Tools That Will Make Your Mobile Marketing Profitable

Are you looking to do better at mobile marketing? Here are five awesome inexpensive tools that will help you get there faster.

MailChimp

To have a successful online business, it is essential to have a proper email marketing strategy in place since is one of the most popular ways to stay in touch with large  number of customers. There are many tools that can help you mobile-enable these programs and MailChimp fits the bill perfectly.

For example, the tool has added a number of mobile features that allow you to easily set up newsletters, see who is tweeting about you and manage your lists and subscribers from your mobile device. MailChimp also offers mobile-friendly and customized templates for your newsletters, so your campaign will look good when users read it on their mobile devices. It also offers Facebook integration that enables users to “like” and share your campaigns.

Customers can now also take advantage of services such as Chimpadeedoo, which allows customers to sign up for newsletter via an iPad. Customers visiting a store, restaurant or trade show can sign up on the spot. For instance, Monkey Joe’s Parties & Play in North Carolina, was able to grow its subscriber list from 250 to 10,000 users using this app.

The greatest benefit is that MailChimp offers a free plan covering 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month, offering all of the above mobile-friendly features and more.

• Red Stamp

Doing business with your customers and clients is not just about money but also about relationships in today’s time. To make an impression with your digital correspondence, you need to check out Red Stamp–- and its recently launched Create Your Own Collection in particular. The feature that enables small businesses to create and send custom, branded letterhead, business cards, notes, invitations and announcements from mobile and desktop devices. Whatever your creation, you can send it via email or text message, post it to Facebook or Twitter, and even mail a paper version to anywhere in the world. 

The users are attracting new clients by sending customized thank you notes after their business meetings, and building long term relationships by sharing visual, branded, real-time conversations with their social networks.

The cost of the product is a one-time fee of $29.99 for custom design and set-up and a $4.99 monthly fee for unlimited digital and social sharing. Paper postcards are just 99 cents — including $0.33 U.S. postage and International sends are an additional 30 cents— and Red Stamp prints and mails your cards for you.

• Swipely

The credit for bringing one of the best innovations to mobile marketing goes to Swipely. The payments company Swipely is helping local merchants to gain and retain customers by transforming traditional payment processing into valuable analytics, loyalty and marketing tools. Its simple “text to join” mobile loyalty program that works seamlessly with the credit or debit card consumers already have, and is free for existing customers.

A popular organic restaurant with multiple locations in the Bay Area is using Swipely and inviting customers to join the program with one simple text message. In a month, 60% of the customers submitted their credit card to join the rewards program which means that the restaurant can now market to those customers via email.

Many other merchants across the U.S. use Swipely to manage over one quarter billion dollars in sales and to deepen relationships with over 500,000 customers. 

The RI based company includes veterans of Tellme, Microsoft, Netscape, LivingSocial and SeamlessWeb, and is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors including Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and First Round Capital, among others. Swipely was also named to Forbes Magazine's list of "America's Most Promising Companies" in 2013. 

• TextUs.Biz

32% of people would rather text than talk if given a choice according to a recent Time magazine mobility poll. With this in mind, TextUs.Biz created a feature to help businesses send and receive texts from customers via their computer or iPad. Small businesses can use the service to send reminders or promotional offers to customers, while customers can use it to request an appointment or reservation on company's main business phone number.

The service is ideally suited for restaurant reservations, changing appointments or answering questions about car repairs, which are often easier to manage via text messaging versus a phone call.

"TextUs.Biz has greatly reduced the amount of time our front desk staff is tied up on the phone and has allowed us to concentrate on even better customer service,” says a salon owner. “Our clients love the ease and simplicity of sending us text messages and our staff uses the service almost exclusively for communication with the front desk.”

The service is free for the first 100 messages, which includes web and iPad access. The "basic" cost is $24/month for 1,500 messages; the "premium" is $44/month for 5,000 messages and "pro" is $74/month for 10,000 messages.

•  Facebook

Besides offering a platform to marketers to advertise their products, Facebook offers extensive features to reach and engage target customers especially on mobile.

Smartphone users check Facebook an average of 14 times per day, according to recent Facebook usage research by IDC, so advertisers are trying to take advantage of this fact with the help of  Facebook Offers and Promoted Posts.

For instance, Sam's Chowder House, a local restaurant in Half Moon Bay, CA, used Promoted Posts to drive a 19% increase in both their monthly number of guests and monthly gross revenue.

