In my opinion, social media isn’t all that’s cracked up to be — and for some, that may sound funny coming from someone who owns a social media marketing company. But in saying that, I do think you are an absolute and utter ball of amoebic fluid if you’re not utilising one type of social media to promote your business, which based on the title of this post, is obviously Facebook.

The truth is, marketing any business successfully using Facebook — and sometimes nothing but Facebook — is extremely easy. And for those of you savvy-sausages looking for this exact information, this post is going to reveal to you the most essential Facebook marketing tools, of course, expressed through my own humble opinion.

1. uSocial Facebook Marketing

Of course, this was always going to be my Numero Uno choice. With uSocial’s Facebook marketing services, you can targeted and real Facebook fans, friends and likes to be delivered to your own profile on the social site. Some people underestimate just how powerful this tactic can be, but for those of you who’ve done any kind of email marketing will realise, it’s about as hardcore as having your very own massive list of targeted email subscribers to send promo messages and offers to whenever you so desire it. In short,  go use this service now or a swarm of bitey insects will likely devour your children.

2. Facebook Advertising

Coming a close second is Facebook’s own advertising platform for advertising on the site. Just like Google’s famous (or infamous, as the case may be) Adwords system, you can pay FB to place your ads in the sidebar of the site, targeted to certain keywords so that they’re shown when users that fit your demographic talk about the topic you’re promoting, or read about similar interests. Of course, the benefits to this are many, including the fact that you can reach such an immense base of people (500 million and counting…) immediately, as well as the fact that clicks are worlds cheaper than Adwords. Start posting your ads on Facebook here.

Unless you’re like Venetian Princess (read: plastic-yet-über-hot) and have almost a million YouTube subscribers, there’s a good chance you’re one of the poor, failing many who are yet to even hit one thousand views to your clutter of videos.

If this sounds like you, and especially if you’re using YouTube as a marketing medium (and let’s not kid ourselves, you either are or you’re lying to yourself) then you should definitely consider the possibility that you should buy some YouTube views. However, if you’re not just ready to dive in an spend your cheddar (Oh, how ‘Gangsta’ of me)  immediately, here are a few reasons to do so that might sway your mind:

1. You Aren’t Getting Any Views

Seriously? Do I have to explain this most simple of points? In fact, I explained this point to some roadkill this morning and it understood, so if you can’t understand why under this circumstance it may be a good idea to buy YouTube views, you should have a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.

2. You’re Not Converting Views To Sales

The great thing about buying views from most places (especially from uSocial) is that views can be targeted based on industry or interest requirements. This means that if you’re promoting a product — let’s say a new type of pet food that makes animals excrete classical music instead of vile substance — you can target this so that only people with pets or who’d be interested in that subject matter will view it. This should definitely boost your sales conversion rate.

3.  You Want To Drive Traffic Immediately

The fact remains that when buying views to a YouTube video, in most cases your views will start being delivered within a day or so, meaning you’ll begin getting good traffic to your site, video, or blog effectively immediately. This can free up your time from conducting more menial and frankly-boring tasks like social bookmarking and allow you to focus on more important things. Like building a 20-foot macrame statue of a bear eating Lady Gaga. Oh, how I’d pay to see that…

4. You’ve Never Used YouTube For Marketing

If you’ve always put marketing your product or service on YouTube as one of those things which was always in the ‘too-hard’ basket, or you simply didn’t think you had the knowledge to do it, the fact that you can buy YouTube views means that as long as you have a few pennies saved to spend on this kind of thing, you can now take serious advantage of this potential traffic source. That, or you can just do what you’ve done in the past and ignore it. But if you do that, a swarm of locusts will eat your face. Your choice.

5. You Have Been Looking For Other Avenues Of Promotion

To say that you’re not looking for other ways to promote your business or service would be like Jerry Seinfeld say that he’s not really Jewish; we’d all know it was a horrible lie. In case you didn’t know, YouTube recently passed the one-billion-views-per-day mark (and still growing) so the potential for using this site as a means for selling everything from earwax sculptures to used King Missile albums is absolutely mind-boggling. In short, if you have been searching for the next ‘Big Thing’ (and I’d have to say, you’re a few years late) and haven’t looked into video marketing, then perhaps now is the time. Go on, before you get all wrinkled and a bout of Alzheimer’s kicks in.

