Keeping up with every tech headline is hard enough for anybody, let alone busy professionals. To help, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week’s most important tech news and insights for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Foursquare 3.0 was released this week and the upgrade included significant enhancements to the location app’s Merchant Platform for businesses. As ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Watters explained, “The update will make it easier to create campaigns, and it is launching with several pre-set Specials, aimed at both attracting new customers and rewarding loyal ones.”
Is your business trying to capture the attention of 12- to 17-year-olds on Facebook? Good luck. A report released by Forrester this week showed that despite living much of their lives on the Internet, American teenagers are generally disinterested in engaging with brands on the world’s biggest social network. Only about 6% of U.S. teens want to hit that “Like” button, according to Forrester.
Also on the Facebook front, this week we took a detailed look at how to properly convert a profile on the site to a Page. Some businesses and organizations got started on Facebook by accidentally setting up a profile, which is intended for individuals. Unfortunately for those users, Facebook doesn’t offer a simple, one-click way to convert those profiles to Pages, so we’re happy to walk you through process, step by step.
A few handy tools launched this week that many small and medium-sized businesses will find useful. We took a hands-on look at HootSuite’s robust new social media dashboard. To take full advantage of it, you’ll have to be a Pro member of the service, but powerful features like this make it worth springing a few bucks.
To help people keep their email more organized, Gmail launched a new beta feature this week called Smart Filters. The feature automatically sorts bulk messages, notifications and forum-related emails into groups with their own navigational tabs. A small touch, but much like Priority Inbox, one that will make getting through one’s inbox a tad easier.
Some other SMB-friendly tools we looked at in the last week include AdGrok’s new Google AdWords management tool and Convore, a group messaging service that just got an iPhone app.
