The important of social media marketing is only expanding, and you’ll need certain tools to start and grow your social media campaign. According to a study by Network Solutions, LLC and the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, about one in five small business owners use social media for marketing. Professional services businesses, real estate businesses, and the entertainment, food, and lodging industry use more email marketing, and the social services and education sector use more social media and direct mail marketing.

Whichever category your business falls into, though, social media marketing is likely to become more and more important to your business in the future. Here are just a few of the best tools that can help you grow your social
media marketing campaign.

Monitter
If you’re already using Twitter as a way to market through social media, you need to know what other Twitter users have to say about your business – and your competition! Monitter is a real-time service that checks in on Twitter mentions. You can set it up to find information on mentions of just about anything, like your business and your business’s competitors. Monitter will then set up a multi-column display that allows you to see what people are saying about you. It’s a must-have tool to track what’s being said about your business and the competition, and it can also help you come up with ideas for further Twitter marketing in the future.

Facebook Insight
Automatically a part of your Facebook analytics, Insight lets you track trends and see how your fans are using your Facebook page. With Insight, you can get a section of demographics about your fans, which includes a list of who most often refers others to your page. You’ll also get analytics about the interactions fans have made with the updates on your page. This lets you see what type of content works best to get a buzz going on your Facebook page, who your fans are, and how you can more specifically market to your target audience.

Bit.ly
This is an easy URL shortening tool that gives you automatic analytics on all your social media. A Bit.ly account gives you an analytics suite that will show you historical data, top referrers, and other vital information about where your links are ending up and who is following them through.

YouTube
YouTube videos are easy to create, and they can be a vital part of a great social media marketing plan. If you’re using every form of social media except for YouTube right now, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon. Upload videos of employees giving presentations. Make walk throughs of how to use your products or troubleshoot common problems with them. Give DIY tips that link with your service industry. Many social media users are more likely to watch a video on a topic that interests them than they are to read a blog post, and once you’ve uploaded videos to YouTube, it’s easy to link them with your Twitter feed, blog, Facebook page, and whatever else.

MailChimp
Email isn’t dead quite yet, and in many industries, the email mailing list is still going strong. Whether you already have a mailing list or want to get one started, MailChimp is a great option for you. You can manage a list of up to 500 subscribers for free, and you can integrate your MailChimp with Twitter, Salesforce, and WordPress. Lots of major companies, including Intel and Fujitsu use MailChimp for their email list management!

While many of these tools are free, some require a subscription or yearly fee, especially if you want to get the most out of the service. If you don’t have it in your business budget to upgrade your MailChimp list, for instance, you have a couple of options.

Guest Blog post submitted by Ashyia Hill. Ashyia Hill from CreditDonkey says you may want to take out a small business loan, or you can look at small business credit cards if you need a quicker option that offers a bit more flexibility. Either way, getting credit to finance your social media growth can be a smart move that may pay of tenfold in the long run.

Some of the questions I get around the time of our monthly client reports are about a website’s bounce rate. What is it, does it affect rankings, etc. When we explain what it is, we are asked how SEO can improve this rate. The answer is simple. SEO gets users to the site. Now what is your site offering to keep them?

Bounce Rate is a common term in internet marketing, referring to the amount of users who land on your site, only to hit the back button and continue searching or moving on to another domain, instead of searching through the website. There are plenty of factors that are common with sites with higher bounce rates.

It comes down to your website’s first impression, which is the home page in most instances. Once a user is staring at a link to your url at the top of the search results page, your SEO has worked. This is the true test of how ready your site is for prime search engine real estate. The searcher clicks on your link, and is taken to your home page. Will they find what they need right away, and is it easy to navigate through your site to find what they are looking for?

This comes down to the golden rule for SEO, which is to optimize your site for the searcher first, and the search engines second. Remember, the end goal of the SEO game is to bring in new customers and more customers. Having a site that looks like perfect bait for the search engines may get you where you need to be in the rankings, but that’s it, and that won’t matter when staring down the barrel of ROI.

Think about your new customers coming to your site for the first time. What do they want to see? What would you want to see? Simple, easy-to-use navigation is a big plus. Relevant photos used within a clean layout helps. You want a good amount of content of course, as this will attract the search engines. But you also want this content to be well written and in a voice that is representative of your business. The main content on your homepage should be your elevator sales pitch. Having a blog on your site also gives you a chance to update content regularly (an SEO plus) which will let users know that you are updating the site often.

Just as search engines take into consideration hundreds of signals when ranking websites, your potential customers also have their own personal signals; red flags, light bulbs, tastes, dislikes, and etc. that will keep them on your site or cause them to bounce right back in the opposite direction. There is nothing wrong with trial and error. If you are unhappy with your bounce rate one month, shake up your home page a bit. Try adding content, adding photos, reducing some of the businesses, etc. Compare the bounce rate from one month to the next until you see improvements.

