The Social Media market is already fraught with different social networking websites. So, how can Google Plus even be able to compete with the networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. But, it seems that with the introduction of the Google’s announcement of Search Plus Your World, a revised search experience, it may be able to gain a place with millions of users. So, it would be better for most of the website owners to get social bookmarking done so that they get increased number of visitors to their website with Google’s search Plus.

What is Google Plus About?

The Google Plus world has brought in almost a phenomenal change in the social marketing industry. This is advantageous for the both the researchers and users and the website owners. The Google Plus can help you gain good ranking of your website. In fact, Google Plus is seen to be growing at a phenomenal rate of 625,000 users per day. So, Google’s claim to reach to at least 400 million users by the end of this year (2012) seems to be quite a real possibility.

If compared with Facebook, Facebook had not even been able to get 400 million users within January, 2008 though it had been operating for three years at a stretch. However, after so many years of popularization, it has now reached the benchmark of 800 million users all over the world.

According to many entrepreneurs and SEO analysts, if Google continues to bring in such changes as is the case with Google Plus, it will be able to bring in better content quality and relevancy. According to them this is a watershed – Google Plus is going to show up on most of search engines throughout the world while Facebook Like shows up only on people’s personally owned pages.

So, these characteristics may be able to help most of the business owners to connect easily with others – other business owners, clients, the market and so on. This is going to make social media sharing easier and beneficial for the companies.

Then, Google Plus has Circles, which is another great aspect about the same. This allows you to have a proper control on the things and events or items that you share – where and with whom. In addition, Google Plus has also added the other Google products onto this, like the contacts, the photos from Picassa Web Album, search results. These have all been listed in the Sparks and thus through this Google Plus has been able to achieve the height of an all en-compassing hub that helps the people online – individuals and corporations.

Other than this, Google Plus also provides better privacy than other social networking websites. In addition, it also provides a better platform for discussion. You can have the option to view the conversations in a totally different way; for you will no more be required to watch the conversations in a linear way. You will be able to view the same on a prioritized basis.

When social media took flight in the days of Myspace, nobody expected it to be the way it is now. MySpace introduced the world to a new way of communication that seemed to change the life of every person. Then Facebook came along using the basics of MySpace while adding new features to enhance the social media experience.

As Facebook rose to the top, many new companies came along searching for a piece of the pie. Those who were loyal to MySpace kept their profile but Facebook gave them so much to get familiar with. As they seemed to forget about MySpace the increased competition sent MySpace to the grave and led to the rise of Twitter and LinkedIn. As Twitter stepped on the scene with its 140 characters and unique look, people who frequently communicate on Facebook, created a Twitter account to see what it was all about. The birth of these new websites still couldn’t slow down Facebook but Google + was in the background with a secret of their own.

Facebook continued to shows its hand and unveil new products not knowing that Google was working on Google+. While Facebook spent most of its time trying to keep it users happy, platforms like Google+ continuously look for ways to generate new users. People love options but the generic friendships on Google+ do not seem to have the same appeal and sustainability when compared to Facebook. With over 800 million users it is safe to say the 40 million Google+ users are more than likely already on Facebook. Many celebrities like Britney Spears and Pit Bull are fan favorites on Google+ but there is not any real communication. It is actually more of a promotional page that seems to be ran by publicist.

Google entered the social media scene and tried to control the amount of users who could sign up by making it invite only. That actually had a negative effect because it took away the interest for those who wanted to sign up right away. While Google built its social media brand to overthrow Facebook it looks like it will be many years before the search engine giant will reach the number one spot. The buzz surrounding Google+ and its hangout feature was supposed to be big selling point but it has not worked as a way to excite social media users.

What works for one business might not work for another, and Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter each have their pros and cons. As a result, many businesses create pages on all three sites, thinking that “more is better”. However, I don’t think that’s always advisable, especially for small businesses. This is primarily because many businesses tend to create and then abandon their social media profiles. Google Local finds information about local businesses based on their social networking information.

