ATTRACT, CONNECT AND BOOST YOUR SALES

Web Design, SEO Services & Internet Marketing
by Deon Designs

Twitter has just announced that to protect people from scams, links in direct messages and sent via email will be shortened using its own URL shortener. It’s a welcome move. Still, I was curious about any impacts this might have for good marketers who are not trying to scam people. Good news, on that front.

To test things, I sent myself two direct messages from the @smx account that I oversee to my personal account at @dannysullivan. The messages had these links in them:

http://searchengineland.com/math-engines-for-multiplying-mixed-fractions-its-wolfram-alpha-over-google-bing-37653

http://selnd.com/du5hRX

Twitter caused a stir Monday when it lifted its curtain enough to show us how much activity the service is seeing currently, and how it’s grown since 2007. And while many reports talk about visits to Twitter.com flattening, Twitter’s own chart showing the number of tweets its users are publishing is staggering.

Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day, which breaks down to about 600 per second.

But how do those numbers compare to Facebook, the king of social networking, and Google Buzz, the new kid on the block?

I bet you are one of those people thinking about implementing a social media marketing strategy for your company right? ‘Well here are some sure fire ways to end any and all efforts you are thinking about pursuing.

Stop any and all effort right now

Listen to the skeptics who are touting social media as a useless medium to gain publicity in addition to poor methods of increasing search engine visibility. Don’t bother with looking for any positive feedback to show your boss as to why utilizing these outlets are of any benefit to the organization.

“But our clients use Twitter/Facebook”

Ever wondered what makes a good tweet?  Let’s break it down.

But first….there are many different reasons to tweet, therefore there are many different kinds of tweets.   Twitter can serve many purposes so before you get started you want to consider all the ways you can use Twitter and determine which ones you want to use now.

Let’s do a quick recap for beginners and then we’ll get into the real meat of it all.

You can use Twitter for:

Personal reasons: For dating, to find friends with similar interests or to keep tabs on the current “chatter” about a topic that interests you.  The possibilities are endless.

As more and more companies decide that investing in a Twitter account is appropriate for their marketing campaign, one thing that traditionally gets lost in the discussion is how they will measure success.

A Twitter account, just like any form of marketing, requires a set of concrete goals that you hope to achieve through marketing in that channel. Are you looking to cut down on customer support calls? Looking to spread brand awareness or “thought leadership”? If you want to learn from what you’re doing, and find ways to become more successful on Twitter you’ll need to define a set of KPI’s.

Many of us in the SEO community obsess about Google algorithm changes, personalized search, Bing market share growth, and the myriad minutia that affects search engine behavior. But for all of the attention that we give most of the major players in search, it remains a mystery to me why the second largest search engine is routinely ignored. In case you hadn’t realized, in terms of share of search, YouTube remains ahead of Yahoo!, safely in the No. 2 spot behind Google, according to comScore.

Facebook has come out with a new page redesign which in my opinion, more and more simulated the web browsing experience moreso than just the social mapping experience. The only problem is, with Facebook constantly referring its users to Facebook fanpages and other controlled content within the walls of Facebook, the overall findability quotient resembles something more of a late 90’s AOL than a 2010 social media world changer.

That being said, what really garnished my attention this morning with the new Facebook design was not necessarily the browser aspect of its UI, but moreso the centering of the Facebook Search Box.

Last night I was exhausted after being in a meeting at work all day. I had to start studying for an online test I was taking for a class at USF. I was procrastinating and wishing Starbucks delivered. I found myself browsing my Facebook account as people often do when they should be doing more important things. I quickly caught myself clicking on profile after profile. I started off by glancing at one photo of a friend and thinking she looked much better than I remembered. I concluded the answer was because my friend had posted a photo of a celebrity in place of her face. I noticed a ton of people were doing it. I thought it was odd but I was intrigued enough to keep clicking away on everyone I knew. Apparently, a large portion of Facebook users were posting a photo of someone famous along with this message:

A few weeks ago I watched the movie called “Julie & Julia“. If you haven’t seen it yet, you definitely should because it is all about blogging (well, not all but blogging has played a huge role in the main character’s life).

Basically, the movie is about an ordinary woman who is so bored with her work that she starts blogging about how she is learning cooking. Her blogging style and schedule is ideal: she blogs daily, one or two recipe a day, and each post contains her personal, quite emotional coloring.

