DreamGrow Social Media

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

Youtube search taking up 28% of all Google searches

A year ago, comScore reported that YouTube has grown to be the second largest search engine on the internet, topped only by Google itself.

Today, comScore’s 2009 US Search Rankings Report, published last week, reports that YouTube searches grew by 35% in 2009, reaching to more than 3.9 billion search queries.

YouTube had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search and 180% more searches than Bing. What we can see clearly here, is that people are getting used to finding information in the form of a video. The same tendency has also shown on websites – people are more likely to watch a short video, rather than read the text next to the video, saying the same thing.

The growing importance of Youtube search (and video search in general) isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, but rather it will grow even more in 2010. So keep an eye on Youtube and maybe consider picking up a camera yourself.

Top Social Brands of 2009

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all? Today I came accross a list of 100 top social brands of 2009 put together by a social media management company Vitrue. The top 10 is…

1. iPhone
2. Disney
3. CNN
4. MTV
5. NBA
6. iTunes
7. Wii
8. Apple
9. Xbox
10. Nike

…and it looks weird. I really couldn’t put my finger on it but then I read that:

Some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.

So you have to take that with a grain of salt. A list of social brands that excludes Google, Facebook, Youtube, Ophra, etc. So I started to look for a second opinion. It wasn’t too hard to find Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands of 2009. Their top 10 is a bit more believable (at least for me).

1. Twitter
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. iPhone
5. YouTube
6. Obama
7. Mac
8. Apple
9. iPod
10. Microsoft

Maybe it is my tech bias or something else but this list seems more in step with my understanding of top social brands. So what do you think?
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Image credit Melodi T

Our Most Read Social Media Post For 2009

Happy, happy, happy new year to everybody! 2010 will be the best year yet. Social media will integrate into our lives and we stop counting how many times someone is checking their Facebook. Here are our most read post from the 2009.

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. It’s a good strategy to see first what free has to offer and the try to find tools that fit in the gaps you need to fill.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. This is what we think will be important in social media in 2010. The slide show in the post was featured on Slideshale and got more than 2000 views in first week.

Market Share of Social Networking Sites 2009. What is going up and where should I participate? These are questions everyone is trying to answer.

Facebook More Visited Than Google. Facebook has a good chance to become THE site people visit and a new poster boy to replace Google.

A Simple Social Media Platform. We drew a picture just to get a clear vision how a simple social media platform should look like.

8 steps to social media goodness. Blindingly obvious for some but I still felt that it’s good to write down the basics and revisit them from time to time.

World Map Of Social Networks. People are stat junkies, as with the firs post on the list, everyone wants to see the numbers.

Social media weekend: Seth Godin, relationships, marketing is dead. All our social media weekend link post got a lot of readers, but this one stood out. We’ll continue to give you links every weekend.

The Mobile Internet is Bigger Than You Think. I wa really blown away by the numbers. The mobile is BIG. Really, really big.

Social media helping to spike up Mercury sales in New England. Our take on sucessful social media case.

We’ll try to keep thing interesting. Every post we make should be useful to our readers. Please let us know what matters to you and we’ll try to cover that. Thank you for reading.
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Image credit Tibor Fazakas

Facebook More Visited Than Google

Everything social is what people want to do most. Currently the top site is still Google but it will pass. People love to talk more than search. If we look at the top sites in US for 2009 then we see that four of them are used for communicating with others (Yahoo Mail, Facebook, MySpace and Live Mail). I believe that this social chatter is fundamental human need and won’t go away any time soon.

As we pointed out in our 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010, people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. This will boost the visits to the social sites and decrease the usage of web mail. This all leads to Facebook becoming the most visited site in the world some time in 2010.

Experian Hitwise US tweeted that:

Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever. — Hitwise_US

Search Engine Land has a Hitwise graph for the data running up to the Christmas.

Experian Hitwise UK shared their data:

Facebook was the #1 US website this Xmas. Not quite there in the UK yet – maybe next year… — Hitwise_UK

I think there are two factors holding back total domination of Facebook. Lack of news and god-awful search. If Facebook would integrate Bing search to its platform then Google would have a lot to worry about.