So, have I swayed you? If so, maybe you should go and buy some views now. Even your Nanna thinks you should — and you don’t want to disappoint her, do you?

Like a spruiking pickled-fish salesman who hasn’t hit his sales target a couple of days before the end of the month, this post is basically going to be a plug. And seriously, as the Internet is all about ’sell-sell-sell’ these days, don’t be surprised when you see people like myself doing so. But, I digress…

If you know uSocial.net, then you know we were the first company in the world to sell Facebook fans, now called ‘likes’. While nothing really has changed in our methodology, what we deliver or the quality of the service, I just thought it a prudent move to post a quick nattering informing all of you that when it comes to getting ‘likes’, then we’re still the best (and probably only) option available. And while I might be as biased as a fat-kid whose Mum (and for any of you Americans reading, that wasn’t a typo — I’m actually spelling it correctly) has put her in a beauty contest, the world media and our clients seem to agree.

Anyway, you might be thinking, why would one want to buy Facebook likes?

The answer to that is simple: In the world of social media, the more friends, fans, connections and the larger your circle of influence, the more money you’ll make and the faster your message will spread virally. Period. And one of the best site case studies to point this out is the simple fact that on a daily basis, you see fan pages (now called community pages) with tens, or hundreds of thousands of members, all growing rapidly because of the viral effect that Facebook marketing has.

And while it’s all well and good to note that many of these pages did rise like a Nazi German dictator to prominence on their own, the fact is that 99% of Facebook community pages never get over a couple of hundred members. Unless you’re going to spend $0.20 per click on Facebook advertising to get someone to your page (bearing in mind that you won’t convert all of them — in most cases, less than 40%) or your content is something which is basically guaranteed to go viral by itself, then you will need help.

The simple fact is, at uSocial, we have a 100% success rate of delivering likes to a Facebook page. No matter whether it’s one thousand, or one million (NB: packages of 100K+ will be publicly available on the uSocial website soon), we can deliver. No questions asked. We can guarantee your page will go viral.

In short, we are the only company who can guarantee you cost-effective results.

Actually, now that I read that last statement it does sound a little cocky, though I’m going to leave it there. I’ve never been known for my modesty anyway. Or my personal hygiene. Or for my collection of ancient pop-art. But, I digress again…

But it’s not up to me to make your mind up for you, just to give you more information on the subject and then you can go from there. But if you have realised that you do want to go and buy Facebook likes right now, simply head on over to the uSocial.net website and buy, buy, BUY!

I know I’m not the first person to complain like a beaten housewife about this, but the uSocial blog was just hacked by a group of quite well-known Iranian hackers, which I believe were the same insignificant band of micro-organisms who for a time re-routed Twitter’s DNS in late 2009.

In case you missed it, the hack resulted in the blog’s theme being messed up and some message about freeing Iran from the US, something about Obama, as well as some other random psycho-political discharge. So it seems that in Iran, or in the case of these hackers at least, people do actually use ‘da Internetz’ or more than just downloading gigabytes of hardcore spank-film and buying useless junk from Amazon. Or at least, that’s what these backward fools want us to believe.

I guess what I find funny about the whole thing is that these righteous keyboard warriors think that by fucking with the Western Establishment (of which my blog is the absolute forefront of) we’re all going to stand up and say “Yes, let’s do whatever it is these hackers want us to do!” But in reality, it just makes most of us hate these beings of bellybutton lint even more.

To be honest, it’s not like it was that much of an effort to set right (only a quick email to my WP go-to guy and about 5 minutes of his time), but it’s still frustrating when something like this happens. On the bright side though, it’s given me a valid excuse to rant about something, which if I must admit, I rather like doing.

In conclusion, I have one final message for these hackers; whoever and wherever they may be.

Suck my balls.

That is all.

While just about every Thomas, Richard and Harold is still referring to people added to your community page on Facebook as fans, the Powers-That-Be at the world’s largest social site have come to the conclusion that a broader “like” system is better for all.

The verdict is still out on this one and while I personally think they’ve now made distinguising between the types of pages about as hard as scraping a steamrolled jellyfish from hot tarmac, the new system is here to stay. And until I become supreme-overlord of Earth, there isn’t much I can do to change it. And because you can’t either, here are some tips on getting more of those elusive Facebook ‘likes’.

