How does this help bring revenue?

This year’s kick off alone sparked a new record for the amount of social media attention it brought online. And while the NFL company originally tried to focus on using social media to bring traffic to the NFL.com website, players are now finding that the best way to reach their fans is through a social outlet. This increases playful competition between teams, offering more traffic to fantasy football leagues and more online purchases on merchandise. Overall the NFL and NFL players are noticing an increase in revenue across the board.

So who is using social media the most?

Surprisingly a large fan base comes from the New York Jets for their emphasis in using social media to their advantage. But in terms of demographics it turns out the audience is completely across the board, including all ages, gender, race, and income. It goes to show that when you’re devoted you will utilize any means of connecting to your interest. More importantly this shows  how social media is becoming a great marketing method or bringing in new forms of revenue.

NFL and Twitter working together

How StumpleUpon Works

• The service engine tries to recommend pages based on the number of similar users.
•  Stumblers begin to edit their interests so they can browse through one interest at a time. This allows the site to appeal to specifically defined audience rather than a broad and general audience.
• Websites can receive referrals. So StumbleUpon can play a significant role in a business’ social media strategy. It has durable value.

What Stumblers Can Look Forward To With The Explore Box

Even though StumbleUpon Explore has a search-like presentation, it doesn’t directly rank websites or goes through a full index of information. The service still caters to user’s interests that have already been added to their StumbleUpon profile. They are not technically introducing a search engine but expanding random information on topics of interest.

StumbleUpon is a growing influence in the social media world. It is making innovative moves and designing new features to make it appeal to businesses and individuals. Hopefully, in the near future, the Explore Box can be able to offer targeted advertising opportunities and can work out to the marketer’s advantage.

StumbleUpon is not like any other search engine. Browse through StumbleUpon and see if it accommodates your specific topics of interest.

Recently there have been multiple methods on how to transport your Facebook pictures to Google+ that have proved to make this moving processed a little bit easier. Out of all of the methods that I tested, the easiest and most efficient one I discovered was posted on moveyourphotos.com. For this process all you have to do is download either the Google Chrome or Firefox add-ons that I have placed below and follow the guided instructions on how to transfer you Facebook pictures.

Download Photo Importer for Google+ (Firefox)

- Download Photo Importer for Google+ (Chrome)

Instructions:

1. Download and install the add-on from the link above (simply drag the file onto the Firefox window to install)
2. Navigate to within a Facebook photo album which you would like to transfer to your Google+ account
3. Enter a name for the album in the text box on your brand spanking new photo-importer toolbar.

   

4. Click ‘make album’
5. At this point, you may repeat the last 3 steps with as many different Facebook albums as you want
6. When you have recorded the information of all the albums you wish to import to Google+, click ‘submit all albums’
7. You will be brought back to moveyouralbums.com and given a link to login to your Google account
8. Once you have logged in to Google we will begin processing your photos, upon completion we will give you a link to your new albums on Google
9. AND YOU’RE DONE!!! Don’t you just feel all warm inside now?

When writing content on the web, a good rule of thumb is to use the inverted pyramid technique, also known as Bottom Line Up Front.  This entails putting your most important point as the title and first paragraph of text in your article, and the supporting details towards the end.  Be sure to capture the attention of your users’ right at the beginning of your page, so that way they don’t need to scroll down to get the main points of your article. On the web, people tend to jump from page to page on websites, so you want to catch their attention right away.

Benefits for Readers

If a user likes what they see in your article from the beginning, they are more likely to bookmark it and read the rest of the article later. Or, if they are using a mobile phone, they can see the main point of the article and email it to themselves to read later on.

There have also been eye tracking studies that show the behavior of web users – they focus mainly on the very beginning of a page only. When a reader reads a magazine article or a book, the expectation that the reading may take a long time is already set. On the web, the expectations are not exactly the same. Web readers like quick but complete thoughts. More people are on the go all the time and want information as quickly as possible, plus on the web,  there are a lot of other competing tag lines, images, and advertisements that may take their attention away.

That is why you want to use the inverted pyramid writing style, where you write in a manner where the conclusion comes first and the details follow. If a user chooses not to read the page completely, at least the main thought of the whole page was already read before they bounce away.

