Don’t Misuse Social Networks

(Source : betternetworker.com) If you look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the idea is to improve your Search Engine rankings by doing certain things to your website, or by trying to build links.

A couple years ago, a lot of the social media networks were passing what we call “Page Rank.” You could go in and place a link on that network back to your website, and your website would increase in ranking on the Search Engines, as a result of that “link love” – the inbound links.

In recent months, that mode has changed. The Search Engines, especially Google, are paying attention to how people are using social networks in an attempt to gain higher rankings when perhaps they don’t deserve them. That is what technical SEO has been all about – improving your rankings by focusing solely on link-building and link love.

The social media and the direction they’re going has changed that.

Then look at the direction that Google is heading. They are in position (at the time of writing) to become the largest social media network in existence. They’re paying attention to communities. They’re paying attention to voting patterns. They’re paying attention to crowd sourcing patterns, where other people go in and bookmark and share content.

So it’s really easy for Google to go in and spot an account and see that it has nothing but links back to your websites. If you multiply that by many different social networks, it’s obvious to Google that you are just trying to game their system. So they will penalize you for that by not counting any of your effort.

What about people like Copyblogger and Chris Brogan? We find them on Twitter all the time. They do interact, but they also post links to their latest blog… where is the line there?

It’s simple. What you have to do is stop focusing on link-building and simply focus on your community (networking). When you do that, it’s evident that you’re not just creating a network for the sole purpose of increasing your search engine ranking. You remove the focus on technical search engine rankings and, instead, put it on social community building. Doing that empowers your network to crowd source. They can bookmark your content, Digg it, Sphinn it, etc. That is the way these applications were designed to be used, and that’s the purpose of the content.

People will bookmark it when you give them great content, and you’ll get the result you want. Plus – Google will be happy.

So all these activities improve your search engine rankings – but only if you are not the one doing it. Intent is critical.

In all the study I’ve done the last few months, it all goes back to natural human intent. Search engines today have prodigious technology they have developed to search out artificial community and content. By following this group, I will show you how to get high search engine visibility without focusing on link building.

The new SEO is upon us.

The moral of the story is… Don’t misuse social media networks by only using them to increase your search engine rankings. I have tested this course using many different case studies. While it may be more or less effective in the short-term, the long-term outlook on link building in social media is frowned upon by the search engines and is becoming less effective.

Link building is an element of SEO that is for ever changing. It is invariably a bad idea to involve yourself in processes that change all the time. It causes you to have to reconstruct your entire income structure over and over again.

As stated before, in this group we purely focus on aspects that DO NOT change so that time and effort spent today will continue to have residual effects 2 years from now.

Gaming systems for short-term rewards is a short-sighted policy that will ALWAYS lead to a re-investment of time. The question you have to ask yourself is… Do you want to waste your time or compound your efforts over time to build an asset?

Facebook becomes third most popular video site

(Source : Cent News) YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen’s VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world’s third most popular place to view video online.

According to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.

In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.

According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.

“During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience,” Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. “In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers’ minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video.”

But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace’s 85.2 million streams during October.

According to Nielsen, the “total time spent viewing video on Facebook” grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.

“Facebook’s rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site’s evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal,” Gibs said. “Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online.”

What Happens to Your Facebook After You Die?

(Source Time.com)In an Oct. 26 blog post, Max Kelly, Facebook’s head of security, announced Facebook’s policy of “memorializing” profiles of users who have died, taking them out of the public search results, sealing them from any future log-in attempts and leaving the wall open for family and friends to pay their respects. Though most media reports claimed this was a new Facebook feature, a spokeswoman for the company told TIME that it’s an option the site has had since its early days.

The company decided to publicize the policy because of a backlash caused by a new version of the site’s homepage rolled out Oct. 23, which includes automatically generated “suggestions” of people to “reconnect” with. Within days of the launch, Twitter users and blog posts from across the Web complained that some of these Facebook suggestions were for friends who had died. “Would that I could …,” complained a user on Twitter before ending her tweet with the hash tag #MassiveFacebookFail.

