Start-Up Businesses use of Social Media

On July 17, 2011 in Business, Internet, marketing.
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According to a recent survey, performed by Market Research company ‘Opimium Research LLP’, less than half of small businesses use any form of Social Media. The broken-down stats go something like this;

  • 28% of small businesses said they used a corporate Facebook page
  • 18% own a LinkedIn Profile
  • 8% have a company blog
  • 6% use YouTube or similar video-streaming service
  • 2% own a corporate Twitter account

With over 2 million enterprises in the UK alone (according to the governments ‘Office for National Statistics’) that’s over 1.4 million businesses which don’t utilize Facebook, the world’s largest social media / networking website (with over 750 million users!).

Seems crazy, given the focus and publicity of these potential market avenues! Sure some businesses wouldn’t find all of the options necessary, but with such a high volume of service based business in the UK I can’t help but think some of the 1,000,000 businesses with no social media avenues are missing out.

Ultimate Hairdressing, Wolverhampton Case Study. Read More »

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A Blogger’s Pride and Botheringly Bad Blogs

On April 26, 2011 in Internet, Website Design.
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Usually I wouldn’t write about this sort of thing; Its not like I’m directly effected, and it really shouldn’t bother me. But bad blogs have recently really got on my nerves!

Blogger's PrideNow, I’m not saying that I write the perfect content – Far from it – But I like to think I put a degree of effort into my articles and have a style of writing which people can at least relate to. Now, talking about ‘computer things’ (as my mom would put it) doesn’t require a specifically sophisticated level of vocabulary. Technical, yes. But not sophisticated.

On the other hand talking about some subjects (namely food and film) are two which are generally associated with understandable, well constructed English.

Why the rant, you may be asking yourself?
Well, because recently one of my house-mates has decided to take it upon himself to ‘review’ (and I use that term loosely) both aforementioned topics. His self-confessed “not good at English” approach makes reading anything hard, and is particularly annoying when coupled with a lack of basic knowledge to base his ‘reviews’ upon. I’m talking more about food than film, as he does visit the cinema quite regularly.

But food!? It’s something I have a genuine passion about. I buy British, in season top quality foods. Comparatively, said house-mate buys cheap, fake, processed battered ‘food’ from god-knows-where. Is this OK? Can his food articles be justified with any sort of background knowledge? Sure, go ahead and review KFC, but not the best sandwich shop in the city!?

Blog WritingSo, yes I’m laying into one particular a little bit – But it’s really quite frustrating when I spend so much time trying to get an article, blog and general website looking/reading well, only to have some badly worded, unjustified, poorly designed excuse of a blog knocked up in 10 minutes.

Again, I don’t know why its bothered me so much; bloggers pride, perhaps?

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What makes a good blog?

On February 24, 2011 in Internet, Website Design.
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Blog EntryFor me, a good blog consists of several elements which combine to produce a great archive of articles which the reader wants to read more about! It’s all about the content, which is usually the blog article! I’m hearing the infamous words of my placement year boss; “Content is King!”. It’s very, very true!

So, what elements should one strive to patch into a website to get the most out of their efforts? Well, it’s just that which makes a good blog; Effort. If you put a lot of effort into your blogs, being thoughtful in what you do (or sometimes don’t) say, provoking the reader to fire up a conversation via comments, then mission accomplished.

There are no magic rules for creating a good blog, but personally I like to read from a page which has a professional looking interface; Not specifically corporate, but looks like it’s been done by someone who gives a damn. If the aim is to look amateur with a sense of cartography, make it look that way, but lets see a degree of effort in the design to make it look like that!

Effort shouldn’t stop with design though. Each article should be clear and as mentioned, provoke a response from the reader. The style here doesn’t matter that much, but how it’s wrote does! No body will read something that’s been hashed together in 5 minutes with little thought, bad grammar, spelling mistakes and general lack of attention to detail. Adding images (fit for the style of the blog) can do wonders too; breaking up text blocks and adding a thousand words!

Of cause, it’s just my opinion, but if your reading this odds on you read the whole article, so I must be on the right lines, aren’t I?

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Make Facebook status update Twitter via RSS

On May 17, 2010 in Internet, Tutorials, Website Design.
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Picture the scenario; You update Facebook status often but forget about the little bird which is Twitter. You want to update Twitter automatically when your facebook status changes, but Facebook have banned the apps that allow this to occur! Enter TwitterFeed.com, a website designed to pull RSS feeds and post them to other pages such as Facebook or Twitter.

Now, stay with me here, as I spent ages looking at blogs thinking that the Facebook RSS pages have been blocked, but they haven’t. To access your Facebook RSS feed navigate to Facebook and click on your notifications (“See all Notifications”). On the right hand side is a “Subscribe to Notifications” section, and under that is a “Via RSS”. Uncheck all the tick boxes and click on this link. From there, simply change part of the URL from “notifications.php” to “status.php”. This should produce the RSS feed required.

Now, on TwitterFeed.com sign up and add your copied URL for Facebook RSS feed. Authenticate Twitter and set (in the advanced options) your prefixes, postfixes and update schedule.

And that’s it! Facebook will now generate the RSS of your status’, TwitterFeed will pull them in (checking every 30 mins or whatever) and post them to your Twitter for you! If your really clever you could set up an RSS from your website too, and get that to post to Twitter/Facebook whenever you add a new article!

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