Tweetdeck based cousin made for instagram

Prototyping company Marvel created a Tweetdeck based cousin for Instagram.

Social media marketing managers and avid Instagram fans will be happy to know that you can now interact much easier on the user submitted photography platform Instagram, and allow multiple users to monitor your Instagram profile.

Picdeck a web app made specifically for Instagram users as a hack-day project, allows you to login to your Instagram profile view your feed, add columns with specific hashtags or even add specific users, viewing them all in real-time.

To read the full article click here http://goo.gl/bJ3eHB

Does Snapchat work businesses?

The online marketing world is an ever changing one and as social media experts we are always looking for new innovative means of marketing to our clients. The image sharing social network that is known to be used mostly for sending “Naughty Pictures” to your contacts could also be a potential marketing tool for businesses.

Here is why we say so…

First thing is first, what exactly is SnapChat?

Well simply put, it is a mobile application that allows users to send photo messages that automatically delete themselves shortly after being viewed. Usually the photos remain on the user’s device for up to 10 seconds before being removed. One can see why it has the naughty element to it right?

Snapchat users range between the ages of 13-25 (mostly) and logs over 400 million messages every day, so if that is your target markets maybe you should look into marketing on this platform.  

To read the full article click here  http://goo.gl/Q7CF6P

Automated social media posting systems – Why do you need it?

Read the full article on our Online Marketing Experts Blog

The newest trend is social media is automated posting systems that manage your posting to your social media accounts. When this initially started there was a big “hooray!” sounding from the offices of social media experts. Finally there is a way to schedule posts to various platforms without having to sit online and wait for the optimum time for this post to go on Facebook. And yes – this definitely is reason to celebrate, BUT it doesn’t mean you can now sit back and scratch social media posting completely off your to-do list. Let’s look at why you need this system and how you can make it work for you.

The first and very important thing to notice is what I’ve mentioned – this does not mean your work is done. It’s like doing washing. You put your dirty clothes in the washing machine and it’s great, but nothing will be washed until you tell your washing machine what it needs to know. You need to set the programme, choose hot or cold water, washing cycles and so on. It works the same with social media automation. The goal is not to take your work away, but rather to help you work smart. So in order to work smart, there are a few things you can do to use your automation system to its fullest capacity.

You need to understand when to automate. Once you start automating, you can find that you may become a little addicted. When you’ve discovered its efficiencies in one area, you might want to keep going with this automation thing until your entire workflow has been automated – not cool. One way of building a brand and an audience on social media is sharing great content. Automation helps here, because it helps you to post this content online when your target market is in the best position to read it. It also frees up some time to find more content. T.A. McCann has a very interesting rule called the 5-3-2 rule of social media sharing. This concept states the following:

For every 10 updates you post to a social media channel;

• 5 should be content from others that is relevant to your audience
• 3 should be content from you (no, not a sales pitch, just relevant information)
• And 2 posts should be personal and non-work related that shows your audience your human side

The great thing about this concept, or rule if you like, is that it forces you to focus more on your audience instead of on yourself. It helps you to convey the right message.

Read the full article on our Online Marketing Experts Blog

Is Social Media Marketing Still Viable?

Facebook recently had businesses up in arms and nearly saw many a social media consultant pack their bags. All of a sudden no-one sees business posts, likes are plummeting faster than Husain Bolt can run and reach stats cause sleepless nights. What is happening? Should you take social media marketing off your to-do list?

The simple answer to the first question is that Facebook is trying to limit business accounts. All companies came flocking to the platform to join in the conversation and reach the millions of relevant people waiting to buy their product. Well, Facebook saw this and have now introduced a price tag on what used to be an open floor.

The second question depends on your business. The best place to find justification for or against social media marketing is the cost-benefit ratio. Are your costs in line with the benefits you receive from marketing on Facebook?

In the old days, someone who likes your page, would implicitly see your content in their newsfeed. Then Facebook started using an algorithm called EdgeRank, which tries to figure out what should be the most relevant information a user wants to see. As a result, many businesses have seen that any post of theirs only shows up in the newsfeed of 15 – 20% of their total followers. This is less than ideal, but if you have a large following, this percentage might still be manageable. Since October 2013, EdgeRank has been put into high gear. Now your post will only be seen by 5 – 6% of your page followers and independent studies revealed a staggering 2% range for pages with more than 500,000 followers. This just shows that larger businesses’ posts are being held hostage and paid advertisements is the only ransom.

