Social Media Infographics

Social Media Infographics

The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct:



Facebook’s World

Facebook is the most dominant brand in the world of social media. Ever wonder how? Click the image below to view a comprehensive infographic:



Age Distribution on Social Networking Sites

Here’s some interesting statistics regarding the age distribution across many of the popular social networking websites:



A HubSpotter’s Guide to the (Social Media) Galaxy

Learn how marketers should explore new frontiers of social media, the blogoshere and more:



Digg vs. Reddit — The Infographic

There has always been a form of healthy rivalry between Reddit and Digg, and its respective user bases. Click to find out more:



Average Age of a Facebook User? 38

The demographics of most of the social networking sites change quite frequently. Flowtown has compiled the latest statistics about general usage of social networking sites especially Facebook. The statistics show that the average age of a Facebook user is 38 and more interestingly about 61% of the Facebook users are above 38 in age:



How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media?

Have you ever wondered about the relationship between mobile phones and social media? The mobile web is growing at an exponential rate, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down:



Social Media Demographics: Who’s Using Which Sites?

Have you ever wondered which sites attract the most educated of social media users, or those that pull in the highest income? Below we map the demographics of the world’s most popular social media sites:




How Executives are Using Social Media

The infographics mentioned below show how executives and professionals are using social media to promote their business or goods and services. According to the infographic: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites used by the executives:



Facebook vs. Twitter -- A Breakdown of 2010 Social Demographics

Let us take a look at a breakdown of 2010 social demographics between Facebook and Twitter:



Women and Social Media

The following is a graphic that takes a look at what sites women are using, as well as how much and why women are participating in social media:



Facebook vs. Twitter

Facebook was once the “contender” against MySpace. That didn’t last too long, but soon Twitter emerged as a pseudo-social-network-competitor-thingy to Facebook and the competition heated up again:



Social Media: A Cheat Sheet

Are you new to social media? Are you unsure about how to engage your audience via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest? Here’s a handy infographic that doubles as a roadmap of the social Web:



Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

If you ever want to impress anyone with your knowledge of Facebook miscellanea, below is the ultimate cheat sheet in the form of a very large infographic. Enjoy!



The Social Media Effect

This Infographics is intended to show you how different components of social media are integrated with one another:



When Social Media Attacks!

What happens when communities don’t exactly behave the way we intended them to? Fighting and bickering is normal and actually healthy for communities. Click to find out more:



Google’s Social Media Timeline

Google hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to social media attempts. Long story:



Social Media Prisms

The prism shows the landscape of social media in Germany with all the relevant conversation channels:



Social Media Building

So much discussion in the SEO community today centers around social media because of its potential to drive traffic, increase awareness, and build links. Here we explore some ways that a business can leverage specific social sites to achieve departmental goals:



China’s Social Media Map

The major players in the U.S. social media world can be counted on one hand: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not so in China, where the country’s 300 million online users have a panoply of popular social networks to choose from — and Facebook doesn’t even crack the top 10!



Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time

Social media monitoring and analytics company Viralheat put together this graphic that shows the initial positive response to Google Buzz on Twitter, followed by shifts in opinion based on events in the developing privacy story:



The State of B2B Social Media Marketing

For a deeper look at the current state of B2B social media marketing, check out the infographic below:



Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook?

Is Facebook an amazing connective medium? A plague that preys on the easily addicted? A little bit of both, or something else entirely?



The Meteoric Rise of Twitter

Twitter is one of among those brands and companies which have experienced such a fast growth. Click the image below to view the infographic:



Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy

Here is a short history of the controversies and missteps that have tarnished the social network’s otherwise meteoric success:



The Biggest Brands on Facebook

In this infographic, we explore the timeline of brand-friendly updates to Facebook itself, as well as the brands that dominate in Facebook marketing today:



Kevin Rose’s Digg

With over millions of users, Digg has become one of the most reputable force in the social media world that allows you to share your favorite stories online with your friends, co-workers and relatives:



The Current State of Twitter

There are some interesting hidden truths about Twitter and its users. The following graphic takes a look at Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets, what we have learned about its users and what they’ve been talking about along the way:



Twitter on Paper

This infographic contains additional interesting facts about Twitter based on some numbers that co-founder Ev Williams announced at the Chirp conference:



What the Tweet?

Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. Click here to find out more:



How are Companies Leveraging Social Media?

Ever wonder how big businesses are leveraging social media? Here is a graphic illustrating the most interesting of their findings:



The Rise of Facebook Mobile

Facebook is the number one app across most mobile operating systems. Flowtown.com took a look at the rise of Facebook mobile, and compiled a number of the most interesting facts and figures in the above graphic:



44% of Online Sharing Occurs Through Facebook

Impressively, 44% of shares occurred through Facebook in 2010, up 33% from last year. That number does not include shares done via Facebook’s “Like” button, which means the actual, universal percentage of shares through Facebook is likely higher:



Inside the Political Twittersphere

Ever wondered how politicians use Twitter? Who are the most active politicians on Twitter? Who do they follow, and who follows them? Who are the political strategists and media personalities that politicians follow? And within the political Twittersphere, who follows the most people, and who follows them?



Twitter Users Profile Infographic

Satire and the Internet make great friends. And the newest Internet sensation to be targeted is Twitter. While many blogs make fun of twitter you must admit Twitter does have a larger group of followers. Of course, how many are actually paying attention remains to be seen:



History of Social Media -- History of Social Media Bookmarking

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries:



Social Marketing Compass

A compass is a device for orientating oneself and guiding physical direction. The social marketing compass points a brand in a physical and experimental direction, allowing them to connect with their customers, peers, and influencers, where those users already interact and seek guidance online:



Social Web Involvement

This map demonstrates the social web involvement of the users worldwide. It provides you a clear picture that every month hundreds of millions of web users create and share their content with one another. This map shows the active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo up-loaders and micro-bloggers:



The Biggest Shift

The Biggest Shift tells the significance and extent of social media network. If you are keen to utilize word of mouth advertising, social media is there to assist to place heighten your works at all. With focusing your marketing interest to the top social networking websites, you will see the instant results of your efforts:



How People Share Content On The Web

This infographic will show that how people share pieces of contents on the web and how facebook dominates social media:

Social Media & Reputation Management Tools

Social Media & Reputation Management Tools

Brand and online reputation management has become a growing concern for a lot of companies because of the multiple ways people can interact with each other online. People now are communicating via blogs, forums, discussion boards, wikis, Q&A, and video sites.

Do you know what people are saying about you? Online reputation management consists of tracking your brand and reacting when necessary. Sometimes it's tedious. But brand monitoring can save you from a potential disaster. It can also help you proactively join conversations around your topic area, to get your brand name out there.

With unless number of social content sharing sites out there, it can be hard to manage what people are saying about you and your brand.

Radian6
Overview: Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Tool
Price: starts at $600 per month
Free Trial: No, Webinar Demo Only
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Radian6 Overview

Alterian SM2
Overview: Social Media Monitoring and Analysis with SM2
Price: Limited Trail & SM2
Free Trial: Y, Up to 5 Keywords, 1000 results
Web/Software: Software-based
Demo: Trial and Demo

ViralHeat
Overview: Social Media Monitoring & Analytics
Price: $9.99/month – $89.89/month
Free Trial: Y, 7 Day Trial
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: ViralHeat Video Tour

Jive Software
Overview: Engage Social Web | Social Brand Management
Price: Contact to Inquire
Free Trial:
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Jive in action: Video Demos

Spiral 16
Overview: Social Media and Web Monitoring 3D Virtualization
Price: Contact to Inquire
Free Trial: N, Schedule a Demo Only
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Schedule a Demo

BuzzDing!
Overview: Online Reputation Management and Social Media Monitoring
Price: $14/month – $199/month
Free Trial: Y, 7 Day Trial
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: BuzzDing! Tour

Trackur
Overview: Social Media Monitoring Tools & Reputation Management
Price: $18/month – $377/month
Free Trial: Y, 14 Day Trial
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Trackur Overview

