If you aren’t familiar with Klout scores, let me fill you in on the hype. This two year old start up company based in San Francisco works to measure one’s influence through various social media platforms. Their system for ranking people is just starting to catch on in in. Klout scores range from 1 to 100 and are determined by analyzing one’s content, interaction with other users, and overall network size.

Last week on April 24, Google released another update to it’s search algorithm, officially named the Penguin update. According to Google Blog:

A few days ago Google made an announcement that they were doing some “spring-cleaning”. The process entails taking old or low usage products and either putting an end to them or combining them with another product. This will allow the Google team to focus on different opportunities and other exciting new products. In case you missed their blog post while reading about the top internet marketing agency, here are some of the more important changes:

Looks like Google is not only playing around with the Google Pengiun Update, but also doing some User Interface changes. This could be some A/B test that Google is running that only a selected number of people see at random.

With social media becoming such an integrated part of our lives, it was only a matter of time before the internet took over the sports world. An increasing number of sports fans are now consuming a majority of sports news and information from online sources, especially social media outlets. According to sources on the web, over 80% of sports fans check social media sites while watching events on tv, and over 60% check sites while at actual games. Along with checking stats, scores, news, etc., fans are also taking a huge liking to following players on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  With the potential to reach millions of fans, athletes are taking to the internet to release special news, comment on certain happenings in the sports world, or to give people a view into the life of a professional athlete. KT Tape, a sports medicine company, put together this infographic showing professional athletes with the most Twitter followers.

We all should be familiar with the sharing application, Dropbox. A place most internet marketers probably use to simplify their lives by being able to share upcoming presentations with employees so everyone is consistently up to date with the most recent versions of their companies files. To stay ahead of competition, Google released its own sharing application very similar to Dropbox, but called Google Drive. This is a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your files. Whether it’s that last minute college presentation you and classmates are working on, or a photo timeline you wish to share with family of your travels; you can upload pretty much anything in Google Drive, including photos, videos, Google Docs, PDFs, and more.

Video agencies, movie critics, and SEM companies take note because if you haven’t heard from internet marketing that YouTube has added over 500 new movies from Paramount Pictures and an additional 600 titles from MGM. This now brings the grand total to six major movie studios, 10 other independent studios, and over 9,500 movies available for use on YouTube and Google Play. The best part about this is the availability that Google Play and YouTube offer. You can stream a movie right from your phone or tablet, or relax at home and watch on your TV or computer. Combine the mobility with a prestigious video hosting company and you have a new player to the video industry.

We should all be familiar with the professional networking site, LinkedIn, as our go to for recruiting and company inquiries. For many years it was one of the only social networking platforms that really catered to the job search market (eliminating photo sharing and status updates like its biggest competitors in the social world, Facebook and Twitter). Two years ago, Facebook decided to up its competition level in the job search industry and launched its own professional network, BranchOut.

In most countries Google is the top search engine. Google leads in market share by a very large margin where it usually holds about 60 to 70 percent year after year. On the social media side, the top social networking site (SNS) is Facebook. It is the most widely used social network that anyone that wants to develop an online audience community, and passively influence them to buy a product or service would spend the most time Facebook alone. If ever other social media websites are used, often these are the ones that integrate well with Facebook. And for selling online on major ecommerce hubs that have the critical mass audience, merchants pay more attention to Amazon and eBay. Now in most cases, the situation is the same in other countries, but of course there are countries that do not follow the same trend. Countries where the most used search engine, social media site or ecommerce site may be totally different from the top sites in the United States. China is one example where all of these top sites do not apply. Not only because of their own preference, but also because many sites are blocked in China. Aside from that, the nature of the business in China may be driven by a different focus than companies in the United State. If you are doing business in China, or doing business with China, your whole SEO, social media and ecommerce campaign may be totally different from how you do it elsewhere. Starting of with the search engines, SNS and ecommerce sites you use. Below are the top search engines, social media sites and ecommerce sites in China.

Starting out as a simple application founded in March 2009, Foursquare has grown into a full fledged, social media marketing community boasting over 20 million users worldwide with over 2 billion check-ins, and millions more everyday. In light of the recent passing of “foursquare” day on April 16th, Foursquare has proven to be a major player in the local search industry, rivaling the likes of Google and Yelp with its new built in search features. Users can interact with reviews, photos, menus of restaurants, etc. With over 750,000 businesses using the merchant platform, it is becoming easier than ever for it’s more than 35 million data based locations to connect with users in ways like never before. By offering coupons to nearby users or posting information about their establishment, restaurants, hotels, salons, can all create more foot traffic resulting in more customers.