The HostDime Marketing Team has spent several months researching, testing, and using various tools for social media monitoring, aggregation, and response. We’ve come to the conclusion that monitoring tools help brand and market your company/website and can help identify quality control or customer complaints that have gone unnoticed. We chose 4 different Monitoring Tools to analyze, and decided on specific pros and cons for each:

Here at HostDime, we know that you have a website because you have something you want to tell the world, be it your opinions or your products and services. Just having a website with that information is not very helpful if you can’t get people to actually visit it. These days businesses are learning the importance of being found online and how much of an increase in business the online exposure can bring. You’ve taken the first steps in building your website and hosting it with HostDime, but that doesn’t mean potential customers will find your site naturally (natural is organic discovery search and not paid targeted ads). To help solve this issue we have started writing a series of blogs focused on offering different free marketing tools and strategies that are out there for you to use. You will be able to find all of them in the “Marketing” category on our blog.

Imagine when company URLs will add their brand names as the web domain suffix – .pepsi, .apple, .google, etc. – instead of the 22 current generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs): .com, .org, .net, etc.

HostDime has been looking for ways to organize our multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including our Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. You probably understand how difficult it is to keep an eye on each of your several accounts on the internet. One of our social media goals was to find an online service that will solve our problem by pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity. Think of it as an ‘eBusiness Card’ that will inform your visitors about you within a short summary and also link them to every network that person is connected to online.

In today’s society, social media marketing allows small businesses to always be accessible to their customers and also increases the traffic to your site by pinpointing your industry’s influencers and target market. A new survey by Constant Contact reports that 73% of small and mid-sized businesses are using social media as a main promotional tool. However, many unfamiliar business leaders have made mistakes within their web marketing program that can reveal their lack of social media savvy and often negate the effectiveness of those marketing efforts.

Recently on Friday, May 20th, 2011 HostDime participated in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life at Lake Eola. Our team of 14 was able to raise hundreds of dollars for the American Cancer Society. We raised money online through our website dime.at/relay, selling hamburgers at the event, and the “America’s Next Top Model”-Mr./Ms. Relay competition.