Here is a list of social games on Facebook that I picked up based on reviews and voting from friends and others.

o    Farmville
A virtual world game developed by Zynga is the top social media game available on the Internet right now. With a small piece of land and money, users can start playing this game. 11 million active daily users reported.

o    Mafia wars
Be your own Mafia boss, do jobs, earn money and buy weapons. This is idea behind this game. Developed by Zynga and with about 4 million active users daily, this is the second on list of popular games on Facebook.

o    Zynga Poker
This is another social game from Zynga, where you can play poker with your friends and win daily bonus. This game has attracted players from more countries with about 30 million active monthly users.

o    Yoville
Just like the ones above, Yoville from Zynga is another virtual world game that allows users to create personal avatars, Yovillians who can play games, chat, attend events and interact with friends.

o    Pet Society
This free game from Playfish allows the users to create their own pets, involving in activities and earning coins to buy cool stuff. Pet society has about 13 million active monthly users.

o    Word Challenge
Another social game from Playfish is Word Challenge, where you are asked to create 3-6 letter words from the given 6 letters. Players are awarded a ranking based on the results for a comparison with their friends.

o    KickMania
The animated Kick Ass game on Facebook where every kick is unique and fun filled. A lot of people are playing this game developed by The Broth.

o    Happy Aquarium
This is a cool social game on Facebook with 12 million active users who can adopt a cute baby fish, watch them grow and build a happy aquarium.

The above list is a small one and soon this may increase in numbers. Now, go ahead and add the one you are really addicted to play and do it again.

What are the subjects that are being discussed on social networks? They are various, ranging from information on products or services, customer queries, product improvement ideas, customer assistance requests, and helping each other with their own views on product related issues and market conditions. This kind of interaction helps business owners respond quickly to customer queries and solve any open issues with ease. At this stage, companies will have to analyze what their customers are talking about, what they expect and their social behavior. This helps the business owners to make useful decision during their future sales campaigns.

I think both Twitter and Facebook have a unique opportunity to tap into the beneficial CRM market. With people sharing more about their personal likes and dislikes, professional information, location, and others, social media helps marketers to define highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns based on the user data. Marketers can use social CRM as an application to study the social profile of their customers to know more about their connections and to build better relationships.

The future of customer relationship management is in social networks, as there is a huge increase in the level of interaction with the customers by way of online communities and social networks. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are the best in class platforms for word of mouth marketing. About two thirds of companies gained increased customer satisfaction utilizing social media as a tool. Business people have to realize that it is not possible to market without social networks in the next few years.

Twitter not only lets you know about what others are doing and offers a tool to spread product deals, launches, and job openings. Everything is for free, where you can allow your followers to view your profile and share ideas, trends, and solicit feedback about your business with them.

Twitter offers flexibility that allows marketers to target a diverse market. The content posted via Twitter multiplies exponentially and good content serves as a tiny press release. As a result, content distribution improves, increasing traffic. The viral marketing feature of twitter is one good reason for B2B companies to choose Twitter as a social media tool. With the help of the in-built features and other third party resources, marketers can easily monitor, track and analyze the flow of information, trends and business opportunities.

The main goal of a marketer in using social media tool is to increase the sales volume by engaging the consumers and target audience to develop brand equity. So all companies must try to understand how to make use of Twitter as a social media marketing tool to create awareness about their brands, engage customers, and maximize profit.

Here is a small list of latest trends that are widely used:

Hope all these latest trends will have a lasting impression on the visitor.

Compared to the traditional email marketing, the mobile marketing formats like SMS, MMS and WAP push messages are sent personally to the user and are expected to receive higher response. Studies indicate short message advertisements are viewed about 70% higher than email messages and this feature may build brand identity and increasing the buying decisions of the consumers. The consumers’ attitudes towards the direct marketing messages highly influence the buying decision in addition to interpretation of the targeted promotional messages. Consumers’ perception in receiving SMS advertising messages is related to the permission granted to marketers. Hence, most consumers will pay maximum attention and read messages from those companies to which they subscribed to receive messages based on their interests.

Permission-based marketing is considered an essential part of relationship development with customers, developing loyalty for a long time. The permission marketing and buying intention are positively related to each other. On the other hand, privacy concern is something related negatively to the customers’ intention to take part in such mobile advertising campaigns. Consumers who consider mobile devices only for personal use are less likely to buy the products advertised through messages and other forms of mobile advertising formats. Studies also indicate extensive mobile advertising leads in a negative direction among the consumers resulting in lack of trust with the firms that are using mobile advertising as a channel of communication.

In order to overcome these, the mobile advertising agencies are highly advised to take all measures to correct the negative attitudes among consumers towards direct mobile advertising.  Marketers should fully customize messages with the help of the available consumer data, and then the relationship can be enhanced.