This means that if you have an abandoned social media profile, or one that has conflicting information with another profile, then you could show up local on Google Local business searches. This will hurt many local businesses a lot more than failing to reach out to the few people who are still on Google Plus or MySpace but not on Facebook. It’s fine to have multiple profiles if you maintain all, but remember that each social media site is different so content that works for one might not work for others. Social media is great for connecting with users, but it’s not really a broadcast medium. I’m reviewing Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter from a small business perspective so that you can figure out which one to use your business.

Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social media site and Facebook users are easy to target with ads. Small businesses can make pages for free and They can also have ads which are very easy to target. For example, your business can make an ad aimed only at people who “Like” a certain page. There are pages for companies, interests, and even individual movies and sports teams. Furthermore, ads can be tailored based on people’s browsing history, since Facebook uses cookies to track websites that people go to while they’re logged onto Facebook. These features are standard on most social networks but Facebook’s main draw is that everybody’s already using it, so they don’t have to go through an extra step of setting up an account to see your ads or be exposed to your company’s page.

Google Plus

Google Plus is similar to Facebook, but unfortunately it’s held back by low usership. Plus, Google’s tied it into other Google services, such as Gmail and Google Search, which prevents it from presenting a Google Plus brand to potential new users so it’s unlikely to ever become widespread among ordinary people. On top of that, Google Plus may violate anti-trust laws because Google yesterday announced that it will include things that people “+1” (Google’s version of Facebook’s “Like” feature) in their Google search results. If Google loses an anti-trust lawsuit over this tie-in, it might be forced to remove other tie-ins that are beneficial to small businesses, such as using people’s Google searches to tailor ads toward them in Google Plus.

Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging broadcast service, whereby users subscribe to other users and can send and receive blog posts of up to 140 characters long. This means it’s a great outlet for giving quick updates. However, it’s limited by the 140 character limit and there’s a large overlap with Facebook, since tweets are very similar toward Status Updates in that both are broadcast and seen by people who like your company’s page or are subscribed to your company’s Twitter account. The short post length makes it hard to reach out to subscribers with useful content, so many subscribers could become “blind” to your company’s Twitter account because they’ll see your Tweets as spam.

It is, however, a completely different type of social network than Facebook and Google Plus, and it has some advantages. People can talk about the same subject by using metatags and see what everybody else who’s using these metatags is saying (Facebook has a similar feature but it’s not ubiquitous yet). This means that you can use Twitter to create buzz about a product launch or whatnot, and then control the dialogue and reach out to many highly targeted users at minimal cost.

This is a guest post by Steve Sims. Steve does PR, marketing, and writing work for Influence People. Influence People is an online marketing and blogger outreach consulting firm in San Francisco. Influence People writers write on many topics, such as INTENTclick.

Google has long favored unique content, even going so far as to punish sites that publish duplicate content. But with its recent “freshness” update, Google is beginning to focus on content it considers fresh, or of interest to users on the internet. Luckily, this recent change to its algorithm provides a few advantages to dedicated bloggers and social media junkies. Because Google is putting more weight on the popularity of Tweets, blog posts and other online content, the search engine giant has created more incentive for SEOs to focus on delivering content their users want to see.

Find Out What Your Users Want, Then Update Your Blog

Taking advantage of Google’s freshness update requires two things: a knowledge of your audience, and creating content your audience will care about. Because Google is treating user interest in content as a signal for search results, your goal is to create compelling content that your users will reshare. This can be a bit of a nebulous idea, but take a look at what’s been popular with your audience in the past. Look through your Analytics data for spikes in traffic. What is it about these posts or sources that made them so compelling? By producing more content people find interesting, you’ll build your user base and improve your search rankings.

Build Your Social Media Presence

Social media sites have been popular for a long time, but Google has just started looking at social signals when determining search rankings in the last couple of years. Google’s freshness update is only going to add more weight to this importance. What more incentive do you need to take the time to develop a thoughtful, fun and engaging social media strategy? Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet for an effective social media strategy. Every market is different, and while a Facebook contest may work well for one company, a similar contest may prove dismal for your brand. Developing an effective social media campaign takes considerable time and effort, but the freshness update makes social media more important than ever.

