SEOmoz: Why Every Marketer Now Needs a Google+ Strategy

• Rank Fishkin shares why he thinks Google is forcing businesses to use Google+.
• His reasons why you need to have Google+:
  1. Google+ in Search Results
  2. Personalization and Social Results
  3. Increase Google+ Adoption
  4. Richness of snippets / markup
  5. Web Spam and Quality Signals
  6. Biasing to social / Google+ in Search
• Make sure you view the video on their website for all the details.
• Also, stay tuned for insights from our very own, Ben Lloyd, later this week.

Embedded Tweets

• Twitter announces the ability to embed tweets on third-party websites.
• While the embed link shown in their blog post doesn’t seem to be in the current version of Twitter, the code they show still creates the intended results with some minor tweaks.

Now you can easily embed Tweets and better customize the Tweet & Follow Buttons. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/tweets-and-buttons ^TS

— Twitter API (@twitterapi) December 8, 2011

5 Ways to Make Your Content Shareable

• Raven Tools has come out with a lot of great stuff lately, like their free Google Analytics Configuration Tool.
• In this blog post, they include the following ways to make content shareable:
  • Have the Right Stuff
  • Write a Great Headline
  • Talk About What They’re Already Talking About
  • … And Stop Talking About Yourself
  • Create Conversation on Your Blog
• If that isn’t reason enough to take a look at the blog, they even include NKOTB’s “Right Stuff” music video. Wow! That brings me back.

How to Create a Social Media Editorial Calendar

• This post from Search Engine Watch shares some benefits of having a Social Media Editorial Calendar, tools to create them, and the following tips:
  • Have goals
  • Break your calendar out for frequency and timing
  • Have themes for your posts
  • Share the calendar with the rest of the team
  • Take inventory of social trends
  • Social mobile messaging
  • Connect your social and print campaigns

Do you “like” something that I missed? Add it to the comments below. Check out more of my likes / +1′s on my Google+ Profile

Amplify Interactive offers Social Media Marketing services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your Social Media Marketing strategy.

This is the first guest post we’ve put up on our site. We plan to bring more good content onto our blog from partners, colleagues, and experts. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Does Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2012 Involve More or Less Social Media?

With 2012 kicking off, it is important for B2B marketers to have a fix on whether or not social media will play an important role in their marketing efforts over the next 12 months.

For some marketers, social media has already paid major dividends in leading their businesses to more exposure and sales for that matter. Others, however, have been slow to adapt social media into their marketing plans, be it to lack of planning, shortage of faith or a combination of both.

When you stop to look at the various studies on social media and its importance to B2B marketers, the numbers are quite frankly randomly scattered.

According to a survey from email and social media marketer StrongMail, more than 50 percent of B2B marketers report they will be adding to their marketing budgets over the next 12 months, while just eight percent plan to decrease their efforts.

For those planning on additional marketing, 55 percent said increases will go towards social media efforts, i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, while 68 percent report they will do more to integrate social media with their email marketing plans. Lastly, 64 percent state that awareness building proved the most important feature when it came to social media.

Meantime, a BtoB Magazine report claims that 93 percent of all B2B marketers are currently using some means of social media marketing, with the majority utilizing the best-known sites, i.e. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The exact numbers broke down to the following:

• 72 percent use LinkedIn;
• 71 percent use Facebook;
• 67 percent use Twitter;
• 48 percent use YouTube;
• 44 percent blog;
• 22 percent participate in online communities.

So, such numbers would seem to indicate many B2B marketers are using social media, but don’t let the data fool you. As it turns out, many marketing pros still report a number of obstacles when it comes to integrating social media into their marketing efforts.

According to the survey, 70 percent of B2B marketers named a shortage of resources as the biggest stumbling block to properly implementing a social media plan. Among the other challenges was:

• 57 percent reporting badly defined success metrics and critical performance measurements;
• 44 percent noting a shortage of knowledge when it comes to social media;
• 22 percent stating management resistance.

While the survey did not break down the reasoning for the 22 percent showing resistance to using social media in their marketing plans, it is safe to say that some older marketers, those who have not been exposed as much to SM as younger professionals, may feel it is not worth their time and effort.

In the event you want your 2012 marketing efforts to include more emphasis on social media, keep these factors in mind:

• Become engaged – In the event your company’s marketing efforts presently do not include sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ then make those priorities in January. On Facebook, set up a fan page. With Twitter, you can share industry links with articles on trends and more. LinkedIn works as a great business resource, while Google+ allows you to construct a circle of friends, exposing them to your marketing efforts;
• Construct your brand – With a strong emphasis on social media, you can increase your company’s B2B brand awareness, better your rank among search engines, and provide both present and potential clients with added reason to want to visit your company’s Web site;
• Measure your results – It is certainly not unheard of to come across B2B marketers who are not effectively measuring their social media efforts. So, why employ a social media strategy if you’re not going to measure the results? You want to see who is engaging in your social media efforts, where they are coming from, what specifically is of interest to them and more. Recording such analytics will help you better focus your social media efforts, letting you know where there needs to be more effort and improvement.

