One year, and now 250 million registered users later, we can say happy first birthday to one of the newest social media platforms, Google+. In light of Google’s celebration, they announced two major updates: Google+ Events and Google+ for tablets. Let’s dig a little deeper into what these updates entail to determine if Google+ looks like it’s going to continue its rising popularity.

Google+ Events: Google is striving to capture and save all the important highlights of an event, before, during and after the event occurs. This methodology is brought about due to Google’s perspective of our lives today stating, “In life we plan, we party and we keep in touch. Software should make all of this more awesome, and that’s exactly our aim with Google+ Events.”

So what exactly is Google+ Events all about? You can click the photo to the right to see a short introduction video but to start, the application has the ability to stay in sync with your Google calendar. This means you will never forget about dinner at Aunt Mary’s on Wednesday night, or little Drew’s baseball banquet Sunday night. When creating an event, you can also attach cinemagraphic themes (like a baseball picture), a personalized video greeting from YouTube, and even unique animations to make the invite fun to receive. Internet marketers should take advantage of this creative opportunity when making an invite for their company’s next event.

Now it’s time to go to the event, and enter “Party Mode” as Google+ calls it. You will receive a notification when the event starts, and then be asked if you wish to enable Party Mode. When this is turned on, you will see any photos other invitees upload, in real-time. Once the event has ended, you can go back to the event page and upload even more photos you may not have gotten to yet. The best part about this is that everyone can reminisce and relive the good memories of the event by seeing everyone’s photos in one place. Google even allows you to browse the photos by popularity, photographer, or who’s tagged. This is great for social media marketers when advertising for a company’s next big event. What better way to engage with your customers then having them upload photos live from the event for all invited to see.

Google+ For Tablets: Google reported that, “More people now use Google+ from a mobile device than a desktop computer, and today’s tablet release will quicken this trend.” With the Google+ application for tablets a user will see a beautiful stream that organizes content based by popularity, type and orientation. There is also a “lean back” Hangout option that is designed for couch or common room chats. With crisper text, easily-tappable actions and fuller photos, Google has truly designed this application to work at its fullest potential for Android users. Google also stated that the update for iPad’s will shortly be released. What do you think of Google+’s updates, will they fare against the social media ring leader, Facebook?

Recently, many people should have noticed Facebook’s ability to auto-tag friends when uploading pictures (the step right before you publish your photos in which Facebook will automatically grab faces of friends in the photo with a suggested friend name). This technological advancement is due to the acquisition of Face.com, a facial recognition software company. By acquiring this company, Facebook can now bring that technology in-house; which gives them control over the domain name, Face.com (awfully similar to Facebook.com).  

According to the Silicon Valley Mercury News, “People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com’s technology has helped to provide the best photo experience. This transaction simply brings a world-class team and a longtime technology vendor in house,” a Facebook spokeswoman wrote. The technology is said to help with auto tagging when uploading pictures from mobile devices. Face.com was acquired for an undisclosed sum, and has grabbed the unwelcoming attention from some in Europe and the United States concerning privacy issues (see picture at right, courtesy of Shalom Life).

To add to more of Facebook’s privacy issues, the social networking giant was recently faced with a class-action lawsuit relating to their Sponsored Stories. The proposed suit accused Facebook of violating California law in which a user’s “like” is featured as a Sponsored Story, without their compensation or an opt-out option. The suits settlement just went public this past weekend, forcing Facebook to pay $10 million to charity.

However, these Sponsored Stories are vital to social media marketing, acting like a viral word-of-mouth spread in the Facebook world. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg even refers to Sponsored Stories as the “Holy Grail” of advertising. So what exactly are Sponsored Stories? You can find them on the right hand side of your Facebook homepage under, “Sponsored.” This sidebar will give you a list of various pages recommended to you, based on your friends liking. You will see their name and profile picture, along with other friend names who have liked the page as well. The option to click on that page, and even like it right from your homepage is given to you. This could appear as a roadblock to internet marketers because it is now up to the brands users to influence others to like their page.  But, in a consumers mind wouldn’t a friend liking a page be more influential for you to like it, then the brand personally telling you to? Let us know your thoughts and opinions below!

With so many social platforms now on the popularity rise, how do we know which one will offer our brand the most engagement? Some may say Facebook due to its 901 million users, or maybe Pinterest for its lucrative, exponential growth in just a few months. But when you have a platform that gives users the ability to watch footage ranging from a music video to one of America’s funniest home videos, YouTube can definitely stir up a lot of attention.  Social media marketing has grown tremendously in just the past year, so let’s dig a little deeper as to how internet marketers can utilize YouTube specifically for marketing their brand.