I’m assuming most of you are already somewhat familiar with StumbleUpon. For those who aren’t, Ann wrote a great post last year StumbleUpon Essential Basics A beginners Guide.

As most of you already know, StumbleUpon made some significant changes to the interface last year that weren’t received very well by the SU community. Besides changing the look and feel of SU, they made other major changes, including taking away the ability to share en mass to all of your StumbleUpon friends with only a couple of clicks. As shown by the screen shot below, on the new StumbleUpon if you want to share a piece of content with your SU comrades, you have to select each friend one by one and then hit “share now” once you have finally finished selecting all the friends you want to send to.

We’re pleased to announce you that we released new features that enables users to search for images of Twitter, Funny and Sports in GazoPa. http://www.gazopa.com/.

Images on Twitter
Twitter is getting popular as sharing images well as sharing comments. Since images on Twitter may not have enough tags, it’s not easy to search for them afterward. Now GazoPa allows users to search for similar images on Twitter.
Click ‘Twitter’ link on the top line and latest images on Twitter are displayed in time line. Or click Twitter tab when users set any image as a
search key. Images on Twitter that are similar to the search key are searched. Images uploaded by Twitpic, TweetPhoto, Fotolife and direct image URL can be searchable now and we will add images that are uploaded by other tools in future.

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 my mind, failure to consider Facebook PPC might now be considered negligent, analogous to dismissing the importance of using traditional PPC for branding.

StumbleUpon and Digg have been my major social bookmarking/voting sites for months. There’s no way to compare the two sites: it’s like comparing oranges to apples; but it’s nice that sometimes we are given the opportunity to somehow mix them.

Today’s social media tools will give some StumbleUpon feel to Digg browsing: the tools will allow to click through Digg stories the way SU toolbar button allows to browse through stories shared on StumbleUpon: all you need is just clicking the button and see some random page submitted to Digg:

A $240 million investment seemingly can bring only so much leverage. Two years after Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook and more than three years after it announced a deal to sell advertising on the site, the two companies are scaling back their relationship. Microsoft executives tell BusinessWeek that the company is no longer selling display ads on Facebook in some international markets and may soon not be selling any display ads on the site in the U.S. either. Nothing, however, has changed in the U.S. yet.

YouTube has launched the YouTube Music Discovery Project. It is a new tool they are testing, which helps you search for music and create YouTube playlists based on that query. You basically enter an artist’s name into the search box, hit “Disco” and it then returns results which you can add to your playlist.

Here is a screen shot:

In other YouTube news, they are now testing HTML5 support on TestTube, YouTube’s play site. They are also offering movie rentals, which you can learn more about in the help section.

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

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Bill Gates just added me on Twitter.

No, but in all seriousness, the Microsoft co-founder just joined Twitter and made a splash with a big “Hello World” as his first official Tweet. Check out his page for yourself. He’s only following a select 40 Twitterers (as of Wednesday morning), comprised of charitable foundations, Microsoft employees, and a sprinkling of celebs. But that’s not stopping the couple hundred thousand Twitterers that are already following him, and the number keeps climing.

So what’s the motivation behind Bill’s latest social media outlet? Loren Baker, co-founder of Search & Social, speculates.

Looking for old tweets? You won’t find any that are more than a week or so old on Twitter. Put the blame on all the massive number of new tweets coming in. The engines, they canna hold captain! Or that is, the search index behind Twitter Search can’t hold it all.

To see this in action, consider a search for “happy new year,” date restricted to New Year’s Day 2010. You’d expect a huge number of matches on that day. You’ll find none.

Let’s face it, not only are Facebook fan pages the craze with clients these days, but one of the biggest obstacles with Facebook is tracking and measurement.

Although Facebook’s analytics are slowly improving, for us data junkies it isn’t near fast enough nor is it sufficient information.

Fan page owners are currently able to get insight into:

(1) The total number of fans and active fans on their page. Active fans are defined as Facebook users who have engaged with your page in some way.
(2) Gender demographic data
(3) Fan subscription and un-subscription trends
(4) Language and location statistics

The Technology Review magazine has an article named How Google Ranks Tweets. They interviewed Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, on the topic.

Amit explained that in the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page. We know Google ranks web pages on the number and quality of those links (amongst other factors). Amit explained it is not just about the number of Twitter followers, but also figuring out who the “reputed followers” are. Amit explained, “You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” It is equated to a popularity contest.