Benefits for Search Engines- Keyword Prominence

Keyword prominence refers to the distance of the target keyword from the very beginning of the source content. The closer the target keywords are to the beginning of the page, the better the page will rank for these keywords. This rule does not only apply to the page as a whole, but also within individual HTML tags and parts of a page, such as in the HTML title tag, the meta tags, header tags, and the beginning of the main content.

Therefore, keep the inverted pyramid in mind and not only will your web visitors appreciate it, but you’ll also see improvements in rankings.

Quitters Far From Winning

Facebook’s privacy battle has only escalated.  The recent changes prompted a small but fierce group of insurgents to mobilize behind “Quit Facebook Day,” adopting the final day of the month of May as their D-Day, publishing on their site: “If you agree that Facebook doesn’t respect you, your personal data, or the future of the web, you may want to join us.”  As of this blog post, the QuitFacebookDay.com movement is just shy of 12,500 pledges to quit on the 31^st.

Facebook, which was probably hoping to lay low for a little while, also grabbed the cover of Time Magazine, due to hit newsstands (coincidentally) on May 31 with an article on the privacy concerns of the social network, called it the “the Web’s sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.”  For all the doomsday rhetoric, worries over the site have yet to materialize into any concern regarding the overall stability of the network; the Quit movement would need to increase its members by 400 times to equal 1% of the total Facebook userverse.

Shift in Privacy Policy on the Horizon

Naturally looking to avoid Time Magazine’s characterization, Facebook has signaled today that they are reconsidering their privacy settings.  From a series of crisis management meetings of senior staff for the social network, all agreed that the privacy settings were at best confusing and at worst exploitative.  It is unclear at this point whether these changes would include an unlikely abandonment of Zuckerberg’s “open graph” proposal he unveiled last month or will satisfy privacy advocates.  Facebook, nonetheless, stresses its desire to remain “user-friendly,” thus fueling speculation that the default setting may be switched back, meaning only those users who opt-in will be sharing their public information with the vast public of third-party websites.  This would likely satisfy their near 500 million person network, as we only want to have a choice in the matter.  All in all, the flak Facebook faces nor the U-turn Facebook management is about to pull will likely hurt the stability of the massive network.  Sometimes things change while remaining the same.

What’s the Difference between Inbound and Outbound?

So what exactly constitutes an inbound approach versus an outbound approach?  And what techniques are brands turning to?  Essentially, an outbound approach is that where a marketer pushes his message out to the masses whereas an inbound approach is designed to pull in people who are already looking for your product or service.  HubSpot classified these techniques based on how important they were perceived by the company, and also allowed for multiple responses in order to account for brands that place value in more than one technique.  From their data, we see that popular and time-tested outbound techniques, such as direct mail and telemarketing, contracted 1% and 6% respectively, only generating 10% of leads each.  Trade shows remained flat at 10% importance among respondents, meaning outbound techniques are preferred by less than 1/3 of brands.

Meanwhile, inbound techniques have become increasingly important to brands.  Paid search and AdWords were the only inbound methods that fell in importance, now at 22%.  However, social media, company blogs, and SEO methods have all increased in importance to brands, with social media and SEO methods important to 60% and 59% of companies, respectively.  Company blogs were claimed to be important to 49% of the survey’s respondents.

Follow the Money, Inbound Marketing Budgets on the Rise

But let’s get down to the bottom-line: company budgets.  When asked whether budgets for inbound marketing strategies increased or decreased for the year 2010, 51% of respondents claimed their budget had increased, with an additional 37% claiming it had remained constant.  This means that 88% of American companies have maintained a healthy budget for inbound techniques, such as social media and SEO marketing strategies.  Furthermore, of the companies that claimed to have a lower budget for inbound marketing campaigns, 92% claimed that the economy, not performance, was the reason for the decrease.

Specifically, social media campaigns returned high confidence numbers from brands, with four in 10 companies overall acquiring customers from major social networks.  Businesses are increasingly placing their confidence in inbound marketing strategies, believing social media and SEO to be the two most important channels in gaining leads and bolstering their brand image.

Open Graph to Blur Existing Distinctions between Websites

The main feature of Zuckerburg’s vision includes the “Open Graph.”  The CEO highlighted current issues in connecting Facebook friends to one another through their Yelp or Pandora accounts, leaving many people unconnected precisely when they are sharing informed personal insight.  As a result, Zuckerburg has proposed the Open Graph, blurring the lines of current distinct Websites.

The Open Graph is essentially Facebook’s method for reading tags from other Websites to decipher what information their users are “liking.”  For example, IMDb starting immediately will include “Like” buttons for films, and Facebook will publish your recent favorite film. Likewise, favorite plays on Pandora will be published on your profile. Furthermore, this process will be fluid, allowing for information from a CNN article –  liked on CNN.com and published on Facebook –  to appear when you hover over the News Feed story.  Facebook has paired with major partners – including Microsoft, CNN, and ESPN – ensuring that there will be enough Websites from which users can begin to test these features.

A lot to “Like” about the Changes to Fan Pages

For brands and businesses, it just got a lot easier to gain fans.  Zuckerburg announced that a single line of code will integrate a “Like” option onto Websites, so that one click can ensure an interested customer has connected to the brand via Facebook. Just like the major partners, brands that include this code will make their website, a fan’s News Feed, and their fan page separated by less than three clicks.

There are skeptics who question whether the public desires to be so steeply invested in Facebook, or social networking for that matter, that are unsure of whether these changes to Facebook will indeed succeed.  It is important to keep in mind that Facebook’s 500 million person strong network can certainly find a sizeable group of test subjects.  The future of social networking and the Internet is uncertain; however, it seems there’s consensus to the claim that major changes are in the pipeline.

Twitter offers advertising partners top post

On the Twitter blog, the company enumerated specific expectations of the advent of Promoted Tweets.  Advertising partners can bid for keywords to ensure their tweets reach the top of the pile once a certain keyword is searched for, much akin to the Google Adwords model.  Twitter lined up commercial partners to start using Promoted Tweets that include Starbucks, Virgin America, Best Buy, Red Bull and Bravo, and offers as example that Starbucks Tweets will always turn up first for a Twitter search for the term “coffee,” provided Starbucks continues to bid on the term.

Twitter emphasizes that they are only in the first phase of their Promoted Tweets program and insists that the promotional aspect of the tweet placement does not mean a decay of quality.  Promoted Tweets, according to Twitter, must meet a higher standard than your average tweet, resonating with users and garnering retweets to maintain its placement as a top tweet.

TweetUp seeks to establish bidding marketplace

TweetUp is a bit more complicated than Twitter’s Promoted Tweets as it utilizes an algorithm taking into account a tweet’s author, number of followers, influence score, number of retweets, along with the user’s bid for their tweet.  Keywords will cost 1 cent per impression; however, if a tweet does not meet the aforementioned qualifications, there is no bid high enough to launch it to the top of the feed (like an Adwords quality score).

All in all, major changes lie ahead for the social network taking its first steps toward monetization; however, Twitter promises the integrity of its network will be maintained, if not emboldened, as the white noise of real time updates won’t hide relevant tweets in the shuffle.

1.    Use the most retweetable words

Of the millions of tweets in his database, Zarrella identified 20 words or phrases that are more retweeted than others. These include (in order): ‘you,’ ‘twitter,’ ‘please,’ ‘retweets,’ ‘post,’ ‘blog,’ ‘social,’ ‘free,’ ‘media,’ ‘help,’ ‘please retweet,’ ‘great,’ ‘social media,’ ‘10,’ ‘follow,’ ‘how to,’ ‘top,’ ‘blog post,’ ‘check out,’ and ‘new blog post.’
While it’s unsurprising that the most retweeted words are those relating to Twitter or social media, it’s interesting to see that the phrase “top 10” makes the top 20. Zarrella explained that people, on average, like to see “chunked content” or readings that are easy to skim and digest. Seeing words such as “top 10” or even “how to” are signals to people that the link is easily readable and, therefore, sharable.

