DreamGrow Social Media

Social Media Weekend: TED Videos, News Readers, Evangelist, Career

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media. The best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the website. Mashable highlights a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

Facebook Largest News Reader? Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%.

Turn your employees into social media ambassadors. Develop a policy that outlines corporate guidelines for communicating in the online world. Encourage management to actively spread the message through social media.

Social Media Consulting vs Viral Advertising: Can All ‘Creatives’ Please Go Back to the 80s. Social Media consulting is not an opportunity to go wild with creative-led, viral-inspired, 60-second advertising. A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. What are the key characteristics of all social media evangelists? What make them stand out from the crowd and march toward the “alpha” category?

4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. Want to know what it takes to start, and develop, a successful career path in the realm of social media?

Study: Spending On Email, Social And Search Rising. Email service provider ExactTarget released a study this week showing marketers plan to boost spending in email, social media and other non-traditional outreach channels this year.

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.

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.

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.

An interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt

Few would dispute that Google sits at the center of the Internet. As the leader in search, Google is now the Internet’s premier brand and the planet’s most potent free service. Managing that commanding position falls largely to seasoned technology executive Eric Schmidt, who in 2001 was tapped for the CEO post by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. via An interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Innovation .