The guys at Technobombs also have an updated comparison available here; http://www.technobombs.com/infographic-facebook-vs-google/
Whether or not you believe that Google’s new Google+ project will one day grow up to become the David that slays the Goliath that is Facebook, one thing for certain is that the social media landscape is set to be changed forever, with many die-hard Google loyalists already making the switch to the new social media platform.
Its no secret that since the launch of Facebook and its rapid rise to popularity, Google has been progressively losing market share in both traffic volumes as well as to its core business of paid inclusion advertising (specifically, Adwords). With Facebook offering unprecedented targeting to its internet users’ interests, likes and social demographic (which Adwords is currently unable to do), Google realised quickly that in order to remain a competitor in this space it had to solidify its own social media foothold.
Now Google+ isn’t the first attempt by the company to break into social media, with its purchase of Orkut a few years back failing to achieve sufficient momentum and consequently falling by Facebook’s wayside. Since then however, Google appears to have learnt many lessons from their earlier failure and has made considerable headway in the launch of its own mobile operating system, Android – now a major competitor to the Apple’s extremely popular iPhone. So while Facebook is definitely the market leader in social media atm, the tight integration between Google’s well established search and content networks, it’s mobile computing OS (for phones, tablet PCs etc) and now Google+ as it’s social media offering, could potentially provide users with a much tighter experience in digital social networking that Facebook could hope to achieve on its own, giving Google+ now a big advantage over Facebook and consequently a much stronger chance of getting it right this time.
But whatever the outcome of this (as its still early days yet), we’re sure to see some exciting developments ahead. At very worst, a little healthy competition never hurt to encourage further innovation by both players 
I’ve included a number of videos below which talk about the new features available in Google+;
Google + Stream
Google + Circles
Google + Profiles
Google + Hangouts
Google + Photos
Google + Huddle
Contact Internet Marketing Advantage today to find out more on how your business can benefit from a social media marketing strategy!
Facebook marketing offers an unprecedented ability to target your prospective customers based on geographic location, age and even their likes and interests, so it’s more important than ever to understand your consumers and how to reach them.
The following are some excellent online tools for establishing who and what demographic may be interested in your product or service;
Google Trends / Insights;
Google offers a range of services that will allow you to more accurately focus your Facebook marketing efforts toward the demographics where you’ll get the greatest return on your advertising dollar;
Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) provides information on search trends around key terms. Using this tool, you’ll be able to quickly identify season peaks and troughs in search volumes for that particular niche subject. For instance, say we were targeting a gardening niche we could easily identify that the country performing the most searches on this subject is Australia followed by New Zealand – as such a your Facebook marketing strategy would get the greatest return by targeting these demographics. With Google Trends you can also compare up to 5 topics at a time so you can easily identify any correlation in topic interests – results are even exportable to a CSV file!
Google Insight (http://www.google.com/insights/search) extends the Google Trends functionality by offering a more granular search capability on trends, allowing for geographic drill downs through a range of filter options. You can also see a graphical representation of the countries with the highest concentration of search volumes for the niche term you’re searching on;
A lesser known feature of Google Trends / Insights is that searches need not be limited to search terms only. A wealth of information can also be gained by searching on Websites on Insights via the following URL on Trends;
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com
Quantcast; http://www.quantcast.com
Another great online tool for discovering demographic information about a website’s traffic is Quantcast. While this service doesn’t exhaustively offer information on all sites, many of the more popular site are captured and can provide an excellent insight into your target market. In my own experience I have found this site somewhat limited, however when I’ve been lucky enough to find a listed site, the demographic information I was able to draw from this site has been quite indepth;
Marshall Index;http://www.marshallindex.com/
Marshall Index is a great site for finding out what topics are hot in the media atm. Perhaps more of a niche research tool than demographic research tool, this site provides a lot of useful information on consumer interest subjects. Check this out and have a drill down into some of the options available (under news –> entertainment), then check out some of the options to view tweets, youtube videos, Facebook, eBay offers etc around that subject. Excellent tool for idea generation!
As an example, see the screenshot below on Facebook popularity; http://www.marshallindex.com/terms/facebook-global-popularity
Hope you enjoyed the post, and Happy Hunting!
