They now serve up a central search box as the main feature with trending topics below in almost a tag cloud style. The top row, with the biggest font features current hot topics. The second row with slightly smaller font features hot topics from the past day and finally the third row with topics from the past week.

Learning By Experience

Defining a “tweet” for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. “Why would I want to do that?” is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

We will see if this helps those people that think Twitter is just a waste of time.

LinkedIn works for business because it was designed for business. In the last year this more business focused social media site has added some features that really help give businesses that serve other businesses an edge.

LinkedIn brings some of the most popular software forums together. Their LinkedIn Intelligent Applications (InApps) platform offers a truly creative environment for presenting your business to fellow members. InApps also promotes internal connectivity.

Connect with other Businesses and Customers with LinkedIn

Use Google Presentations or Slide Share to embed a visual display of recent accomplishments. Do you want to stay on top in your field? Add Reading List (from Amazon). You will find out what others are reading. Are you promoting an eBook or print media? Reading List is a promotional tool as well.

LinkedIn offers two blog options: WordPress App and Six Apart’s BlogLink. If you have a WordPress blog, it is easy to sync it with your LinkedIn profile. Special LinkedIn tags allow you to filter your posts, and you can display your personal WordPress Gravatar. Automatic updating is included.

Do you already use a different blog platform? Then use Blog Link instead. It supports WordPress and TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, Blogger, LiveJournal and more.

LinkedIn also offers an Outlook Toolbar. Now every person you contact, or who contacts you, can be added easily to your Outlook Contacts. It also lets you know when you have contacts that aren’t part of the LinkedIn network. We all know that the best way to grow a network is to invite someone to join it.

Have you ever wanted to take advantage of a long layover? Now you may be able to. Tripit lets you and other members post travel itineraries. When connections will be in the same city, you can arrange for the personal connection. Nothing builds rapport like actually meeting people.

Connect your employees with LinkedIn

Huddle Workspaces creates secure online workspaces. Collaboration and sharing tools are part of the package. Box.net Files let members share and manage files online.

LinkedIn offers its own feedback tools

Company Buzz is a great tool for finding out what people are saying about your business. You can identify topics that you want Buzz to track. Buzz stores historical data so you can look for trends. You can also use Buzz to drill for related tweets on Twitter using the top words associated with your topic. If something is being said about your company, you’ll find out.

LinkedIn Polls lets you create polls. You can poll within the community for free, or expand your poll to include specific groups of professionals. For example if your business targets medical professionals, Polls can deliver your poll to that group. There is a pay-per-response fee for polling outside the community.

LinkedIn doesn’t take a daring approach to adding services. When they put a new service on their site, you can know it works for business. The CEO of LinkedIn, Dan Nye, is committed to offering “applications that enable people to more effectively collaborate with their networks on a wide range of daily professional activities. We choose to work with leading companies whose services make sense for how our members use LinkedIn – for collaboration, information sharing and developing opportunities.” They intend to keep improving their offerings.

Social media marketing for businesses will only work if you have some kind of useful content that you create on a regular basis. If you have a good article that has useful and interesting information, then it is a great idea if you promote it via the social media websites.

Developing articles and successfully getting them popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website:

· Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the number of visitors who come directly from social media websites after reading your article. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.

· High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat ‘certified‘ the value of the site.

2. Primary & Secondary Traffic

General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many. So this is valuable for getting a link but also the visitors that come from those links, will probably be interested in your service.

What Makes Social Media Marketing so Important?

Social Media connects people through technology, affordably, and comfortably. When people connect, information gets shared! If you have a service or product that you are promoting, you really can’t afford to ignore the potential of social media marketing.

Most people think of social networks like Facebook and MySpace and have no idea that they can be used to promote a business or a product. Absolut Vodka has a page called Top Bartender on Facebook. Acura has a fan club, Acura TSX Connect, as well. If the big companies see the benefit of using social networks, you should, too.

Facebook and MySpace aren’t the only social networks. Do you want to connect with the business community? LinkedIn is the site for you. It is the perfect place to promote services and products that meet the needs of business. Would you like to integrate video, pictures, and blog? Then Bebo is a top competitor. All these social internet communities can be tapped to market services and products.

Some sites give you exposure because people collaborate on them. The most famous, always at the top of the search engines, is Wikipedia. You may be less familiar with social bookmarking. Delicious and StumbleUpon are the most popular. These bookmarking sites let members store and organize bookmarks to their favorite sites in categories that they choose. These bookmarks can be kept private or made public. Members can give feedback on the sites, too.

How Do You Make Social Media Marketing Work?

The first thing is to let people know who you are. On Facebook use your profile to say who you are, what you do, and where you are. On a blog, your about us pages tell the story and your posts provide unique content that can then be distributed via social media sites.

The main thing is that you have to create good solid content on a regular basis because it can then be used to get more people to your website and as a bonus you can usually get a number of high quality back links pointing to your site, that you normally would have never gotten and this increased link exposure usually will lead to higher organic search engine rankings.

Social media marketing offers a number of low-cost ways to promote your business. Create a blog, post video clips on YouTube, create articles and submit them to Digg and Reddit and start building your site up through social bookmarking.