Facebook's Pages Manager app also allows you to manage your Facebook Page, post photos, comments and ad campaigns all on your phone.Join Businessfriend today. Where social networking leads to productivity

How to avoid unknown Facebook Friend Requests

Getting too many Facebook friend requests from unknown people and very much annoyed with it? You don’t have to worry much as Facebook has a built-in feature which can can be turned on if needed

. By default anyone can send a friend request to anyone and I have seen this as a common problem to many of my friends. In the worst case some of my friends have deleted their Facebook account just for this reason.

To avoid Facebook friend requests from unknown people all that you need to do is go to Security Settings as shown above. Now under ‘Privacy Shortcuts’ click on ‘Who can contact me?’. Under this you will find an option named ‘Who can send me friend request’. By default it will be ‘Everyone’. Here you need to change this to ‘Friends of Friends’ option. By disabling this you only block unknown people and not your friend’s friends. People who find you on Facebook search or on Google search can now send you only a message and not a request as request option will not be visible to these unknown people. You have an option to send a request to anyone unless the other person to whom you are sending the request  has done the same thing as you did by selecting Friends of Friends and not Everyone.

If you are forced to add or in a situation where you have to add them but  really not interested in chatting with them (best example is your manager) then you even have an option to turn-off chat with selected friends. To know how this is done check: Turn Off Facebook Chat for selected friends.

Hope these tips were useful and you can have a peaceful day. Leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can like my Facebook page to get latest updates on How To Tips.

How to block Facebook App requests

Not all are interested in playing games on Facebook and people generally get irritated with too many notification alerts from different games or invites from different Facebook Apps.

There is a work around for this, you can block Facebook apps individually.

Follow the following steps to block Facebook app and you will stop getting notifications till you unblock it.

• Login to your Facebook account
• Click on Facebook Settings icon and click on ‘Privacy Settings’.
• On the left side click on ‘Blocking’
• Scroll down and go to ‘Block apps’
• Enter the name of an app Example: FarmVille and hit enter.
• You can always come back to this place to unblock any of the blocked app.

If you have already given an app all your details like email ID then the app owner can always send you emails even after removing authorization for the app in the App Center on your app settings. Once you block an app, you will no longer get any requests, email from the blocked app or they cannot even access any information about you unless you make it public. You always have an option to unsubscribe from the app entirely at the bottom of the email that app sends.

You even have an option to do this directly. To the right top corner you will be able to see all the requests. Move your cursor over this request and you can see cross icon. Click on it and select block. Once you block it, the blocked app will appear in the ‘Block Apps’ list under Privacy Settings.

When you block Facebook apps under Blocking, you also have options to block other stuffs like you can block a user, block invites, block event invites and the apps.

How Facebook Page Post type can increase traffic to your website

It’s always better to have social presence to increase traffic to your website. If you have a new Facebook Page then you need to wait for the first 30 likes to get Facebook Insights which Page admins can view. This is a very helpful feature which will give you details on the type of traffic like Organic, Paid or Viral. There are many other details like link clicks, stories created, other clicks, number of people taking about this, likes, comments and shares. If you are using your Android phone and Facebook’s Pages Manager App then just under the post click on ‘View Insights’ to view these details.

Organic or Natural traffic are techniques where you don’t have to pay anything for search engines and your post appears in search results on it’s own and no tricks are done. It’s always nice to get more Organic traffic. Paid traffic is where users pay to get traffic by advertising about their post or promote their post for more views. Viral views are making your post visible by using social media, PR sites, pod-cast etc. This will exponentially increase the traffic or number of visitors to your site from the initial organic traffic that was generated.

So,  How to increase Facebook Page post views and increase traffic to your website. I have been experimenting on this for a while and this is that I have seen. Most of the website or blog owners use auto publish or share their link on Facebook and other social networking sites. When you auto publish, your post will be shared as a link on your Facebook Page. Instead of doing this try publishing the image in the post and leave a small description along with the short URL to your post. As you can see in the image the number views are low when shared as a link and much more when shared as an image. Also, the organic traffic almost remains constant where as there is a huge increase in the viral traffic. Check my Facebook page [link] to see how I have posted. You can try this to increase traffic to your website by publishing your post as an image instead of just the link. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment. Try this out and share this post with your friends if you find it useful.

Download all your facebook data

Facebook has got too much of your data like your uploaded photos, messages, status updates, likes, videos etc. Did you know that you have an option to download all of Facebook data from your Facebook account ? Google has given it’s users an option to pull out all your data using Google Takeout [Link]. Well, this is how you do it.