Official disclaimer; This will only work on Facebook pages where permissions allow it to take place (as is generally the case for any celebrity or public corporate figure). In using this method to populate your own wall, it may also be worth keeping in mind that the Facebook pages which you’re drawing the Wall post feed from may (more than likely) also be using their wall for publishing of their own promotional materials, so this would carry across to your own wall too. With that said, let’s get onto the nuts and bolts of how we can do this.
Let’s extend on my last post on Youtube RSS Feeds, and apply this again onto the celebrity niche. First we need to find the Celebrity we’re looking for official page. Let’s go with Celine Dion again;
http://www.facebook.com/celinedion
Next we need to get their unique page identifier. You can do this by right-clicking on the profile image for instance, and copying the URL. Paste this into Notepad – for Celine’s page, this will give you;
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?profile=1&id=6624036650
The value we’re after here is the id=xxxxxxxxxxx value, which we place at the end of the following two URL constructs to give us our RSS2.0 (or Atom10) feeds;
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=6624036650
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=6624036650
As with the Youtube RSS feed examples, you can check your RSS links to ensure they follow the correct (importable) format;
As simple as that! Import the above URL as your RSS feed to your Facebook page and now you’ve got the celebrity (or company or service you’re promoting) feeding content directly into your page!
Adding a Youtube RSS feed into your Facebook page is a simple and effective way to introduce rich media content into your wall updates without having to manually trawl the internet and post these individually.
I’ve had a few people report to me that they’ve had some difficulties in getting the official Youtube method working (http://www.youtube.com/rssls), so I thought I’d make a post to provide some clarification on this with some tried and proven techniques. I’ll be covering methods to include both a Youtube Search Result, as well as how to access a Youtube channel‘s RSS feed – using a celebrity niche as my example.
Youtube Channel RSS Feed
The following is based on the below Google code documentation:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#User_Uploaded_Videos
The basic URL construct for a user feed uses the following format;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads
Applying this to (for example) Celine Dion’s personal youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/CelineDionTV), we would then get;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/CelineDionTV/uploads
This new URL, you should be able to view in a browser to see a standard RSS feed layout similar to;
Youtube Search Results RSS Feed
The following is based on the below Google code documentation:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#Searching_for_Videos
The basic URL construct for a user feed uses the following format;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=SEARCH+QUERY&orderby=published&start-index=11&max-results=10&v=2
Applying this again to a search on “Celine Dion”, we’d get the following;
Search result feeds can be a little bit hit and miss (as evidenced by the RSS output of the above feed), so our recommendation would be to try and find an official channel to base your feed from – however either way you now at least have the tools to get it this going!
Importing your Youtube RSS Feeds
Even though these URL constructs will generate valid RSS feeds, we’ve still had instances where on importing these Facebook reports back that it was unable to find the feed. If you encounter this, simple retry to import this again as on the 2nd or 3rd attempt will usually be successful.
A powerful method for generating completely autopilot content into your Facebook page is through integrating an RSS feed into your Facebook Page’s wall updates. Below I’ve listed 5 powerful search engines to help you find RSS feeds relating to any topic you may wish to include into your Wall updates;
Search 4 RSS
Search4RSS.com helps you discover feeds by using a keyword. An auto-complete dropdown helps you with possible keywords. You can click on the URL of the website in the search results or directly click on the RSS feed link and subscribe to it. A grey link lets you preview the feed content from the site. Search4RSS.com is actually a motley of search engines available through one search box.
Plazoo
Plazoo is an RSS search engine that looks for news and information in thousands of RSS-Feeds. You can search across categories like blogs, company news, job market, news and media, and more. Results can be sorted by relevance or date. A set of advanced filters also fine tunes the search results. For instance, you can set which date should the oldest result have. You can limit searches by languages and media type too - very handy!
RSSoogle
Quite obviously, the name of the feed search engine comes from RSS and Google. You can use it like a general purpose search engine or use it to search for RSS feeds with a click on either of its two buttons. RSSoogle.com also extracts the date of the feed, so you can go for the ones which are current. If you like to add the search tool to your list of search engines in the browser; click on the link given at the top.
RSSMicro
RSSMicro.com is a feed specific search tool that taps into 12,000 indexed news sources. The service also uses its own proprietary feed ranking technology to improve the quality of the search results. Along with the feed search, you can do a web search, videos, and images. Before subscribing to the feed you can look into the inline preview and other included posts. After trying out the service, I am still a bit fuzzy about the co-relation between the site’s own Feedrank and the real timeliness of the search results, but still worth a look into.