Produced by TechWelkin, the infographic below informs us of the latest YouTube facts and statistics. Here are some key takeaways I have derived:

• YouTube is the 3^rd most viewed website after Google (#1) and Facebook (#2)
• More than 1 trillion views took place in 2011 (that’s 140 views for each person on earth!)
• The equivalent of 500 years of YouTube videos are watched every day on Facebook
• 700 YouTube videos are also shared on Twitter every minute
• Each week 100 million people either like, share, or comment on YouTube
• More than 50% of videos are rated/commented upon by the users

Based on these statistics we can conclude that YouTube has the ability to create awareness about a brand/topic on a global platform. Therefore, it is vital that your company create a YouTube channel and post videos that are both informational and more importantly, as entertaining as you can make them. In a world where three billion hours of video are watched monthly, we can no longer ignore that YouTube could be the next best way to advertise over television ads. What do you think about the popularity of YouTube and how is your business using the platform to market your products/services to consumers?

Perhaps you recall reading an earlier post about the marketer’s perspective on social media. Here we gave you an inside look as to how internet marketers view the social media scene for business-to-consumer marketing. Now courtesy of social media examiner, more than 1,900 business-to-business (B2B) marketers has given us further insight into how they’re utilizing social media for their campaigns. In this post I will focus on the different experiences B2B marketers encounter when running their campaigns, as opposed to a consumer-driven focus.

In terms of how confident B2B marketers are in social media for expanding the reach of their business, more than 93% are using it to market their business, a 5% increase from 2010. When it comes to experience it was stated that, “B2B marketers bring more long-term experience to social media marketing than B2C, but lag behind slightly in the 1-to 3-year category.” When asked what results social media has brought to their B2B marketing campaigns, over 56% stated they acquired new business partnerships, 60% saw improved search rankings, and B2B marketers are more able to gather marketplace insights from their social efforts, when compared to B2C. In this area it is important to note that only 53% of B2B marketers found social media helping to develop a loyal fan base; an area where B2C marketers rely heavily on social media for. Also note that there was no mention of a correlation between social media and increased sales. This is due mainly in part to businesses not knowing how to measure their efforts, and therefore not given the opportunity to see results from their campaign.

When it comes to which tools B2B marketers are utilizing, the results were higher with using Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and Google+ when compared to B2C marketers. 82% responded with using Facebook, compared to 96% of B2C marketers using the platform giant. We all know Facebook and its extremely high impact it can have on consumers, but these numbers infer that experienced marketers really understand where their target audience spends their time.

Where did the time go? B2B marketers are far more likely to increase their use of LinkedIn and invest more time in blogging when compared to B2C marketers. And what do B2B marketing companies want to learn more about in the social media world? Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter (and it that order). 77% of B2B marketers are interested in learning how to measure the effectiveness of social media, 72% in how to convert activities to sales, and 69% are interested in discovering the best social media tactics. In the future, B2B marketers plan to increase their use of SEO, event marketing, and e-mail.  Will your B2B marketing company be doing the same?

Ever wonder why some Facebook posts and Twitter tweets don’t have as much reach as others? While, this is actually due to a number of factors such as quality of content, topic of discussion, expertise on the topic, and many more but perhaps one factor you may not have considered is the timing of your post. A recent study released by Bitly, an online link shortening service that helps you share, track, and analyze your links shows the best time to post on Facebook and Twitter for maximum reach. Internet marketing agencies may want to consider these findings to maximize their client’s promotions.

Best Time To Post a Link on Facebook

• Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m EST Monday to Thursday
• Peak Traffic on Wednesday at 3 p.m.

Worst Time To Post a Link on Facebook

• Friday after 3 p.m. & weekends
• Any day between 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.

Best Time To Post a Link on Twitter

• Between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. EST Monday to Thursday
• Peak Traffic from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Worst Time To Post A Link On Twitter

• Fridays after 3 p.m.

*The days of the week are on the Y-axis beginning with Sunday on top, and hours are on the X-axis beginning with midnight and increases by 5 hour increments.

Social media marketing is at an all time peak. As seen in the findings, the timing of your posts have a huge impact on the success of your promotions.  It is far more difficult to make content go viral on the weekends as opposed to mid week. Also for those of us on the west coast, we may want to begin promoting around noon PST to maximize reach on the east coast. Next time, plan your posts & tweets wisely. Please tell us if these findings pertain to any of your campaigns.

