Google Plus

Google+, a social network operated by Google, Inc., launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products, including Buzz and Profiles.

One key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing within subsets of your social group, which are what Google calls Circles. Circles are simply small groups of people that you can share to, each with names like friends, family, classmates and co-workers.

Also within Google+, Google has created a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos he or she has shared, as well as the ones he or she is tagged in. It’s not just photo tagging, though: Google+ includes an image editor (complete with Instagram-like photo effects), privacy options and sharing features.

Another feature that’s widely discussed is “Hangouts,” Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chatroom alone. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” Friends can then join the hangout as long as they have been placed in a circle that was invited by the person who created the Hangout.

via Google Plus.

Facebook Says 600,000 Accounts Compromises Per Day

n a blog entry on Thursday, Facebook stated that about 600,000 log-ins every day are compromised.The factoid, first noted by security site Sophos, was in the context of an entry introducing new security features for the social network. The figure was extrapolated by a stat showing 0.06% of 1 billion logins per day are compromised. Less than 0.5% of Facebook users experience spam on any given day.Facebook’s proposed solution for such breaches is to find three to five “trusted friends”. That way, if you’re locked out of your account, Facebook will send codes to your friends to give to you. Facebook is also testing app passwords that the company will generate on your behalf and you won’t need to remember.What do you think? Are you surprised at the extent of the breaches or does this seem low to you? Let us know in the comments.

via Facebook Says 600,000 Accounts Compromises Per Day.

7 Tips For Boosting SEO Of Your Facebook Page

Brands and businesses are moving away from traditional websites, and placing more and more emphasis on their Facebook pages. This is great from a customer service and interaction standpoint, but certainly muddies the waters from an SEO perspective.

It used to be that with the right mix of keyword-laden text, reciprocal links, and clever use of heading text, a crafty SEO expert could push a website up in the rankings. But now the focus is on your Facebook page, and you still need to get your brand or business in the top of the rankings. Here’s seven tips to help you do just that.

1. Push Your Brand Or Business Name

The names of your Facebook page, custom URL, and custom tabs are of utmost importance. Search engines see these titles in Heading 1, which means they’re heavily ranked by search engines. Craft the title of your page, tabs, and URL carefully, making sure they contain the name of your brand or business.

If you’re the proud owner of Joe’s Garage, but instead opt for “Mechanics You Can Trust,” Joe’s Garage isn’t going to rank highly on the SERPs. Your brand or business name is how you’re known and how you’re found, so be consistent when labeling your page, URL, and tabs. And once you’ve named your page or picked your vanity URL, commit to it.

2. Get Links From Multiple Sources

As is the case with traditional SEO, getting links to your Facebook page and custom tabs is extremely beneficial. Links are like recommendations. If one friend recommends you eat at a certain restaurant, you’ll consider it. If a number of your friends echo that recommendation, you’ll be convinced.

If Google sees that your tabs and pages are being linked to by numerous sources, both on and off of Facebook, then your page and tabs must be important. But search engines also take into consideration where the links are coming from. A link to a custom tab on your business page will be weighted much more heavily if it’s from a popular, recognized source.

3. Get The Most Out Of Wall & Custom Tab Content

More of your Facebook page is indexed by search engines than you may realize. For instance, your wall posts are indexed. But since wall posts lose their relevancy in time, they aren’t given much weight. Still, using your target words and phrases in your wall posts isn’t a bad idea.

Your new custom tabs you painstakingly created? Relax, those are indexed too. And given quite a bit more weight than wall posts. Remember, well-earned Likes are a significant ranking factor in Bing, and building Likes is one of the easiest and strongest things you can do for ranking Facebook content on Bing.

So if you haven’t already, build some custom tabs and name them appropriately. Use Heading 1 text, emphasize titles, and add bold text. Custom tabs have staying power, you and your friends can create links to your custom tabs, and you can even provide links to your custom tabs from external sites, so aptly named tabs with multiple links to them will be will be very beneficial in your SEO efforts.

Here’s where it gets tricky, though. If you use third-party applications to build tabs, make sure they’re configured so they’re indexed on Facebook and not on the third-party’s servers.

4. Don’t Hide From The Search Engines

Google doesn’t “Like” your page. It’s a non-fan. So if you’ve got some key content on your custom tabs hidden behind a fan gate, Google can’t see it. And if Google can’t see it, it can’t be indexed.

While you may be inclined to build these gates to create a buzz about your page and drive up your fan count, carefully consider whether or not you want your content gated, because it will be hidden from search engines.

5. Put SEO-Rich Text In The Right Place

It may seem like common sense, but search engines can’t parse images, which means they can’t tell if there’s text inside an image. So don’t put your SEO-rich text within an image that you add to a new custom welcome tab. It can’t be indexed there. Instead, put that text on the About and Info tabs.