There are a range of essential factors that influence the look and feel of e-commerce websites. The top features include quick & easy navigation, product related simple design for increased visibility of product, effective branding, specific product images, displaying related or recommended products, listing popular products, offers & discounts, simple checkout process, and complete website search option.  

The navigation of product pages should be carefully designed with more options for the users to locate the product easily.  This feature of the site requires thorough user experience testing to ensure all navigational issues are addressed properly. With the help of some simple design approaches, the site will give better visibility to the product, as selling is the key point of any e-commerce website. For better performance of the website, the design should be related to the style of products available and thus making a direct connection with the brand.

Your firm should include product specific photos, especially in different angles.  This will help the user get a feel of the product and to make an easy purchasing decision. They should also make use of the homepage and help the users to find something really interesting by adding offers, popular products, new arrivals and other discounts. Displaying a list of related products on the product details page to the user may result in increased sales of those products as well and serves as a promotional tool for similar products. Users may find it difficult to land with the particular product of their interest even with good navigation, so in order to avoid this and help them gain easy access to the product, it is advised to include search box with range of options.

In total, e-commerce websites with all the above good features provides advantages for small and medium businesses in developing countries reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency.

The major factors that affect the use of mobile advertising include device, interface, purpose, media, content, message and the audience. Acceptance of mobile as an advertising medium among consumers is influenced by a wide range of factors that include purpose, personalization, control, privacy, protection, usage, specificity, psychological barriers and other regulations. When these factors that influence the consumer acceptance are analyzed properly, it will provide valuable insights about the role of mobile marketing and advertising in the near future. Quite a few non consumer centric variables exist, like advertising content and technology, when manipulated accordingly will create a positive response among the target audience.

So it is important for one to understand the consumers’ attitude towards mobile advertising and various factors influencing it, based on that a unique model can be defined and executed. One of the key elements for the success of a mobile advertising campaign is to understand both the user expectations as well as the differences in available mobile devices and keeping the users engaged in communication. A good number of businesses are now experiencing success using mobile advertising and marketing as a tool, because of less competition as of now when compared to internet marketing. Overall, mobile marketing is a great tool for lead generation and to build relationships with consumers if the so called factors that influence consumer acceptance are addressed properly.

The current format of mobile advertising or marketing does not have a major effect on the buying decision of the consumers and various studies reveal that the response of consumers towards this form of marketing fall in different categories which include a disruptive nature of the advertisements, a need for personalization of advertisements, and the advantages or use of mobile advertisements. The major advantage of this media as a tool of marketing is that it will improve the chances of reaching consumers directly with personalized content. On the other hand, most companies think of negative response from consumers and invasion of consumer privacy as main disadvantages.

Recent studies reveal that one third of Americans who have signed up for promotional alerts via mobile phones indicate that these marketing services make an impact on their buying decision. Placecast studies indicate that only 3% of women and 7% of men are interested in location based social networks.  The check-in services or the mobile optimized location based services of leading social networks has only a limited impact and the reach is still not measured properly.  Studies also reveal that the short messaging services as a new advertising medium can generate good responses as high as 40% compared to direct mail and banner advertisements.  Location based mobile advertising messages are having higher click through rates when compared to online advertising messages.

The key for success in mobile marketing is to maintain a certain level that will not disturb the mobile phone users. So for every marketer, it is very important to know the use of mobile marketing to make a clear impact on the buying decision of a consumer. Mobile media is considered to be more personal than any other traditional mode of communication and emails. It is highly recommended to follow a conceptual framework when defining a mobile marketing campaign using the permission based marketing strategy.

First define your goal when you are planning to measure the social media performance metrics on your business. Then go ahead and define actionable performance indicators to effectively measure the results of your campaign and then adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Social media analytics are all about measuring the results to understand your customers, opportunities for business development, and how you translate your conversations with prospects to make business decisions.

Plenty of great tools are available either paid or free to monitor your social media marketing strategies. Both the free and paid tools offer different features and benefits. IBM introduced one such tool named the IBM SPSS Modeler Professional that helps marketers to find insights of campaigns. You should find such a tool, monitor your customers or prospect’s online activity and their conversation about your products or services to learn how to enhance the social media campaigns further.

Facts about Facebook:

1. 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
2. Facebook has about 100 billion hits a day
3. 50 billion photos on Facebook and more than 3 billion photos uploaded each month
4. More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
5. More than 70 translations options available on the site
6. 1.5 million Local businesses have active pages on Facebook
7. Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
8. 100 million active users are accessing Facebook through their mobile phones

So how do companies successfully use Facebook to market its products or services to large group of users? Facebook Optimization is the answer. Here are some key points that need to be followed on a Facebook Marketing Campaign includes: developing specific messages to target audience, paying appropriate attention to what is being discussed, and engaging in a good conversation. There are special tools that are specifically made for Facebook portal that help small businesses engage more and more deeply with the consumers and prospects. Facebook open graph tool help optimize your Facebook pages and with this tool, Facebook Optimization is now increasingly becoming the new SEO.