Facebook has recently announced that they will be revamping the design of profile pages on their popular social networking site as an effort to organize the clutter that comes from their users’ diverse activities. Easing the navigation of photo albums, history, friend updates and applications, the development team will be splitting the profile page into threes sections, separated by tabs at the top of the page.

The tabs will be labeled `Wall’, `About’ and `Photos,’ and the content will be divided accordingly. The development team is also hinting that users will be able to create additional tabs. This move is intended to make profile navigations more organized as people add more applications, as well as personal information, on their profile pages.

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Flickr is one of the premier photo-sharing sites online that allows you to post your favorite photos, organize them into albums and share them publicly with a vibrant web community. Also, by tagging your photos, people can find your photos based on their content, comment on them, and even invite you into groups specific to the subject matter in your work.

Flickr is a great way to find exciting images, connect with other photographers and artists, and promote your photographic abilities. Flickr’s popularity can also be attributed to its easy integration with users’ blogs and websites, with attractive ‘Flickr badges’ that display your most recent, or random, pieces from your public albums right on your page. Having a Flickr badge adds another visual element to your blog and showcases your latest interests, travels and activities, letting your readers get to know you a little more.

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Apollo Media is once again diversifying their Social Media Marketing strategies by tapping into the massive potential of Facebook. With over 64 million registered users and 100,000 new ones joining everyday, the Facebook Empire is estimated to be worth 15 billion dollars! Needless to say, the market is huge.

In May of last year, Facebook released their application program interface (API) to the public, allowing independent developers to try their hands at creating accessible tools, games and other features that everyday users can add to their profile pages. The release of this interface offered up a new avenue for social media marketers to reach their audience, creating fun, interactive and sharable ways of promoting products, places and people.

Realizing the possibilities that Facebook has created for companies, Apollo Media has taken the plunge and started developing applications to promote the services of our clients in new and exciting ways. Our team of developers has mastered FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and ready to produce cool new games, polls and other applications for our clients to better interact with their prospective audience.

Since exploring the potential of Facebook, we’ve been commissioned by a popular gaming company to create an application that will create excitement and competition among their target market. Stay tuned to Apollo’s Blog as we reveal more details about our applications…and let’s watch as Facebook becomes a major marketing force in the 21^st century!

Apollo Media has just signed with another education-based client. This time around, we have partnered up with Casa Dei Bambini, a prestigious Montessori school providing an enhanced, holistic curriculum to students aged 18 months to 9 years old across the Greater Toronto Area. Situated in Vaughn by Langstaff and Hwy 400, Casa Dei Bambini is an open learning environment that stresses health and wellness. The enriched, practical curriculum includes areas such as yoga, nutritional guidance, interaction with nature and even language lessons for French and Italian.

We here at Apollo Media are honored to work with such a progressive and culturally engaging institution. We plan to provide the school with the best in web development so they can effectively communicate their value to parents and other educators. The new website for Casa Dei Bambini features beautiful design themes and animation courtesy of our talented designers and programmers. Expressing the school’s commitment to self-reliance, nature and growth, we opted for a calming, forest theme that draws visitors directly into Casa Dei Bambini’s educational philosophy.

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Here on Apollo Media’s social media marketing blog, we have stressed the importance of social bookmarking when it comes to promoting your blog. When readers bookmark and share your posts on sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon, they generate buzz about your blog and direct lots of new traffic your way.

But simply having excellent content is not always enough for it to get the attention of hard core bookmarkers across the web. Sometimes, you have to employ specific writing strategies that will make your writing more bookmark-friendly. Here are some suggestions: Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine advertising (SEA) is one section of search engine marketing (SEM), an internet marketing strategy using search engines as a website promotion tool. SEA involves strategic placement of online advertisements on web pages and the use of keywords.

Paid placement or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the most popular advertising model that search engines, advertising networks and websites/bloggers offer to businesses to advertise their products and services. They are called “sponsored ads” and can appear at the top and sides of search engine results or where webmasters/bloggers decide to publish the ads on their site. Advertisers only pay when users click on the ad (which then brings them to the advertisers’ website).

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At Apollo’s Blog, we’ve talked a lot about crafting exciting, catchy, and consistent posts to better your writing abilities and make your blog a true phenomenon. Now that you have spent the time brainstorming, writing and refining your content, why not take the extra step and market it to your prospective audience?

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Search engine optimization or SEO refers to the practice of improving web design, development and content so that it is more accessible to search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc). The main intention of SEO is to get a website discovered by its target audience through higher rankings (earlier appearances) on search engine results pages (or SERPs) for specific search terms (keywords). In essence, SEO connects a website with its most interested users using the fundamental principals of search engines.

To explain what SEO does, it helps to know what search engines are and what they do. In attempts to organize the vast amount of information on the Internet, search engines comb the Net (using search engine spiders) and index web pages. Each search engine has their own patented, secret algorithms that they use in order to accomplish their goal of prioritizing websites. Prioritization is solely based on relevancy for specific search queries.

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While you may be a gifted writer and have crafted some serious articles, simply leaving your work on a static web page won’t drive the traffic you want to become a successful blogger. To be a recognized and authoritative voice in the blogging world, you have to post on a regular basis.

As a social media marketing company running several blogs simultaneously, we aim for posting once a day and recommend it to all our clients. Here are some reasons and suggestions for posting on a regular basis: Read the rest of this entry »

As a social media marketing company, Apollo Media manages many blogs for clients in various and, sometimes wildly, different industries. This requires an army of intelligent and dependable writers. But not just any Joe Writer will do. They must have background knowledge in these topics, the desire to continue reading more about the subject, and the passion to write about them.

One of our strategies in building this literary militia was to organize a social group about blogging and recruit interested and talented writers. Since registering with Meetup.com in September and creating Toronto Bloggers, nearly 80 people signed up. We consider that a smashing success!

Now that we are in the full swing of the New Year and Apollo Media has set up its 2008 business goals, the Toronto Bloggers group will be moving into a new direction: professional blogging. This means that Toronto Bloggers is no longer open to the public; and now more like an exclusive blogger association.

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