Social media provides a couple of benefits to websites: a popular platform for delivering content, and a means for interacting with users. Social media shouldn’t be simply treated as a method for holding contests and delivering advertisements. Use your social media accounts to interact with your audience and share interesting links, too. I’m not saying don’t use Twitter to advertise giveaways and specials, but be aware that you’re speaking to actual human users, and take what your audience wants to see into account.

Don’t Forget to Update Your Website

Regularly updating your website is another way for your content to appear fresher to Google. Large changes to body copy is seen as fresher than changing a single sentence or making a handful of small edits, but completely overhauling a website’s body copy every week simply isn’t viable. However, every website can rely on regular news updates, a company blog or social media activity to improve its freshness rating. Making regular updates has another benefit, as well. Google will crawl your site more often, which means your content will get indexed more quickly and become easier for users to find when searching.

This update won’t affect all types of searches, but will have an impact on search terms that are related to recent events, or regularly occurring, or otherwise frequently updated. The key to using Google’s freshness update to boost your own SEO is finding a way to relate this kind of content to your site. Blogging and social media updates are two great ways of doing this, but shouldn’t be seen as the only way of capitalizing on Google’s freshness update. The idea is to create quality content that your audience, clients or users will care about enough to retweet, reblog and share with others.

Author Bio: Tyler Moore lives in Indianapolis and works as a freelance SEO consultant with a focus on guest blogging and copy writing. Tyler currently works for DocRaptor, a web application used to convert HTML to XLS format. DocRaptor can also be used to convert HTML to PDF, and operates with a simple HTTP POST request.

Social media started out with the MySpace monopoly. Then the world witnessed the rise of Facebook and Twitter. Just when you thought the tide was calm, a series of new social media platforms emerged looking for a piece of the pie. Some may think there is too many websites to keep up with but the people at Yammer have a different outlook on the future of social media.

The name Yammer may seem like a joke but this group of people is all business. The basic idea behind Yammer is an enterprise social networking site for corporate employees to hold discussions. Yammer is in good hands because its founder is none other than David Sacks who earned notoriety when he held the COO position with PayPal. When Sacks started Yammer in 2008 nobody knew if his vision would be well received. That all changed when some of the most influential people in social media took notice. When it came time to generate funding for the startup it was clear that Yammer was on the right track.

One man who was around for the rise of Facebook took his talents and hefty bank account elsewhere. Facebooks former Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya returned to his roots as a venture capitalist Instead of sticking around to be apart of the next stages in Facebook . His new business venture Social+Capital Partnership has been making a name for it self recently because of its relationship with Yammer. Most of the conversations having to do with Chamath Palihapitiya being the man behind the money. His time at AOL, Mayfield Fund and Facebook, gives him and his company Social+Capital Partnership strong credibility in the business world. Not to mention the large amount of wealth that can be used to back his ideas and resume.

The first round of funding for Yammer brought in close to 41 million dollars. This latest round of funding led by Chamath Palihapitiya and Social+Capital Partnership helped to add another $17 million. Chamath Palihapitiya is one reason Yammer generated such a large amount of money. His company Social+Capital Partenership put in $15 million that boosted the funding up to the $17 million dollar mark. This large $15 million investment is one way to see that Chamath Palihapitiya truly believes in what Yammer has to offer. The fact that this deal also gave Social+Capital Partnership a board observers seat at Yammer also had a lot to do with the large investment.

There are so may article directories currently on the web that it can become a daunting task trying to sort through all of them to see which ones deserve your attention and which do not.  Below is a list of the top ranking articlke directoies.  This means they hold the most value in terms of search engine optimization (SEO) link juice and can influence your rankings in the search engines.  We have chosen Page Rank 5 and higher sites only so you can subit to valuable sites without wasting your time elsewhere.

