Social networking isn’t easy – with so many pages and profiles to manage on a regular basis, things can get confusing and time-consuming quickly. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools and services available to help make things a little easier for you. Here are five of the best tools that will allow you to access and manage all of your social networks from one place.

 

HootSuite

HootSuite is one of the most popular and useful social media management services. You can manage just about any social network you can think of with HootSuite’s dashboard, including your WordPress accounts. With this service, you can perform all the necessary functions to keep your social networks updated and running smoothly. Most importantly, HootSuite gives you access to all of your analytic data in one place, and it helps interpret it for you with valuable custom reports. There is a free basic account, but businesses are better off with the $9.99/month pro account.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another service that’s especially helpful for your business. You can update, manage, and track all your social network profiles and pages in the easy-to-use dashboard. Sprout Social will also keep an eye on your business and brand for you, letting you know when you’ve been mentioned, or checking out what your competitors are doing. It also monitors and analyzes your data and lets you know the effectiveness and reach of your marketing efforts. The pro plan costs $9/month and includes up to ten profiles. More expensive plans ($39 and up) include more profiles and additional features.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is another more popular tool for active social media users and businesses, and it’s free. While it doesn’t offer as complex or in-depth features as some of the other paid services, it’s very helpful for tracking and updating your social networks. Beyond Twitter, you can manage Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Flickr, and more, and new features are being worked on regularly.

NutshellMail

NutshellMail is a great tool for businesses who want their social networks to come to them. Instead of using a dashboard interface, NutshellMail will send you a single email report of all the activity and data you need to know about from your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Foursquare, and CitySearch pages. It includes information like comments, mentions, analytic data, requests, messages, recommendations, reviews, and more. You can even respond or react to the activity directly from the email. Another great thing about NutshellMail: it’s free.

SocialOomph

SocialOomph has a wide variety of features and tools that will help automate and track your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. Features are very customizable, so you can get SocialOomph working for you in the ways you need it the most. Besides scheduling updates, you can integrate blogs (WordPress, Tumblr, and more), learn information about friends and followers, segment them into lists, make custom spam controls, and more. Many Twitter features are available with a free account, but a professional package with total access costs just under $36/month.

Trying to establish your business in the digital realm is no walk in the park. If you’re a business owner and you’re not considering the content that you are producing, then you need to re-think your online strategy and pay close attention to a few of the golden rules detailed here. Content is the hidden key to your online success, whether you’re using it to get to the top of Google or using it to promote your products and services. Read on to find out why content holds all the power and why you need to play by these rules.

Content is king!

First, I want to show you why content is the most powerful tool you have. So, to do that, I want you to perform a little imaginative exercise. Close your eyes and picture the internet without content. Now, close your eyes and picture the rest of the world without content. What do you have left? A massive void of nothingness that doesn’t disclose anything.

That is the power of content. It’s everywhere, from the information on your website or brochures to the words written on bus stop ads. Without content, the world wouldn’t have a voice! So, now that’s established, let’s have a look at the golden rules.

Rule number 1 – Write for the human user

I’ve seen so many businesses get side-tracked with search engine optimisation (SEO) that they completely forget about the humans that have to read through their content. If you don’t write your content for the human user, then you’re doing nothing to attract them to your business.

SEO is important, but you are doing your SEO to attract more traffic to your website. So if people arrive at your site and see a load of jibberish that doesn’t give any value to them, then they’ll soon be heading elsewhere. Focus on writing informative, engaging, and useful information for your visitors and they’ll be coming back for more. At the end of the day, the best SEO is natural SEO.

Rule number 2 – Use keywords sparingly

This is another one of the downfalls of many businesses online marketing campaigns. Keywords are important for SEO, there’s no doubt about that, but spamming keywords like they are the only words you’ve ever learned will do nothing but damage your efforts. Plus, your visitors are going to have a hard time reading your content if the keywords are in there unnaturally.

The art of ‘keyword stuffing’ is an SEO technique that has long gone. Google’s algorithm updates (mainly its Panda update) have fully revised the way it gives sites relevance. It can instantly spot the overuse of keywords and will punish your site for it, even banning sites in extreme cases. Instead, use your keywords strategically so the content still flows and can be read naturally. You only need a keyword density of about 1%, which means a keyword should only appear four times in a 400 word article or web page.

Rule number 3 – Break up your content

This golden rule is one to abide by if you ever write content that’s over a few hundred words, or even a few paragraphs. In the online world, people have short attention spans. There are so many clickable distractions littered around the virtual world that can easily see them navigating away from your web page, article, or other content. The best technique you can use to hold their attention is to give them your content in bite-size chunks.

Take this post as an example. I’m placing a bet that you’ve read this far because you could easily see the journey this article would take you on. You have the main heading, the intro text, and then the neat little subsections. This breaks a 700 word article down into easy to digest chunks.

