You may or may not have heard about the “significant” Facebook News Feed algorithm shift that occurred in April. You may or may not have noticed a decline in Likes and comments on your business’s Facebook page.

Whether or not you know about this change - it’s affecting you and your business.

But before you start to blame yourself, your social media marketing manager or your social media agency, I’d like to explain why it’s not their or your fault, and what steps you can take to counteract these changes.

Understand that Facebook often refines the News Feed algorithms, then tests how useful and satisfying the changes are to users. This is a common practice and will continue to happen. Twitter and other social media sites do the same thing. (It’s a way for them to keep their sites from becoming irrelevant.) This change in April, however, was created to please people users, not business users.

What Was April’s News Feed Shift?

The main point of this News Feed adjustment was to bring Facebook back to an online, social place that is centered around friends and family, not businesses, organizations and public figures. To put it bluntly: This is not a business-friendly change.

In a social media environment that is increasingly commercial, content that reflects the best of the human spirit –our impulse to help, empower, and protect, is bound to generate deeper engagement with social media audiences. What this means for your non-profit organization, is that you are in a unique position to harness the power of social media in order to obtain: - Supporters for cause - Donations - Volunteers - Visibility

The Power of Social Media

Still, many organizations are not harnessing the power of Facebook, twitter, and Instagram to reach their goals.

Ever wonder how businesses appear on Google Maps and Google Search Results?

If you’ve ever wanted to find out exactly what you need to do to add your business to Google’s local search results and maps results, we’ll teach you what you need to do. There’s no magic, special accounts or privileges, or any cost to do so! It’s totally free and anyone can do it!

An important fact to mention is that the process of adding your business to Google also creates a Google+ (Google Plus) page for your business. Google now uses Google+ pages as the main focal point of Business pages on the Google network. Your Google+ page will in fact be your Google Local listing (Now just called your Google Maps listing), which also used to be called Google Places (Now part of the Google My Business dashboard).

In fact, Google is so interested in having you add your business listing to their directory that it has now launched and entire team devoted to this task. Google is calling this new initiative “Get your Business Online” (GYBO). The GYBO team is traveling across the US giving free sessions on how to put your business on the map. But you don’t need to attend the seminar to figure it out, we’ll spell it out step-by-step for you:

Step 1: Search for Your Business

We already talked about why businesses should open an Instagram account. Now we are going to give you some tips on how to capture the perfect picture. It’s not easy but it’s not complicated either.

You can either take pictures with a professional camera or your phone, it all depends on what you have in hand. Now lets get started.

1. There’s no such thing as taking one perfect picture

When trying to find new customers for our businesses, we often overlook the most obvious target: our neighbors. And if you live in California, chances are those neighbors are Hispanic.

As announced this June, Latinos are officially the largest ethnic group in California, outnumbering whites. This demographic group is a mixed bag of people who were born in the U.S. and migrated here. Some are second or third generation, others moved a couple of years ago. Their English proficiency varies. Even those who are comfortable speaking English sometimes throw in in a phrase or two in Spanish, which is the language of their parents, a language attached to their roots, idioms that feel like home.

So here´s a tip:

Instagram is right for any kind of business either large or small. Many business owners may be a little skeptical about it but let me explain why it is more than just visual content. Instagram has generated more than 300 million active users, has an average number of 70 million photos posted daily, and has caught the attention of both large and small businesses.

Let’s take a look at our 4 key benefits.

1. Connecting with audience/customers

Everyone has a blog it seems like these days

Why is that?

Once upon a time blogs were reserved for your stay-at-home moms looking to share their favorite lasagna recipes. Now, every business—no matter what market or industry they operate in—is making a blog the focal point of their online marketing strategy.

Today the internet is overflowing with the benefits to your brand of having a blog, but I’ve broken those down into the 3 most undeniable, all-encompassing reasons why your business should have a blog:

Get real-life web programming experience to increase your skills sets and portfolio!

Bloominari is happy to announce it's first Internship Program, for this Summer 2015!

If you're a student in San Diego and are looking for an opportunity to put your website development and programming skills to the test, here's your opportunity.

Do you know if the time and money you’re investing into social media strategy and management is paying off?

Make sure you understand your return on investment (ROI), no matter whether you’re using social media to improve awareness of your product or increase your bottom line — or both!

Here are three ways for you to measure your social media ROI in Google Analytics.

If you are an email marketer or handle email campaigns on a regular basis then you’re sure to benefit from this post. We’ve picked the 10 most common blunders and mistakes done by email marketers.

These are small mistakes that can have a huge impact on your overall E-mail marketing strategy. After we list al of these terrible blunders we’ll tell you how you can fix them.

We have executed multiple e-mail marketing campaigns and figured out the best practices to ensure smooth and successful campaign results. So, if you are planning to send your next e-mail campaign, don’t miss the following points: