Social media is everywhere. It’s in our homes, places of worship, schools and, of course, our businesses. Everywhere you look, people are using social media and are talking about it. And it seems that every week a new type of social site pops up.

And as the number of social networking sites grows, so does the number of services that are created to measure, track and monitor those services. What’s a marketing professional to do?

Companies are pushing their Facebook Pages like never before. No matter where you look – from online advertising and marketing to television and print ads, billboards, and even business cards – you’ll see “Find us on Facebook” or that iconic lower-case “f”. With Facebook’s 800 million users, it only makes sense for companies to place their products or services where they have the opportunity for so much exposure. And with sharing, commenting, and Liking, Facebook gives companies the power to reach more people than they ever could have with a traditional website. Since Facebook is getting so much love, what’s happening to traditional websites?

As an online marketing strategist, I continually come across business owners who rave about the number of visitors coming to their website. The irony is that website traffic alone doesn’t generate money.

I ask these business owners questions: Where is the website traffic coming from? What Web pages are visitors landing on the most? What percentage of visitors return to the site? How many visitors convert into customers?

Their lack of answers shows they’re concentrating on volume and not on quality, and I guarantee their sales are suffering as a result. It doesn’t matter how many people visit your website if those people are not the “right” people — the type of people who will buy something from you someday.

Naysayers still dismiss Twitter as a platform for people who post self-promotional links or trivial details about their daily lives — this tuna sandwich is tasty! — but there’s no denying its growth. As we reach the halfway point of 2011, users of the microblogging service now post 200 million tweets a day, Twitter announced in a blog post Thursday.

The Social Media Revolution Video for 2011

Why do nicer restaurants have a no free refill policy on soft drinks? This is a question that has perplexed me for years. [I know, this is a deviation from the normal post you find on my blog, but in a way, it is business, if not web, related].

I often order a soft drink when I go out to eat, sometimes tea, but more often just Coke. And it has been my experience, having lived all over the United States, that I will have free refills. Seriously, how often do you order a Coke and ask, “Are the refills free?” I was eating dinner this evening with my wife, at what I would consider “a nice restaurant” called Libby Montana, located in Mequon/Thiensville, Wisconsin. Mequon is considered to be a nicer or up-scale suburb of Milwaukee with a lot of nice and higher-end restaurants and shops.

The Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a Website yourself, you’re dealing with the other end of this issue. How do you get noticed online, and is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

There certainly is! Here are the top five ways you can strengthen your site and increase your online visibility.

Here are some quick tips on what you can do to your website to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

Writing content is not easy, no doubt about it. Then we usually go and start worrying about how to make that content easy to share, how to provide valuable information, how to engage readers and so on to make it even harder.

Content is what Search Engines want to index, sort and bring to the searchers. Relevant content is desired by all who want their site to be a stopping point in the daily life of the internet. But there is content that can actually harm your site or business if you are not careful to implement a few guidelines.