Mixero
Overview: Professional Twitter client for Windows, Mac, Linux and iPhone
Price: Free
Web/Software: Software-based
Demo: Mixero on Vimeo

Collective Intellect
Overview: Social Media Analytics
Price: Contact to Inquire
Free Trial: N
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Contact

Moreover Technologies
Overview: Real Time Market Intelligence
Price: Contact to Inquire
Free Trial: Y, 30 Day
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Moreover Technologies Demo

WhosTalkin?
Overview: Social Media Search Tool
Price: Free
Free: Y
Web/Software: Web-based

Lithium
Overview: Social Media Monitoring Tool
Price: Contact to Inquire
Free Trial: Y, 14 Days
Web/Software: Web-based
Demo: Lithium Tour

CONTACT US FOR MORE DETAILS

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) may appear like child’s play. After all, what is there to it? Create a bunch of profiles, Digg a little, Stumble a bit and you are set, right? Wrong! That is the exact attitude that can kill your social media campaign (and dreams) before it can begin.

I don’t mean to suggest that it is beyond a social media novice to successfully carry out a marketing campaign. Armed with enough knowledge, I am fairly certain, even a novice will be able to pull it off. Nor am I making it out to be more complex than rocket science. However, approaching it with a complacent attitude definitely won’t be helpful. Social media, as much ‘fun’ as it is, is not without rules. And successful social media marketing is possible only if one, pro or novice, follows these rules.

DO’S!

1. Build a strong social network. So, you have a profile on Twitter, so, it has over thousands followers. You pat yourself on your back for building such a strong social network. Boy, are you ever so wrong? Have you taken care to ascertain how many of these thousands of followers are legit? And how often do you interact with your followers, respond to the tweets you receive? Less than positive answers to either of these questions mean that despite the impressive number of followers, your social network is as weak as it can get. Interact with your network, only that can ensure your network is as true to you as you want it to be and that your message is conveyed successfully.
2. Expend your effort building the trust quotient of your site. If yours is not a trusted site, set about working on improving the areas it is found lacking in. When you engage in SMM, you are inviting the entire world to scrutinize your site, if you think it won’t be able to stand up it, wait until you are ready to launch you campaign. You can start by ensuring your site is clean of harmful viruses and spammy links.
3. It’s simple, it may sound a little hackneyed, but it is also true – pretty impossible to drive a social media campaign without a blog. Bloggers pioneered and now sustain social media, without them, there would be nothing to Digg, or Like or Stumble. Social media would be reduced to a couple of social networks and unending streams of status updates. (All right, maybe a little more than that, but you get the picture). Integrate a blog (pretty easy to do with Word press) into your site and update it regularly with ‘good’ content!
4. This is a classic tip, works every time. You may remember a time when ‘List’ posts were all the rage (as a matter of fact, they are still very popular), how they could draw traffic to a blog like nothing else could. Well, now with the immense popularity that video sharing sites seem to enjoy, creating a video in the vein of a List post (for example, a ‘How To’ or an ‘x Best Tips’ video) and uploading it on sites like YouTube and Tubemogul is something that can really benefit your SMM efforts. Sure, you wouldn’t say no to instant exposure and the possibility of reaching millions of viewers. Apart from YouTube, you can promote the links to the videos on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and effortlessly double the exposure your brand stands to receive.
5. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your finger on the pulse. Bad anatomical idioms aside, being aware of all the changes happening around you on the web is important not just in social media marketing, but any kind of marketing on line. Subscribe to feeds from relevant sites, use an RSS reader (like, Zune or Feedreader) and be among the first to comment on posts you like or find particularly relevant. Commenting on posts is great way to get in to the thick of the social activity on a site, but being the first commenter will give you the opportunity to initiate a discussion and channel it in the direction you wish to.
6. Social media marketing can hardly be possible unless you are willing to be, you know, social. It’s a given that you should make your presence felt on all the major social sites, but what is equally important, but is often overlooked is being part of micro-communities – that are relevant to your business. While your message may get lost in the irrelevant ‘noise’ on established social sites, it has more probability of reaching the intended audience in a smaller, but niche, micro-community. If you have a site about pet grooming, joining a niche community for dog lovers like Dogster will greatly help your business.
7. Stick to your brand philosophy! Just because you are depending on a (relatively) modern approach to marketing doesn’t mean you have to abandon your brand’s basic ideology, which has hitherto guided you. Let your brand philosophy guide your SMM strategy, it will stop you from over-promising and help sustain your brand identity.
8. Be familiar with the social culture of the communities you frequent – very important, lest you commit a social faux pas and the other members banish you from the community. If you have ever participated in a forum discussion, you know what I mean. Like forums, social communities have a certain culture – certain jargons they favor, certain topics that are preferred. If you wish to be accepted as part of a community, be sure you are well-versed with its ways and are prepared to adapt. Though essentially they do the same thing, Digg and Reddit has different and distinct cultures; if you are found to be pro-Reddit on Digg, you’ll be buried even before you can say social!