2.    Avoid the least retweetable words

Here’s some words you should probably avoid using in your next tweet (also in order): ‘game,’ ‘going,’ ‘haha,’ ‘lol,’ ‘but,’ ‘watching,’ ‘work,’ ‘home,’ ‘night,’ ‘bed,’ ‘well,’ ‘sleep,’ ‘gonna,’ ‘hey,’ ‘tomorrow,’ ‘tired,’ ‘some,’ ‘back,’ ‘bored,’ and ‘listening.’ In other words, don’t be boring! Ask someone why they’re not on Twitter and you might hear: “why would I want to know when you’re eating breakfast?” Well now there’s proof of the unattractiveness of these status updates.

3.    Include a link in your tweet

It’s hard for something newsworthy and sharable to be self-contained within only 140 characters. That’s why the most retweetable tweets include a link to something interesting. Also, the use of URL shorteners (especially bit.ly) leaves enough room in the tweet for others to add a short comment. Don’t miss this opportunity. Link to the story and keep it short!

4.    Tweet the news

Another unsurprising tip, but important nonetheless. Breaking news, in particular, is one of the most sharable types of content. And again, guess what’s not sharable: small talk.

5.    Use longer and more unique words

The average tweet has about 1.58 syllables per word, while retweets have 1.62 syllables. Also, retweets often contain words that are uncommon in average tweets. In other words, be unique and interesting in your choice of words and you’ll be the social butterfly of the Twitter Party.

6.    Use colons, not semicolons.

In general, Zarrella proved that tweets with more punctuation are more retweetable. While you would think that the opposite would be true given the focus on rationing your characters, it turns out proper punctuation is a more attractive characteristic. And the use of colons makes for great “Headline: Sub-headline” news stories. Semicolons, interestingly, actually make it less likely for you to be retweeted—perhaps given the ambiguous nature of when to use it properly.

7.    Write entertainment tweets for women, opinion tweets for men.

This tip is actually more dependent on your particular audience. But if you’re unsure what kind of content your followers would be willing to share and you skew a particular gender, use this rule of thumb.

8.    Avoid the self-reference

Even though Twitter previously asked its users to share “What’s on your mind,” it turns out that the self-referential tweets are the least retweetable. In fact, this goes for every sensory experience that just involves you. Instead, your tweets should focus on social experiences, focusing more on “we” instead of “me”

9.    Time your tweet for Friday 4-5pm EST

Like every good comedian knows, timing is everything. And it’s no different in the world of twitter. Zarrella identified that people are more likely to share another tweet on a Friday and anytime from late afternoon to evening. But the sweet spot is definitely from 4-5pm EST.

10.    Ask for it!

They always say the simplest solution is the correct one, but on Twitter this is especially true. Adding “please retweet” to your next tweet makes it 5x more likely to be retweeted! (Just remember to use this tip sparingly since it can become a bit annoying).

So Why Should I Care About Retweets?

It may seem a bit geeky to focus so much attention on just one of Twitter’s features, but in reality, learning to craft better tweets can have a great impact on your bottom line. The more your message is retweeted, the more other followers will notice you. And the more followers you gain, the more traffic you can convert on your website! Even more, learning the rules to go viral on Twitter can help shed light on other ways to make your other content more viral. So with that said, I’d like to craft the perfect tweet given our tips on retweets:

“Please Retweet: Top 10 Ways to Write Retweetable Tweets on Twitter!”

Nonetheless, expectations for 2010 remain optimistic.  In a new study released yesterday, StrongMail reveals nine out of ten business executives plan to maintain or increase their marketing budgets.  Execs aren’t thinking conventionally for the new decade either, instead the survey’s respondents indicated they were open to marketing strategies that utilize the Internet and maximize their dollar.  Next year, 69 and 59 percent of business executives anticipate increasing their email and social media marketing, respectively. Another 42 percent claimed they expect to spend more on search engine initiatives, such as SEO and PPC.  The survey’s results indicate a migration to internet marketing tactics, as advertising and direct mailing initiatives are expected by less than 30 percent of execs.

Furthermore, the study showed a desire among business executives to combine the tested and proven tactics of emailing potential customers with social media.  Execs did not, however, demonstrate uniform confidence about how they would go about implementing such strategies in the upcoming year.  Instead, one out of five executives claimed they had no idea where to begin.  With more businesses seeking to establish an online presence in hopes of finding cheaper alternatives to conventional advertising, it is certain that social media marketing and search engine initiatives will play integral roles in the year 2010.