The above chart tells us that Facebook, to no surprise, is still the leading social media platform, accounting for 26.4% of total referral traffic. So although it seems like Pinterest has a way to go before becoming the next Facebook, its noteworthy enough to cite the extreme jump in numbers in just one month, not to forget to mention that it is driving more traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube combined.

The infographic below, “Is Pinterest the Next Social Game Changer?” helps us visualize how much attention the new social networking site really has gained in comparison to others. A shocking increase of 429% occurred last year from September to December, putting its estimated unique visitors at 7.21 million. According to Monetate (creator of the infographic), Pinterest is now part of the top five social networking and forum websites driving the most referral traffic, with Facebook taking the number one spot and Google Plus not even making the list.  Having only been around for two years now, we are excited to see if Pinterest will remain on the Internet as the hot new trend, or is it just a fad that will leave our minds soon enough?

So what has contributed to Google+ recent growth? Earlier we heard about the Google plus Your World, a program where Google+ integrated company search results with daily search results. This may have convinced companies to utilize Google+ toward more of a business standpoint. Another intriguing scenario is the move to open the network doors to teenagers. Google+ started with restriction that only 18+ may join, since then Google+ has set the age limit to those 13 years or older – which has presumably gained a larger share in the younger audience.

Timeline Deadline

Another interesting factor is Facebook’s movement toward a universal Timeline. The widespread mandatory Timeline may have forced Facebook users to switch platforms and move toward the Google+ network. This is still taking affect so the real results of this won’t be seen till later.

Facebook or Google+ take your pick. We all know that this battle still has years and years of great competition ahead of these social media sites,  but who do you think will prevail?

+Dolly Parton is encouraging followers to add +Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to their circles in hopes to benefit the children of her home country in East Tennessee, USA.

+Usher is also attempting to spread the word about +Usher’s New Look Foundation, which certifies young people in four leadership pillars (talent, education, career and service) to ensure their success as leaders throughout the world.

 +Linkin Park also posted a video asking people to share information about the nonprofit organization, +Music For Relief, which supports disaster relief and works to reduce global warming. Specifically he directed attention to the Power the World Give Light campaign, which encourages people to donate to provide solar-powered light bulbs for families in Haiti without electricity.

So join in on the cause this holiday season and include #CauseILoveEm with any post directing followers to your favorite nonprofit organization. Let them know what you like most about the nonprofit and don’t forget to type “+” before the nonprofit name.

First off, Google+ Pages will now come up in potential clients search results. This is important for your business because it allows them to not only recommend you with a +1, but make a real connection by adding you to one of their circles. This will create a long-term relationship by allowing them to listen in and spend time with your team. Your most loyal customers and super fans will want to say hello as soon as you start sharing.

Secondly, a new feature called Direct Connect serves as an even faster way for your business to get connected to your prime prospective consumers. Maybe you just heard about a new company on a TV commercial that you want to know more about, or you saw on a billboard a cool new product you want to try. In both scenarios, you want to get connected with the desired product/service right away; Direct Connect makes that happen in an easy and even automatic way. Just go to Google.com and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Internet Marketing Inc).

You will then directly be taken to their Google page, and if you desire, an option to add them to your circles immediately. As of today, Direct Connect only works for a limited number of pages, but give “+Google” a try to be the first to see this cool new innovative feature! If your organization seems fit for this great new opportunity to not only get more clients, but create a relationship with them, you can learn more about Direct Connect in Google’s Help Center.

One clear distinction between the two networking sites was how each managed to segment ones friends. Google+ allows the user to segment people into what they named, “Circles.” The user can create circles of relationships ranging from friends, family, or acquaintances. It was finally possible to share those “girls’ night out” pictures selectively, with whom you wanted to share them with, rather than your 500+ network of friends.  This new segmentation option posed as a definite pro to joining Google+, and therefore resulted in tens of millions of new users.

Facebook saw this as a clear advantage Google+ had on them, therefore they had to keep the ball rolling with its latest update, Smart Lists. Unlike Google+ Circles, Smart Lists will automatically segment your friends into three groups:

• Friends you attended school with
• Friends who live <50 miles from you
• Friends you work with

If these automated lists still aren’t privacy-effective enough, Facebook is promoting a feature that allows one to manually segment friends into the following three groups:

• Close Friends – People you want to hear from often
• Acquaintances – People you do not want featured prominently in your News Feed
• Restricted – People who you do not want to share information with

With these new Smart Lists in place, Facebook users can now easily share the content they want to share with a specified list of friends by using a filter on their news feed. So when comparing the new features of Smart Lists, Friends Lists, and updated privacy settings on Facebook versus Circles on Google+, who do you see as the social media networking leader?

Back in December of 2010 Google’s Matt Cutts stated, “I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use ‘social’ as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.” Social media has fit its way into SEO and has started to alter traditional organic search results. If you are logged into your Google + while searching for something on Google, your search results will be different than if you were not logged into a Google account. If one of your friends has a web content that is related to the topic you are searching for, then Google gives that web page higher placement on SERPs. Google and Bing have both admitted that they look at their users’ social authority when making search engine ranking decisions.

Social media can influence search results depending on the number of times an author’s content is shared on a social networking site. If you are not connected with any social media sites, do not fret because there are steps that you can take to change this. To get more traffic through social media, you first want to build a presence on a social media site and stay up to date with your followers. Optimize your website for social media sharing, for example if you are based in WordPress you can install the Sharebar plugin to enable sharing. Lastly, you are going to want to constantly encourage your followers/views to share your content through other social media tools. Just because social media is booming doesn’t mean that traditional SEO is irrelevant. There will always be that group of people that don’t prefer social media sites, so traffic for non-social media site users will not completely diminish, but realize that traditional SEO is beginning dwindle, so changing with the times is not a bad idea.

For more information on this topic visit:  Quicksprout.com

There are already 25 million Google+ accounts, which is 13% of the US population. While Facebook has penetration of 71%, Facebook has a considerable head start. YouGov predicts that over the next year, there will be an additional 9% of the population acquiring a Google+ account. According to their survey it looks like 30% of Facebook users, that also have Google accounts, are planning to cut down on time spent on Facebook.

When compared to the Facebook demographic, there are some stark differences that YouGov points out:

• 3 men on Google+ to 1 woman
• 59% of Google+ people have a college degree while Facebook has 37%
• 48% are single, while Facebookers are 33% single. In my own experience with Facebook though, many relationships are jokes between friends. In my opinion, the count on “real” relationships reported on Facebook cannot be determined by Facebook relationship status.

Google has a different target market than Facebook, which appeals mostly to college students while Google+ aims for college educated young men

In fact, Google+ is predicted to become the #2 site behind Facebook in the next year with 22% penetration while LinkedIn, Twitter, and Myspace all have under 20%. With the next push for Google+ accounts over the next 12 months, the social media industry is going to have a run for its money… well, whatever part of it isn’t owned by Google already.

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.