DON’Ts!

1. Don’t ‘spam’ on social sites. A no-brainer, really. Everyone on the Internet knows that Spam = Evil, so if you are engaging in social spamming, you are clearly prepared to see your SMM campaign die an extremely quick death. But to those of you, who are yet to commit this cardinal of sins, let me say this: DON’T DO IT! Not only you lose your credibility, social or otherwise, but all your efforts will go to naught as well. Social spamming isn’t limited to offering unsolicited irrelevant links on social sites; posting promotional comments (with or without links), Digging or Stumbling posts on popular topics that are in no way related to your site, even sending automated Direct Messages on twitter are considered spammy practices.
2. Avoid blatant marketing tactics, be subtle. I know what you are thinking, “what’s the point of having a ‘subtle’ marketing campaign?” I am afraid that’s the way things work in social media. The ‘social’ element (a.k.a user/follower/fan) in social media apparently has little patience for overtly promotional and gimmicky marketing tactics. Give then fun contests, quizzes and games that don’t ‘corrupt’ the social space too much, and they’ll love you!
3. Don’t forget to keep your social profiles live and updated. One would think, this goes without saying, but there are enough ‘dead’ profiles out there to change one’s thinking. I don’t like following, friending or even ‘fanning’ inactive profiles, I can only imagine it is true of other social media users too. Freshness is of the essence in social media, if all a profile can provide is stale information, it is of little use to anyone.
4. Don’t forget about Online Reputation Management. A significant amount of signals monitored in ORM come from social sites. So, while you are engaged in SMM, it is of vital importance to gauge user reaction to your product and to take appropriate measures to counter any less-than favorable signal. If these negative signals point to an actual problem with your product, take them to heart and address the issue immediately. If they aren’t, work to rectify the wrong perception.
5. Don’t drop search in favor of social. You SMM efforts should complement your SEO efforts. Choosing one over the other will turn out to be nothing so much as a mistake. Continue building links and optimizing your site while you build your presence in social media.
6. Don’t try to do too much too fast. Let your SMM take a natural course. Natural being the keyword here; just because you figured you got into the game a little too late, don’t try to make up for it by working over time. So, tweeting updates every half an hour – bad idea. Your followers want to receive useful tweets from you, even one tweet a day will very likely keep them happy. Try not to flood their streams with less-then-useful, overtly promotional tweets, this holds true for your activity on other social sites as well.
7. You social media activities should be primed to bring exposure to your site. They certainly should not be used to go on the offence and slander your competition. Battling it out with a competition can do more harm than good to your SMM efforts.
8. Don’t engage in social climbing – you can’t have a successful SMM campaign if you have only people with big, established profiles on your network. While seeking to climb the social ladder, arguably in an effort to boost the importance of your profile, you may lose out on many a potential customer.

Consider these rules while you are chalking out your SMM marketing plan and you can stop worrying about your efforts backfiring on you.

