Monday, April 27, 2015

Social Media For Business And Non Profit

Our team of Columbus SEO consultants will help with creating well-optimized and updated social media presence for your company.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and other social media networks are rapidly changing almost everything about our society. They’re impacting politics, commerce, dating and relationships, and most other ways in which people interact with one another. The world of nonprofit corporations – charities, activist and advocacy groups, and others – is no exception.


The most obvious and perhaps least important change brought about by social media to nonprofit organizations involves the way those organizations do what they have always done, namely fund-raise and communicate. Social media provide nonprofits with new and inherently different ways to reach out to the public both to raise money and to raise awareness.

As with commercial use of social media, though, their use for nonprofit purposes requires an awareness of the nuances involved, and how social media represent two way or even multi-vector communication rather than the kind of one-way street that describes traditional communication media such as print, broadcasting, or even most web sites.
That said, nonprofits are finding in social media ways to inexpensively broaden their approaches to include video, interactive communication, and direct Internet fundraising, as well as receiving suggestions from others about how to promote their causes. It’s increasingly being said that social media are not optional for nonprofits but are a necessity of life in the modern environment.
An even more fundamental and potentially revolutionary change impacts the way that we organize for common purposes.

That is, after all, what a nonprofit organization always does: it’s a way to coordinate efforts in support of some purpose that is not directly profitable or commercial, but is worthy of common efforts. Whether the goal is to help the poor, support art, protect the environment, advance the cause of a religion, or any other purpose pursued by nonprofits, the method always involves people coming together and organizing for a commonly-agreed end. Social media may in part actually be replacing the formal nonprofit organization for that purpose, just as in some ways they allow sidestepping big corporations and political parties.

This happens because of the way in which social media facilitate rapid self-organization on a horizontal level. The structure of nonprofit organizations tends to be vertical rather than horizontal, with a central authority directing the activities of branches and communication, and hence the generation of agreement and consensus, proceeding slowly enough that such authority is needed for the efficient making of decisions.

But social media allow for such rapid communication that direct democracy becomes possible in any participatory context. This allows people who have a common goal to agree on and implement steps to advance that goal without going through the formal process that traditional nonprofits must use.

In the long run, this is likely to have the biggest, most lasting, and most unpredictable effect on the way in which we pursue charitable, artistic, and other not-for-profit goals.

SEO Check-Ups

This month, why not make sure that your website is on the right track, with an SEO check-up?  Start the New Year with a clean, polished, and SEO friendly website, and you’ll get more from your online marketing, and enjoy a profitable 2015.
Search engine optimisation is a complex field, and there are a lot of things that you will need to  look at to ensure that your site is as efficient and SEO friendly as it could be, but before you rush out to contact SEO agencies, take a quick look at this list.  Once the basics are in place, you can turn to SEO agencies to take your site to the next level:
  • Loading times:  Slow loading times can push you down the search results.  Use the YSlow extension for Firefox to identify things that are slowing your site down, and fix them.
  • Meta Tags: While Meta search engines aren’t as popular as they once were, meta tags are still important.  Make sure all your pages use them, and that they contain relevant keywords.
  • Broken links: These are a very bad thing.  Use Google Analytics to identify any dead ends or broken links, and fix them.
  • Keywords: Is it obvious what they keywords on your site are?  Make sure they appear on your pages, and make sure that your site’s formatting emphasises them.
  • Poor code:  If your site looks bad in certain web browsers, requires unusual plugins, or slows down browsers on old PCs or netbooks, then you could be losing a lot of visitors.  Keep your sites clean and simple.
  • Poor accessibility: Accessibility means more than just having Alt-tags for all of your images.  If your site requires a big screen and a high bandwidth connection to navigate, or requires JavaScript, mouse-only navigation, or any other restrictions that would stop some people from using it, then maybe you should re-think the design.
  • Incoming links: Link building is important.  Do you have a lot of relevant incoming links?  IF not, this is something SEO agencies can help with.
The above points are all fairly easy to fix.  Invest a few days in cleaning up your website, fixing broken links, and making sure that your site’s code validates properly.  Once you’ve done that, you can work on building links, running an advertising campaign, or working on social bookmarking.
Be sure to give your site regular “check-ups” once you’ve got everything ticking over.  Bugs, errors, and invalid code can sneak in from the strangest of places – new advertisements may use bloated code, CMS updates may break your template, or a well-meaning intern could delete an out-of-date page and forget to put something in its place.  Don’t let such changes go un-noticed for too long.  The quicker you fix them, the better.
Frequent SEO health checks will ensure that your site stays in the top spot of the search engines, which is exactly where you want it to be.