On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Facebook garnered 7.56% of United States internet traffic market share, whereas Google had 7.54%. Subsequently on Christmas Day, December 25th, Facebook’s piece of pie ballooned to a whopping 7.81% while Google dropped a bit to 7.51%. The day after Christmas, December 26, Google regained its stature as most visited site in the US with 7.33% share, while Facebook retained 7.12%. The ramifications of these stunning statistics, which truly reflect the massive girth of Facebook’s 350 million users, simply can’t be stressed enough to brand managers. To [...]

Related Topics: Brand Aid | Channel: Social | Facebook | Social Media Marketing

Building up an authoritative status on social media profiles is a very important element that users spend hours doing daily. Usually it's with some of the most popular social communities like Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. How many social media enthusiasts and search marketers actually stop to consider their Google profiles though? When I discuss Google profiles I'm not talking about optimizing a current Google Profile page. I'm talking about increasing your trust and authority by delivering value and contributions. Google is increasingly creating and testing new channels of soc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Social Search | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

I preferred search engine results pages (SERPs) before other forms of social media became the rage. I think the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. Do you?

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Usability | Social Media Marketing

These days it's rare to find a brand, blogger or CEO that does not monitor his or her reputation by Google Alert or other hair trigger mechanism. Training your feed’s content-creation team to exploit this new reality for systematic blogger outreach can yield terrific results over time with very little added cost. Read on to explore powerful techniques to serve your brand’s feed readers, earn influential friends, garner links, generate buzz and drive traffic to your website. Humans do what humans do In high school I heard from a mutual acquaintance that "Joyce," a young woman I admi [...]

Related Topics: Brand Aid | Channel: Social | Social Media Marketing

Websites like Sponsored Tweets and Ad.Ly were created with the hope that famous and popular social media users will be willing to start sponsored conversations online. And with clients such Kendra Wilkinson and Kim Kardashian ready to spread any advertiser's message for the right price, participating in social media has finally become profitable. Even Google has began to monetize YouTube for users, gradually accepting popular users and companies into their advertising AdSense program that runs Google ads over streaming videos. Users posting videos that Google runs ads with receive a profit for [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To: Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing

For years now, it has been a commonality for social media sites to rate content and commentary on a sliding scale. Sites like YouTube and Yelp allow users to rate and review content on a five-point scale, while sites like StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed want to just know if you like it or not. Scaled ratings Historically, stars have represented a scale of ratings on popular sites such as YouTube. People give five stars to videos they love and a single star to videos they dislike. YouTube has now revealed how rare it is to receive feedback from anything in the middle. In a recent blog post, they [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

To successfully promote a business through social media means walking the finest of fine lines. To market without intruding, to advertise without offending; these things are not easily done. This week, I was thinking about online marketing opportunities using Facebook. And nowhere is the line finer than on Facebook. On that platform, you need to entice your audience to become fans, use your apps and share your content. You need to achieve this on a platform that is all about friends and family—people are not on Facebook to blog, to chat to strangers or to publicize themselves—th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To: Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing

A Citibank/GFK Roper survey of 500 U.S. businesses with fewer than 100 employees has found very few small businesses in the U.S. have adopted social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter for business uses. The findings include: Three-quarters of the small business owners surveyed say they have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn helpful for generating business leads or expanding business in the past year 86% said they have not used social networking sites for information or business advice 25% said they’re using more online advertising to generate busines [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Social Media Marketing

It's hard to justify the time spent on social media account management. But there are ways to measure the real value (monetary or otherwise) of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. These top two social media websites offer free advertising, an open customer service and communication platform and a demographics database all wrapped up in one, so knowing the value of fans and followers can be a big help when deciding how much time should be allotted to social media efforts. Here are some of the ways to measure how much Facebook and Twitter users are really worth. Number of quality fans [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To: Analytics | How To: Twitter | Social Media Marketing

One of the most interesting aspects of social media is the fact that there really aren't any rules, anyone can use the platform however they want. When it comes to Twitter, a lot of organizations that aren't associated with cutting edge marketing tactics are using some creative, outside of the box thinking. In fact, some of them are acting like animals ... literally. First up is the Whale in the Natural History Museum of New York. If you've never been to the Natural History Museum, there actually is a large whale hanging from the ceiling there. The whale tweets about a lot of things [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

p>Following a series of presentations on eMetrics Summit about ‘Measuring the Voice of the Customer’, I will give some examples on how User Generated Content can be used to both improve the organic results and the conversion rates of a website. The idea behind using UGC in a website is a two-sided effort that can improve both conversions rates and SEO (see other examples in this previous conversion-driven SEO post).