• Login to Facebook and click on settings icon.
• Click on Account Settings.
• In the image as shown here, click on ‘Download a Copy’.
• Now click on ‘Start My Archive’.

The downloaded content will all of your timeline data like photos, videos, wall posts, messages and many other information. Click on start will download your content and the time taken to download depends on how much content you have uploaded all these years, how huge your album is, older your account in years more will be the time taken to download your content. Your  information is available to you in three different places:

• Downloaded Info – which  includes your timeline info like posts you have shared, messages, photos, videos and more.
• Expanded Archive – which includes account info like logins, cookies and more. This is in addition to the above downloaded info. You have an option to download this separately.
• Activity Log – includes history of all your activity from posts you have commented on or liked, to apps you have used, to anything you have searched for. Your search details may not be present if you deleted your Facebook Search History [Link].

Also, don’t forget to keep this data safe as it has your entire Facebook Timeline information.

How to check your Facebook search history

Searched for something sometime back on Facebook, maybe even few years back and want to know what you had searched earlier on Facebook search? Well, there is a way to do that on Facebook.  It will show the query that you used to search. Example in the below image I have searched for “How To Tech Guru” Facebook page from my profile and How to Tech Guru was the search query. Now, to find what you have searched, follow the following steps:

Just login to Facebook and go to your profile. As shown below click on ‘Activity Log’.

Facebook Activity Log

Activity Log will show you all the details like what you have liked, on what post have you commented, what links have you shared, all your status and posts update that you made. Also, it shows privacy setting that you had set for each of these activities. You have an option to modify the settings or even delete an activity. Now, Click on more to the left to find ‘Search’. Click on Search and you will find all the queries that you had typed as shown below.

Facebook Search History

It’s better to keep your search history clean if you are using a shared machine or if you are using a machine where your passwords are saved or even in you home machine just to be on safer side.

How to fix Facebook Thumbnail and Description issues

Tried sharing an article on Facebook and you see that the Facebook thumbnail and description is missing or just the thumbnail is missing and do you see something similar to the one as show? 
  The reason would be that Facebook might be using cache to store information. Caching is very important for Facebook as they have too many users and its performance that matters for Facebook. If users are sharing the same link then caching will help Facebook in loading data in no time. This issue can be fixed by clearing the cache. You can check my previous post on how to Clear Facebook Cache Data. Trying to paste a link in the share field or trying to share this post directly from your site usually will not cause an issue but sometimes can cause an issue as shown above. To fix this go to Facebook developer’slink and paste the url as shown below and click on debug. By doing so, Facebook will clear and update its cache with the latest info. Here you can see all the details like url, image, description, title and also, any issues that are to be fixed.

How to access your 'other' inbox on Facebook for Android

The initial Facebook for Android beta includes access to a hidden messages folder for your account. Here's how to access it.

You know you have a hidden inbox on Facebook, right? The "other" message folder is reserved for those people who message you and aren't one of your Facebook friends.

There's a chance some messages from non friends will go to your main inbox (depending on your settings), but most of the time these messages make their way to your other messages, without you ever being notified of a waiting message. Unless the sender decides to pay $1 to guarantee the message ends up in your main folder.

Up until recently, the only way to access your other inbox was to log on to Facebook.com and navigate to it on the Messages screen. It appears Facebook is finally ramping up plans to bring it to your Android device, as the feature is included in the latest Facebook for Android beta build.

To be able to view your other inbox, you'll need to sign up to participate in the Facebook for Android beta, which is free and requires a Google account. Once you've signed up and downloaded the beta from the Play store, you can begin digging around and finding new features.

One of those new features, of course, is a gear icon next to Messages in the navigation window. Tapping on the icon lets you navigate to your archived messages or your other inbox. Here you'll find any missed connections, or random messages from complete strangers wanting to chat it up; if you find anything at all.

Record silent Instagram videos

The severed end of a TRRS headset cable.

Well, that trick did work for the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 I had handy, and it may work for other Android devices as well. It did not, however, work with my iPhone.

It turns out that Apple hardware requires a specific resistance in the headphone components in order for the device to sanction the connected headset. By cutting out the mic from the cable (as well as the surrounding circuit board of tiny resistors and diodes), I stripped out the very thing I needed for the trick to work. My iPhone knew I was up to no good and it resorted to using its internal microphone instead.

Not one to give up easily, I tried a number of different TRRS jack adapters, such as the weird USB charging adapter from the iPod Shuffle, and even a VGA A/V cord. No dice.

