Best Served Cold

Web design and development

We pride ourselves on producing high quality websites that fully conform to the highest web standards. Our sites are accessible and search engine friendly, making sure that all our sites have the best possible chance of succeeding where so many others fail.

Social Media and how to use it…

Social Media is an often used term and it covers a broad range of different websites – almost all new websites include some form of social media: in comments, embedded media or links to social tools. I like to think of Social Media as an umbrella term that as a basic rule covers three main types of website:

Social Media

Sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Flickr are all Social Media website. Literally speaking they are used to display Media in the context of a Social community. In this sense media is used with the traditional meaning of an act of communication – via film, art, photography, music etc.

Social Networking

Since the arrival of MySpace and Facebook the importance of social networking sites has increased dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years. These are now the most used and most active type of website in the world. The basic function of a Social Networking site is to allow users to chat, view and interact with each other via a simple interface.

Social Bookmarking

This is the most difficult type of social website to describe and understand. The idea behind Social Bookmarking sites is to easily store and distribute useful information and links to websites. Rather than storing favourite sites on your personal computer you are allowing anyone to view your links and rate the web pages based on the relevance to topic, how interesting they found it or some other criteria.

So that’s a brief overview of Social Media but how do you use it to your advantage when marketing a new website, prodcut or service? That’s where the work starts!

There are lots of blogs that will help with talking about social media and marketing and how to optimise your Facebook pages and Twitter tweets but one of the easiest to understand I’ve read recently is this:

16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited

Here at Best Served Cold we can help you get started with Social Media and guide you on the best sites to register with, who your audience might be and how you can utilise the social internet to promote your brand or website.

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that can get you links, attention and large amounts of traffic. Sometimes the work involved can be quite time intensive but it is always low cost.

The two main benefits of developing a good social media marketing strategy are:

  1. High numbers of new visitors
  2. Quality links from external websites

Both of these translate directly and indirectly to a higher search engine ranking and increased traffic to
your website:

  1. New visitors from social bookmarks or networking sites may find your site or article, read it, and then leave the site. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the content. Online success is, at the most basic, a numbers game. The more visitors you can attract to your site, the more people will read your content and the more people will register with your site or bookmark you for future reference.
  2. A well written article, marketed across social networks will encourage other bloggers, journalists and network members to write about and link to your site. These links get picked up by search engines such as Google and this in turn increases the value / ranking of your site within search engine results.

If you already have a Social Media online marketing campaign in place we can still help you further by talking you through Social Media News Releases or SMNRs. We have helped to create Pressitt.com which is a frree service that allows you to publish online press releases across your favourite Social Networking and Social Media platforms. From Pressitt:

The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.

Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.

With a Pressitt newsroom you can collate all your Social Network links in one place giving your customers an easy way to find you and your products. More importantly it gives you a high profile online presence to talk about your brand directly to your customers. If you’d like to find out more about Pressitt and Social Media News Releases why not contact one of the Pressitt team?

Pressitt.com – officially live

Today marks the launch of Pressitt.com, we had a brief mention in PR Week last week and now the team are getting word out about the public beta launch.

Pressitt.com – create a social media news release

From the site:

Pressitt allows you to create your own social media news release (SMNR) – also known as a social media press release (SMPR) or social media release (SMR), and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.

Many journalists use the Internet as their primary research source when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed primarily with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMPR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, and offers contact details for more information, all without the usual PR fluff.

Through Pressitt, you can create news that is truly ‘social’, as well as enhance your SMNR with images and video clips. You can also add relevant links, upload PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, or whatever you need to get your message across.

We think it looks so good, we’ve alsoo submitted it to 101 Best Websites – it’s a blatant plug, but you’ve got to try! 🙂

Pressitt – Social Media News Releases

or SMNRs are the next big thing and we’ve got in at the start with a collaboration with Liberate Media: Pressitt.com.

We’ve just taken it into private beta release for testing – you can register to find out more but we’re only allowing a small number of users for the first couple of weeks while we make sure everything is working correctly.

There’ll be more information coming soon… watch this space!

Pressitt.com