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.

Upon downloading Google Drive, you will be able to:

• Create & Collaborate: Since Drive is setup with Google Docs already built in, you can work with your fellow colleagues/classmates in real time on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. Once the document is shared, you are able to add and reply to comments on any part of your content. You will receive notifications when other people make comments so you can respond efficiently.
• Access Content Everywhere: One of the main selling points for Google Drive is being able to store everything and anything safely, but then being able to access the content on virtually any type of platform. Whether that may be your home Mac of PC, or your Android phone/tablet, Drive can even be accessed with a screen reader. It was stated that Google will be working hard on a Drive app for iOS devices, so be on the lookout for that announcement shortly.
• Search Everything:  Within the Google Drive application, you can search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. What’s an even cooler benefit here is the savvy technology Google developed, Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With this you can actually search for a word from the text of an actual article, even if you only scanned a small image from an old newspaper clipping. Say you uploaded some pictures from your trip to Italy, you can later enter in, Italy, to the search bar and pictures of the waterway canals should pop up. Google did state that this technology is in its early stages, and improvements are to be made over time.

Everyone will be able to download Google Drive shortly, with 5GB of free storage space. From there you can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month, or if you still want more, 1TB for $49.99/month.

What’s really great about Drive is it was created to work seamlessly with all of Google’s applications.  This means you can attach photos from Drive directly to your Google+ page, and soon you will be able to attach content directly into Gmail. So we want to know, will your internet marketing company be utilizing Google Drive? If yes, what do you see as the biggest benefit that can be brought to your agency?

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.

At 25 million registered users, BranchOut allows aspiring internet marketers to see which of their Facebook friends (or friends of friends) are working at specific companies. The application will directly connect you with your pre-existing Facebook graphs. It will pull your basic info and profile info (education history, location and work history) along with your friends’ profile info (education histories, locations and work histories) upon download. This allows you to save time by not having to build your professional network one person at a time, something you must do on LinkedIn.

BranchOut works and looks much like its biggest competitor, LinkedIn, in that it allows you to browse over 3 million jobs and 20,000 internships. Online marketing companies can also use the network for sales and recruiting through its RecruiterConnect tool (which works like LinkedIn Recruiter).  I decided to download the app and take a look for myself; here is what the platform looks like (from my profile view):

As you can see BranchOut allows the following:

• Ability to search for people, companies, or titles in the search bar
• Find connections at top companies
• Gives a live feed of what your friends are up to regarding their work/education history
• Allows you to see where your friends work, and if there are any open positions (and how many)
• Post jobs to BranchOut network and to your Facebook page

After some exploring I think the most useful part of the platform is when you click on a company it will show you a list of inside connections. Here are the people who work there that may somehow have a connection to you; if you hover over their picture icon it will state whether they are a direct friend (1^st degree) or a friend of a friend (2^nd degree).  You can use the Message button shown in the pop-up dialog box to acquire any further information you may want to know about the company before applying.

BranchOut still has a ways to go to catch up to LinkedIn’s 150 million registered users, but with a database of 850 million on Facebook, I see this platform experiencing exponential growth in the near future.  Has anyone else given the new professional networking platform a shot; if so, what are your opinions?

It is no secret that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have grabbed the attention of millions of consumers when it comes to the social scene. This is why event marketers and planners should be considering the viral networks in order to spread word of mouth and create buzz about their next big event.  An online marketing firm can benefit from the platforms to announce their upcoming events in hopes to acquire a bigger reach and awareness about your company and its events. Follow these three easy steps and be on your way to publicizing your next big event through social media marketing.

1.  #HashtagSwag – Create a Universal Buzz Word

It is important that consumers can connect with your event and find information about it easily and quick. This is why internet marketers should brainstorm for an overall hashtag, about 10 characters or less, that can be used to advertise the event in a unique, yet specific way. Take a look at what hashtags are trending now on Twitter to get a better perspective on what types of words/phrases grab people’s attention.

In terms of event marketing, speakers will love to reference the hashtag for it gives them a real-time feedback loop. A universal hashtag about your event will also give those unable to attend the opportunity to follow along with announcements and get involved on a virtual basis. Be sure to remind your audience about the hashtag you plan to promote before, during, and after the event. This is very important because you will need many tweets using the hashtag in order to gain virality; therefore consider including your hashtag on all print and online editions of any advertisements about your event.

