For the first time, Facebook now allows personal user profiles to be converted into official business Pages, turning all their friends into fans.
The “Profile To Business Page Migration” tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes.
As business people get in the habit of participating in online social networks and engaging in social behavior as part of their everyday routine, the next waves of online innovation won’t necessarily come in the form of a Facebook killer or Google launch, as they will in little adaptations of tools and apps that let us do more of what we’ve grown used to doing.
To me, a great case in point is the growing buzz around group texting apps. Group text apps such as GroupMe, Beluga and Disco allow users to form groups that can send and receive text messages in a sort of reply and read all manner.
You can think of it like group chat or reply all emails, but on the go and on a mobile device. You can also launch group conference calls from the service. (Right now most are limited to US carriers as sorting out International texting is going to prove trickier.)
oogle is making a big new push into social with a feature called “+1” that is similar in purpose to the Facebook “Like” button, but integrated directly into the world’s biggest search engine.
Starting Wednesday, users who opt into the +1 button experiment (and soon everyone else) in Google Labs will start seeing a +1 icon next to each link in Google search results.
Designing for the future Web. That’s a big subject. Where do we start when we’re talking about something that isn’t here yet?
In this article, we’ll look at what the future Web might look like and how we can adapt our current skills to this new environment, as well as how to create fluid websites that are built around a consistent core and that adapt to the limitations and features of the device on which they are viewed. We’ll also look at how our conceptual approach to designing websites should evolve: designing from the simplest design upwards, and not from the richest website down.
But before we get to that, let’s start with a question. What do we mean by the “future Web”?
Web site design principles and best practices are becoming well known these days. For example: In a process funnel, progress status should be readily visible across its pages. We should prevent errors from happening, but when errors do occur, provide adequate guidance to help users resolve them.
Many believe the basic principles and guidelines that are applicable in the design of Web sites should still apply when designing for mobile platforms. After all, Web design has evolved from basic, text-based HTML pages into today’s Web standards. So, we might expect that mobile sites that follow the same guidelines could easily reach the same level of success with users that desktop Web sites have achieved.
they come to your site. We want to take this conversation a step further today, and discuss some strategies that can potentially increase the cost per click (CPC) of your ad units.
Though we can’t quantify a good or bad CPC, there are several things you can do (and a few that you shouldn’t do) if you’re trying to increase the CPC of the ads on your site. Take a look at some of the best practices outlined below:
In the age of micropublishing, how many people are actually reading what you tweet or share on Facebook? And more importantly, how does the click-per-share ratio compare between the two very different social platforms that are utilized by millions of users every day for consuming and sharing content?
These are questions that keep social media strategists awake at night (or maybe just me). So at Mashable, we decided to take a look at our own data and see how user behavior compares between Facebook and Twitter, the two social media sites that generate the most referral traffic to Mashable.com.
After pulling three months worth of our social data and calculating the click-per-share (CPS), it appears that users on Twitter are more likely to share an article rather than read it, whereas users on Facebook click on more articles than they share. According to our social data, Twitter received roughly 0.38 clicks per tweet, whereas Facebook received 3.31 clicks per engagement (the number of times people posted a Mashable link to Facebook through an action on a social plugin or through a Wall post). This would mean that a Facebook action gets roughly 8.7x more clicks than a tweet.
Looking to carry out an investigation into whether social media is a big influence on search engine optimization? Monitoring these social media metrics will help you base your insights on more empirical data.
Online video is becoming a first stop for many customers. It is akin to what the Web page was a decade ago — something that can give early adopters an edge over competitors. It gives them a channel to talk directly to customers in ways previously accessible only to large companies that could afford TV advertisements.
This guide to using online video focuses on YouTube, which is by far the dominant player with two billion views per day — but many of the principles also apply to the other hosting services, including Vimeo, MetaCafe, Facebook, Viddler, Brightcove and Blip.tv.
Search engines such as Google have an amazing amount of data, both in general (they do store the entire web, after all) and about what we search for (in aggregate, regionally, and categorized in all kinds of segments).
In 2009, Google published a fascinating paper about predictions based on search data. The company has made use of this data in kinds of ways, such forecasting flu trends and predicting the impact of the Gulf oil spill on Florida tourism.
You can see the forecasted interest for all kinds of things using Google Insights for Search. Own a gardening web site? You might want to know that people are going to be looking for information on planting bulbs in April and October.
On March 8, I introduced my tenth book. There are few processes that I enjoy more than a product introduction, and this one enabled me to try many social media techniques and online tools and services.
After only a week, the book was on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. I have to conclude that at least some of that success was due to the promotional techniques I employed.
Here, I’d like to outline the 12 things that I did to launch my new book, including information about costs and vendors I used, as well as analytics. Though my “product” is a book, the methods I used can apply to product introductions in general. Hopefully this post will provide marketers with ideas for how to launch just about anything.
I doubt that this really shocks anyone when they are rationally thinking about the power of social media rather than being swept up in whatever hype is coming out of Silicon Valley these days.
Despite the social media revolution and the ‘your life will never be the same!’ messages that accompany every new product launch (Color anyone?) there still remains the fact that at least at this point in time people still talk more about brands and products face-to-face more than any other way.
A study performed by Colloquy and reported by eMarketer shows that even amongst the technologically savvy young adult crowd (age 18-25) face-to-face is the most often used method for giving information about products and brands.
With respect to the consumer Internet world, there are almost no valid reasons.
The best legitimate rationale applies only to a very small set of previously successful entrepreneurs who are "famous" and are attacking a market that is not intuitively massive. They might want to avoid signaling that the market opportunity merits a closer inspection until they are ready to launch.
I've recently seen a lot of chirping and discussion on the value of nofollow links for search optimization, with some people saying that there was value to having them. I asked three industry leaders in search engine optimization what their take was on nofollow links.
Specifically: "What's your take on no follow links? Is it still valuable to get them when you can, such as from social media sites or Wikipedia? Under what circumstances do you pursue links from Wikipedia? Is their huge reach and audience worth it, even without SEO value?"
Google introduced Custom Search Ads for AdSense today. These are AdSense ads designed for your site’s search results pages, so in effect, are similar to Google’s AdWords ads that appear in its own search results.
In hindsight, this offering seems like an obvious product for Google to offer, and will no doubt be a popular option for webmasters and publishers. If you have a significant amount of content, there’s a good chance your users may use your search feature.
After a year of “beta testing”, a new version of Facebook questions rolled out yesterday. Naturally, I had a ton of questions on how questions works and how brands may use questions on fan pages, which I’ll uncover below.
Are you overlooking some of the most powerful influencers on the social web? Let’s find out.
Traditionally, there has been a 1-9-90 rule when it come to creating and consuming content:
There’s a new element in this equation, though: Content Curators — people who make a practice of finding content relevant to their friends and followers, and then sharing links to that content. I am making a distinction between a curator and an aggregator who pulls content from around the web, usually related to a specific topic, to display on websites generally to enhance search engine optimization.
One of the main reasons that people "Like" a page is because they want to stay up to date with the latest happenings at a particular company. Just like a company blog, if your Facebook Fan Page is rarely updated then people aren't going to have much incentive to "Like" your page. It's not only important to update your page with relevant company info, but also interesting goings-ons in your industry.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
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You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.