@Publish

mobile market, which brings in a quarter of YouTube's daily 1 billion hits

Solid content strategy (what you’re going to post on your page)Promotion strategy (how you’re going to continually increase your fan base)Engagement strategy (how you’ll respond to fans and build community)Conversion strategy (how you’ll turn your fans into customers)

the average ER for most brands and businesses is a mere 2%!

It’s perfectly within Facebook’s Terms of Use to do a giveaway on your fan page. The rule of thumb is does everyone get one? If the answer is yes, you’re good to go—that’s a giveaway. If the answer is no because you’re drawing select winners, then that’s a promotion where you must adhere to Facebook’s Promotions guidelines and use an app to administer the contest/sweepstakes.

If you use Facebook to communicate about or administer a promotion (such as a contest or sweepstakes)

Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App. ii.    Promotions on Facebook must include the following: a.    A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant. b.    Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. c.    Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook. iii.    You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.

Contests and sweepstakes on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.

Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”).  Your contest or sweepstakes could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest or sweepstakes, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide

Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

it could also be because Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s not a big picture study here – just a slice.

The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.

Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.

content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.

The beauty of such Big Data applications is that they can process Web-based text, digital images, and online video. They can also glean intelligence from the exploding social media sphere, whether it consists of blogs, chat forums, Twitter trends, or Facebook commentary. Traditional market research generally involves unnatural acts, such as surveys, mall-intercept interviews, and focus groups. Big Data examines what people say about what they have done or will do. That's in addition to tracking what people are actually doing about everything from crime to weather to shopping to brands. It is only Big Data's capacity for dealing with vast quantities of real-time unstructured data that makes this possible.

the number of Google queries about housing and real estate from one quarter to the next turns out to predict more accurately what's going to happen in the housing market than any team of expert real estate forecasters. Similarly, Google search queries on flu symptoms and treatments reveal weeks in advance what flu-related volumes hospital emergency departments can expect.

Much of the data organizations are crunching is human-generated. But machine sensors — what GE people like CMO Beth Comstock called "machine whispering" when I talked with her this past summer — are creating a second tsunami of data. Digital sensors on industrial hardware like aircraft engines, electric turbines, automobiles, consumer packaged goods, and shipping crates can communicate "location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, and even chemical changes in the air."

According to HubSpot, 93 percent of adults on the Internet are on Facebook, yet only one percent of a brand’s Facebook fans will ever make their way to the company’s main website.

If there’s no stylistic connection between a company’s Facebook page and its main Web site, visitors may not trust that the page is legit. Brands often spend a disproportionate amount of time, money and effort on Web site branding efforts, in comparison to the relative pittance reserved for complementary Facebook efforts. Keep branding consistent across all channels, so that visitors know exactly where they’re going and whom they’re dealing with.

PageLever also says LinkedIn drives more referral traffic to Facebook Pages than Google and Bing combined

"The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling 'targeted killings' of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false," the report, entitled Living Under Drones, states.

The "best available information", they say, is that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September this year – of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children. The figures have been assembled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimated that a further 1,300 individuals were injured in drone strikes over that period.

US drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in north-west Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning," the American law schools report says

Williams was asked whether he thinks Twitter should highlight the number of active followers users have rather than just the total follower count.  “I would endorse that,” said Williams, who remains on the network’s board of directors. “I think that’s a great idea.” But he went on to note that even active followers wouldn’t be the ideal metric to represent one’s distribution power on the social network. Instead, he suggested that tallying the number of times a tweet has been viewed and reweeted would be the ultimate measurement — not unlike what services like Klout and Crowdbooster offer.

“The dream metric is really how many people see your tweet, which is not even active followers,” he said. “It’s some different metric.”

About 50% percent of consumers think a brand’s Facebook page is more useful than a brand’s website, a new study suggests.

one of the top reasons to follow a brand on Facebook is to print coupons and discounts. The study revealed that 77% of those who “Like” a brand on Facebook have saved money as a result.