1. Buy Facebook Likes

Shameless plug for uSocial? Yes. But the simple fact is that while we at uSocial still call them fans as if we were some kind of social-media relic hanging on to better days gone past, you can still buy ‘likes’ from us in packages starting from 1000 and soon to go up to one million and beyond. Without any further plugging, buy Facebook likes here.

2. Join Relevant Groups

By searching for groups with interests which are similar to that of the page you want more likes for, and then subsequently promoting the page to the group, you’ll likely get a load of new people liking your community page in no time at all. But whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of joining groups which have absolutely no similarities in interest to yours, as you won’t get many sign-ups (if any) and people may report you for spamming Facebook’s system. That, and you’ll look like a right wanker.

3. Buy Facebook Advertising

Like point #1 this will cost you money, however it’s a tried-and-tested way of increasing the numbers on your community page. The main benefits for those of you who know nothing of the fantastic world that is Facebook advertising is that your ads can be targeted to the audiences you’re looking for within the site itself, as well as the fact that your ads will begin showing basically immediately, pending approval. To check out FB’s own in-house advertising, click here.

4. Promote to Your Friends

One powerful resource which almost all Facebook users have access to, though most seldom use, is their own base of friends related to their personal account. If you’re looking to promote any kind of community page and get ‘likes’ fast, simply click the ‘Suggest to Friends’ button on the page itself (it’s underneath the profile image, if you haven’t found it already) and it will then be magically suggested to all your friends. While all of them may not like the page and become a fan, you can always threaten that you’ll self-harm if they don’t.

5. Be Powerful

If you want your community page to stand out, you need to get noticed and have a powerful message. The best way by far of doing this that I’ve found is by being controversial, or by making your community page interesting. For example, if you have a page which is relating to the welfare of stray dogs, don’t call your page something like ‘Help Stray Dogs’ — while this does communicate the message of the page, it’s quite boring, no? Instead, call the page something along the lines of ‘Stop 1000’s of Strays Being Brutally Slaughtered’, or anything like that. The title has a powerful and moving message which will

6. Grow A Brain

I honestly cannot count the number of groups and community pages these days that have titles which appear as though a retarded horse bashed on a keyboard with it’s lame hoof to spell it out. For the sake of the newborn infant Zombie-Jesus, don’t even think about launching a page if you can’t spend a meager amount of time with a dictionary making sure each word in the title is spelled correctly. You will look like an absolute sea-sponge if you’re recommending a page to your friends called ‘Lern How 2 Make Munny On Fcaeboook!’ — not only that, but I will find a way to slap you in the face via email if you do.

7. Harness The Power Of Viral Marketing

If you really want your new community page to spread like Swine-Flu in a nursing home, you must do something to attract the attention of the masses. And above all, you want people to naturally recommend the page to their own friends, which is how the whole viral marketing game works. By implementing point #5, promoting your page to everyone you know on a regular basis, as well as adding a section on the community page itself telling everyone who becomes a member to recommend it to their own friends, your page will grow exponentially without you having to do a further thing. So now that you know how to get more Facebook likes, just sit back, pick your nose a little and watch your page grow!

Build Relationships: Twitter provides a social platform that lets business owner’s build relationships with their clientele. Twitter allows business owners to get to know their clients by enabling them to look at user profiles, and clients can get to know the businesses by doing the same. Mentioning and Direct Messaging people on related topics of interest regarding business can also help to build a certain level of understanding and trust.

Don’t Spam: Spamming is the easiest way to lose credibility in the eyes of the public. People sometimes view spam messages such as “Check this link out”, as a scam. Make sure all tweets and messages are composed with valuable content that consumers would be interested in reading.

Take Feedback: Business’ can ask their followers questions regarding their products. Additionally, customers often tweet about the products and services that they received, and the business that they received them from. This gives business owners the opportunity to find out what they are doing right, as well as what they are doing wrong. If the feedback from consumers is positive, then that drives others to seek out the items referenced positively. Negative feedback can even be made into a positive if business owners reach out to the customers that had a bad experience, and make the wrong a right. Afterwards, customers that had a bad experience are more likely to talk about how good the customer service was versus what went wrong.

