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Google launched their latest iteration in search recently with the +1 button.

You’ll start to see this appear across the web in search results, and on websites. It’s the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘Like’ button and it’s Google’s attempt to get some of the social data that Facebook has in spadefuls.

It’s a social layer that is being built in to search and your results will be influenced by those in your social network and the items that they have ‘plus oned’. Having said that, your social network are contacts you have in Google (in Gmail and Google profiles), which is not the social beast that Facebook is.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online.   TechCrunch

So how does this affect search engine optimisation (SEO)? Well the number of people who have plus-oned a web page may become a ranking signal for Google. If  people are recommending it, then it’s a strong case for the quality of a page.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too crazy about the ‘+1′ naming of the concept, but let’s see how well it takes off.

You can take a look at the top right of this post to see it in action (feel free to ‘plus one’ it).

You can get one to add to your WordPress site by using this plugin. Others are available for different platforms.

This is the easy peasy guide to adding a Slideshow to your Blog or Website. It’s done using Flickr, so all you need are the images!

If you already have a Yahoo account or a Gmail account, you can use either of these to sign in to Flickr. Otherwise, it’s easy to create an account.

1. Create an account with Flickr (or sign in if you have one)
2. Upload your pictures
3. Add Title and Description and Tag them
4. Set the privacy to ‘Public’
5. Set the Licence (what rights others have to the images) – see Creative Commons to see what kind of licencing you can do
6. Add your pictures to a Set
7. Start a Slideshow of the Set
8. Click on the Share button in the upper-right corner of the Slideshow
9. Copy the Embed code to your clipboard
10. Paste the code to your Blog post

Here’s a slideshow example so you can see what it will look like. This one uses a WordPress platform and the code is simply pasted into the post in the HTML editor.

You can also create your own Flickr Badge which can be used to brand your slideshow with your company logo for example.

For WordPress users, there is also a Flickr Photo Album Plugin which will give you more control over the look and feel of your slideshow and you can put one in the sidebar.

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform which is free to join (although there is a premium paid service) and offers a way of connecting professionally, rather than socially – no facebook ‘funnies’ here!

It allows you present information about yourself and your professional career in a similar format to a CV and allows potential customers, employers or business collaborators to get to know that you exist for a start, and also see some relevant information about you.

With over 70m members (not as wide a net as facebook’s 500m I’ll grant you), it presents an easy way of connecting with colleagues, past and present, and former college mates also. One of the more interesting and useful features is that once connected to another person, you can see the degree of separation between you and somebody that is connected to that other person. Have you seen the film ’6 Degrees of Separation? It’s the same idea, but the emphasis is on professional relationships.

As with most social networks it offers the means to share content. This can be means of feeding your business blog through, which can be done quite easily – no IT support required! Or, you can feed your tweets through by means of an interface like Hootsuite.

But the most powerful feature so far lies in the networking possibilities of LinkedIn Groups. You can join groups that correspond to your professional interests and raise topics, ask questions, share information, gain insights and generally raise your profile. Many jobs are also posted on these Groups.

Find out more about using LinkedIn Groups:

From an SEO point of view, your profile can contain links to your website and your business blog, thus increasing your inbound links and your traffic.

Interestingly, the Digital Marketing Institute are asking for applications to their forthcoming Post-graduate Diploma in Digital Marketing to come from LinkedIn and are based on your profile there.  This is the first time I’ve heard of a social network being used in the application process for a post-graduate course! As Anthony Quigley from the DMI said: ‘If you’re lying to us on LinkedIn, you’re lying to everyone’.

And he’s right.

As with all social networks, and indeed everything on the net, the functionality is increasing all the time. One of the latest features to be added to LinkedIn is a new app by Behance allowing creative professionals to link their portfolios directly to their LinkedIn accounts.

To tweet or not to tweet?

This is the first in a series of posts on Social Media and their relevance for Online Marketing.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging site, where you have 140 chars to add real-time messages which are publicly available for viewing. Users ‘follow’ other people and then their followers ‘tweets’ appear on their Twitter Home page, as they are written. The limitation on space makes it very conversational in nature.

What’s Twitter all about?

So, it’s about conversation and sharing, rather than advertising or selling. It’s about engagement in a personal way, and it also offers opportunities for brands to follow what others are saying about them and to respond.

Is it useful for you?

Twitter could be useful in the following ways if your customers and industry are users:

• marketing your business with a greater online profile for your brand
• engaging with customers
• engaging with potential customers
• engaging with your business community
• accessing resources (the latest research, for example)
• SEO – real-time Twitter feeds to Google’s search results pages

Getting started

Twitter.com is the place to start. Twitter itself has resources on the site to help the novice and FAQ sections that cover most troublesome questions.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is do you want to use a personal profile with a photo (or avatar ), or a business profile with a branded logo.

Depending on your business, either may be appropriate. However, if your brand identity is important, then choose a logo and a profile name which is either that of your brand or close to it. For business, you are primarily using Twitter to engage with people on behalf of your company and your reputation is also important here. What you tweet represents the company. Also, it’s common now to add a ‘follow me on Twitter ID’ to business cards and email signatures.

