Online marketing expert Karin von Abrams has stressed that internet marketing campaigns are increasingly at the heart of companies’ branding strategies.

Ms von Abrams, a senior analyst at the eMarketer organisation, said that nowadays virtually every brand has included online marketing within their overall marketing operations. At the same time, ad agencies are becoming ever more skilled at creating the perfect integrated internet advertising campaigns.

Although some sectors of the business world have taken longer than others to realise the full potential of online marketing – with one example being the fast-paced consumer goods sector – many companies within these sectors are now pioneering internet advertising and setting the standards for the rest of their sectors to follow.

This can be seen by the innovative ways in which many brands are using social networking or micro-blogging sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and in the strategies adopted to rise to the top of the search ratings in Google.

Ms von Abrams said: “It is now clear that every brand or business can benefit in some way from building awareness online, or from rethinking its business processes to make full use of digital channels.”

The rise of internet advertising was underscored recently when market analysts the Nielsen Company, which showed that worldwide spending on advertising increased by an eighth in the second quarter of this year – and spending on online marketing alone increased by 12 per cent.

At the end of the first quarter of 2010, the total global spend on advertising stood at a massive £65.4 billion.

Global goods colossus Unilever’s senior vice-president Laura Klauberg stressed the importance of social networking sites such as Facebook in online marketing and advertising last week at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Delegates from all over the world gathered in the south of France to discuss the changes and challenges facing the industry and were all singing from the same hymn-sheet when it came to the pivotal role of social media over the next decade and beyond.

In previous years, special guests have included the bosses of the Microsoft corporation and search engine giant Google, but this year’s online marketing focus was well and truly on Facebook, with a special appearance for its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Ms Klauberg, who is Unilever’s senior VP for global media, insisted that “social media isn’t just another channel. It’s not just about Facebook, it’s much bigger as it changes the relationship with the consumer, forcing us to change the whole mindset of our business.”

She revealed that her company is increasing its budget for digital advertising by at least 50 this year and said that it is increasingly reliant on online marketing to complement its advertising in more traditional media such as television or print.

Procter & Gamble is another company that is beefing up its social media role. The firm’s chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard told delegates that “the moment I realized the huge potential of social media was when I joined Facebook two years ago.”

With its ability to generate “instant feedback” on brands, services and products, Facebook – along with Twitter – are increasingly being targeted by forward-thinking companies for their unique contribution to advertising and marketing.

A leading online marketing organisation has urged companies to harness the instant feedback possibilities of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

A recent poll found that nearly half of all online consumers demonstrate their support or dislike for certain brands on Twitter or Facebook.

Referring to the study by market analysts ExactTarget, search engine optimisation company SEO Junkies argued that even negative feedback from such social media was very useful when it comes to formulating online marketing strategies.

SEO Junkies director Di Forster insisted that any companies that experience negative feedback online are well place to “turn it around and spin it to a positive.”

“You’re finding out how people are talking about you, whether it’s good or bad. It might be bad, but you need to know about it, then you can change it,” she added.

With the recent introduction by Google addition of an improved real-time search algorithm, which updates the search engine’s databases more swiftly and accurately than ever before, social media such as Twitter has become more important as a marketing device than ever before, Ms Forster insisted.

However, the benefits for companies intent on incorporating Twitter into their marketing strategies will not come without effort. Writing for Official Wire, SEO expert and social media businessman Leon Hill stressed that for social media to be at its most effective, brands have to put work into building up a strong and loyal following.

A company needs to consider what sort of fans it wishes to attract and then concentrate its online marketing efforts into enticing them.

Micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter is contributing to the excitement surrounding the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup today with a special website set up for football fans around the world.

The social network unveiled http://twitter.com/worldcup, which is dedicated to all things World Cup – giving Twitterers information about the match schedules, flag icons of all the countries participating in the tournament, and of course the promise of live tweets throughout all the World Cup matches.

Writing on the official Twitter blog, its co-founder Biz Stone pointed out its advantages for fans and the potential for online marketing, with the dedicated site giving them a perfect opportunity to link up with teams, players and official sponsoring brands during the World Cup, not least through the medium of Twitter advertising.

He said that the Twitter FIFA World Cup page boast such unique features as live widgets, real-time search facilities and Top Tweets sections. The latter in particular is interesting, as its algorithm seeks out and republishes the most popular and interesting tweets about the tournament. By clicking on the View Match link, Twitterers are able to check out a live stream of all the site’s updates concerning an individual match.

But there is more to the Twitter/World Cup tie-in than that. It has also introduced a facility that causes a football icon to appear next to any tweet concerning the World Cup which features the #WorldCup hashtag, as long as users are viewing them via the Twitter Web interface.

When Twitterers use the hashtags with the first three letters in a participant country’s name, such as #ENG for England, the nation’s flag will appear next to the tweet in question.

Its a fact blogging is here to stay and if you have a blog the chances are it will be using the worlds most popular blog CMS Content Management system Wordpress. If you don’t have a blog why wordpress well one of the main reasons we used wordpress was it is so easy to use and second there are so many different plugins and options available so you can customise the blog to your own personal preferences.

One of the most important things needed if your blog is going to work and by saying making your blog work we mean generating visits and traffic is you have to consider the blogs setup from a seo or search engine optimisation point of view.