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

When a search engine sends out a robot / spider to visit your website with the goal of indexing your content it is only looking at what is being presented in the Markup Language. Generally a search engine does not behave like a user when indexing your website, it doesn’t click buttons or links it simply makes note of URLs associated with each page then individually then visits these pages to index them. This largely goes against the goal of AJAX which is to have as few pages as possible by interacting with the web server in a smarter method as the users interact with the website.

To put the last paragraph simply any content that is changed via AJAX or Javascript on a webpage that is not hardcoded in a page won’t be cached by the search engines. This essentially means that if you have great content that the search engines may love but you’re using AJAX you may be missing out on traffic. There are two approaches to rectifying these which may even give you an advantage over sites that don’t utilize Javascript / AJAX.

The first approach is to make sure that your website degrades to normal flat markup language for non javascript capable browsers and search engines. Essentially every time you would have used an AJAX call make sure you have a page with the same content. Unfortunately for a lot of people this could mean a lot of work, for those individual using a database with PHP or ASP it is not too hard to build a site that builds itself with some effective web programming.

The second approach is to use AJAX in a more minimalist fashion. The goal here is to present the search engines with your optimized content while making sure that any AJAX calls a user would do has no bearing on what you want the search engines to see. In fact this can be used to remove content from your website which may negatively affect your rankings such as testimonials. I’ve seen very few testimonials that actually do good things for a sites keyword density, I’ve even been known to optimize testimonials on client’s websites. With Javascript / AJAX you could insert a random testimonial into a page and therefore not affecting that pages keyword density. The only downside to this approach is that some offsite keyword density tools actually use Web Browser rendering engines so they may get false results as it takes the Javascript into account.

Now you may think that I’m anti AJAX from everything that I’ve said, but there are times and places for AJAX, provided it doesn’t affect how the search engines see your beautiful relevant content your trying to rank. AJAX is great to use for Member sections of your website, interactive forms, slideshows, and a lot more it just needs to be leveraged correctly to avoid missing out on search engine visitors. The final thing to keep in mind is that most search engines like to see more than a single page website which many AJAX website appear to be, always strive for at least 5 or more indexable pages as internal links and anchor text can have a lot of value.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Social networking profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks is to register on social media sites with high PageRank: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ecademy, Twitter etc. These sites allow you to set up a user profile with information about you and your company, including a link to your website. The only catch is that not all of these sites' links are 'do-follow' - which means your site will not always receive the 'link juice'.

Links in Twitter posts

If you place a link to a web page in your Twitter post, keep in mind that all of Twitter's outbound links are 'no-follow'. Google and Yahoo do not pass the Trust or PageRank power through the 'no-follow' links. Thus Twittering has limited value for your site.

However, such links do have some value. In May 2009, we witnessed the launch of the Topsy site, a technology that transforms Twitter links into a searchable database. Topsy makes it possible for users to search for information (relevancy is determined based on the number of re-tweets). So, any Twitter link now has a chance to be found and followed by Topsy visitors. Remember, increased traffic is the main goal!

Social bookmarks forever?

Is it possible to get permanent links from social bookmarks? Well, yes and no. Most social bookmarking sites will retain your bookmark until it's popular. But as your bookmark loses popularity over time, it will be moved into the archives. Ideally, a permanent link should stay on the same page with approximately the same PR forever, but in reality, most social bookmarking websites remove links after some time.

Nevertheless, social bookmarking sites are valuable for other reasons. If you have a quality article that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites, people will link to that article in their blogs, and post 'do-follow' links on forums.

You can search the Web for the keywords 'do-follow social bookmarking sites' to find the latest lists. Networkers have also created services like socialposter.com or socialmarker.com for automatic submission to bookmarking sites.

The truth about blog comments

Blog commenting is probably the most popular - and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) - technique of getting permanent links.

The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That's because the page's PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn't want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the 'nofollow' attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.

A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google's approach to passing PageRank through the links with the 'nofollow' attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing 'link juice'. The only difference is that it's neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.

If you own a blog, setting up the 'nofollow' attribute to all comments means conserving your blog's 'link juice' and getting fewer comments. The 'do-follow' principle can lead to more spam, but it's a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don't rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.