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

After reading Avinash’ post about cool Twitter tools I tried to find out what tools are availabe for free to monitor Twitter and other social media.

Who does what, where and how? Are you measuring up against your competition? There’s a lot of social media buzz going on. What are they talking about your brand and your company? We have compiled a list of 46 free social media monitoring tools. Some of the tools have free basic plan or free trial period but most of them are totally free. The list is sorted alphabetically. Enjoy! If we missed any great tools please post them to comments.

Addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

Backtype
BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so you can find out what people are saying about the topics that interest you.

Blogpulse Trend Search
Create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others. Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.

Blogpulse Conversation Tracker
When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. From those seeds sprout links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

Boardreader
BoardReader can be used to find and information on the forums and message boards. Boardreader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously.

BoardTracker
A search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with BoardTracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.

Compete Search Analytics
Paid and natural search trends, historical search referral data, and customized filtering that let you focus on top performing keywords and traffic for thousands of websites. Enter a keyword and get a list of sites it refers traffic to or enter a site or a category; get a list of keywords referring traffic to it.

Compete Site Profile
Provides free information for every site on the Internet (not really, doesn’t work for smaller sites) including site traffic history and competitive analytics. Gives site-specific trust scores based on up-to-the-minute data from Compete and third party services.

Facebook Lexicon
Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

Google Blog Search
Blog Search will help users to explore the blogging universe more effectively. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. You can select the time frame for the posts and set up alerts.

Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It also predicts the future for one year.

Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool gives you insight into interest levels of different topics. It also suggest alternative words and phrases that might be tied to your filed of interest. You can segment results by location or language.

Google Trends
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

GraphEdge
GraphEdge helps you make sense of the Twitter. How many of your followers you’re really reaching? How quickly your network is growing? Who’s dumping you? Who your most influential followers are, and how to reach them?

HowSociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites.

Icerocket
Trend Tool, enter up to five items to see mentions trended over time. Search feature finds blogs that mantion the phrases you enter.

Keotag
Tag search multiple engines, tag generator and social bookmark links generator. Buzz Monitoring.

Klout
Klout measures influence on topics in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers on given topic.

Monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

Omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

Quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

Retweetist
Find out who is retweeting you or other Twitter users. Discovering trends, popular topics and popular people by tracking retweets across Twitter.

Samepoint
Samepoint crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Our categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google.

Surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Search
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site.

Techrigy SM2
SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. As businesses and consumers increasingly utilize and rely on social media, your agency needs the best tools and expertise to stay competitive.

Topsy
When you search on Topsy it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. The results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Results are ranked based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.

Trackur
14 day trial. Trackur is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Trendrr
Trendrr allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources. Free for 10 trends

Trendpedia
Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics and organizes the articles in a trend-line that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trend-line from three months ago up to today.

TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.

Tweet Scan
Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Status.net-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, and JSON.

TweetVolume
Enter words and phrases to find out how often they appear in tweets. Compare up to five different keywords.

Twitalyzer
There are a variety of uses for the Twitalyzer, but most people use it to track their use of Twitter over time, benchmarking themselves against other Twitter users, and helping to determine which social media strategies are working (and which are not.)

Twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

TwitterCounter
Track your Twitter follower count up to three months into past. Compare your numbers with other Twitter users. You can also see statistics of whom you are following and your tweet frequency.

Twitter Grader
Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search
Searching Twitter gives you insight into what’s hot at the moment and helps you find who is tweeting about the topics you are interested in. Advanced search lets you specify dates, languages, people and even attitudes.

Twitter StreamGraphs
The Twitter StreamGraphs is a content visualization tool to let you create StreamGraphs from the latest tweets containing a given word or from a particular user.

Twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL.

Twendz
Twendz gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.

UberVU
Find out what people are saying about brands, stories or events. And follow the comments all over the social web on blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed and many more.

Usernamecheck
Does wht it says. Check your user name across 68 social networking sites.