“We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it’s important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized,” Kelly said in the post. To discourage pranksters, Facebook does require proof before sending a profile down the digital river Styx. Family or friends must fill out a Facebook form, including a link to an obituary or other information confirming a user’s death, before the profile is officially memorialized. Once that is completed, the user will cease showing up in Facebook’s suggestions and certain information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed, the stream of real-time user updates that is the site’s centerpiece. If relatives prefer not to have the profile stand as an online memorial, Facebook says it will remove the account altogether.

Better publicizing memorialized profiles is an attempt by Facebook to answer lingering privacy concerns. Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart investigated the company in July and issued a report that asked Facebook to explain certain areas of its privacy policy, including policies regarding the profiles of deceased users. In response, the company promised to issue a new privacy policy that better articulates how user information is treated postmortem and offered the commissioner an outline of its memorializing policy, nearly three months before the blog post explained it to users. Spokeswoman Anne-Marie Hayden says the privacy commissioner was “quite pleased” with Facebook’s response to the office’s concerns and says the commissioner will review the detailed version of the site’s new policy, expected in late October. (See what happens when parents join Facebook.)

Facebook’s attempt to clearly state its policy is prudent, as other social-networking sites have struggled with the question of users’ deaths. MySpace in particular has had a difficult time with digital rubbernecking — during the site’s heyday, a handful of well-trafficked blogs specialized in matching MySpace profiles directly to obituaries and posting the pairings online for all to see. By sealing profiles to family and friends and removing profiles from search results, Facebook assuages users’ fears that they’ll be fodder for online voyeurs in the event of their untimely demise — and hopefully will put the issue to rest.

Facebook Fan Page

(Source searchenginejournal.com)When Facebook announced the Fan pages, there were a number of mixed reviews.  Some where hailing it and its integration to the new advertising platform and some hated it – claiming it was turning Facebook into Myspace.  Whatever your stance is, here are 6 reasons you need to make a Facebook page for your website or company now.

1. Pages are public.  Most of Facebook is behind a login, preventing search engines from indexing.  However, some Fan pages are not behind a login and thus search engines can index the page.  Hopefully, people will stumble on the result in SERPs, visit the Facebook page, and then get to your site via the link (see reason #2).

2. Pages include links.  Because the pages are public, you can get some nice facebook.com link credit.  You can’t use an anchor text, but hey, it’s free.

3. Send “updates to fans”.  One of the greatest features is that you can send “updates” to fans whenever you want.  It’s a nice way of building a database of interested users.  Send messages about new products, updated website, etc.

4. You control the page.  Making the page before a Fan or a competitor is critical.  You want to be able to send the messages, edit or remove sections, and control the information to an extent.

5. News feed.  When a someone joins a Fan page, it’s published in their News feed for all their to read (unless they have turned this off).  It makes someone joining your Fan page somewhat viral.

If you want to create facebook fan page for your website i would recommended Inka Technology http://www.inkatechnology.co.u . check their portfolio page

Woman arrested for ‘poking’ Facebook user

(Source telegraph.co.uk)Police deemed that 36-year-old Shannon Jackson violated a protection order – similar to a restraining order – by using the site’s feature to attract the attention of another user.

The order previously obtained by the woman who received the poke banned Jackson from “telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner”.

While police interventions to halt online harassment are not uncommon, this is believed to be one of the first cases of someone being detained for a poke – one of the most rudimentary forms of virtual communication.

The feature, which allows Facebook users to make themselves known to other users of the site without sending a message, is commonly used by members to say hello to their friends, or to flirt with people they do not know.

Police in Hendersonville, Tennessee have obtained screen grabs of the victim’s Facebook page showing evidence of the poke, according to the local newspaper The Tennessean.

Jackson, who lives in Hendersonville, faces up to a year in prison and fine of $2,500 if she is found guilty of breaching the protection order. She is due to appear in court later this month.

Although the poking angle may be unique, this is not the first time that Facebook communication has led to an arrest. Earlier this month a burglar in Italy was held after logging on to Facebook while carrying out a break-in.

