Yes, Twitter and Facebook are more addictive than cigarettes, according to new research. It is all of us, over  900 million users who have helped make Facebook such a success because we are indirectly the product.

Let’s face it: Facebook has long lost a huge degree of its cultural cool for me maybe because I socialise more with my fanpage than personal (Perhaps thats what Facebook wants) with its new eye catching redesign for marketing opportunities.

Facebook encourages self promotion and a funny way of keeping in touch with friends by showing list of songs you listening to, videos you’ve been watching, news or ebooks you’ve been reading. While no modern website on earth exists without a Facebook Share button (exagerated), influential social media movements like Twitter & LinkedIn are also on the rise.

Coming in to fill the empty large house on the social media block is Google+ with intuitive features(Circles, hangouts) that makes Facebook look like old. Other guerilla social media movements includes  Pinterest, Path, Tumblr, Badoo and other social media apps on mobile platform.

It could be said that no online product or service has kept its lustre for more than a  decade. Even Google and Yahoo are now struggling to maintain its dominance in search and either building a social networking site or suing  for patents rights to compete with Facebook. In few countries like China and India, Facebook membership faces serious hurdles due to government restrictions/policy on the social networking site and other indigenous social networking sites.

Facebook wont die overnight. Its fate will be like AOL or Yahoo: a huge IPO would make the execs rich; then talent will leave, a lot of fresher networks will emerge and slow, inevitable decline begins.

I may be right or wrong. Do you think Facebook will be overtaken ?

Are you on LinkedIn, Pinterest? Do you tweet? Do you blog? Do you spend time on Youtube, Facebook or G+ ? Perhaps, you likely are presently engaged in one of these before getting on this page. Yes, social media as a business tool cannot be over-emphasized. Already, individuals and many organisations alike have absorbed social media into their marketing and PR.

This post highlights 10 key strategies to make social media an effective for your personal brand  or business:

1. Control Google

In my previous post about how to know what Google knows about you, it highlighted the need to understand how Google uses your personal and social sentiment to help determine which ads to show you based on your account information as its evident with their new privacy policy. One can come to the conclusion that your personal brand is equal to your google results, so get active as search engines love to see fresh content coming out of Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is imperative to harness all these platforms.

2. Use One Display Picture

Yes, this might seems boring but it very much professional for a personal brand to use the same image (even it if requires changing them occasionally) across each platform that represents your brand online.

3. Tagline Consistency

Your personal tagline is where you say who you are and what you do in about 10-140 characters. Make sure it’s identical everywhere- on your Twitter bio as well as LinkedIn.

4. Know Your Audience

This perhaps could be difficult at the start but identifying a niche market or finding where your target audience like to hang out and target that platform via an effective strategy.

5. Connect with Key Names

Every industry has its “Mafia”. It is important to know them and start following or engaging with them online so as to ensure you’re on their radar.

6. Content Marketing

Procuring quality content can be challenging but necessary to continually engage your audience. But setup a system of procuring quality content from the web  relevant to you audience. Present this to your network regularly- just remember to add your personal twist to avoid plagiarism or duplicate content.

7. Create Content

Creating content is better than procuring content and more challenging. Content can be anything from a blog post, a podcast or a Youtube clip

8. Listen

Use Twitter search, LinkedIn signal and Google Alerts so you can monitor mentions of your name, company and keyword related to your industry.

9. Meet People

Some of the greatest relationships start on social networks and are taken offline. Meeting people for a drink or at events creates even stronger bonds online.

10. Remember to Switch Off

Social media is a time bandit. Set a limit.

Personally, I  do employ majority of these steps and still need to improve on other areas. Which of these steps are you effectively using presently, share with us ?

Have you ever wondered what make the ads you see on the web more interesting, well Google uses your personal and social sentiment to help determine which ads to show you.

Google uses your Google account information, such as items you +1′d on Google websites and across the web, to personalize content and ads on non-Google websites.

How it works ?

Many websites, such as news sites and blogs, partners with Google to show ads to their visitors. Your interests are associated with an advertising cookie that’s stored in your browser. Google actually gives users the ability to edit/correct the personal information stored in the cookie Google has about you.

Simply go to: Google Ads settings page and Google will tell you what it knows about you, and it gives you the option of changing it if you like.

Here’s what they think about me: [screen shot]

It’s actually pretty accurate,  so I do know the ads I expect to see.