What’s the Buzz?
Type in a keyword below and find the buzz about it in blogs and social bookmarks. It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days and the Google Trends chart for the keyword. It finds blog posts tagged with and containing the keyword. It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

YackTrack
Enter what you want to see comments for and f there are comments on any of our supported services, you should see them.

If you know other tools we have missed, please post here in comments.
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Image credit: David Basson

SocialTwist Social Media Sharing Trends 2009

Really interesting result for me was that: Analysis shows that the most popular channel for sharing content is email. Nearly 60 per cent use email to share content.

Other major findings

• Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.
• Facebook has displaced MySpace as the most popular social networking site when it comes to sharing content.
• It is clear that Twitter is perceived to be a news broadcast platform and not a “sharing” platform. It enjoys only 5% of “shared information” traffic among popular social platforms.
• Bookmarks are rapidly losing their significance in the social media space. Only 2% of shares happen over Bookmarking sites.
• When it comes to email services, Yahoo Mail is still the most preferred, followed by MSN. Gmail is way behind.
• Google’s services like Google Bookmarking, Google Talk, Gmail, and Blogger have failed to replicate the brand’s search engine success online, especially when it comes to ’shared information.’
• LinkedIn, as a networking site, ranks the lowest when it comes to social media sharing.

via SocialTwist Social Media Sharing Trends 2009.

Facebook getting ahead of Google before 2010?

We have seen the emergence of Facebook for a long time now, and with every social media site talking daily about the enormous success of it, it almost starts to get worn out….almost. Looking at the latest graphs, I can’t stop but feel amazed. Facebook will soon have more visits to its homepage than Google itself! The yearly amount of its visits has grown by 342%, compared to Google’s 42%.

On september 2008, Facebook started out with 0.5 Billion pageviews – a year later today, it’s 2.3 Billion pageviews a month! When looking at the growthchart, I can’t stop but feel amazed – will the only thing stepping in Facebook’s way be the actual number of people in the world with internet connection?

In one way, Facebook’s growth is understandable. People want to communicate and with all your neighbours and even the milkman being on Facebook, it’s natural that Facebook is where they’ll go. 500 Million users next year is a fact seems pretty certain. What about a billion? Can Facebook handle that? Is it even possible? Maybe, cause when looking at the graphs, it seems funnily realistic.

Remember when your company’s homepage on the web was important? Although still important, the times are changing now – Facebook is where you’ll want to be. Getting on the bandwagon early in the game (and Facebook themselves think 2009 is just the start), will get you some big advantages over your competitors in the long run.

Will this be the new Google in 2011?

But what if the sun comes out?

I have been using cloud services for some time now. The most important of which is the Google Applications for Domains. GMail can be automatically backed up to your computer via POP3 or IMAP but what to do with Google Docs, wikis, Flick, Youtube and other services? In Youtube and Flickr you can archive the originals. So Google Docs is most problematic for me as the documents get created in the cloud, the cloud is the original. The same goes for social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, etc.

Naive as I am, I assumed that the big players (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others) actually back up their data. Now, in the light of the T-Mobile and Microsoft loosing users personal data (contacts, notes, calendars, etc. ) it seems that we can take Linus Torvald’s advice on back up:

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20). Post to linux.dev.kernel newsgroup.

If Facebook would lose user data then it would be a permanent loss because there is no way to back up you account. Even if you would make a copy of everything you put on Facebook then there’s no way to restore it after the loss. The time and effort that has gone into building the profiles and communicating with peer would be gone forever.

A lot of our stuff is in the cloud. But what if the sun comes out? What is the probability that Facebook, Google or others would loose user data permanently. What would be a good way to protect yourself?

The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook

In Facebook you see links that your friends have shared with you and this should make these links more relevant to you. Other links come from pages and groups that you have joined indicating you positive attitude towards those brands, causes, people, etc. This was confirmed by a recent study.

Facebook and Digg are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitikas publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. Visitors that went to a site four or more times in one week were considered loyal users.

via The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook | WebProNews.