Consumers (73%) also noted that they have no issue with un-Liking a brand on the site if they post too often.

The sheer weight of fake and inactive followers is not great for the company’s image. Even the @Twitter account itself has 33% fake followers, according to one count.

The latest active user count, back in March: 140 million. An unofficial count of total Twitter users, including the fakes: half a billion.

Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, two of Twitter’s most-followed users, would both see their counts drop by 70%. Mitt Romney wouldn’t fare much better, with a 50% drop. If Twitter did this before the election, it would be headline news across the planet, and the company would be accused of stepping into the race.

the best approach may be to get your fans to support your reputation for you.

Reputation defenders will do anything from passively monitoring social media to creating paid, positive reviews in order to counteract negative posts - and dominate the first page of search results. (For more insight on how the process works, see Brian Proffitt's post: Inside The Mysterious World Of Reputation Management.)

Wyer's advice for businesses looking at negative reviews is to stay positive. In almost every instance, an aggressive rebuttal will look defensive. “Our experience is that, in most cases, this approach only antagonizes the attacker and this, in fact, can escalate the online conversation, accusations and attacks.”

Klein's consulting business untrikiwiki previously advertised SEO consulting services that implied that the firm could take advantage of Wikipedia as a very powerful SEO source. Language previously appearing on the untrikiwiki site included the following: “A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.” Since the story broke, that language has been removed,

"We’ve never made a single edit for which we had a conflict of interest on Wikipedia – ever. Although we have advertised such a service, we’ve not aggressively pursued it – and we have not accepted any clients interested in on-Wikipedia work." 

Focusing on vanity metrics--such as the sheer number of media placements you received this month--will only set you up for disappointment because it's not a strategic way of thinking about what delivers the best ROI.

Media mentions aren't the only ROI for your business. We've done SEO analysis and found that some of the "small" placements actually provide the best search value.

By the end of the year, 80% of companies plan to use social media for customer service. On the consumer side, 62% of customers have already used social media for customer service issues.

A study by A.T. Kearney found that, of the top 50 brands, 56% did not respond to a single customer comment on their Facebook Page in 2011. Brands ignored 71% of customer’s complaints on Twitter. And, 55% of consumers expect a response the same day to an online complaint, while only 29% receive one.

. Create humanized response models to engender loyalty and build relationships. Many companies are guilty of creating robust and well-planned strategy for social customer service delivery -– but fall at the final and most important hurdle — creating a voice your audience can relate to.

Twitter users follow at least one brand, and that more than half of users follow six or more brands.

Twitter also studied the reasons why someone follows a brand, and as you might expect, freebies and discounts are definitely a factor. But according to Lunenfeld, people also said they were interested in getting access to exclusive or promotional content.

The big message of Lunenfeld’s talk was to encourage advertisers to understand that advertising on Twitter isn’t separate from regular content. Brands should think of conversations on Twitter as a canvas where “you can paint some amazing stories,” he said.

You click. You buy. An advertiser pays. In an over-simplified sense, that’s how desktop digital advertising works. That system doesn’t work as well on mobile, however, where an estimated 40% of clicks are accidents (or fraudulent) and advertisers are still wary of their value. Research firm eMarketer projects that advertisers will dedicate just 2% of their budgets to mobile advertising this year--even though customers are increasingly logging in through their mobile devices.

At Google and other companies that sell advertising, the golden question has become not how to get consumers to simply click more mobile ads, but how to measure effectiveness beyond the click--even if that means tracking offline actions or purchases made on another screen.

“There’s this incredibly new, incremental engagement point called ‘out and about’ or called ‘sitting on public transportation’ or called ‘at home on the couch in front of the TV' and these are places where we didn’t used to be connected,” Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile ads for the Americas, tells Fast Company.

With the new tool, Twitter’s advertising partners will be able to conduct surveys on the social network from the new @TwitterSurveys account. These survey questions — an example of which you can see above — will appear in the user’s timeline just like Promoted Tweets currently do. The user will then have the option to answer the question directly in the tweet.