While social media is not the end all of your marketing efforts, it can and should play a major role in your plans for 2012. If it doesn’t, you’re simply being anti-social.

About the Author: Dave Thomas, who covers among other items starting a business, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Get Amplify Interactive’s SEM Secrets whitepaper, which covers the topic of integrating  SEO & Social Media Marketing.

Image via Wikipedia

We’re big fans of Stumbleupon here at Amplify. Not only is it essentially a way to “channel-surf” the Internet when you have some free moments and you wish to discover some great stuff on the web, but we also use it as a tool to help expand the visibility of our client’s quality work as well as our own.

Well, we recently learned that Stumbleupon is making some big changes to their service. The big three changes:

Removing Groups

Groups in Stumbleupon were easy ways to join communities of like-minded individuals who had the same interests that you had. We also liked groups to be able to recommend content to people that would find that content useful. Well, groups will be visible up until October 24th. After that, they will be permanently removed from the site.

Removing Themes

While Stumbleupon didn’t have a whole heck of a lot of profile customization to begin with, they will be removing the ability for users to use different themes for their profile, instead opting for a default theme that is a white background with black type. While I get Stumbleupon is all about stumbling across the web, removing customization choices for people takes away any kind of personalization of their profile.

Removing HTML / Blogging Functionality

After October 24th, Stumbleupon will be removing all HTML and blogging functionality. What was created before that will still exist, however it will be in plain text format. So if you want to blog about anything, make sure to do it in the next four weeks or so.

This is the opposite of where Facebook & Google+ are going

It seems like groups are all the rage right now: you see Facebook incorporating groups now more than ever and Google+ is liked due to the way people can group people with Circles. Stumbleupon is removing groups. Seems like the opposite, doesn’t it?

Additionally, with Facebook’s recently announced timeline feature, they’re allowing greater customization of a user’s profile page. Google+ has decent customization of a user’s profile page and I can only assume that they’ll be expanding the customization of it. Stumbleupon is removing profile customization. Again, opposite of what Facebook & Google Plus are doing.

Stumbleupon states that they’re making these changes to “focus on improving the discovery experience for you” and that “…we know some of you have enjoyed having these features, but we believe that these changes will allow us to better focus on making stumbling amazing for you.” How does stumbling get better than it is, already? I’ve selected my interests and you serve me pages that others that share my interests have thumbs-upped.

It’ll be interesting to see just how Stumbleupon will be improving their stumbling for users. Stumbleupon users: what are your thoughts on the changes?

SEOmoz: Tracking the KPIs of Social Media

• Rank Fishkin shares his KPIs for Social Media and gives examples of great tools to track them.
• Social Media sites he specifically talks about include:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Yelp, Flickr, and YouTube
• Blogs + Forums
• If you’re struggling with tracking the effectiveness of your Social Media campaigns, check out this post.

34 Google+ Resources for Your Business: Advice from the Pros

• This great post from Social Media Examiner compiles blog posts from across the internet – giving you everything you could ever want to know about Google+.
• The font shortcuts covered in this post were something I found very helpful and I know a lot of people aren’t using.
• *Word* = Word
• _Word_ = Word
• -Word- = Word

Bit.ly Shows Links Have a 3 Hour Half-Life

• Bit.ly recently looked at their links to determine their half-life. The results were interesting.
• Twitter – 2.8 hours
• Facebook – 3.2 hours
• Direct traffic (Emails, IMs, etc.) – 3.4 hours
• YouTube – 7.4 hours
• Bit.ly’s conclusion, “the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!”

Bit.ly Links Half-life Density

Social Media Examiner: 7 Tips to Increase Your Blog Comments

Social Media Examiner has some great tips for how to get more comments on your blog. For more information, make sure to visit their article.

1. Check your blog comments settings.
2. Ask for comments.
3. Write a blog comment policy.
4. Provide comment instructions.
5. Respond to comments.
6. Make people feel good about their comments.
7. Build community with your replies.

Snoop Dogg for CEO of Yahoo 2011

Snoop Dogg

• That’s right, if you haven’t heard yet, Snoop Dogg officially put his name in the hat for CEO of Yahoo by Tweet.
• @SnoopDogg Im takn over as tha CEO of Yahoo. Need sum of tha Snoop Dogg content ya digg. Nuff Said.
• He has also suggested several new names for company, such as, Yahsnoop, Y A H Double OO, Yahoez, and Yah-dig – just to name a few.
• @SnoopDogg My name is alread raisn tha stock price of Yahoo uhearme!! Bout to call a board meeting! http://on-msn.com/qqhRGO
• Good luck, Snoop, in your vie for CEO dominancy.

Do you “like” something that I missed? Add it to the comments below. Check out more of my likes / +1′s on my Google+ Profile

Amplify Interactive offers Social Media Marketing services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your Social Media Marketing strategy.

Facebook Insights for websites has changed this. We may not be able to see exactly what they’re saying about the brand, but we can at least see how frequently the website is being shown on the largest social network in the world. Below are the four main actions that users can make using Facebook to talk about your specific website domain and can now be tracked using Facebook Insights.

1. Facebook Organic Shares

Ever wonder how many times your website content is shared on Facebook? The Organic Shares tab is the place for you. This section of Facebook Insights tracks the total number of times a link to your domain was shared through a status message or a wall post on Facebook. It will also show how many impressions (or views) the post received and the number of times the link was actually clicked on.

Facebook Organic Link Share Post

The thing that we, as marketers, like about Facebook is that the users put a lot of demographic information on their profiles, which then carries over to Facebook Insights. Want to know if men or women share more of your content? What about clicks? It’s all there – including age, language, and country.

Facebook Insights Organic Share Overview

Are you wanting to know how many times your latest blog post was posted on Facebook? What about the webpage for your new product? Facebook Insights can even show you data on specific pages of your website. Simply click on the “Select Page” link right below your domain at the top of the page, put in the exact URL of the page for which you want to see stats, and the stats magically appear. There is also a sub tab for “popular pages” that will show you shares, clicks, and clickthrough rate (CTR) for your most popular web pages on Facebook.

2. Facebook Like Button

Most businesses, as well as individuals, have a Facebook Like Button on their website. It gives website visitors an easy way to say they like a webpage on their Facebook profile. The Like Button tab allows us to see stats on these like buttons – a lot more stats than the button itself tells us.

Facebook Like Button Post

This tab allows us to see how many times the Like button was shown on the website, how many people clicked that like button, and subsequently the number of impressions and clicks that “like” story had on Facebook. It will also show “Like Story Feedback” – how many people “liked” the like link story or posted a comment regarding the like link story. Again this information can be broken down by demographics, as well as a page by page basis.

3. Facebook Send Button

The Send Button allows website visitors to send the webpage link to specific Facebook friends or groups of Facebook friends, as well as specific email addresses. When the link is sent to Facebook friends or groups, a message is sent to that friend’s Facebook Message area. When the link is sent to an email address, Facebook identifies if that email address is associated with a Facebook account and if it is, a message is sent to the Facebook account. If it is not, an email is sent to the specified email address with the message and the link.

Facebook Send Button Form

As with the Like Button, Facebook Insights shows how many impressions the Send Button had on the website, how many times a message was sent from the button, how many times the message was viewed on Facebook, and how many people clicked on that message to get to the webpage. Demographic information, as well as “Like Story Feedback” is also available.

4. Facebook Comments Box

The Facebook Comments Box is very similar to most comment boxes you have seen on blogs. The bonus with this comment box is that it puts the webpage link and comment on the commenters Facebook profile (if they keep the “Post to Profile” box checked).

Facebook Comment Box Post

Again, Facebook Insights will show you the number of times the comment box was shown on your website, the number of comments posted to Facebook, how many times that post was seen, and the number of clicks the website link received. Demographic information, as well as “Like Story Feedback” is also available for this tab.

5 Steps to Setting Up Facebook Insights for Your Website

Now that you’ve seen all the great data you can get with Facebook Insights for Domains, I’m sure you want to know how to set it up for your website…

Well, here’s the deal, I’ll tell you in my next blog post, 5 Steps to Setting Up Facebook Insights for Your Website, but first you need to do something for me. Help me “Beat the Boss.” I need this post to get over 600 pageviews and you can help me reach this goal. Simply do the following:

1. Like Amplify Interactive’s Facebook Post for this blog article – while you’re there, like Amplify Interactive if you haven’t already done so.
2. Share this article on your Facebook Wall.
3. Re-tweet the tweet for this blog post from Amplify Interactive’s Twitter Profile
4. Thumbs Up the link to this post on StumbleUpon.
5. Share the link on Google+ – feel free to follow me too!.
6. Put it in your LinkedIn status update.
7. Digg the article
8. Submit the article to Sphinn
9. If you’re really old school, share it on MySpace.
10. Share the article anywhere else you think it could be helpful to others.

Once the article reaches its pageview goal, I’ll post 5 Steps to Setting Up Facebook Insights for Your Website. So stay tuned!

Amplify Interactive offers Social Media Marketing services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your Social Media Marketing strategy.