The Online Business Arsenal

So your business has a website, that’s cool, if you’re from the 90′s. Nowadays business’ look for social media engagement, SEO optimisation and all in a wild crazy bid for the magic verse, ROI.

Here’s a breakdown of the top tools we use to stay on top of this ever changing, ever challenging environment.

Social Media

Twitter: Chances are you know what Twitter is, perhaps you’re here because you saw the link on twitter. It’s great for business, how you use it is a whole different ball game but, once you are using it, it’s time you managed it.

Yahoo! Pipes + Twitterfeed – These can be pretty tricky so search around on how to make them, there are loads you can easily “clone” for your own use, the point of them is to capture and post twitter content for you automatically. Be careful with what you auto-tweet because you never know what it might throw up.

Bit.ly – This service shortens your links so that they don’t take up your precious 14o characters but wait, it does more! If you were to sign up on their website, you could see how many fellow bit.ly-ers shared the same link, how many times people clicked your one and how affective your social media link sharing is. Where and to what people click most and if you’re not thinking strategy by now then think… link strategy.

Facebook: Facebook is the other social mega-giant, it’s more for friends and real people but business’ use it to dominate every angle of someone’s life, in a non-scary way. Instead of linking or voicing, Facebook is a great place to share ideas, discuss and show what you do. If Twitter is the networking event, Facebook is the pub afterwards.

Static HTML - This is an app on Facebook which takes all of the hassle out of making a custom Facebook page. It lets you write HTML code (what websites run off) to be shown to the Facebook user. If that’s confusing then definitely don’t go near the custom app route. If it doesn’t, then we like it because it means no SSL requirements for us.

LinkedIn: Essential for the aspiring business, set it up, link it to your other social accounts like Twitter and let it roll on. Perhaps join some interesting groups to see what’s going on and try to contribute as much as possible to make a reputation for your expertise.

Website

Blog – We use WordPress to get this done, launch a well rounded site in as little time as possible. Our site is built on WordPress and as it becomes more and more a content management system rather than a blogging system, it’s plays even more into our keen hands.

Hits, results and visits – Google Analytics provides a great way to track visitors, see how people use your site and how to capitalise on it

Viral Marketing – AddThis / ShareThis buttons add a way for visitors to share your articles with their friends, easy. We’d all love to be able to do it without them but unfortunately we need to “impress” people.

SEO

Keywords – Google Webmaster Tools helps you find what keywords people use that eventually lands them on your site. Great for optimising your SEO.

Layout, navigation, titles, meta – Whitepapers and common sense help us out here. Here are some great sources to get reading into, if you’re using WordPress then we suggest using the Ultimate SEO plugin for some amazing granularity on your articles.

Video Content

YouTube: A huge audience and reliable service means that you can be sure your video is at least accessible. YouTube takes all the complicated hassle out of online video distribution at the cost of allowing to be freely available, which in most circumstances is the perfect situation.

BitsontheRun: This service allows you to control your videos with utmost precision. We use it for private shows or to “whitelabel” it to our brand.

Facebook Fan Page

“Like” Us!

We’re keen to be involved in social media, it’s where we can be unique and show our true colours. In our SM arsenal we’ve got YouTube, Twitter, FourSquare and Facebook. All have one neat page where you can find out everything about us in that context. Except Facebook.

With Facebook we had a Group, an App and with that an App profile page. The group showed blog posts as links and the app showed them (in an iFrame using WPBook which is excellent). It was confusing as there wasn’t one port of call for users trying to find us, we’ve changed that with a Facebook Page.

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Care Showcase

SurreyCare came to us to update their yearly Care Showcase website.

http://careshowcase.org.uk/

After putting it together originally it works out. We made it easy to update and change for any non-space-engineer-computer-hyper-user so when they came to us we initially just said, it’s easier to do it yourself! But, as it turns out, companies steer well clear of changing their website and most web design companies LOVE that, £50 an update anyone? NFP doesn’t like that mentality although it would definitely make us more money! What’s worse is now that clients expect that, all the work to make it easy to update isn’t used. Still the customer is always right.

We charged a hugely small price, not just small for a web design company but the kind of money that would buy you a DVD (just to make it plain, a really rubbish DVD!) just to keep the business in all honesty In the hope that this would become a yearly thing.

So here we are and SurreyCare have come back to us to update a few things and add some buttons. Coincidentally, our unbiased and un-phazed new web design rate card has been made. So, time to test it out!

New Site Launched!

The new site is here! After a few months of development it’s time to move off from the old site and onto our super sleak new version.

Our new site has launched as projects come to a close, we have more time to focus on our own things. There have been a lot of ideas put on hold as clients take priority in terms of websites and now’s an opportunity to get them off the ground.

We decided to change things around for a few reasons, primarily I get bored easily and fancied a change but there are more substantial reasons for putting in all the effort.

The old site was expensive to run with videos being loaded from a VDN. This meant videos going down and being taken off when we ran out of bandwidth which does not look cool to a prospective client! This site is all in house, which takes longer but is provides better quality videos and less bills, which is what we’re all about.

We want to expand! Our old business model was mostly video based but it is clear that web design and branding tie in very closely and should be encouraged as well. We also have plans for photography services and events management. The new site is a lot easier to manage and everything has a specific place and purpose which is nice. We’ve also got a little better at what we do so it’s time we reflected that in our portfolio.

The site was very project based and revolved around our client work, by moving things around we can now have a main site, our own projects and this site for some background news on what we do and why we do it, this is also in aid of our new film project site.

One of the biggest new changes is NewFlightNetwork.com taking off! It’s in the very early stages but will help client collaboration and project planning much easier and more streamlined. When it’s running well we plan to open it to other studios to use as their web and video project management portals just as we do.

I hope this is the start of something great, it’s definitly what NewFlight Pictures stands for, evolution, expansion and motion, by design.