Social media marketing is becoming very popular and is something that should be part of your overall Internet marketing plan. Now is the time to start utilizing social media marketing in order to promote your business.

Contact us for Social Media Marketing and other SEO Marketing Services.

You may or may not be using social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or Digg in your business. The overarching theme from this panel at PubCon was… why not, what do you have to lose?

Social media gurus, including Warren Whitlock, Co-Author of The Twitter Revolution, Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel Interactive, Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI, and Kent Schoen, Facebook Product Manager, joined forces at this session to discuss the Big sexy buzz around social media and provide some food for thought to convince skeptics that social media can be a successful marketing channel.

Warren Whitlock kicked off the session discussing twitter habits.

There are two stages of Twitter:
1.    Denial: Why would anyone care what I ate for breakfast?
2.    Reluctant Acceptance: I have a Twitter account but haven’t seen any traffic

The Twitter Revolution really is about making meaningful connections.  Let people know what you are up to, because contrary to some beliefs, people do care.

Warren explained that in today’s online world, we are all publishers. If you have a MySpace page, a Facebook account, or use Twitter, you publish content for other users.

Many people have asked the question, “how do I get more people to my website?” Warren’s advice: publish more content and tweet more. Give users more advice, resources, and content and they will find your website and make a connection with your brand.

The most important thing to know about Twitter is that there are no rules.

You can use Twitter however you want, but know that people are not going to follow you if you spam them, and only post promotional links. Be authentic in your approach and you will make a connection.

Next up, Brian Cartern discussed the benefits of the big Trifecta.

What is the Trifecta?

The Trifecta is a combination of blogging, bookmarking and Twittering. The key is to incorporate optimization into each corner of the Trifecta.

Optimization = Getting the results you want faster

Brian gave us his 5 step process to optimize anything:
1.    Identify your goal
2.    Establish a measurement
3.    Where you at?
4.    Plan Route to Goal
5.    Let results guide progress

In social media, if you want to succeed, you need a brand that is more powerful than your target markets. In social media, you need a powerful goal.

Why does the trifecta work?
-    Blog is a place for you to establish your authority
-    Bookmarking is social proof
-    Twitter gets you attention

Guillaume Bouchard talked mainly to social news and the benefits of sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, and stated that the main principle of social news sites it to catalyze natural link growth.

The realistic role of social news:
-    Produce link worthy  content
-    Taking luck out of the equation

The Social platforms: Digg and StumbleUpon make up 90% of social traffic.

Digg:
-    Onsite voting
-    Tough to succeed
-    Can get buried
-    Large traffic spike
-    Success: home page

StumbleUpon:
-    Toolbar voting
-    Not as tough to succeed
-    Can get thumbed-down
-    Lower total, more gradual spike
-    Success: recommendation surge

Make it or break social media strategy involves:
-    Content
-    Platform
-    Submitter
-    Category
-    Vote (solicitation)

Content Development:
Approval = perception of quality and enjoyment / time taken to enjoy

Give quality:
-    They like to laugh, but avoid failed attempts at humor
-    They appreciate hard work, but avoid build-content-quick-schemes
-    They like learning
-    They tend to follow their communities (dis)approval
-    They do not like spam, or SEO & marketing, for that matter

Save Time:
-    They don’t want too much text
-    They want to be able to skim and get the basic idea
-    They don’t like having to click unnecessarily
-    They resent when your server can’t handle their visitorship
-    They like being able to vote right now

Platform of Trust:
Both Digg staff and users value trust. Unfortunately, trust isn’t easy to earn.

The numbers
-    Trusted domains account for +90% of home pages
-    Of non-trusted domains, 30% are images, 10% are videos
-    ~100-125 stories hit the home page every day

The Trusted Submitter:
-    Domains are trusted, but so are people
-    Trusted submitters are less likely to be buried
-    Receive immediate fried votes
-    More than 30% of sites on the home page are from top submitters

Category Selection:
-    Different categories have different voting requirements
-    Digg has a proportional home page breakdown for each category

Soliciting Votes:
-    Look for exchange opportunities
-    Leverage instant messaging
-    In-site communication services
-    Vote on lots of stories

Ken Shone, product manager for Facebook, wrapped up the session sharing some Facebook statistics with the group.

Facebook Users:
-    120 million active users
-    15 million mobile users
-    1billion profile details
-    20 million daily status updates
-    100 million daily pokes
-    20 million daily wall posts

Social media is influential. A survey conducted asked users when they were considering purchasing a product or service, what was the most trusted and valued source of information. Over 70% said word of mouth.

With massive amounts of content online, communities and friends have become the filter to help determine an individual’s media preferences and is used to identify what content is worth their time.

Measurement and analytics with Facebook:

Passive measurement
-    Lexicon measures social interactions and demographics on Facebook
-    Identify the trend in conversation
-    Ad tools can help you understand who is out there (geographic and demographics)

Active measurement
-    Discover who’s engaging with your business and how

Demographic data may confirm your suspicions or lead you in a new direction. Make informed decisions based on how people interact with your content.

Great post from TopRank Blog