Facebook Offers Translation Tool to Other Sites

(Source nytimes.com)Back in January 2008, Facebook was available in one language: English. That’s when the company introduced a new translation tool that allowed its members to do the hard work of translating the site into their native languages. As a result, Facebook is now available in 65 languages, and a majority of its users are overseas. On Thursday, Facebook will make that translation tool available to other sites. The new program is called Translations for Facebook Connect, and it is being offered to the 15,000 sites and applications that use the Connect service, which allows visitors to log in using their Facebook ID and password and broadcast some information back to their friends on the social network. The translation tool works by asking users to submit possible translations of phrases, and then soliciting their votes on which is the most accurate. So now a country’s tourism Web site, for example, can use the tool to solicit help with a translation, and then present the site to users in their native language when they log in using their Facebook ID. It is free for developers, but Facebook hopes it will increase the use of the Connect Service. Facebook’s human-powered approach juxtaposes quite sharply with Google’s service, which uses technology to automatically translate Web sites and text — with occasional unintentionally comical results. (The Facebook system, of course, has had to handle a relatively tiny number of phrases.) “Other businesses try to accomplish the same thing using technology to solve these problems, and it’s not always 100 percent accurate,” said Ethan Beard, head of platform at Facebook, in a veiled reference to Google. “But technology doesn’t take into account cultural values, idioms that are hard to translate. In the same way we think reviews are better when they come from friends, translation done by people is significantly better than what you would get otherwise.” [Facebook application development ]

Facebook used to connect with youths

FACEBOOK is being used in the Isle of Wight Council’s bid to gather the views of young people. The Wight 2B Heard group is designed to find out what services and activities young people want from the Connexions service. Council leader Cllr David Pugh said: “We recognise we need to use online social networking sites alongside more traditional consultation methods in order to reach young people. “It is very important for us to gather as many views as possible in order to create a Youth Connexions Service that suits the needs of the Island.” The move forms part of a wider consultation, which runs until October 11 and has included question-time sessions at schools and surgeries at libraries. Young people will also be able to share their views at the Big Day Out, via a Big Brother-style diary room. Source >> http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/news/facebook-used-to-connect-with-youths-28752.aspx [ facebook connect widgets ]

Twitter valued at $1 billion

The wildly popular microblogging Web site Twitter reportedly is close to locking in as much as $100 million in new investment, placing a $1 billion value on a company that has yet to generate real revenue or show anyone how it can.

The San Francisco-based social media and messaging network has raised $50 million from investors to date, but now is said to be poised to rake in twice that from a team of new and repeat investors. Read more

Facebook claims mail API less intrusive than Gmail

Facebook has defended plans to open up members’ inboxes to application developers as a technology designed to spur for innovation in areas such as mobile messaging. The social networking site said security consultant concerns that development of the technology makes for an unacceptable privacy risk are misplaced. In particular, Facebook said its Mailbox API plans poses less of a privacy risk than Gmail, which scans email messages to serve targeted ads. Facebook users who sign up to applications that make use of Mailbox API give permission for applications to scan the contents of messages sent through the social networking website. In answer to our questions about what privacy controls would be applied to the delivery of this functionality, Facebook offered a response that also sheds light on how the Mailbox software hook-ins might be developed to offer push email style-functionality for messages sent through the social networking website. >>>  Facebook api developers

Facebook Applications

Facebook is the world’s largest social networking platform with a user base of over 250 million, the platform is used by the masses to connect and keep in touch with their friends, family and relatives. Among many interesting features like photo and video sharing the Facebook platform has another very engaging feature associated with it, these are called Facebook Applications.
In its early days Facebook was used purely for connecting with friends and maintaining a social circle but with the passage of time e-marketers explored the opportunities presented by the Facebook network and they decided to use it as a social media marketing tool. Facebook applications are the easiest way to approach millions of users who can be turned into potential customers.
There are a lot of Facebook application development companies active globally specially in UK and Europe. So how do these applications help in brand promotion? The best part about Facebook is that it is for sharing, every activity a user performs is shared between their friends. When a particular “brand application” is used it causes a viral affect which draws more users towards it this means the more an application is used the more the company is exposed to probable customers.
The Facebook application developers have created gamming applications, quizzes, trivia and lots more; there are applications for promoting fashion designers, restaurants, super marts, IT companies, TV channels, celebrities etc. Facebook application development has opened new doors for marketers who make use of this amazing Facebook feature to monetize ideas, promote brands, run campaigns and generate revenue.
If you want to know more about Facebook application development or want to get a Facebook applications for your company, feel free to visit us at http://www.inkatechnology.co.uk