Jamesoo
Jamesoo presents the searched out latest news in a newspaper-styled layout with a summary and a link to the main content. The search engine takes all the news from the latest RSS feeds published. You can also use the crawler in a choice of 15 languages. It is not perfect though, as some old posts make their way into the results page.
So in summary, RSS feed search engines offer a great tool for finding relevant and useful RSS feeds to stream into your Facebook pages. Remember, Facebook marketing is all about relationship building so always make sure that the content your providing your lists is valuable and interesting to them. The more they like your feed, the more their friends will get to hear about your page and the more your list will grow!
In our next posts we’ll be discussing how to integrate a Youtube channels as a video based RSS feeds, and even how to take the Wall updates of another public Facebook page (such as that of a celebrity) as an RSS feed into your own celebrity fan page – stay tuned
As internet marketers, we’re all familiar with the expression “the money is in the list“, a concept that is widely promoted as probably one of the most effective and powerful mechanism through which to drastically improve conversions to your website. Whether building a list through a dedicated lead capture system or just maintaining a contact list of existing customers, the primary objective of such lists is to encourage customer loyalty and ultimately translate into repeat business through the continued relationship management of your customers.
While conventional approaches to list building – through offering some incentive such as a free report, ebook in exchange for a prospective lead’s contact information – may have been an effective method for achieving this in the past, the process of building this into a site often involves costs for website design rework, creating the incentive itself and possibly even ongoing costs where a 3rd party email management services be used to support and manage these lists (such as aWeber).
Enter the world of Social Media and Facebook marketing. We’ve all seen the infamous ‘Like’ buttons appearing across the internet, so let’s take a closer look at what these actually mean and more importantly what they can do for your business.
Firstly, to draw reference to Facebook’s own definition of Like Buttons;
The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.
When your Web page represents a real-world entity, things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants, use the Open Graph protocol to specify information about the entity. If you include Open Graph tags on your Web page, your page becomes equivalent to a Facebook page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the “Likes and Interests” section of the user’s profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content.
I hear you saying “Open Graph tags!? OMG I have to code something??”. Open graph tags are definitely the more advanced ‘Like’ integration option and may well go beyond the average website owner comfort zones to implement, however don’t be scared away just yet. The Like button itself – which Facebook provides you the code for via a graphical user interface – is still an extremely powerful, simple and very effective tool for building a list of followers to your site. Let’s take a look at how to go about setting this up for your business.
Creating the Facebook page is simple;
- Log into your Facebook account (no need to create a new account if you’re already signed up)
- Create a new page for your business; http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. I generally go with Brand / Product and then a Website subcategory.
- Give the page a name reflective of your business.
- Customize your page to give it a picture (company logo), then edit your information to provide some company details.
- Make a few wall posts; perhaps to introduce new product lines, promotional offers, upcoming sales etc – make sure to includes some pictures also to keep the wall looking fresh and interesting.
Brilliant – so we’re half way there now! Next, to generate your Facebook ‘Like’ button;
- Firstly grab a copy of your page URL. This will look something like; https://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Marketing-Advantage-Pty-Ltd/138683548650
- Next, we jump across to the Developers pages to create a social plugin; http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
- We want to create a like button, so select this social plugin option. This will take us to the graphical user interface for creation of you like button;
- Paste your new company page URL into the “URL to Like” section at the top
- Configure the appearance options below to suit your requirements, then..
- Click ‘Get Code’ to export the FBML or iFrame code to plug directly into your website!
- See example at the bottom of this page, and click ‘Like’ to see how it works
The application of your Like button code is quite extensive. As the purpose of this being to connect your prospective clients to your new Facebook company page, you can (should) include this code directly onto your main company website, any online press releases, emails to your clients – basically anything you can which allows for HTML code to be included.
As you build your Facebook Like list, you’ll be able to directly communicate with your list through your Company’s Facebook page wall updates. Whenever you make a post to your wall, this immediately appears in your Like list’s friend feed. Then if they like your post, they can then click ‘Like’ again to put this on their own wall which shows your wall post to their friends, and so on… so if you’re having a sale on the weekend, you can quickly see how you can reach a large number of people very quickly and effectively using this technology – making this a VERY powerful marketing tool to have!
For more information on how you can drastically improve the effectiveness of your Facebook page, simply come to our Facebook page and click LIKE!
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