Facebook’s “Awesome” Addition
I noticed that Facebook now offers Skype integration. This must be “Awesome” addition to Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg was eluding to during his last trip to Seattle. With the partnership that Microsoft has with Facebook it comes and no surprise that Facebook would have a partnership with Skype / Microsoft. With the release of Google+ and their video hangouts, this should make things interesting within the social space.
First Imperssion of Google+
First Impression of Google+
With Google+ launching in a closed beta phase, I am fortunate to be a part of it early on and I wanted to give a first impression breakdown of Google+ as it stacks up against the giant Facebook.
At first glance the two have the same look and feel. Very clean lines and content is the main portion of the user experience. But after looking it over a little more Google+ has a slight advantage over Facebook with no pushy banners, over power events and let?s not forget the nonsense horoscope, game requests, or look who answered a question about me bullshit.
Google+ is not initially positioned for the average users, but for the super social users. (aka. Geeks) Rather Google+ is being pushed for business class; mind 20?s ? 40?s demographic. Google+ is not currently a Teen venue like MySpace was and Facebook has become. ?It is more of a civil way of being social online. ? (Imagine me saying that in a tight jawed British accent ? no offense to our London peeps)
Google+ seems to have gotten the community activity right. Google+ has “hangouts” a video group chat application that lets groups communicate via webcams. This will be one of the game changers for Google+. This will allow users to conduct meetings, conferences and plain family events with their selected groups. This has the potential to be a social Juggernaut if Google can incorporate the hangout with mobile.
The other main differentiation for Google+ will be its ability to have full analytics data to go along with it. Google has been rolling in social data and Google +1 data for a few months now. So I think it is safe to say GA will be able to have full analytics for user engagement for Google+ in the near future. That is where Facebook has fallen short in the past.
I do not see my mother jumping on the Google+ bandwagon, but it will be fun to watch these two major corporations who have unlimited funds to play with. Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon due to their sheer number of users and worldwide adoption, but Google will start to make an impact.
Social Media & SEO Benefits:
Most successful social media campaigns utilize back links to complement the SEO campaign. This is one of the metrics for producing a ROI for the campaign. Link building is one of the top factors in SEO and it has been proven to be a strong component of long term SEO success. Link building via social media allows the company to focus on two key areas to any business playing in the online marketing space.
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Social Media and SEO
Recently I had an interesting discussion about social media and the effects it has on SEO. The main focus we couldn’t escape talking about the famous “Dominos Pizza YouTube Incident.” The incident It happened quite a while ago, but I’m pretty sure everybody’s seen at least part of the famous YouTube video where Dominos employees Kristy and Michael film themselves doing some pretty disgusting things to the food.
The main area of the discssion was the Dominos video because it’s an excellent example of viral media, using social media, and how social media relates to SEO. Shortly after it was uploaded to YouTube, the video was being spread around the web at one of the faster rates recorded for viral content. On its first day, over 1 million people viewed the video – even before the news stations started running the story.
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