The best plug in for this is the all in one seo pack this really is a must if you are going to get the best out of your blog. This allows you to add meta titles, descriptions and keyword to each page which is very important in generating listings on google and other search engines. The second selection of plug-ins to consider are the social networking ones now social networking is as we speak becoming more and more popular and providing people the ability to share news or articles with there existing set of friends on followers on facebook or twitter it is a great way of generating free exposure.

Social networking is such a new source that many companies simply don’t understand the full implications of using it to benefit there companies from a marketing point of view. If you are new to blogging and are looking to get your company blogging on a regular basis we would say you would be better using a company that offers a blog setup service. This way you can be ahead of the game and save important time so you can start adding content online.

Time and time again the optimization of Natural listings and Google adwords is mentioned as one of the first steps to improving your companies fortunes online.  Often overlooked simply because of a simple lack of understanding Social media and the optimization of this should be considered as one of the first steps for your companies internet marketing.

Optimization of natural listings comes with first on page and link building a long drawn out process. Our Managing Director Garry Pickles explaines further ” Many Companies are still not fully aware of how to get the best from social networking. A Simple fan page or group is created and then neglected.”

The key to improving these fortunes is simple News content and relevant news content at that. If you can engage with the audience and provide interesting information and news on a regular basis then it is possible to generate traffic. More and more social networking sites are used to share infroamtion amoungst there peers this is where the snowball effect of the social networking experience comes into play.

So as with the optimization via link building for natural listings the optimization of social networking accounts isnt easy and dedication is required a longterm commitment is required but there really is nothing to lose. Once your companies grows its number of followers and friends the only way is up and the pages will grow and grow. This isnt a short term fix social networking is here to stay and in 5 to 10 years time you could be broadcasting  your companies information to literally thousands of people daily

So make the move into social networking and consider how you can get the best out of it before someone else in industry does.

Twitter has become more and more popular over the year and as time goes by companies are realising its potential as a way of generating traffic to there companies websites. We have run several different tests on the effectiveness of Twitter and have found a wide range of positive results not just from our own twitter account but many other companies we represent.

On average each twitter post is generating 5 – 15 clicks of course the more followers your twitter account has the larger the chance of generating higher click volumes. Our research over the past 6 months has shown the importance of twitter being automated to a blog this way the account isn’t setup and left idle as many accounts are following the initial setup.

One thing we feel is important is creating the right image on your twitter page. The twitter background is a great place to tell people about your company and promote your company logo and brand. Not just that it looks really professional if you have your own personalised design which conforms to the correct resolution and dimensions.

Our twitter background has been live for the past 4 weeks and has already help generate a better response from twitter traffic and helped to increase followers. If you are serious about improving your presence on twitter then a personalised background is a must.

View our Twitter page – http://twitter.com/onlinemediadltd

One of the most common responses we get from our clients when we suggest the use of twitter is one scepticism. Firstly the customer response how can Twitter help us we are a “plumber in London” for example. Ok they do have a point but the first mistake is to think of twitter as something where people have to randomly generate one liners with information on there daily happening such as “just making a cup of tea” and “its raining again” Ok it might work for many twitter celebrities who have helped endorse the new genre online. But this is what the vast majority of the public understand twitter as being.

Using Twitter to generate traffic with hashtags

So its understandable why people discount this or perhaps open an account on twitter with the best intentions and then find it fritters away and isn’t touched for the next 2 years. Put simply people and business’s don’t have the time to add content to there twitter accounts on a daily basis.

The secret is an integration between other sources which you already add content on a regular basis Online media direct can set up your twitter account to automatically update with your blog posts this clever internet marketing technique is vital then to help it reach the right audience on twitter by adding relevant hash tags in order to list your tweets in the search results on twitter.

Google live search making search instant

You may have noticed recently doing searches that live updates are now being processed from sites such as twitter. This offers a great way of getting first page listings and generating traffic to your web pages. It is not set in stone where the live updates appear but it does tend to be places , people and events as opposed to products.

Next time you are adding a twitter post consider the traffic it can generate from search terms through live search results on google.

Take a few searches on google and see if you can trigger live search results.

Can you advertise on Twitter ?

In answer to is it possible already ? In a way yes it already is possible.

Twitter is becoming more and more popular now a days. Originally it started with a bunch of techno geeks and twitter seemed to be another flash in the pan. But it really is begining to take a permenant position as the next best thing to Facebook.

Twitter allows users to simply add one line of text to there account as opposed to the difficult aspect of facebook  and there countless applications. In a way facebook is already used in a very similar way to twitter already. The status that appears on peoples accounts using facebook is in effect the same concept of what Twitter is.

Twitter Advertising for Business

Untill a time comes when Twitter provide cost per click, banner advertising or sponsored tweets business’s will have to remain getting the best out of twitter by using it as a way of broadcasting there blogs rss feeds. A simple tiny url displays on twitter whenever a company updates there blog and this along with the added value of something like twitter feed it results in a great source of free traffic and advertising.

Will Twitter Allow Advertising

Many companies see twitter as a brand that will add a certain image to there existing companies websites. It acts as an indicator to the public that the company is upto date and of modern thinking when it comes to there online presence.

Many companies would benifit from a twitter account in so many different industries. If you ask me the main benifit has to be the integration with a Rss feed from a wordpress blog. We would reccomend you consider a blog setup service that we offer to get your company up and running we setup the all important twitter accounts and there integration with the rss feed totally free of charge.