For those existing negosyante out here are some tips to promote your business with the new social media. Embracing social media is key for small businesses hoping to strengthen their customer relationships in an engaging way. But with so many social media platforms across the web, it’s can be overwhelming to maintain a presence on each. A better alternative is to be active on those sites that can help your business most, but how do you know which one is best for your business? We break it down for you here.

Facebook

On Facebook you create a business page where you can post updates, photo, video, and connect with “fans,” potential customers, and others in your industry.

Audience: Facebook has over 800 million active users, closely split between women (58%) and men (42%). Contrary to popular belief that social media is only popular with younger generations, 54% of users are actually aged 35-54, with 67% making $25,000-$75,000.

Best For:
Engaging with customers more dynamically by uploading photo albums, posting more detailed updates, and using your profile as an extension of your website.
Building your brand within the Facebook community via different applications like Facebook Marketplace (which allows you to sell directly from the site).
Tracking your page activity via Facebook Insights to gauge what type of content gets you more likes and activity
Networking as widely and easily as possible.

Google+

G+ works like Facebook in that you can interact more dynamically with your social network. But G+ allows you to compartmentalize your social networks, meaning you can tailor certain messages to certain contacts.

Audience: G+ is still relatively new, however, the majority of early adopters are male (63%) compared to female (37%). The site user audience also skews younger than other social networks with the majority of users being between age 18-34.

Best For:

Businesses with consumers who are younger/early adopters.
Creating more targeted social interactions via “groups,” allowing you to send special discounts just to repeat customers, for example.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows users to “pin” photos/links they like, then organize them into boards. Other users can like, comment, and re-pin these links.

Audience: Pinterest’s popularity has exploded. The site’s estimated to have received nearly 11 million visits during one week in December (almost 40 times the number of visits six months earlier). It is definitely female-dominated (83%), and 70% of users make $25,000-$75,000.

Best For:

Gaining exposure for products, particularly creative or design-specific products (every post requires a photo).
Businesses with visual goods that also want to engage with their consumers and industry.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a simplified blog that lets you post many things, including text, photos, links, music, videos, with the added benefit of being able to post from your phone, browser, email, etc.

Audience: Tumblr is a newer social media platform that is more popular with younger demographics: 72% of users are under age 44, with more women (62%) than men (38%) using it.

Best For:

Tech-savvy businesses that want to use the highly customizable interface as an extension of their brand (some moderate HTML tinkering is required).

Those on-the-go — you can update from mobile devices and set posts to publish later.
Businesses with content that is highly visual — half of all posts are photos.

Twitter

Twitter is a social media site that allows you to post a short 140-character messages to interact with your networks.

Audience: The majority of Twitter users are female (62%), though males (38%) also contribute; 71% of users are ages 25- 54; 63% of users make $25,000-$75,000.

Best For:

Companies that don’t have a lot of time but want to stay connected.
Finding out who’s talking about your company, allowing you to engage directly to do things like promote new products, provide customer service, conduct market research by asking questions, get feedback, etc.

YouTube

This video-sharing website allows users to upload their own video clips, including tutorials and video blogs.

Audience: YouTube attracts men and women almost equally, but notably one of the largest segments of users are those age 45-54 (30%), followed by 35-44 (22%), and 25-34 (18%).

Best For:
Businesses that provide services or products that are conducive to a visual medium, such as tutorials, demonstrations, etc.
Brands that can properly produce (and benefit from) quality videos.

Good luck on your promotion in these social media platforms. Share your other suggestions that is successful on your part on the comment section below.

flowtown

A solution to a long vexing problem of garbage can cover. The problem: You put out your garbage cans, the wind knocks them over, the lid pops off and everything that was once inside is now blowing down the street.

“Physics makes the lid fall off,” he said. “Not me.”

Then someone drives over the lid and now — because you can’t buy lids separately from the can — you’re off buying yet another new can.

Kiernan’s fabric lid can stretch over any standard trash can. Velcro holds it in place. It takes a few seconds to put on and is easy for trash collectors to remove.

He’s made about 200 lids (he does all the sewing and assembly himself), which he’s distributed to friends and family. Now he’s at work on nearly a half-dozen other inventions designed to make daily life a little bit easier. Great business idea for filipino semptress.

Lohud.com

Happy new year everyone. We tend to predict what it would be by 2020, here are some items that will no longer be around by the end of this decade.

