Online Marketing Blog

21 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2012

Curious to find out what 2012 could have in store for online marketers?  This presentation from DreamGrow shares 21 predictions on what 2012 could look like.

Highlights include:

• Social CRM making inroads
• Social media influencing more sales
• Social commerce on mobile devices

Facebook IPO and Most Popular Social Sites:

Social Commerce Psychology [INFOGRAPHIC]

This is indeed an infographic of a different color.  Tab Juice has created a very interesting graphic which focuses on 6 mental rules of thumb that affect social commerce buying decisions.  In an online world flooded with infographics this one definitely stands out!

Did You Know?

• 81% of consumers receive advice from friends and family through a social networking platform.
• 50% of people have made purchases based on recommendations received through their social network.
• Over 25,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month.

#Trending: Reflections of 2011 & Predictions for 2012

“150+ Content Marketing & Social Media Predictions for 2012”  This very extensive list of 2012 predictions includes some of the creme de la creme for online marketers including: even more from Google+, the year for video and mobile, and long-form content poised to make a comeback. Via Content Marketing Institute.

2011 Social Sharing Trends [INFOGRAPHIC]

A new infographic recently released by Clearspring provides a good overview of social sharing in the past year.  I especially liked the breakdown of shares by social media platform.

Facts You May Not Know You Didn’t Know:

• 73% of the top 10 shares were related to death & disaster
• Twitter makes up 52% of sharing in Japan
• Google sharing declines by 8% even with the addition of the +1 button

Is Google Scheming on Your Location?

“Google follows Currents launch with activity-recommendation tool Schemer and face recognition on Google+ Econsultancy” If you want to try out the new location based tool recently released by Google, get in line.  Currently in beta testing mode “Schemer” is an online application that allows users to make plans and explore suggestions for things to do.   In addition to launching new services Google+ is also putting it’s best face forward with a facial recognition feature.  Sounds like Google’s been busy!  But will it pay off in the end?  Via Econsultancy.

The first logo for predecessor to Google (BackRub) was this photo (via a copy machine) of of Sergey Brin's hand in 1996.

Continuing our theme this week of Content Marketing, this post digs into some of the changes that have happened with search engines (but mostly Google) and how understanding both the diversity of search results and content formats can help internet marketers gain a competitive advantage with content optimization.

There’s nothing static about Internet Marketing, but the one constant we can all count on is the persistent effort by search engines to improve search quality and user experience. Such continuous improvements can affect how content is discovered, indexed and sorted in search results as well as what external signals are considered to determine authority.

Despite starting conservatively with my personal Google+ use, I’ve had quite a few people ask me what I thought of G+ and when we’d write a post about it here on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.  With all the hype and past track record with Google’s social media tests, I decided to wait.  I’ve been a bit more active on Google+ as of late and strangely enough, nearly 6,000 people have decided this was worth a Circle inclusion. You can find me here: Lee Odden G+.

Rather than focus on yet another “Top Tips for G+ Power Users” post, I thought I’d write about what Google Plus doesn’t do. Or rather, what is it that I’d like a social application like Google+ to do. Maybe you’ll relate to some of these “wishes” and an interesting discussion will follow. I’m pretty reasonable on some of these, but certainly more “pie in the sky” on others. It’s Google after all, and the bar is/and should be high.

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google’s approach to helping site owners and shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience.

The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

As Google Chrome continues to grow, so to the extensions that go along with it and their functionality. Below are a few extensions that bloggers can use to quickly create new blog posts without leaving the page they are on.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire has long been one of the most popular blogging extensions for Firefox, and it has made its way to Google Chrome.

ScribeFire allows you to create, edit and update all your blogs from one extension. It has built-in support for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, LiveJournal, and other blogging platforms. It’s quick, easy and probably the best extension for blogging on Chrome.

ScribeFire

88 billion (OK, 87.8, we rounded up). That’s the number of search queries Google web properties are responsible for each month according to comScore.

Core to many search marketing strategies is to “Fish where the fish are” and make no mistake, the fish are decidedly hanging out on Google. YouTube, Gmail, Blogger.com and many other online services from Google make its presence ubiquotous in the online marketing world.

Now imagine if Google disappeared tomorrow. What would that do to your marketing? What would it do to your business?

Some of the people reading this post have experienced such a disappearance. Not of Google going away, but the experience of their own sites or pages disappearing from high visibility positions within Google search results.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google

Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools.

Maile Ohye has become a well known public figure from Google that works with webmasters and web marketers coordinating Google Webmaster Central outreach efforts, including the Webmaster Central Blog. She has been speaking at search conferences for several years and has done many interviews like the one at the bottom of this post with Greg Jarboe on real-time search. Her involvement with Google’s Webmaster Central has been instrumental in helping many web site owners find solutions to their Google problems.

To know what the world is searching for must be amazing. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are in that position but they’re not exactly sharing those insights. Well, except if you do a little guess work and leverage their keyword research or keyword suggest tools. For example, the suggest-as-you-type features that all the major search engines now offer can provide some interesting insight “on the fly” into what people are searching for.

For quick keyword research, Aaron Wall has a Google Suggest tool for keyword suggestions that adds more options and insight.

There’s some entertainment value to this as well. Start typing in “my girlfriend” or “my boyfriend” and you’ll see what I mean. Along those lines, let’s see some examples for each major search engine using the syntax, “Google is “:

Over the last few years, the popularity of social channels – for professionals, teens, grandmas and everyone in between – has skyrocketed. Consider the recent numbers:

• Twitter experienced an annual growth in 2009 of 1,382%
• Facebook now boasts 400 million active users
• Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

Between blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, videos and every other piece of social content published, there’s a whole lot of information floating around out there.

Enter the latest social media player, Google.

Google’s latest activities, acquisitions and features all point to the fact that the search giant no longer has a close eye on web 2.0; it’s already there.

Here are 5 ways Google is now becoming a dominant social media player: