An important development in the localised search field went live this week – thats right, Facebook have cranked up the local services they have on offer with the new Facebook Places.

So what is it?

Facebook places allows you to connect with friends and people around you – in real time via your smart phone.

How Do You Use It? Example – At a bar with friends.

At the bar, you open up Facebook mobile on your smart phone, tap ‘Places’ and Facebook plucks and saves your location via GPS – you’ve officially ‘checked in’. Then you can checkin tag your friends to that ‘Place’, the bar, and those Facebook users get added to the ‘Place’ group.

How is that useful?

I haven’t really figured out why you’d want to do that, other than feeding the Facebook database with more personal information.

Ok, so how about for advertisers?

Ah… Well, its a gold mine for advertisers. With this new addition to highly targeted local, real time advertising expect to see adverts when you start using Facebook Places.

For Example…

You are at the bar and your group of friends are all checked into Places. Now, as an advertiser, imagine you own a pizza restaurant 100 yards from the bar. The pizza restaurant owner can send an advert for extra an large pizza (enough for a group of friends) a few hours after you made the Facebook Places check in.

We all know what happens after a few hours drinking beer, and I’m sure there is an optimal time to send that advert out based on when you checked in to Places.

Think I’m joking and it won’t happen?

Advertisers are set to spend $3.3 billion on social networking websites in 2010, with Facebook’s revenue to hit $1.2 billion in this year alone. This stuff is real – and advertisers value your ‘Really smashed with Johnboy in town’ updates.

Privacy

As with most Facebook developments, Facebook have set all Facebook accounts to default into the privacy settings they (and more importantly their advertisers) want, which in a nutshell is open and willing to accept anything. So make sure you review your privacy settings following the launch of Places in the UK, in particular:

‘Customise Settings’ > ‘Things other share’
‘Customise Settings’ > ‘Include me in People Here now after I check in’

When you check in, your location is visible to your friends and another Facebook user around – people you don’t know. That weird girl at the bar with one eye and a strange twitch could know all about your favourite music and what you did last weekend.

If you’d rather be more private, you’ll have to opt out of this setting – or Facebook Places altogether.

Back in March, Nestle had quite a negative backfire on their Facebook fan page, resulting from a Greenpeace video campaign which had over 1 million views to urge the company to stop using palm oil in their products due to deforestation and orang-utan deaths. If you missed the video watch it below: Read more »

A Strategic Approach to Targeted Internet Marketing, Focused On Results

At TBO Media, we look at things differently. Our full service approach combines fundamental internet marketing techniques along with field-tested practices to provide you with the most successful targeted internet marketing campaigns. We will ensure we are promoting your unique selling points and defined objectives in order to maximise the return on investment.

You can benefit from our vast experience and generate more visits, more sales and more profit to your business with our proven practices, including;

• Search Engine Optimisation
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As the up and coming internet marketing company, we merge the creative talent of an advertising agency with a host of essential internet marketing solutions to ensure we broaden your online net. The success of our clients is vital to us to continue our own growth and reputation, and we strive to deliver the highest level of service.

Please click here to learn more about how we can help expose your business online and generate more traffic to your website.

I can’t thank Andrew enough for his continued work on my new website. He took my original ideas and previous website stat data to build a user friendly and ‘findable’ website in the search engines.

Andrew has got me top of the search results, and I’m so busy as a result of new work and leads through the website, Andrew is slowing down his pace with the Google optimisation!

Highly recommended.

David Parnell
Pest Control Hertfordshire

David has seen a huge rise in website visits as a result of the new keyword researched website – and he now ranks top of Yahoo, top of Bing and is on the 1st page (at the time of writing 3rd on Google.com) of Google!

With access to auction sites, every man and his dog can start selling online. So how do you stand out? How do you grab a readers attention? You need Killer Sales Copy!

Enter Mike Whittaker. He was looking to sell his clapped out old washing machine, and listed it with no reserve and a starting bid of $1. Here’s how he described it:

Scary washing machine. No really, its terrifying!

It’s the loudest most violent sounding washing machine I have ever encountered. It makes guests scared and children cry. I’ve lived with it like that for almost a year and it still scares me…

…If your in a fix and need a cheap washing machine and are either completely deaf or hate your neighbours this baby is for you.

So what happened as a result of this?

• The washing machine sold for $5160.
• TV and international press coverage
• 800,000 views on the auction
• 800 comments on the auction
• The video went viral on YouTube
• A new website and online business was born for Mike.

Pretty amazing. He grabbed the viewers attention, gave them some plain talking, informal, amusing copy to read through and the result took his scary washing machine global…

Hi all,

This Blog post updating my web design hertfordshire Google challenge has been a long time coming, so apologies to all those who have been tracking my progress!

So to recap – we had a less than perfect ranking of 180 on page 18. Good progress considering the scale of this experiment, but room for improvement. So, here’s the latest: Page 4, rank 33. Now we are getting some results! Here’s the screenshot:

To learn how to expose your business online, register your interest for our FREE e-book by emailing dev [at] tbomedia.co.uk and quoting ‘Exposing Your Business Online’

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Twitter on the other hand is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Here’s a neat graphic which displays the pros and cons of each, click the image for the larger version:

Hi everyone,

Just a quick post to dispel a few myths around Google, and what needs to happen when you have a brand new website built.

Q. Do I need to submit my website to Google?

No. Google is smart. Very smart. So smart in fact, you do not need to ‘submit’ your website to them, chances are they already know about it…

Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

- Taken from Google Webmaster Central

Q. What about the other search engines?

Yahoo and Bing however, do require a manual submission to get included in the index. The process is extremely simple and takes no longer than a few minutes, here are the links:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ (You will need a Yahoo account)

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Q. How long does it take to get included in Google’s index?

Done correctly, you should see your website in the search engine index in about a week, although the past dozen sites we have built have been noticed in about 3days.

Remember – this differs from ‘keyword ranking’ which takes considerably longer, depending on the keyword.

Q. How do I know if my website IS in the Google index?

A quick and easy way is to put: ‘site:http://www.tbomedia.co.uk‘ into the search box and hit enter. No results? No indexed site for you…yet. This also works for Yahoo and Bing.