1. Wrist Watches
2. Paperback books
3. Traditional Homework
4. Newspapers
5. Car keys
6. College Backpacks
7. DVD’s
8. Instruction Manuals
9. Corked Wine
10.Offline Voting
11.Cash
12.Desktop Computers
13.Paper Shredders
14.Post Offices
15.2D
16.Boring Airplanes
17.Paper Resume
18.Blind Dates
19.Broadcast TV
20.Education Inequality

You can check out more at Socialnomics.

Courtesy of: CreditDonkey

For all negosyante out there who needs a business plan for your new venture, here is a free business plan writing reported by techcrunch. Writing a business plan is no easy task, it can be painstaking. If you’ve ever written one, you’re probably familiar with the many websites that offer those static business plan and projections templates and galleries. They can be a great point of reference, but oftentimes they’re just that. Cynthia McCahon founded Enloop because she wanted to build a better resource for entrepreneurs gritting their teeth over their business plans, and because she’d watched many friends and colleagues sink time and money into business ideas that just weren’t going anywhere.

Hoping to take a bit of the emotion out of an emotional process, Enloop was founded as a way for entrepreneurs to create business plans from scratch, guide them through the business plan process, and offer a system that provides thorough and intelligent risk analysis to give founders a sense of whether or not they’re off on the right track. Check this out, every negosyante should have a business plan before starting a venture.

Franchises Opportunities and The U.S. Economy

This is another great negosyo idea that we can also help our kababayan who are in prison.A report from the U.S.- “We Have the Time to Do It Right,” is one of the mantras on the unit’s corporate website; “Built with Conviction” is another.

Although 40 of 50 states still produce license plates behind bars, prison businesses have diversified. Inmates at Arizona Correctional Industries at the Lewis prison complex in Buckeye fix diesel tractors. Nearly a thousand Tennessee and South Carolina convicts use draw knives and hand scrapers to “antique” floors for a company that markets interiors with a vintage look.

The Pendleton, Ore., penitentiary sells a line of Prison Blue work apparel. California has a product in development: its own denim collection, Folsom Prison Blues.

In the U.S., prison industries—correctional facilities with for-profit ventures that sell goods and services to the public—will have sales of over $2.2 billion this year, according to the National Correctional Industries Association, a Baltimore-based trade group. Silver State’s auto-restoration shop here in Indian Springs brought in $130,000 of the facility’s $6 million in fiscal 2010 revenue.

Besides auto-restoration, Silver State Industries also has a shop that packages old playing cards into souvenirs for Nevada casinos, and others that print books and make clothing. Here in the Philippines most prisoners make handicraft like Christmas lanterns to sell during the Christmas season but the negosyo idea above is quite good for a year round income generation that earns the prisoners with some money and also help local business that need there manpower.

Here is a report from CBS Los Angeles. A Helicopter drones are one of the military’s most effective tools. Unmanned aircraft that can get in and out of touch spaces without being detected.

In the tough world of real estate these days, some might call it war, those drones are now being used to sell pricey homes in Southern California. With the booming real estate business here in the Philippines, this is another good negosyo idea to start here in the country. I think the real estate agencies are a good market to open a business like this here which they can readily afford.

The drones can sweep in, circle a home, take a 360 degree view and give the potential buyer the kinds of details you’d be hard pressed to find in a MLS. There are many available types of remote controlled planes nowadays that you can use to start this business here in the Philippines with not much needed large capital.

A news from ABC World News shared the story of Amit Aharoni, an Israeli national and a graduate of Stanford Business School, who secured $1.65 million in venture capital funding with two cofounders to launch CruiseWise.com, an online cruise booking company.

The company hired nine Americans in just one year. But Aharoni hit rough waters after he received a letter on Oct. 4 from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denying his request for a visa and notifying him that he needed to leave the country immediately. Aharoni moved to Canada, where he was forced to run his company via Skype from a friend’s living room.

While “World News’ viewers voiced their disappointment, this morning, Aharoni received an email from USCIS. He was told that his petition had been reconsidered and approved. He is once again able to work in the U.S.

Experts say America’s immigration policy is putting it at a competitive disadvantage. There are other countries that are eager to have entrepreneurs, enticing them with special visas and funding. According to Partnership for a New American Economy, an organization that advocates “the economic benefits of sensible immigration reform,” countries including the United Kingdom, Singapore and Chile have visas for entrepreneurs. Chile even has a program that offers $40,000 in seed funding. Its a story for the Negosyantes or Pinoy businessmen who wants to venture business from outside the Philippines.