Google is Watching and Measuring Your Search History

Google also uses your actual search history to determine what ads to show to you. This is most apparent on the Google Display Network, where you are likely retargeted to no end after visiting an advertiser’s web site.

In search, Google uses “session-based ads” to show ads to you for products that are totally unrelated to your current search, but might have been something you searched on in recent memory.

I recently attended a google event, which was deemed to be the biggest Engage event of the year  with the aim of learning the very best ways to service clients from insights to creating proposals to tracking and measuring results. The event tagged Google Engage: Box of Tricks showcased  top tips on Google’s agency tools and an insight into Google’s latest products including AdWords Express and Google + Pages.

In a keynote speech, Google and Innovation by Arvind Desikan, Google’s Head of Consumer Marketing, he pointed out that, as Google  is continually looking towards the future, these core principles guide their actions. The 8 innovation principles of Google are outlined below:

• Focus on the User
• Open will Win
• Ideas omes from everywhere
• Think Big, Start Small
• Never Fail to Fail
• Launch early and Iterate
• Be a Platform.Float all Boats
• Make it Matter

The online search giant released a short video recently highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years.

From the Google blog post announcing the video, Google sums up its approach to improving search: “Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it.”

Click here to see a larger version of the timeline.

Google has overhauled the way it serves up results in response to search queries.The update is designed to work out whether a person wants up-to-date results or historical data.
The US firm estimated the alterations to its core algorithm would make a difference to about 35% of searches. The changes try to make results more relevant and beef up features which Google believes set it apart from rivals and to offer a better guess of how “fresh” the results should be. The under-the-hood changes sought to understand whether a searcher wants results “from the last week, day or even minute”.

The update to improve the “freshness” of results builds on the big update made to the underlying infrastructure of Google’s core indexing system in August 2010 known as Caffeine. That change made it easier for Google to keep its index up to date and to add new sources of information. The last big update to the Google algorithm, known as Panda, affected only 12% of searches.

As the web gets ever increasingly social, it is important to be updated constantly. The growth of Google+ is something that marketers and bloggers will need to continue to optimize as it will drive traffic to your sites. Google+ Devs, an unofficial Google+ api news and development site has created a WordPress Plugin that allows people to add themselves to your Google+ followers and put you in their circles. It is called the Google+ card by plusdevs.

I have installed in it on my website. The plugin adds a widget to your wordpress install that will display your ‘googleCard’ in your blog’s sidebar.

How To Install it on Your Blog

1. Download googlecards.zip and unzip
2. Upload the unzipped googlecards folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Go to the ‘Widgets’ menu in WordPress and add the widget to your sidebar.
5. Choose a title for the widget and input your google+ id. (You can find your google+ id by going to your profile, it is the 21 digit number e.g. plus.google.com/YOUR_ID_IS_HERE).

UPDATE: Installed a more user friendly widget, you can find it here

The service has barely been available for a month now, and has acquired over 10 million users. That’s a big feat considering it’s the new social media networking platform out there battling with a host of others. Google is slowly pulling all strings together to “make GOOGLE the new INTERNET” by giving users a more streamlined experience between their products.

Once it is fully opened to developers, we’re bound to see a huge influx of useful and interesting apps built around the network. Ofcourse its not quite there yet, there are certain features that are are lacking but even as it is, Google+ offers a great option for users embracing it.
Personally, I feel you can get as creative as you want with how you put Google+ to use.  Statistics as shown that users are predominantly male and tilted to the tech savvy individual, I soon hope other users will be able to join Google+  over time.

Here are the 8 Reasons Why Google+ Has So Much Potential:

1. Communication

Google clearly has done its homework very well when it comes to being social on web compared to Facebook as described in an Interview of Matt Brittin, Managing Director UK and Ireland, Google by Mark Choueke, Editor of Marketing Week after a presentation on Fast and Happy: how the web is changing the world for consumers.

Matt talks about search and social and other initiatives google is laying ahead in the pipeline such as the Google Plus Project and how facebook is not “social enough”. Watch the video here.

With the Circle feature, you can make announcements to an entire circle of colleagues, to specific colleagues, or even share information privately one-on-one. You can browse your circles to see what all the different people in your life are sharing with you. The integration of Google Chat into Google+ makes it easy to have quick conversations all in one place.

The Hangout feature is the ideal alternative to video conferencing, useful for companies. You can absolutely start a Hangout at any time, from anywhere as up to ten people can pop in and chat.