Article marketing has many uses online.  Articles can establish credibility in your field, build SEO back links to your website, create traffic to your site, go viral, and much more.  All this comes to show that article marketing is not dead and still very useful in ranking websites in the major search engines.

http://findarticles.com 9
http://technorati.com 8
http://ibiblio.org 8
http://sports.yahoo.com 8
http://startribune.com 8
http://in.reuters.com 8
http://apsanet.org 8
http://arabnews.com 8
http://gizmodo.com 8
http://googledocs.blogspot.com 8
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http://scienceblogs.com 8
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http://en.blog.wordpress.com 8
http://en.forums.wordpress.com 8
http://gigaom.com 8
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http://informaworld.com 8
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http://economist.com 8
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http://hyper.ahajournals.org 7
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http://pcmag.com 7
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http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com 7
http://blog.facebook.com 7
http://linux-mag.com 7
http://alice.org 7
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http://degree.net 6
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http://businessmajors.about.com 6
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http://inventors.about.com 6
http://linuxquestions.org 6
http://heart.bmj.com 6
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com 6
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http://atvb.ahajournals.org 6
http://linuxforums.org 6
http://ibj.com 6
http://listverse.com 6
http://lwn.net 6
http://jiplp.blogspot.com 6
http://jgid.org 6
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http://wareseeker.com 6
http://homebusiness.about.com 6
http://wattsupwiththat.com 6
http://inform.com 6
http://indesignsecrets.com 6
http://inciid.org 6
http://watchblog.com 6
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http://isaserver.org 6
http://hoax-slayer.com 6
http://internetworldstats.com/press.htm 6
http://walyou.com 6
http://javaboutique.internet.com 6
http://jiplp.oxfordjournals.org 6
http://jerz.setonhill.edu 6
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http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu 6
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http://marketingprofs.com 6
http://math.umn.edu 6
http://msexchange.org 6
http://mideastweb.org 6
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http://nei.dei.uc.pt 6
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http://rotor.com 6
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http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com 6
http://mensnewsdaily.com 6
http://magazine.org 6
http://malaysia.answers.yahoo.com 6
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What article directories do you use? Do you see any article directories that we may have left off the list? let us know as we want to hear your feedback and create the ultimate article marketing list on the internet.

The day after Thanksgiving is well known by all shoppers as Black Friday. Once the turkey and dressing settle you might find the urge to sit in line at your favorite big name department store. Those who were not able to complete their shopping list are still in luck because Small Business Saturday is the day after Black Friday. You may not have heard of Small Business Saturday but all it takes is one look at your social media homepage to find out just how big of a deal it is.

Black Friday has been around forever, while Small Business Saturday is only in its second year. Retailers involved in Black Friday spend a lot of money generating support through television and radio ads. Small business owners do not typically have the resources to spend on costly ads but that has not slowed down the pace of Small Business Saturday. The second annual Small Business Saturday has generated a lot of promotion by reaching out to consumers through well known social media platforms. Websites like Google+, Facebook and Twitter are the most active partners in generating support for Small Business Saturday.

This year Facebook had 2.7 million people hit the like button for Small Business Saturday. That number may not seem like a lot when you think of Facebook’s 800 million users but when you compare it to the 1.2 million people who did the same last year, you can definitely see the increase in exposure. Twitter saw over 30,000 tweets that had something to do with Small Business Saturday. Google even changed its search engine homepage on Saturday to make sure the second annual Small Business Saturday would not go unnoticed. This level of exposure was a good boost in the numbers from last year. One might even say that the level of violence at this years Black Friday will only lead to more people skipping it and waiting for Small Business Saturday next year.

This time of year many people are overwhelmed by department store sales and the urge to spend. It is safe to say that many of these department store shoppers do not realize that small businesses makeup almost 99% of all American businesses. By shopping on Small Business Saturday consumers are supporting the most important bracket of business owners and paving the way for even more Small Business Saturday sales next year.

When a conversation about business comes up there always seems to be one way of thinking. You could be in a room full of successful people and they will all say the same thing. “Be patient, no business made it big overnight” or they will say “Expect to make no money in your first year“. Then came a team of college students who used knowledge and technology to defy all the basic principles of business and create Facebook.

