| Foursquare Makes It Easier for Businesses to Offer "Specials" to Their Customers Yesterday location-based social network Foursquare rolled out a substantial upgrade to its platform. Foursquare 3.0 includes improved discovery, recommendations, and rewards for its users. Those rewards are aimed at loyal Foursquare users who check-in regularly at a particular venue. So to make it easier for the quarter of a million some-odd businesses that have claimed their venues to offer these rewards, Foursquare has just announced an update to its Merchant Platform.
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Despite Living Online, Teenagers Don't Want to "Like" Your Company on Facebook Teenagers in the United States are constantly connected to the Internet. About 75% of them go online on a daily basis, and that number increases every year. Whether they're connected via their phones, gaming consoles, laptops or the computer lab at school, they're online pretty much all the time. Social networking - on Facebook and elsewhere - is a huge part of what they're doing. You'd think this would be a potential boon for social media marketers, right? Not quite. According to research released today by Forrester, only 6% of U.S. consumers aged 12-17 are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook, even though they are active users of the site in general.
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AdGrok Launches A User-Friendly Management Tool for AdWords Designing and managing your business's Google AdWords can be an overwhelming process. Even though there's plenty of information available - or perhaps because there's so much available - figuring out your strategies can be confusing. Even if you have a clear plan, the Google AdWords interface can be incredibly frustrating. But Google AdWords are still a key form of online advertising - and it remains Google's largest source of revenue. Frustrations with the service, then, make it a great opportunity for a startup like AdGrok that launches to the publi today. The Y Combinator alum provides search engine marking tools to small businesses, simplifying keyword bidding and and ad creation.
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Most Small Businesses to Increase Spending on the Cloud We've discussed previously how valuable cloud computing can be to small businesses, especially in terms of cost savings and efficiency, two hugely important factors for smaller operations. Appropriately, a large majority of small and medium-sized businesses are looking to invest more in cloud services this year. Seventy-four percent of SMBs plan on spending more on it, according to a survey conducted by Egnyte, a provider of cloud-based file server solutions.
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SMB Tech Roundup: Apple & Google Court Small Businesses, GoToMyPC For iPad and Cheap A/B Testing Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why at the end of every week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses. The week started out with Citrix's launch of an iPad app for GoToMyPC, their remote desktop support solution for businesses. We reviewed the app and found it to be pretty solid. It lets you commandeer almost any modern desktop or laptop computer from the iPad, which is great for providing remote IT support or even checking out some bloated, Flash-based restaurant websites from Apple's famously Flash-free tablet.
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3 Affordable A/B Testing Tools For Small Businesses Sure, your company's website could be improved. But with time and resources in such short supply, how do businesses know where to focus their energy? One answer is A/B testing, or the practice of publishing two variations of a Web page and measuring which one performs better. A/B testing has been used by large enterprises for years. Amazon uses it to optimize product listing pages. Google was once criticized by an outgoing designer for relying too heavily on data-driven methods like this.
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Fulfill E-commerce Orders With FoxyCart and Shipwire Integration Users of hosted e-commerce shopping cart solution FoxyCart can now have their orders fulfilled via ShipWire, thanks to a new integration between the two services called FoxyWire. ShipWire is an order fulfillment provider that promises to give small and medium-sized businesses the supply chain capabilities of larger enterprises. They handle the storage, packing and shipping of products that are ordered online, as well as customer returns.
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