Read the full article on our blog: Is Social Media Marketing Still Viable

This is what you need to know about SEM

For the full article, please read it on our main blog: ATKA SA Online Marketing Company 

When the term SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, was introduced into business lingo just over a decade ago, it was used as a blanket term for any kind of marketing or targeted advertising that would allow companies to expose their websites to a wider audience on search engine results pages. Now, however, the term has expanded and evolved to mean something slightly different.

Now when we speak about SEM, we take it as referring to the practice of utilizing paid advertising, such as Google’s ‘AdWords’, or Bing Ads. These products allow companies to target keywords and other statistics such as frequency of searches, location based searches, and more in order to have adverts and links to their websites and pages appear within the search results on popular search engines.

In most cases, search engines will charge a minimal fee in order to host the advert, and an additional fee based on how many times the link is actively clicked from the search results page. In this sense, advertisers pay more for their advert if it does well, but that is supplemented by more traffic to their site, and therefore potentially more sales and exposure.

Search Engines usually have two different sections on their search pages available for advertising - a designated bar at the top of the page, allowing users to clearly see that what they are being presented with are adverts, and those that are integrated into the list of results itself. While these look like regular search results, and are usually always relevant to the search terms that were entered, they do have a disclaimer showing that they are paid advertisements.

For the full article, please read it on our main blog: ATKA SA Online Marketing Company 

Using SEM for your business website: Is it worth it?

For the full article, please feel free to read it on our main blog: ATKA SA Online Marketing

In order to optimize your business website to take advantage of the full scope of the power of search engines, you will need to understand the basic idea behind Search Engine Marketing. One of the biggest buzz terms around these days is “Search Engine Optimization", more commonly known as SEO, yet this is only part of your potential arsenal when it comes to creating an online presence for your company.

While SEO focuses on getting your website itself ready for user interaction, and helps ensure that your website is visible in the search results that appear when users type in certain keywords, there are also more direct ways of getting your brand out there. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is most commonly identified as paying to have your website advertised when certain keywords are typed into a search engine.

While SEM is actually a collective term that encompasses all aspects of online marketing including SEO, pay per click advertising and various other online marketing tools. It is important to remember that your first priority when creating a website should be to optimize your site using SEO basics; that way, your content and website are well adapted to search engine requirements, so you will be rewarded with a higher SEO ranking. Once that is done, you can focus on other marketing techniques, such as paid advertising that will show up as text content on the right hand side of the search results page once relevant keywords have been entered into the search bar.

For the full article, please feel free to read it on our main blog: ATKA SA Online Marketing

The basics of optimizing your website

Please read our blog for the full article: ATKA SA Online Marketing South Africa



The process of starting up your own website may seem like a daunting task at first, and having the potential to be viewed by millions of people on the Internet means that you’ll probably want it to look and work as well as possible. In order to have those millions of people visit your website, however, you will need to be taken seriously by the search engines that will display webpages for potential users to visit. In order to ensure that your website is listed as high as possible in the search results, you will need to optimize your site in order to show the search engine’s algorithm that you are able to offer something worthwhile to the users.


This is where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization’comes in. The ref termers to the practice of revising the content of your website in order to make the experience more user-friendly, and by doing that, increase your chances of being listed in the organic results section that is generated when keywords are typed into the search bar.


Some of the easiest ways for you to increase your rating with search engines like Google or Bing is to make sure that the content on your website is relevant, fresh and accurate. This means that it is important to constantly add new content to make ganging new users easier, as they will tend to return to find new content (no one wants to read the same thing over and over!).


Flooding your website with key words so that the search engine’s algorithm is also quite ineffective, as the algorithms used these days have advanced past reading plain text, and are looking for context.


Making your content easy to read and your page easy to navigate will also go a long way towards increasing your SEO, since clear and value laden URLs, page titles, headings and subheading will not only allow users to navigate directly where they want to go, but it will also give the search engine more to work with when running through results for certain keywords.

Please read our blog for the full article: ATKA SA Online Marketing South Africa