But remember that Facebook is a place for social connection and interaction, so don’t go overboard with SEO-rich text. Material that isn’t social won’t hold your fans’ attention, and can even cause abandonment.

6. Optimize Your Multimedia

Videos are the easiest form of multimedia to optimize because the titles are heavily weighted. So make sure you’re giving your videos good titles, both on Facebook and on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Similarly, the images and logos you use on Facebook can be optimized by naming the files accordingly.

7. Nothing Beats A Well-Run Page

Being a good community manager is just as important as an SEO campaign. The popular Facebook pages have all those likes because those pages embrace the ideology of Facebook: they’re interactive, engaging, and usable pages. Facebook, at its core, is about connecting with people, so don’t sacrifice the interactivity of your page for the sake of SEO.

via 7 Tips For Boosting SEO Of Your Facebook Page.

3 Ways to Get More SEO Value from Your Social Profiles

Social media and SEO go hand-in-hand when it comes to building your online brand. The two disciplines are intertwined more than ever and the most successful websites are the ones who have managed to leverage social media for SEO and vice versa. No longer existing in separate silos, the lines between social media marketing and SEO are slowly disappearing.

In order to give your brand the best chance at succeeding in the online world, here are 3 ways you can derive SEO value from your time spent on social networking sites:

Link between profiles

Link Social Profiles Think of social media marketing like the wheel of a bicycle. Each social profile is one of the spokes and your website is the central hub linking them all together.

You never want the visitor’s journey to end at any given social profile. By interlinking your social profiles with each other, as well as with your website, you are encouraging visitors to extend their interaction with your company and your brand. The longer you can keep them engaged the better chance you have of getting them to convert.

Linking between profiles also gives you the chance to connect with your target audience on more than one platform, increasing the amount of touch points your brand has in their online lives. For instance, if someone connects with you on LinkedIn, why not send them a message inviting them to follow you on Twitter and to Like your Facebook page? You don’t know which one of these social profiles plays the most important role in their online social lives, so by creating a loop between all of your social profiles you are helping ensure your message gets heard at least once.

Keep in mind that the end goal of social media marketing should be getting your social connections over to your site, not driving traffic from your site towards your social profiles. Don’t dedicate prominent real estate on your website to giant “Connect with us on Facebook!” buttons. Your site should focus on converting your visitors, not turning them into fans/friends/followers. Keep the “connect with us” buttons on your site, but don’t let them overshadow the other goals of your site.

Promote your content

Content marketing forms the backbone of your SEO and drives most of your online marketing tactics in general. But creating great content is only half of the battle. It doesn’t matter how unique, informative, inspiring or useful your content is if no one sees it. That’s where social networks become incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Social media marketing thrives on fresh content and gives your social connections a reason to interact with your social profiles. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and present in their online social lives.

Every time you (or one of your connections/readers) share a piece of your content on a social network that creates a valuable inbound link for your site. Not just ways to drive traffic, these social signals are being used by the search engines to determine the importance of your content. The more times a piece of content is shared across various social networking sites the more valuable it becomes and the better it will rank in the long run.

You don’t have to publish the whole blog post to your Facebook wall either. A small snippet and image is enough to attract the attention of your network. It’s a teaser to get them interested and give them a reason to head over to your actual blog/site to read your content.

Customize and optimize profiles

Social profiles can rank in the search engines like any other webpage. Make sure you take full advantage of this opportunity and properly optimize your profiles like you would your site. For instance, Facebook allows users to create custom URLs for their pages; this is a great place to target your most relevant keywords. You should also focus on targeting relevant keywords in your biography or info sessions.

Not every profile will allow you to post the same amount of information, so it’s important to ensure consistency across your profiles. Before you start getting really heavily involved in your social media marketing, write a few company biographies of varying length that all focus on the same core message. You want to present a unified brand across all of your social profiles so you don’t accidentally confuse your audience.

via 3 Ways to Get More SEO Value from Your Social Profiles | SEO Articles – SEO Optimization – SEO Tutorials.

Moms Continue Flocking to Facebook

More moms use Facebook, social networks than average internet users

Have you Facebook-friended your mom yet? Even if you haven’t, you probably have more than a few connections on the social network with little ones of their own, using the site as a way to communicate, stay in touch with families and exchange information about parenting, among other things.

eMarketer estimates 23 million US moms are on Facebook this year—a figure that counts women with children under 18 in the household who use the site at least once each month. That represents well over two-thirds of all online moms in the country. Overall, eMarketer estimates that just 57.1% of internet users (including children) use Facebook monthly.

US Mom Facebook Users and Penetration, 2010-2013 (millions, % of mom internet users and % of mom social network users)

Facebook, of course, is not the only social networking site moms use. Overall, 26.5 million mothers with kids in the home use social networks at least once per month, or 79.2% of online moms. This compares to 63.7% of internet users overall.