Ron Swanson would not be happy.

The time has come for Google to update its privacy policy, combining 70 separate documents into one, “easy” to read policy meant to appease web regulators and users alike.

Before people get up in arms about “Big Brother” watching all of us, or you chuck another computer in the dumpster; let’s take a second to examine Google’s new policies and what it means for the users of the internet.

To start, the new policy will give Google explicit rights to combine the personal information from different Google platforms (like Google Search, Google Plus, Youtube, Gmail, Google Calendar) from Google users actively signed in to their account.  Searchers will be given results based on past browsing, personal preferences, and searching trends on other Google platforms.  According to a post on Google’s blog, the goal of these changes is to implement a complete, “beautiful” search experience across the Google channels.

Those who have gotten comfortable with Google Plus and the relatively new “Search Plus Your World” features shouldn’t be surprised at this next step. Google is doing everything they can to make your search as personal and precise to the individual as possible. Google search will correct misspellings, make suggestions, and alter your search results based on your previous searches and web activity. As a Google user, you may see your calendar reminders while you watch videos on Youtube. You will see photos from your Google Plus in your Google search.

For those that embrace these changes, you will have a complete, personal search experience using Google’s many platforms. In the video on Google’s blog about these changes, it says it will even be able to tell you whether you are late for a meeting  (calendar) based on your current location and traffic conditions (places). The Future!

For those that do not embrace these changes as warmly, it’s cool. There are ways around it.

You can log out. This uber-personal search experience will only effect Google users actively logged in to their account.

If you love Google but not the new policy, there are ways to change your preferences to keep your Google out of your business. Log in to your Google account, then find your “Account Settings”. From account settings, go to the “Services” section, followed by the “Go To Web History” link. If the web history feature is enabled, you will see a list of familiar sites that you have been to recently.  You can clear this list, and then click to pause the web history, so it will not maintain a list of any sites you visit going forward, even when you are logged in. The whole process takes about 1 minute. Kudos to Google for making this part so easy.

Whether you think of Google as Big Brother  or the best thing since JJ Diner’s The Four Horse-Meals of the Egg-Porkalypse, the new policy goes into effect on Thursday, March 1^st.

This week, Evolving Interactive’s Director of SEO, Mark Bealin sits down with Stik.com founder Jay Gierak to discuss the effects of social media’s integration into search engine results. Stik.com uses your social and professional connections for an informed consumer experience. Watch the interview here:

A Guest Blog Post by Jerry Hillburn

Rise and shine fellow marketers, a new day has dawned at Google, and the game is afoot. On January 10^th, 2012 at 06:29AM Google Time, Google quietly announced the arrival of Search, plus Your World . The big G has changed how search results are served up, and in doing so has created an incredible opportunity for those who publish daily content to get better positioning for their efforts.

According to Google, “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships”. Interesting! As a fulltime participant in multiple social media platforms I have developed an understanding of the strengths and weakness of each. With Twitter you get tweets and about 5 minutes of fame, and if you’re very lucky, a viral retweet ripple that drives traffic. With Facebook you get a rich environment in which to engage your friends, and through Fan pages customers and prospects. As long as you live inside the walled garden you can have a lovely time with either.

But while both are great in their core offering, neither offer decent search results. I follow search very closely for my clients and I am always looking for ways to get their tweets or status updates seen in the big G search results. Over the past two years we’ve watched Facebook and Twitter updates appear in the results for a period of time, and then completely disappear. These messages come and go with little predictability.
Within the walled gardens of search on FB or Twitter we don’t see much better search results either. We often find that in Facebook Search you have to write your query in “exact case sensitive” detail or you get bounced to the Bing results. Google has owned the best search on the planet for years, but the walled gardens block its bots, which prevent it from serving up consistent Facebook and Twitter results.

For instance, let’s say you’re a chiropractor. You’re interested in finding people who are having lower back pain issues. Prior to 1/10/2012, when you do a search on Google for the exact term “my back hurts”, you would get a list of websites that offer to help you with your pain. But you don’t get a list of people who updated their Twitter, or FB status with mention of their pain.

Of course we will all still be tweeting and posting statuses to our friends, but for those of us who work in G+ there is the added benefit that when our friends, business partners, and clients work in G+, everything they post shows up in the Google search results.

There is a wrinkle. To see those results, you have to be logged into your G+ account when you search. But if you’re like most of us who have a gmail account, you’re always logged in and your search results now will be influenced by that little detail.

And so fellow marketers, there you have it. One doesn’t have to think hard as to how this new paradigm will be of benefit for your customers. And while I am hopeful that other results would appear as well from Facebook and Twitter, given the intense rivalry between these companies, I am not taking bets on it happening anytime soon.

This is a guest blog post by Jerry Hilburn. Jerry Hilburn runs a company in San Diego serving the local small business community with business web development, social marketing, and content publishing services. You can reach him at www.san-diego-marketing.com .