Monitoring and measuring your brand on social media is essential for the success of your business. It helps you ascertain what people are talking about and how you can make them talk about your products and services. Although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, both monitor and measure are two different words that are often interchanged.

Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.

Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring is the process of being aware of the conversations taking place on various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn with the aim of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can monitor your competition, industry leaders, partners, customers, or others. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement because it lets you respond in real-time and helps you protect your brand from negative word-of-mouth.

How Monitoring works: Monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords are included in your brand name, product name, etc. And, based on your these keywords, your monitoring system goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs and arranges the relevant articles and messages for you to plan your strategy.

It’s important: Monitoring helps you know what people want from a certain category of product. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your products and how you can better it? It also gives an insight as to what your competition is doing, helping you draft a correct plan of action or your products.

Social Media Measurement

Unlike monitoring, measurement is more concerned with metrics over a specified time period. While monitoring answers questions like “Who is talking about what?” “What are people saying?” “How does my keyword perform over time?” “How does that compare to my competitors?” and “What are some trends that I can use to make my product more usable?”, measurement tabulates the data gathered and helps you prepare a report.

How Measurement works: Your measurement system goes out and looks for articles where that specific combination of keywords occurs. It then tabulates these occurrences and presents them to you in the form of a report. It enables you to categorize your data by source, by date, and other dimensions.

It’s important: Measurement enables you to present a matrix of your data and compare it to see whether your products performance is on the rise or not. Constant benchmarking is the only surefire way to know if things are working. It also helps you change your strategy if the figures state a negative outcome.

Thus, it can be inferred that monitoring, lets you listen and respond quickly, enabling you to protect the image of your brand, while measurement helps you draw comparisons of the data collected. And, so both monitoring and measurement should be a significant part of your social media strategy.

Please share your suggestions and feedback on the same.

Do you own a websites that offers online ordering facility or processes confidential data ? If yes, you would need an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate installed on your website to secure your confidential data from any kind of phishing attack.

People nowadays look for websites that feature an “HTTPS” prefix, a padlock icon, or a green address bar in the browser before submitting any kind of confidential information online.

SSL certificates help  in securing private and confidential data. When a person navigates to a
website that has an SSL Certificate, a “handshake” between the browser and server takes place, resulting in a secure session with a unique session key. Every SSL session consists of a Public key used to encrypt the information and a Private Key used to decrypt the information and restore it to its original format. All this happens behind the scene without interrupting the user’s experience.

LimeDomains offers three kinds of SSL Certificates to its customers:

•     RapidSSL® : stable and easier to install than a chained root install certificate, Rapid SSL is ideal for websites conducting lower level of e-commerce.  Also, Rapid SSL certificates have a lower price as compared to the other certificates and delivered within 10 minutes

•    GeoTrust® True BusinessID Certificate:  These certificates are suitable for mid tier business websites. True BusinessID SSL certificates Include GeoTrust® True Site seal with dynamic
date and time display, helping in increasing customer trust and confidence.

•    GeoTrust® True BusinessID with EV: It is the most recommended SSL certificate, as it offers the maximum security and offer extended domain and organization information validation. This certificate
includes a dynamic GeoTrust® True Site Seal with your company name and a dynamic date/time stamp and the Green browser bar indication.

Choose the SSL certificate that meets your needs and requirements in the best possible manner.

In addition writing and editing your blog to installing plug-ins and occasionally tweaking the design of your blog, here are some tools that would make working with your WordPress blog easy and fun.

Post Administration & Layout

Adman – This tool allows you to post ads such as Google AdSense at the beginning or middle of a post.

Another WordPress Meta Plug-in – This tool enables you to add Meta tags and keywords to your post and help you optimize your blog for search engines.

Corrector –  This tool adds Google Spell to your admin area. You can use this tool to spell check your blog in 27 different languages.

DropCap First Character – This tool enlarges the first character of a post, giving it more of a magazine appearance.

Post Templates – This tool enables you to set up repeating templates such as a “Picture Of The Day” and without the tedious process of copy and pasting.

PostPost – this tool allows you to add content, such as advertisements before or after every post.

Posts Expire – This tool helps you set an expiration date on your post, and as the expiration dates passes, the post will no longer be displayed.

Subscribers Only – Lets you mark a post as “subscriber only” so they are visible only to members of your site.

Subscribe-Remind – This tool helps you add a reminder to the bottom of each post to your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WordPress PDA – Helps your readers view your blog on a PDA browser.

Post Tools

Author Complete Post List – This tool offers you the ability to display all the posts by an author, including the ones where they are co-author.

Code Markup – This tool allows you to include snippets of code, including HTML, in your post without affecting the page.

Plain Text Paste – this tool eliminates the tedious task of pasting something you wrote in Microsoft Word into WordPress.

TD Word Count – This tool displays a word count for each post on a blog, and gives you a total count.

Ubernyms – This tool enables you to make shortcut for terms and links that you use very frequently. All you have to do is enter the abbreviation and this plug-in fills it in for you.

WP-Footnotes – Allows you to add footnotes to a more detailed post.

Hope that these tools will help you manage your WordPress blog easily and conveniently. Please share your suggestions and feedback with us.

Whether you’re one of those who is about to open his first online shop or are considering to change your e-commerce platform, here are some of the most popular e-Commerce platforms that would help you fulfill your needs in the best possible manner.

osCommerce

This free e-commerce platform is sufficient for setting up, running and managing an online store in a cost effective manner. Its multilingual, multicurrency and offline payments features together with support for shippable and downloadable products allows you to set-up virtually any type of e-store. osCommerce supports more than 14,000 live stores and a community base of over 2,00,000.

Magento

This free E-Commerce platform is available in two flavors: Enterprise Edition and Community Edition. The Enterprise Edition includes powerful tools to boost sales, including gift cards, store credits, members only sales, clubs, multi-store capability and top-notch support. On the other hand, the Community Edition is for expert developers and comes with no support or warranty.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an open source online store management system. It is PHP-based and makes use of MySQL database and HTML components for its functioning. It is The program is built by programmers and designers who understand the online selling process from start to finish. Zen Cart features all necessary tools required to build a successful online store.

X-Cart

X-cart is a commercial package with open-source code. X-Cart is fast, W3C-compliant and search engine friendly. It also falls within the budget of start-ups as well as established companies. Users opting for X-cart get all the professional support they expect when buying this software as.

VirtueMart

This open source software supports multiple languages and currencies. You can add unlimited number of products and product categories by making use of VirtueMart. Also, it enables users to search and rate your products.

PrestaShop

Launched in August 2007, this software is currently being used by nearly 25,000. PrestaShop makes use of the popular Smarty template engine, combined with an Ajax heavy back-end to offer a smooth functioning to its users. The best thing about PrestaShop is that it is very attractive and helps users create stores that are professional and elegant and it’s got a very active community for online support.

Spree

This free e-commerce platform is based on Ruby on Rails and features loads of great extensions on offer which you can use to tailor your site to your specific needs. It lets you modify shipping, tax, discounts and coupons to suit the requirements of your customers. This search engine friendly platform has Google Analytics built in it. It’s ideal for small and medium enterprises.

WordPress e-Commerce Plug-in

WordPress e-commerce plug-in is by far one of the most popular e-commerce plug-ins, having been downloaded over half a million times. This plug-in lets you customize your shop to suit your brand image. Also, it is integrated with PayPal and Google Checkout, the payment gateways that are used by a vast majority of customers.

Hope that these e-commerce platforms will enable you to set-up your e-store conveniently and quickly. Please provide your suggestions and feedback on the same.