Promote Yourself: Twitter is the perfect place to get consumers involved in your company. Business owners can tweet about coupons and incentives, and place links for followers to navigate to. Twitter is also a good platform to hold contests on, and contests have the potential to create a large buzz among users.

All of the tips above can help a business owner utilize Twitter and possibly grow their business while promoting their brand. Again, it is important to understand that the more followers a business has, the more likely it is that others will want to start using that business’ products and services. uSocial can help business’ build a strong following, which will can lead to greater public awareness in general. Pricing can be found through the following link: http://usocial.net/twitter_marketing/.

To learn more about how Twitter can help your business refer to the Twitter 101 manual: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

Sponsored advertisements revolve around the use of auto ads and sponsored actions. Auto Ads would allow an outside service to help the user in dispensing the tweet ads when the actual user of the account is not actively tweeting on a regular basis or is idle. The user can also set the auto ad to send out advertisements at certain times, in order to ensure that they do not annoy their followers. Sponsored Actions would require the user to send out a call of action to followers, such as re-tweeting a certain phrase where a hash tag is used (for tracking purposes).

Direct Advertising allows users to promote a particular product to their followers. If a user’s followers fits a certain niche market for a company and/or product then that company will want to employ that user simply because of the resources that they have to offer them in that market (potential buyers). Essentially, all direct advertising requires is making a recommendation to followers to look into a specific item. After recommending the item, the user would need to present the follower with an action, like buying the product.

Affiliate Marketing lets users make money through affiliate links or the user’s personal sales pages. An affiliate link is comprised of a tweet that recommends a product, and presents a link in the same tweet that directs the follower to where that product is sold. A sales pages would allow the user to send followers to their own personal sites (where the user can sell the follower their own products and services), versus sending them to affiliate companies.

Sponsored contests are sometimes done to promote brand awareness, or help advertisers gain insight into the minds of their consumers through feedback. Feedback can be obtained through one’s followers when the user simply throws out a question asking the followers how they feel about a certain product or service. Brand awareness is gained by having users compete in tweeting the best descriptions of products or in sending descriptions that get the word out on certain companies/products. Sponsored tweets are also a great way to go about this.

Paid Reviews allow users to simply get paid by sending in reviews on products, services, or even people. A paid review lets users send information on how they feel about something directly to the company, and does not require anything of the user’s followers.

All of these methods of making money using twitter require you to grow your twitter network.  uSocial can help you do just that by partnering with you to help you increase the numbers of followers you have. Again, increasing your number of followers can increase your personal value in the business world, and therefore increase your wallet size. Visit uSocial’s marketing page on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/usocialads

Uploading music via Tinysong, Twiturm, TwittyTunes is fairly simple, but gaining followers is not. USocial is a great strategic partner for musicians in their quest to stardom.  Usocial helps aspiring musicians gain followers and share music with the masses.  Usocial helps musicians to not only grow their followers, but to identify and follow those interested in similar artists to their genre.

When an artist produces good music and is able to share that music and connect with others many followers feel that a solid connection is formed. As a result large fan bases begin to take shape, and those fans begin to spread the word on that particular artist and become “brand champions”, which can be invaluable to an artist.

With uSocial gaining a large fan base it is quick and easy for musicians and bands to not only acquire a higher profile, but to also establish a higher sense of credibility as well.   When visitors to an artist’s profile see that they have a large fan base or network of followers, they are more likely to follow that artist and give listening to their music a chance.

USocial specializes in building fan bases and followers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites. Pricing can be found through the following link: http://usocial.net/twitter_marketing/

The sale is only on until this Sunday and we won’t be offering it again for a long while, so our advice is that if you want to save some big dollars, you should go and get to it right now!

Want to invest? Then click here to get started.

More and more companies now are focusing on how to better collate realtime data, including Google who are in talks to buy Twitter, many believing only for the realtime search abilities.

A new contender to this market is CrowdEye.com who laucnhed today and promise to be a strong contender in the market, though the company themselves admit they can only index a portion of all content, not everything in its entirety. This isn’t a shock however, as the site is only in its early days and will grow and expand as time goes on.

Take a look at CrowdEye by clicking here.