Technorati
When you’re the owner of a business, you don’t have lots of time to spend on rooting around the internet for juicy links, industry news and the like to use for updating your social networking profiles to keep them fresh and interesting. We understand that there are only so many hours in the day, you’ve got lots of work to do and there are meetings to attend, suppliers to visit, and you know the drill.But if you’ve created the profiles, it’s your job to update them, and we aim to help you make it as quick and as painless as possible by providing you with the very best websites out there chock full of juicy news, tailored to your company.
As we’ve mentioned before in our 101 Marketing Tips- the key to attracting fresh traffic and potential custom through social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook is by providing status updates full of links and news that are both relevant to your company and entertaining- no-one wants a news feed full of sales pitch, but they’re more likely to stay subscribed to you if your updates are informative, different and fresh.
One such website we’d like to recommend is Technorati- the internet search engine catering specifically to blogs. On the last count in June 2008, it had indexed 112.8 million blogs by logging tags that writers have placed in their entries. It’s free to open an account, and if you have a blog for your business (which hopefully you’ve already linked up to your Facebook Page’s Notes Application) you can apply to have Technorati list it by a simple validation code system. Once you have registered your blog and built your profile, you can now begin using Technorati for what it does best and begin searching for some juicy links.
If you’re a business that provides hard stock, run a quick search for some of the products that you stock- are the manufacturers producing any new models? Are there any trade events that are worth attending? How about spokespeople of your products- what are they doing at the moment? Are there any related stories about your products in the online press at the moment? Are there any bloggers who have strong views about the items that you sell?
And, if you retail services, what is going on in the industry at the moment? Are there any changes to policies and procedures that could affect how you run your business? Perhaps there’s some blog writers out there who really need your services, or events that that you can attend to showcase your business? Are there any celebrities that you can associate to your services? For example, if you are in the business of personal dressing, there’s countless male and female celebrities that you can provide updates on, most of whom receive awards on a regular basis for being well styled?
Technorati is very easy to use- just type in the keywords and the blog entries pop up for you. As the site has user generated content, be sure you read each blog past fully before you link to it- although you may think that it’s common sense that your company doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of a blog, it is better to keep yourself covered and only link to entries that you agree are 100% suitable.