The internet giant is one of many businesses that can be considered an overnight success. If Facebook’s control as the social media market doesn’t speak for itself, than Co Creator Mark Zuckerberg’s title of the Youngest Billionaire In History should about sum it up. The movie Social Media gave the world an in depth look at the start up and all the drama behind it but it did not show all of the hardwork and dedication Mark Zuckerberg and Co Creator Dustin Moskovitz put in to achieve this level of success. It also does not show ho w many of the people who helped create Facebook decided to take their talents elsewhere and start new companies.

With any business there is bound to be a list of hidden secrets that are never to be spoken about. Good thing Facebook Co Creator Dustin Moskovitz was willing to speak with TechCrunch Editor in Chief Erick Schonfeld. He did not speak of the programming secrets but he spoke of the mentality adopted by his team that insured the success of Facebook. Dustin explained how Facebook’s problem never had anything to do with generating users. He said “Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004. On February 5, we were feeling pretty confident, even from observing the first few hours of usage.”  The early stages of Facebook led to a rapid boost in users from colleges around the country. It was all about finding a way to create space for the large amount of interested students to sign up and join. He also spoke about the methods and programs used to track the amount of monthly users and how much time the average user would spend on Facebook.

The interview with Dustin also shed light on his thoughts of Facebook’s newest competitor Google+. Although he spoke of the Google+ design being good, Dustin did not speak of it being any kind of serious competition for his friends at Facebook. Even though Dustin and many of those who started Facebook have moved on they are still frequent users. They have even gone as far as giving themselves the name Facebook Mafia.

Google is always changing and this is why those in SEO (search engine optimisation) need to keep ahead of changes, or we can see our sites plummet in rankings overnight. Google Instant has been in operation for some time, and it is a feature of Google Search that allows Google to predict what you are searching for. We need to have a fast Internet connection for it to start, and in most cases, it will start by itself. Google Instant can affect search results, and can greatly influence what a user is looking for. There are many who still do not understand Google Instant, and naturally, how that influences the way we come up in search. This article looks at some of the pros and cons of Google Instant, particularly in relevance to search optimisation and a user experience.

• What is Google Instant? Google Instant tries to predict what you are searching for before you type. You enter in a word or two, and Google starts throwing up options automatically. This can greatly influence what you thought you were going to enter in the first place. Actually, the results come from what others have searched for using your same word combinations. At the same time Google tries to predict the words you are going to enter into the search window, it also throws up those search results. This can mean we see results before we having finished actually typing what we intended.

• User Influence. There is a lot we work on when building links and pushing our online presence that involves a step-by-step process of building content and relationships to get particular results. With Google Instant, a user can be heavily influenced at the time of search, and not afterwards as we are hoping with our optimisation and other marketing activities. It is easy to dismiss the ability of Google Instant, but as a user, it is quite impressive, especially in how it aids one when trying to search for particular information. We might not have known how we should approach a particular search, and Google Instant turns into Google Assistant.

• Benefits for Google. As a user I am very happy to use Google Instant. I see this is the case with many other users of Google Instant. Many users already expect it to be available when they are searching. More than predictive, it helps a user to use Google. This leads to further loyalty as those who get used to it, do not have similar options on other search engines.

• Managing Keywords and Understanding Influence of Instant. If we consider that certain terms will be greatly influenced, and others not so much, we can see that some websites might actually be greatly influenced because of the keywords related to them. If it just so happens your keywords, for example, become a part of that predictive text, then it is more likely you will come up more regularly during those pre-emptive searches. Calculating this in advance will become a little complex, as the predictive text will also be changing based on what is being searched for more at a particular time.

While Google Instant is still relatively new, it is worth understanding as a user. This will help us understand what influence it will play on our own website design, keyword management and online marketing strategies. For the time being, we should not stray from our step-by-step strategy of building appropriate and good content to bring relevance to our website. Trying to bend changes for something that is constantly changing is like a dog chasing its tail. Google Instant has now grown to include images, and other important search tool for many users. Those in social media marketing and online marketing know we cannot radically depart from our current strategies without careful consideration.