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Finally, I hit on a solution. I have at my desk a guitar cable adapter made for iOS devices called AmpliTube iRig. The adapter runs around $40 new and comes with a great app for playing and recording your guitar. But assuming you're just using this to disable your iPhone's internal mic,inexpensive alternatives can be found for around $10 (though I make no guarantees on their compatibility). Just plug it into your headphone jack and leave the instrument input empty, and you've got an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad with a bypassed microphone, capable of creating silent videos for Instagram or Vine.

Convenient? Not really. But until either company sees fit to include a simple microphone mute button (if they ever come to their senses) at least this is a workable solution for silent video purists.

Change privacy settings for shared posts in Facebook for Android

Forgot to set the correct privacy settings on a post before you shared? Here's a quick tip about today's update that lets you fix sharing settings on any post.

When sharing a post from the previous version of Facebook for Android, you may have forgotten to tap the itsy-bitsy people-sharing icon before you sent it off to the Interwebs. This icon controls the settings for who can see your post, be it Public, Friends, or other groups you're part of on Facebook. Fortunately, this icon hasn't gone anywhere, but in case you forget to use it, there's a fix -- and it doesn't involve logging in on the desktop Web site.

First, make sure you have the most recent version of Facebook for Android. Just because you've done all updates from the Google Play Store doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the latest version. Many mobile app updates are done with a staged rollout, which can be quite annoying if you're not in the first group. The easiest way to check your current version is to go into the Application Manager (Settings > Applications) and find Facebook in the list. When you tap it, the version number will be displayed in the top area of the screen.

If you don't have version 3.3 you will need to wait for the update to reach your Android device, or install it from a third party (at your own risk). Once you're on version 3.3, follow these quick steps to adjust privacy settings for shared posts:

After a post is finished updating to Facebook, just tap on the three dots in the top-right corner and select Edit Privacy. Next, select the audience you want to share the post with. Now the post will be available only to the people you selected.

If you're like me, you probably think this feature is extremely overdue. What other changes would you like to see in the mobile app? Share your thoughts in the comments. 

How to transfer large files on Facebook with Pipe

A new Facebook app will let you share files up to 1GB in size with your friends. Just follow these quick steps to get started.

Step 1: Connect the Pipe app to your Facebook account.
You'll need to visit their Web site: https://apps.facebook.com/pipeapp and then give the app permission to access your timeline and messages. Pipe does not send messages that you have not authorized.

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Step 2: Click the Friends button in the top left-hand corner of the Pipe app to find someone to send a file to.

Step 3: The pipe displayed on the screen also serves as the button for selecting a file to send. Click there and then locate the file you want to share on your hard drive, up to 1GB in size.

If your friend is online:

You'll see a box pop up where you can include a personalized message. Then just click Send File Now and you're set. The app will tell you that it is sending, the file name, the size of the file, percentage completed, and lastly the amount transferred out of the total size. Either party can cancel the transfer at any time.

If your friend is offline:

Pipe will give you an option for how long you'd like the file to remain in the cloud "Locker." You can choose between 1 and 5 days. The next time your friend is on Facebook, they will receive message stating that a file is waiting for them to download.

Post picture comments on Facebook from your smartphone

Facebook now lets you post photo comments from the Web site, but not through the mobile apps. Here's how you can still post a photo comment from your smartphone.

Facebook on Wednesday announced it was rolling out a feature that allowed users to post a photo as a comment on any thread or status update from the Web site. The feature, a long overdue addition, was slowly activated for users throughout the course of the day and should be active for pretty much everyone by now.

When I first posted about the feature, I had a few friends comment they didn't have access to it via the mobile app, which is expected, because the feature wasn't added to any of the dedicated apps. The ability to use a photo in a comment was only added to the Web site, and mobile Web site.

In order to post a photo comment on Facebook from your smartphone, you simply need to visit m.facebook.com using your mobile browser. The mobile site will work on basically any platform, it's not just limited to iOS or Android.

When you tap on Comment below a status update, you'll see a list of the current comments (if there are any), and you'll also see the normal text field at the bottom for your comment, but now to the left of the text field you'll see a new camera icon. Tapping on the camera icon will let you add a photo as a comment, be it one you have saved to your device or a new one you just snapped with the camera, just as you would using the Facebook Web site.

This isn't an ideal solution, but it's a solution nonetheless. Until the ability to post a photo comment from the dedicated apps is released in a future update, it will have to do.