US Mom Social Network Users and Penetration, 2010-2013 (millions and % of mom internet users)

These estimates mean that as of 2011, moms will make up 17.9% of all US social network users and 17.4% of Facebook users. But the high rates of penetration reached in this group mean growth will be relatively slow, and moms will actually lose share on the sites over time. By 2013, eMarketer estimates, 16.1% of US Facebook users will be moms with children in the home, while 17.1% of all US social network users will be mothers.

via Moms Continue Flocking to Facebook – eMarketer.

70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter

Despite increasing numbers of customers using Twitter to publicly complain about brands, the vast majority of companies respond in the exact same way….with the quiet of contempt.

70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter New research from Maritz and Evolve24 of 1,298 Twitter complainants found that only 29% of those tweet gripes were replied to by the companies in question.

This is a dereliction of duty, in my estimation. As we discussed in The NOW Revolution, brands must look at these new channels as the “social telephone” and ignoring these 140 character cries for help is a flawed decision for two reasons.

First, responding to Twitter complaints can turn lemons into lemonade. The Maritz study found that 83% of the complainants that received a reply liked or loved the fact that the company responded. This is irrespective of how, when or why the response came. Think about that. Just the fact that the company acknowledged the problem and showed it was listening improved customer psychology 83% of the time.

“What is striking about these findings is the strong degree to which consumers want to be engaged online to have their issues addressed,” says Anthony Sardella, senior vice president and managing director at evolve24. “They are clearly seeking to have a greater voice in the customer service process and see social media as a streamlined means for resolution of their issues.”

Second, the people that are using Twitter to complain are already disproportionately upset. Previous research from ExactTarget called Twitter X-Factors showed that fewer than 1% of customers use Twitter as their first stop in problem resolution. In almost every case, the people complaining on Twitter are doing so because your company already failed to satisfy them in one or more traditional customer service channels.

Let’s see if I have this right. Angry customers just looking for a sympathetic ear, shouting about it in a public forum. That does not seem to me to be an equation that 70% of companies should ignore.

Why The Social Telephone Goes Unanswered

In my consulting work with mid-sized and large brands, I find two primary reasons why companies purposefully ignore complaints and fail to answer the social telephone.

Fear. Companies literally believe (and I hear this exact phrase all the time) that they’d like to get involved but are afraid the conversation will turn negative in social media, and that answering gives greater exposure to complaints. Here’s the deal. If your company sucks, Twitter is the least of your worries. Social media doesn’t create negativity, it puts a magnifying glass to it. Twitter doesn’t make people more upset, it makes them less upset (if you respond) – especially women 35+ who are disproportionately delighted to get a response on Twitter from a brand.

Resources. It’s true that social media doesn’t close at 5pm, and in fact many customers use social media during the night and on weekends, when it may be inconvenient for you to monitor and reply. But your corporate convenience is not the prism through which you should be gazing upon social business. There was a time when grocery stores closed at 10pm, catalog call centers weren’t open on the weekend, and the only companies that had websites were in porn. But the world has changed – not to throw a wrench into your carefully crafted staffing and resource allocation model – but because the needs and desires of your customers have changed.

Customer Satisfaction with Operating Efficiencies

Also recognize that while you may need to expand your “paying attention” windows to meet the new customer expectations social media has wrought, you can also handle customer issues with greater efficiency. Sure, you only have 140 characters to reply, but your customer only has 140 characters to gripe. Do you think Comcast does Twitter customer service solely because they are nice guys and/or want to get newspaper coverage about doing so? They do Twitter customer service because it’s more efficient than telephone or email customer service.

This isn’t that hard. This is not out of reach for 70% of companies. You need to listen, respond, and triage. I know they just look like tiny little heads floating across your computer, but these are real people. They are your customers. They are pissed off. Your silence is deafening.

via 70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter | social crm | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert.

How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search

Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.

“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).

“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”

Search Engines Adapt to Survive

Since the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.

Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.

The spammers have done well for themselves. Over the last few years, searchers have increasingly complained about the number of irrelevant or spammy results returned in searches.

The battle to the top of search keeps search engines on their toes. Every so often Google, makes an abrupt change in its algorithm, like the “Panda Update” of early 2011 that wiped out a significant number of content farm results. Periodically, new search engines launch to try to outdo Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has climbed to 30% market share since its launch in 2009. Blekko, an “anti-spam” search engine, has climbed to a million searches a day since its launch in 2007.

And now, social media is factoring in to make results even better.

Social Media Changes The Game

Social networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends.

Today, people share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook and over 5 billion tweets — about a quarter of which contain links to content — per month.

In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out — and taken to heart — a delightfully simple mantra: If people share your content, it’s probably pretty good.

In a white paper called New Signals To Search Engines, Search Engine Strategies Advisory Board chair Mike Grehan says, “End users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don’t rely on the elitism of one website owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.”

We’re already seeing proof of search engines taking social data into account when serving results.

via How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search.