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEO | Social Media Marketing

Most firms now recognize the importance of developing a powerful online brand. Now, an increasing number of professionals have started to recognize the benefits of developing a personal brand. Many people recognize that a personal online brand could be as important (possibly more so) than a company brand when looking to win a new client, get a conference speaking pitch approved or be asked for expert opinions from the media. Online reputation management has also become a very important aspect of recruiting. When investigating a person, the first place most people will go is Google. Rathe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEO | Social Media Marketing

Recently, Greg Finn at 10e20.com covered Will Digg Be a Better Place Without Shouts? In the post, Greg announces the news of Digg dropping their shout system, which allowed Digg users to share content with each other, in lieu of a feature that allows users to share content via email, Facebook, and Twitter. So, the main concern now is how Digg content will infiltrate (and pollute) Twitter from this point forward. Image courtesy of ReadWriteWeb.com There is already so much noise on Twitter that it becomes difficult to monitor the majority of the conversation without integrated segmenta [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

Power to the people!  Sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Mixx have become popular social news sites due to the community driven aspect that fuels them.  Traditionally these news sites offer "digital democracy" that entices users because they themselves are able to determine what is (and isn’t) news.  However, a different form of social news not only exists, but flourishes: "editorial social news." Editorially driven social news allows users to submit articles for consideration, but content is chosen by editors who handpick it from a wide selection of submissions.  While this may n [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

Twitter has reached critical mass.  Oprah's recent announcement that she'd joined Twitter, and her near-instantaneous recruitment of over 1,000,000 followers, has signaled a tipping point—tweeting is no longer a pastime exclusively for the technorati and uber-geeks.  In fact, it seems like elitist spinsters are the only demographic not to embrace it yet at some level (anticipating protests from Maureen Dowd devotees—no, this is not her actual Twitter account). Unsurprisingly, the Brits are way ahead of us in terms of Twitter adoption, having been much faster to incorporate mob [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Small Is Beautiful | Social Media Marketing | Twitter

How many good conversations have you had where one person spends the entire time talking? That's not a conversation, of course. That's someone simply spouting off. A conversation requires dialogue, people taking turns talking and listening. The online world is no different, and we've reached a point where true online conversations occur all the time. The days of receiving an e-mail from someone who says they'll "talk at you" later are disappearing. That person likely now tweets those messages, creating an instant back-and-forth as followers chime in with their replies and spread the news [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Local Search | Social Media Marketing

What are infographics? Infographics, or information graphics, are visual devices that communicate information or data in an easily digestible manner. They have been used for ages by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of communicating conceptual information, support it, strengthen it and present it within a provoking and sensitive context. Since infographics are image-based they usually contain very little text. Images speak a thousand words especially when images are used together to visualize an architecture of information. Infographics and their infl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

While having great content and an appropriate message are crucial for success on social media news sites, having a quality user help with promotion is essential to build momentum. Contacting and conversing with top users who share similar interests as you can be beneficial in helping to spark your content and get it noticed. This is meant to be a resource to find all of those top social users that people continually speak about so you can find related power users on the social site of your choice. Social Media News Digg. Even though Digg eliminated its list of the top Diggers years a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search & Social | Social Media Marketing

For many B2B marketers, social media is still a bridge too far.  Because it's a broad concept—there are so many different ways to use social media—its amorphous nature can impede implementation.  But a good way to get beyond this obstacle and jumpstart your social media efforts is to start small and aim to get some direct value out of it.  This is exactly what you can do when you tap into social media for its hidden value: key customer insights.  My last article discussed why B2B marketers should leverage social media in this way.  Today, let's take a look at how to get the jo [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Social | Social Media Marketing

The DiggBar has been out for about a week now. Since then, there continues to be concerns over twin issues of whether it robs sites of link love and frames their contents in a way that's unfair to publishers. I had a good conversation with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose today about these issues and how Digg is actively looking at ways to solve worries over the tool. For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that's useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook | Features: Analysis | Google: Images | Legal: Copyright | Search Engines: Digg | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | Social Media Marketing | StumbleUpon | Toolbars & Add-Ons | Top News | Twitter