Just imagine if this article was nothing more than a heading and a large chunk of text. You’d either be too scared to start reading, unsure of what the article contained, or you would’ve got a paragraph in, looked at the rest, and thought to yourself ‘will this ever end?’.

If you structure your content so that your readers know exactly where it is going and what it is about, then they’ll be more inclined to read on. Another great technique is to do as I have done here, and make each paragraph only a few sentences long, as this breaks your content down even further, giving you an even greater opportunity to hold those attention spans.

That’s the golden formula

Well, that’s the three golden rules covered. There are other ‘not so golden’ rules too, but if you master these three then you’ll be writing quality, readable content that users can enjoy in no time at all… and you’ll still be doing your all-important SEO. So, what are you waiting for? Get writing and see what you can come up with!

Despite a shortage of lower priced homes in markets across the country, the huge foreclosure inventory refused to decline in June, raising renewed fears that the overhang of discounted properties will put downward pressure on home prices.

CoreLogic today reported that in June 2012only 60,000 foreclosures completed were either sold at auction or returned to lenders to be sold as REOs, compared to 80,000 in June 2011 and 60,000 in May 2012.

Approximately 1.4 million homes, or 3.4 percent of all homes with a mortgage, were in the national foreclosure inventory as of June 2012 compared to 1.5 million, or 3.5 percent, in June 2011. Month-over-month, the national foreclosure inventory was unchanged from May 2012 to June 2012. The foreclosure inventory is the share of all mortgaged homes in some stage of the foreclosure process.

The inventory represents more than the total number of foreclosures  completed last year- either sold at auction or returned to lenders to be sold as REOs.  In 2011 some 830,000 were completed and in 2010, 1.1 million.  Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 3.7 million completed foreclosures across the country.

“While completed foreclosures and real-estate owned (REO) sales virtually offset each other over the past four months, producing static levels of foreclosure inventory for most of this year, they are beginning to diverge again,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “Over the last two months REO sales declined while completed foreclosures leveled out. So we could see foreclosure inventory rising going forward.”

“The decline in the flow of completed foreclosures to pre-financial crisis levels is more welcome news pointing to an emerging housing market recovery,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “However, we believe even more can be done to reduce the inventory of foreclosures by decreasing the level of regulatory uncertainty and expanding alternatives to foreclosure.”

If parceled out evenly across the nation, the inventory  will double the number of foreclosures on the market for more than a year.  However, inventories vary by state and market.  “Judicial” states, where a court order is necessary to foreclose, typically take longer to process foreclosures and during the processing slowdown of the past two years, lenders concerned with liability issues moved even more slowly in judicial states.

As a result, the foreclosure backlog is significantly higher in a handful of states, which will feel the brunt of the inventory.  In these states, more foreclosures will be released into their local markets over a longer period of time unless lenders find ways to mitigate the impact, such REO-to-rental programs that take foreclosures off the market turn them into single family markets.

According to CoreLogic, today the five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes are: Florida (11.5 percent), New Jersey (6.5 percent), New York (5.1 percent), Illinois (5.0 percent) and Nevada (4.8 percent).  All except Nevada are judicial states.  However, Nevada recently enacted legislation designed to protect homeowners from improper foreclosures that has greatly slowed processing.  The five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in June 2012 were: California (125,000), Florida (91,000), Michigan (58,000), Texas (56,000) and Georgia (55,000). These five states account for 48.4 percent of all completed foreclosures nationally.

Currently, demand for lower priced homes is high, due to the high levels of negative equity and the slow processing of foreclosures, which have created an inventory drought in many markes, especially for lower prices homes.  Demand is increasing as many first time buyers and inventors are entering the market as prices slowly been rising this year. (See Frozen Foreclosures Frustrate Buyers).

Markets where inventories have actually increased in June over the past year are: Baltimore-Towson, MD (1.4 percent increase); Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV (0.3 percent increase); Philadelphia, PA (0.5 percent increase); New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ (0.3 percent increase); Nassau-Suffolk, NY (0.9 percent increase); and Edison, NJ (0.2 percent increase).  All are in judicial states.

In another sign that the housing economy is steadily improving, the number of Realtors has increased at a faster rate in the past three consecutive months than it has since the tax credit boom in 2009.

Through June, some 25,279 agents and brokers have joined the National Association of Realtors, bringing total members to 988,734 from a low of 963,445 in March, just 141 fewer than January’s total. The March total was the lowest membership count since September 2003.

At its peak in September 2007, NAR membership reached 1,363,758. Membership today is still 3.3 percent below June 2011.

Membership grew fastest in Washington State, where membership grew 1.87 percent over May; Texas, up 1.59 percent over May; and Massachusetts, where membership grew 1.49 percent over May. On a year over year basis, the only state to register a net membership gain is North Dakota.

Yesterday RE/MAX announced it has added more than 1,300 agents year to date – the first such increase since 2010. RE/MAX said it has also sold nearly 300 sales in the first half of 2012. In the United States, Florida led all regions with franchise sales 30 percent higher than the first half of 2011.