2.  Publicly Display Your Virtual Attraction

In order to keep people involved online while at your event, you must bring the online attraction to the event through use of Twitter walls, for example. Setting up Twitter walls throughout your event will allow attendees to see all those online who are interacting with the event in a virtual way, while enticing them to join in on the online conversation as well.

If your event is small, consider setting up a virtual welcome near the registration center that encourages attendees to check in through social media platforms, like Facebook and Foursquare, using your designated universal hashtag. Once they see their name displayed on the big screen they will be more inclined to stay involved and keep tweeting about the event.

3.  Create a Central Online Location For Social Content

Those who are interested in your event should have a location that is easy to get to of where they can find all the social media information about your event. For example, consider creating an event page on your company’s website about upcoming events, with a tab that directs interested attendees to all your social media platforms. Be sure to include your preferred hashtag associated with the event here along with direct links to your Twitter account, Facebook page, Google+ profile, YouTube channel, etc. Consider putting a link to this page during the registration process for the event so you can drive consumers to your social media sites early on.

After reading these three easy tips, do you plan to utilize social media in order to gain awareness about your upcoming big event  and hopefully create interest for more people to attend?

Social Media Examiner released this week their fourth annual social media study, which has grabbed the attention of more than 3,800 marketers to tell us where they see the future of social media activities heading. It is stated in the report that an overwhelming majority of 94% say they use social media in order to market their business; while 83% feel social media is important for their business. With so much likability, any online marketing agency should analyze this year’s industry report to help your business utilize this service.

So if marketers can agree that social media has an impact on their business how much time exactly should we be spending on our social media efforts? According to the report, 59% of marketers implement social media efforts 6+ hours a week, with 33% devoting 11+ hours a week. It was also noted that those aged 20-29 are spending the most time in social media, with 43% spending 11+ hours a week.

Now that we better understand the time commitment, what do marketers see as the biggest benefit about social media? 85% believe that increasing exposure is the biggest benefit of social media, with increasing traffic following close behind with a 69% response rate. An important takeaway from this part of the study is that 58% of marketers who have been utilizing social media efforts for three years believe it has helped improve sales.

In terms of which tools we should be utilizing, 92% responded with Facebook as the most used social media platform. Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and YouTube took the next four spots. It was interesting to see that even with Google+ being newly added this year to the report, 40% of social media marketers are using this platform. Google+ was also the platform that marketers are most interested in learning more about (ousting last year’s winner, Facebook). Also added new this year was the category, photo sharing sites (including the new Pinterest platform) with a 21% user rate.

Aside from social media marketing, marketers view email marketing, search engine optimization, and event marketing as the top three services they are also implementing. Surprisingly, pay per click internet marketing is not gaining as much attention as previous years, coming in the sixth spot. Also losing heat is webinars; 48% plan on not utilizing them at all this year and 79% plan on keeping the same level or increasing their use of press releases.

There is a lot of useful information to take away from this study, so we want to know where you see the future of social media is heading based on these results?

With courtesy to Online MBA, internet marketing companies everywhere should take note and analyze the infographic below in order to better understand where we stand now in terms of social media and which platforms offer the greatest opportunity. Did you know that over 66% of all adult online users are connected to one or more social media platforms? Internet marketers should be taking advantage of the most popular social media sites by using them as a channel to find and reach the most targeted audience. By gaining better insight as to who exactly is using these platforms, we can decipher which sites will be most effective at reaching our target audience through use of advertising campaigns.

The infographic below breaks down users of the most popular social media sites based on gender, age, education, and household income. Facebook being the leader of social media, comes in with 845 million active users; most of which possessing some college education and a household income of $50,000-$99,999. This platform would be useful to use if you have a product/service that is somewhat costly and appeals to the older, intelligent generation. Twitter, with 127 million active users, obtains most of their tweeters from a mobile device; therefore make sure your website is mobile friendly. Google+ is definitely a platform mostly used by the college grad (age 0-24), predominately male figures who are single and looking for friends. If you have a product/service surfaced around online dating, Google+ would be a good place to advertise. It is also noted at the end of the infographic that most Americans use social media sites to stay in touch with friends. Although web marketing companies like to use the sites as a gateway into our targeted audience, remember too much promotional content could backfire.

Via: Online MBA Resource

The infographic provides lots of good insights as to who the most typical user of the social media platform is and why they are using it. Let us know what you think and how you will be utilizing such networking sites.