Common terms

@                :           precedes a Twitter ID to identify a username and is used when replying

RT              :          retweet

#hashtag :         similar to other web tags but with a ‘#’ in front of the word. They can be used anywhere in the tweet,  and are used to identify tweets about a particular topic across Twitter, making it easier to find in search eg. bizcamp Dublin has the hashtag #bizcampdublin. Conferences and events in particular rely on them to track the conversation both before and after.

See our Weekly Web Word ‘tweeple’ for more.

Reputation Management

Aim to build a reputation as a trusted and relevant source of information. At the same time you can have personality, ask questions and engage people. Using it to push a marketing message will alienate followers. Or tweeting for the sake of  tweeting, ‘hello’ for example, will also alienate a lot of people.

How to find people to follow

Find out who’s tweeting in your space and who you want to follow by using Twitter Search on your keywords, search.twitter.com

Other useful search tips are:

“internet marketing” near:“dublin” containing the exact phrase “internet marketing” and sent near “dublin”.

seo filter:links containing “seo” and linking to URLs.

traffic ? containing “traffic” and asking a question.

Or, you can search on Google:

To search for ‘digital marketing’ in the title of profiles of Twitter users:

intitle:”digital marketing * on twitter” site:twitter.com

to search for a ‘seo consultant’ in the bio text of Twitter profiles

intext:”bio * seo consultant” site:twitter.com

You can also search by ‘location’ instead of ‘bio’.

Or, you can use www.twellow.com to search by category

SEO

Google are using Twitter real-time search as a feed for search results. If you’re contributing to the conversation on a trending subject then you may be returned in Google’s search results. All good for your SEO.

Tools

URL  shorteners are used to shorten the URLs for links so that the 140 chars of your tweet are not taken.

bit.ly

Tinyurl.com

short.ie – with this one you can customize the URL yourself – perfect for tweet links more meaningful and very useful for your Facebook Business Page if you don’t yet have 25 ‘likes’.

You can also register with Tweetscan.com to get alerts.

Metrics

You can see from your Google Analytics just how many referrals you are getting from Twitter.

Twitter Trends

Twitter itself is currently beta-testing it’s new Twitter Business Center functionality. This will provide for a specifically Business account (currently only an individual can be verified on Twitter) and allows for basic info on the business to be entered. There is a new feature whereby the business can accept direct messages from individuals who are not following them. This has implications for customer service businesses where they can get direct feedback from customers and will need to be able to address it and manage it. Read more at http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/twitter-business-center-toolkit/

Finally

Be humourous. Be informative. Be relevant. And build authority.

Twitter processed 1.76bn tweets in April. This is 47% increase from the number of tweets in January this year

[source: royal.pingdom.com, May 2010]

105 million registered users on Twitter globally

[source:
mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2010/04/15/twitter-goes-public-with-user-numbers/,April 2010]

It’s getting closer to real-time. Google now has a real-time feed from Twitter showing a scrolling feed as people are tweeting on the given search term.

Even Blog postings are indexed practially straight away. Our post on ‘deep links’ was indexed within an hour and displayed in Google’s search results:

How fast is your new content being indexed?

Search Engine Optimisation and Twitter

Twitter is the most recent social networking tool to gain popularity, although, even amongst the experts, it is still unclear as to how it will evolve, and how useful it is for businesses. The enormous number of Tweets (short messages) being posted is too great for most mere mortals to follow usefully.

However, one thing Twitter has clearly got going for it is the ability of search engines to scan through the content (or verbiage!) and they do, very regularly. So regularly in fact, that content may be indexed every few hours, well beyond the ability of people who have businesses to run!

So, to gain more traction from your own blog or web site news, feed it through to Twitter using TwitterFeed. It’s free and straightforward to use, simply follow these steps:

1. Set up an account with TwitterFeed
2. Attach your Twitter account to it
3. Use the URL of your own site’s RSS feed (this can be found by placing the mouse over your own RSS feed logo). Type in full http address.

SEO Tip: For greater search engine brownie points, use your full site’s URL (rather than the shortened forms eg. tinyurl.com – these are useful for maximising on the limited 140 characters available in a Tweet, but not useful for search engines).

The answer is:  67.3% of Ireland’s population. 

This has risen hugely in the last number of years and people are using the internet for a wider variety of functions, information, news, shopping, social networking, games, job hunting, bill payments.. the list goes on. Even young children are online and you can see from the following chart how it’s going. This generation will be enormously sophisticated in their usage, in how they view, and discerning in what they view. The challenge for online marketeers is to grab their attention, and then to hang on to it! 

Digital Marketing - the global audience

In Sweden, this penetration rises to 89.2%, the highest in the EU.

Statistics source: internetworldstats.com/Europa.htm

Of course, my own personal theory, that the ratio between internet users and inclement weather is inversely proportionate, is borne out by the fact that Iceland has the highest penetration of internet users, at 93.2%. The combination of  a long, cold, dark winter and cheap geothermal central heating has led to the population spending increasing amounts of time online, in the comfort of their home.

In fact, Iceland has the highest Facebook penetration in the world – almost 50% of the population is facebooking! (Source: www.nickburcher.com/2009/04/facebook-usage-statistics- by-population.htm).  And you see the same trend in the cold Nordic countries also.