, Michigan and elsewhere, your mobile Website needs to offer an easy way to answer customers’ questions about your business, like “What are your hours?” “Where are you?” “Do you have any coupons?” “How do I contact you?”

If you make it easy for customers to get answers to their questions, the search engines may love you.  We know your customers will!

The strategy involves banning repeat “Tweets” and recruiting users to flag bad accounts on Twitter.

The banishment of repeat “Tweets” is actually good news for those who follow the rules, using Twitter to offer up helpful business information on a regular basis, for example.

Regarding the flagging of bad accounts, Twitter says, “Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you. You nailed it!”

Twitter promises that its spam-fighting tools will evolve as does the behavior of  “spitters.”

One thing’s for sure;  as social news sites like Twitter gain traction as Michigan marketing tools, the people who want to abuse those tools will never be far behind.

In fact, according to some, social media may herald the biggest cultural shift since the Industrial Revolution.

Regardless of how it will be described in the history books, social media is now a “must do” for all business owners. Watch this video and see if you agree.

And … if you’re a small business owner feeling a bit lost? Just give Excel Performance Marketing a call. We’re here to clear up the confusion and help you use social media to increase your profits.

According to USA Today, “Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they’re required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they’re encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.”

Why would Ford do a thing like that? Because that’s where the customers are.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the percentage of Americans 18 and over online who use a social-networking service is experiencing tremendous growth, up from 8% in 2005 to 35% in 2008.

That percentage is are only going to get bigger, as smartphones, netbooks and other new technologies  make connecting via social media, “the 21st century version of knitting,” with users killing time by comparison shopping, banking, communicating, etc.

If you’re a small business who isn’t using social media, don’t think for a minute that this type of marketing is out of your financial reach.

Many of the technologies you could be using in your business are free.

And … like so many things in life, “It’s easy once you know how.”

Give Excel Performance Marketing a call today if you’d like us to help you learn how to use social media to increase profits and slash your advertising budget.

Falken’s first cynical reaction is to say, “Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age….suddenly, quite recently, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren’t even apes then. We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks. “

As you’ll see in this video about the author of new book Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods , small to medium-sized businesses may have the some of the same advantages as those smart little rodents.

Why? They’re nimble and can move quickly. They can make business decisions that don’t need to go through a committee.

And, as author Shel Israel tells us in this video, small businesses also have an easier time “scaling the conversation.”