Future Searches

How Social Media Sites Make Money

Here is an info-graphic I received from one of our readers on How Social Media Sites Make Money. I thought it is worth seeing. Here we go:

Harnessing Social Media to Build a Personal Brand

The days of customers dealing with faceless big businesses are coming to an end. People like to deal with other people, and even corporations understand that now. Just think about some of the most well-known companies and the names associated with them. The late Steve Jobs was the face of Apple. Bill Gates, to many people, is Microsoft.

Sometimes, the person that represents the brand isn’t a CEO or a manager. Many game developers rely heavily on their community managers. Ask a gamer about Pitch Black Games, and most of them will mention Sanya Weathers, a community manager that has served several companies, and is highly regarded.

Socialising as a Brand

When you’re in the public eye, representing a company, you need to be careful. Social media marketing is not the same as social networking on a personal level. This is something that is easy to forget. You might post about “Lolcats” and your favourite, perhaps slightly tasteless YouTube videos on your personal account, but do you really want your customers to see those posts? Just imagine if you went to Elle Macpherson’s brand page on your favourite social network and saw links to online petitions, games, and funny Occupy Wall Street memes. If your political leanings weren’t the same as Macphersons, there’d be a good chance she’d lose a customer.

The Future of Search – SEO or Social?

The web is currently alive with talk of the evolution of social marketing. With new social plugins expected in the form of the “Send” button from Facebook and the “+1” button from Google, it feels like there is a change in the air regarding the way that people find the websites and information they are looking for online.

With social seemingly gaining momentum and arguments over whether you need to hire social media experts circling the web (for http://www.seomoz.org/blog/everyone-should-hire-social-media-experts and against http://shankman.com/i-will-never-hire-a-social-media-expert-and-neither-should-you/), is the future going to see a move away from more traditional forms of SEO in favour of a more socially driven internet experience? If your career is based in SEO, do you need to get more social to survive? Let’s take a look at the state of the industry and see where the future of web marketing lies.

Social

Social networks are enjoying the very peak of success at the moment, with Facebook users increasing all of the time and Twitter gaining more followers as it becomes the ultimate resource for keeping up to date with the latest news stories.

Social Media Past Twitter & Facebook

There can be little doubt that social media is one of the most important recent innovations for both the business world and its’ customers. The speed at which it has been adopted means that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore social media platforms.

That being said, there is a problem that threatens to damage all the good work businesses have put into becoming active members in the social media community. While there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook are the major players, their very dominance can lead to a false sense of security as well as a business’s social media strategy becoming stale and static.

The truth of the matter is that there are a number of other key players that most businesses need to be aware of so that they can ensure they are covering all the bases and not getting a nasty surprise that can have a negative effect on their brand’s reputation.

Linkedin

Probably the other major player after Twitter and Facebook, Linkedin is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and is a superb resource for networking. However, even if a business feels that their core audience lies beyond its typical user, it should still maintain a presence, especially if the business provides B2B services.

It is Not Just Social Networking, The Word is Nicheworking

From networking to nicheworking:

When it comes to business needs, social media boils down from “general” to “niche”.  Social media evangelists better term it as a ‘target’ or ‘passion’ market. Businesses want to undergo a makeover and so they need to add dashes of social nicheworking. Becoming the cynosure is the mantra.

How to kick-start nicheworking?

• Grow with your users: Growing your business does not mean to have a great product or service. One needs to enhance the product into a brand. This manifestation takes place when we start developing the brand identity around the people and following their behavior.
• Find the passion points: Your target market is the niche or passion market. Niche refers to a particular element that becomes inherent in your business goals. This is same for users. For example, if you want to start an online business on real estate, you need to approach people who are searching for low cost homes. Just an add-on like “Find low cost homes” could work wonders for your business. You are catering to the immediate needs of your users. Today if you are thinking of an idea, you never know that is already in the light. But you need to make more noise so that your users come to you. So you got to reach out to those fine passion points!

5 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Have you ever tried to find out what people are saying about your brand? As social media optimization (SMO) is enlarging with its presence, most of the businesses are now engaging with their customers on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin etc. More and more people are revealing their likes or dislikes about a brand on those sites, but one finds very tough to keep tracks of those conversations of customers online. Therefore, we need a tool where we can monitor and know what actually people are saying about our brands. There are plenty of paid tools available online but we’d like to address some free tools.

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. Social Mention

This is one of the best social media monitoring tool available online where you can find each and every data about your brand. There are so many options available in this site such as:

• Top Keywords – Where you would find the keywords which speaks about your brand
• Top Users – Users who are ranting about your brand
• Top Hashtags – consisting of your keyword or brand name
• Top Sources – sources where you were getting involved

Twitter’s New “Retweet” Feature for More Social Users

Twitter is testing a new feature called “retweets” on a small percentage of accounts currently. I felt lucky to see my account has been included in to this Beta Retweets testing so I can write about it promptly.

New “retweet” button is displayed at the end of each tweet. We only see retweets of the people we follow. Retweet button enables people to forward interesting tweets to their followers. You can undo your retweets from the retweets page and get the message “your followers will no longer see the tweet as retweeted by you” message. There are retweets by you, retweets by others and your tweets, retweeted sections in retweets page. To make retweet easy to spot, they have added an icon at the beginning of retweets.

Retweet button screen shoot

Twitter is planning to see the performance of retweets and release the feature once it is ready. Social media is growing as those guys are leading people to communicate, share and spread the word around. Twitter, as a micro blogging platform became so powerful by just asking people the most simple question “What are you doing?” and today the biggest search engines like Google and Bing are racing to sync with it to use it’s power of “real-time search”. Good job Twitter!

Use Social Media to appear in Real-Time Search

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.