Love it or loath it, social media networking and advertising is having an increasing large impact on both our personal lives and business life. Deloitte has predicted that in 2011 social networks are likely to go way beyond one billion unique members, which may deliver over 2 trillion advertisements. The big question therefore is how do we best use the opportunities presented to us by considering the vast number of networking platforms out there? Well lets take a peak at some of the biggest:-

Facebook
The key is to utilize those platforms, which you believe your target audience (customers) will use. For instance here are some basic *stats for Facebook:-

• Facebook is currently the world’s larges social network with over 500 million active users.
• This literally means that this correlates to 1 out of every 13 people on the earth use this platform.
• 48% of 18-34 years olds immediately check facebook as soon as they wake up.
• 206.2 million Internet users are in the USA.
• 51% of people now talk more online than they do in real life.
• 48% of young Americans said they find out about News and what’s going on in the world through Facebook.

So if your business sells beauty products to 18-34 year olds then Facebook would certainly be a good networking platform to utilize. You can also specifically target any advertisements you do to meet certain demographic and geographic market segments.

Facebook allows users to communicate directly, share information and engage in a host of other interactive applications. But users of the platform need to link up first and become “friends” in order to share experiences.

There are two ways in which you can set up an account with Facebook that is either a personal or business account. So what is the difference between a business account and a personal account?

**Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Twitter
***On March 21st 2006 Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet and this is what we see today:-

• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

Accounts
• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

One of the main differences between Twitter & Facebook is that Twitter users don’t have to be friends in order to view each others posts. Also the amount of information users can share on Twitter is limited to 140 characters per message – hence where the word tweet” came from.

Twitter is therefore a micro-blogging platform that is designed for people to post quick updates. When you sign up for a Twitter account you won’t see any tweets until you “follow” those who you are interested in. You can also “unfollow” certain users by clicking on the “unfollow” link next to their username. Below every tweet there are three options

“Favorites” – this will add that tweet to our favorites list;
“Retweet” – this is for when you really like a tweet and want to share it with everyone.
“Reply” – used if you want to send a direct reply to the person who sent the tweet which don’t forget will be seen by anyone following.

Linkedin

****Linked was started in May 2003 and now has over 101 million worldwide members with 6 million coming from the UK. The demographics are as follows:-

41.1% Female
58.9% Male

18-24 years = 20.9%
25-34 years = 35.8%
35-54 years = 36.3%
+ 54 years = 6.9%

Linkedin is an established professional networking site, which aims to connect users with people they trust or have worked with in the past. It also aims to provide further opportunities for individuals to share information, collaborate, find potential clients and explore new business and job opportunities. Each member basically creates their online profile listing their career achievements and current position. Its then up to the user to connect with people they trust, have worked with or want to extend their network with utilizing other’s trusted contacts. This platform is a powerful tool for those wishing to expand their business opportunities or release their career potential.

So if you want to get your brand or name out there then social media platforms are just the place to shout about it. Remember you can also use these platforms to check out what your competitors are doing, find new suppliers or business partners or even recruit new talent. So start tweeting now!

* Statistics taken from linklingmedia.net
**facebook.com/
*** blog.twitter.com/
**** slideshare.net/

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In general search ranking factors are tweaked continually but every now and again something more interesting happens like Google introducing “Panda”.  The implications of Panda being rolled out by Google has caused some web based technology sites to see their rankings drop.  Many people in the search engine market have voiced their thoughts that Google puts too much emphasis on backlinks to the cost of high quality content.  We believe that the new Panda update seems to be an attempt to redress this balance.  Indeed there are a vast majority of technical companies that rely on certain keywords within their website being on page 1 and ensuring that these keywords draw large volumes of Google traffic.  So to find out that Panda has demoted some sites for certain keywords to pages 3 and beyond has certainly has left some companies with a bitter taste in the mouth.  Companies, which have been demoted, are the ones, which scrape content from others and as such sites such as airfairesflights and hotfrog have taken a hit. Other web platforms such as voucher sites have also been hit hard.  On the other hand websites such as ebay and the national lottery where users spend a long time reading pages have actually benefited from Pandas launch.

So you might well be asking yourself … what is good content all about? While there are many possible answers, we believe it’s all about ‘page view duration’ and that this is now a critical factor for Google. We believe that content is now more important than hypothetical keyword density or similar on page factors. Also sites with duplicate content will also suffer and so if you want decent rankings then it’s important to produce good quality, literate copy.  Focus your website copy on selling to customers as opposed to writing for search engines.  Make your copy witty and interesting in order to entice your audience to stay on the site and read its content for longer.

You might also be asking yourself… what about backlinks then?  Well our opinion on this is that it has always been important to obtain multiple back links from a diverse range of sources i.e. article sites, social media sites, directories, classifieds etc so its important to keep up this good work. Don’t worry either if your links are from some websites which have a “no follow” attributable to them like YouTube because the theory now is that Google could now count that link.

Also activity on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter almost certainly appear to be favored by Bing and Google, specifically “shares” on Facebook are just as important,  as is links to your site from your fans/friends walls.

Another key ranking tool is Googles +1 button (the equivalent to facebook “likes”), which is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out” which will soon be affecting SERPS (Search Engine Results Page)

But the +1 button isn’t just for search results as Google is working on a +1 button that you can put on your web pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search.

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