With the Sparks feature, you can use it to get a constant feed of things that you’re really into and share it with friends. Yes, The Google+ project makes sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life.

2. Project Management

Of course, with any project management tool you need to be able to create individual projects, list tasks and assign them. For project management in an organisation, circles are actually the ideal solution. All ideas, videos, pictures and more, will be on that Circles page, so everything is documented. The circle becomes the workspace and the tool of communication in one go.

There are several ways you can deal with task management using Google+ for project management in a company. First for each project or department circle, you can assign the task in the circle, and the person who has been assigned comments to confirm they have received it.

3. Youtube Integration

Recently, the platform integrated the Youtube channel plug-in so it is easier for user to embed or watch their favorite videos which shows extent the search engine  giant is putting towards integrating all its products together.

4. File Sharing

With Google+, it’s also more than easy to share images, videos and links. You can actually upload any kind of file to Google Documents, and then share them using the traditional Google Documents method, via email.

5. Contacts

All of your contacts are integrated into one place. Google+ profiles add a little personal touch where you can share links to your websites, portfolios and more. In short, it makes it really easy to share more information about yourself with your colleagues if you want.

 6. Email Integration

It’s a given that using Google will give you one account to keep track of your incoming emails with notification in your Google+ bar to let you know when you have a new email. This feature definitely gives a hint of the potential of integrating all Google products into Google+.

 7. Notifications

Aside from Gmail notifications, you might also want to receive Google Plus notifications to let you know when a colleague has made an update. With an extension like Helper for Google+, you can receive a notification whenever a new update is made.

 8. Mobile Access

The feature on the mobile phone is particularly useful if you want to keep up with your colleagues in real time while you’re on the go though just still available on the Android platform and still expecting an iOS app approval of from the Apple Store.
Do you think G+ has got potentials? Share your opinion in the comments.

Here are the Top 10  Rising Web Searches  in Nigeria for the Month of June:

So what have  you been searching for  on the web ?

Yes, Search Engine Optimisation, there are a lot of articles on this topic online, so i won’t hard sell on how to be on Google page rank and position 1 but just highlights few tips to achieve a better Google ranking. Building an online presence and having increased visibility requires having new and relevant content which is frequently indexed by Google. And as always, the key is to focus on publishing high-quality content that readers will want to share.

Here are 5 tips to move to the top of the Google search rankings.

#1. It’s all about the user

It’s important to remember that the reason for the continually changing algorithms and updates is that Google has one objective—to provide the highest quality, most relevant search results possible. When it comes to search engine rankings and improving SEO, start by looking at the site from the perspective of the user searching Google. Does your site provide the best, most relevant information for a given search term, keywords, design and if not, what can you do to fix it?

#2. On-site Optimisation and Off-site Optimisation

Content: Now, in the eyes of Google, it’s better to have fewer high-quality pages then lots of low-quality pages. Blogging is still one of the best ways to move up the search engine rankings as it is a good way to add high-quality information to a website. However, web pages or blog posts offering little of value can now negatively impact a website. Removing these pages might actually help a website move up the rankings or recover from a drop in ranking.

Links: Incoming links have always looked good in the eyes of Google, which is referred to as Off-site Optimisation. As a result, one way to move a site up the search engine rankings is to generate a high number of incoming links all pointing to a given web page.

As Google places higher and higher value on the quality of the content, this tactic is not as effective. Website owners should focus on creating fewer high-quality articles or incoming links, as Google is no longer placing much value in links from article distribution sites such as Ezine.com. Focus on getting high-quality links from high-quality websites. Guest posting is still an excellent way to generate high-quality incoming links.

#3. SocialSEO: Make the most of social media

Google is constantly evolving and is now indexing social media as part of its Google search results based on engagements such number of likes, views, retweets, etc. So effective use of these platforms considerably helps in Which also  providing real-time social sharing in the search results.

Also important is the new  addition of the Google +1 button.  This again demonstrates the importance of high-quality content.

#4. Let the search engines know you’re there

Once you’ve published high-quality content, it’s important to tell Google about the content and make it easy for users to find. This means that meta titles and descriptions should closely match the content on the page.

#5. Don’t “Over-advertise”

Too much advertising can also result in lower Google rankings. Google is constantly evolving to improve search results for the user. Google tends to equate an overabundance of advertising to lower-quality or “spam” websites. Be sure that advertising does not interfere with the content on the page. This is especially important with advertising above the fold and within the text.

What do you think? What other ideas or suggestions do you have?