Even though Google have denied that they are in direct competition with Facebook, everyone who has both these social networking accounts can see how similar they are to each other and how there’s always going to be some rivalry (let’s not forget Facebook’s association with Bing instead of Google).

Last week, Mashable ran a poll and just fewer than 35% of the 5,346 people who voted said that they hated the new Facebook! People also vented their anger and confusion using Twitter which then saw #NewFacebook trending.

However, we all know, from past Facebook changes that users will moan about the updates for a little while but then just accept the new changes and forget all about the old Facebook, allowing the social networking site to retain its users and continue growing.

Facebook has now reached over 800 million users whilst Google+ is also growing at a very quick rate, and has over 43 million users. Although the number is not as impressive as Facebook’s numbers just yet, we have to remember that Google+ is only 3 months old and has only this week become available to all people, rather than invite only.

With Google+ now open to the public, we are wondering if Google’s real time search would make a comeback after Twitter and Google failed to agree on terms so that Google could keep Twitter’s real time tweets in their results.

However, it seems that they are still at loggerheads with each other rather than working together. Bing renewed their contract with Twitter earlier this month to have real time results in their search engine, but who actually chooses Bing over Google when it’s not their default browser setting?

I have to admit that I’m one of the people that complained about the new Facebook changes and contributed to the discussion on Twitter, but still found myself using Facebook. Facebook is still the social network that most of my friends are using which makes using it much more interesting than Google+, where nothing is really going on in my circles yet. However, if I find that more people I know start using Google+ more I may get weaned off Facebook. It’s just what happened to my Myspace account, once everyone I cared about joined Facebook, my Myspace got deleted.

At the end of the day, people are going to choose and use a social networking site where they can actually be social with other people, rather than choose a networking site purely based on how great the user interface is.

We’re not sure if people are ready to ditch Facebook for Google+ just yet. Do you have a preferred social media account?

A couple of months ago you couldn’t move for posts about Google+, with everyone talking about its rivalry with Facebook, its sudden influx of 20 million users and hundreds of debates about how it was going to completely change the game! But now when I look around SEOMoz, Econsultancy, Search Engine Land and the rest I see barely a few mentions of this ‘revolutionary’ new social network.

To be fair, I am no better than the rest, when Google+ first came out I was straight on it and published 2 or 3 posts about how it could topple Facebook, change the way we connect online and add a huge new element to SEO, but now I am paying about as much attention to it as I am to AOL.

The fact of the matter is, so far we have seen little to no impact on SEO by Google+, and although it has 20 million+ users I haven’t seen a fresh update from any of my circles in weeks! Meanwhile, Facebook continues to roll out new features, such as the subscribe button, and both Facebook and Twitter are still much better places to interact with friends, fans and customers.

So where do we go from here?

A couple of months ago everyone was discussing how Google was becoming much more social and how we need to adapt to that and move away from traditional SEO tactics. However, in the last month there has been very little impact from Google+ and Google have not renewed their deal with Twitter, effectively losing some of their social element, rather than increasing it.

So should we just forget about Google+ and social networks altogether? Well no, social is obviously still very important for online marketing, with Twitter and Facebook being excellent mediums for creating brand awareness, customer interaction and content distribution, but I do think it is fair to say that the initial hype over Google+ was a bit much and that, although a move into social is good, abandoning traditional SEO tactics in favour of a social only approach might be a bit too presumptuous.

Since Google+ was launched two months ago, a staggering number of over twenty million users have set up an account; it took Facebook three years to gain the same number of users.

As Google+ pages for businesses aren’t available until the autumn, UTalkMarketing.com discusses what brands and businesses might want to get out of the social networking platform, once they’ve signed up.

One of the suggestions was having an online shopping experience on Google+. Facebook offers online shopping within Facebook pages, however businesses have struggled to measure how much of its new business can be attributed directly from consumer activity on the site. Matthew says “I would like to see the integration of [Google’s] shopping search results, so that businesses can have a direct point of sale on their Google+ profile and therefore accurately attribute sales from this medium”.

The article suggests that Google+ could challenge Facebook by touting itself as an effective new business tool.

You can read Matthew’s thoughts and the rest of the article on UTalkMarketing.com.

There has been so much written about social media lately, it is of little surprise this week that we again find ourselves discussing who’s shaking up the world of social networking. Week after week it feels like the three big players, Twitter, Facebook, and of course now, Google+, are trying to out-do one another. Each wants to reign supreme as the number one social network – especially when it comes to attracting business.

They are also, naturally, trying to expand and grow, and move with the times. So what are they all doing to woo business to interact with their platforms?

Google+ Business Pages

To begin with, let’s look at how Google+ has attracted millions of users, and is currently trialling its business pages. In its short life Google+ has already gained over 20 million users worldwide, and whilst businesses were told to stay away from it as a marketing platform, Google has been working hard to build a business friendly field whereby a company can host a business page in order to then generate further brand awareness and, of course further business. Business pages, such as the one Ford have been lucky enough to secure, are rumoured to have an impact on how well the brand will rank in search – something which will no doubt motivate many businesses to sign up when they are allowed.

“Facebook For Business”

Facebook last week announced the introduction of its “Facebook For Business” site, and, on the face of it, it seems to be a way by which they plan to maintain a presence and influence. This is, somewhat cleverly, aimed at smaller businesses rather than huge brands. The reason I believe this to be a clever move by Facebook is because smaller (especially local) businesses will be more willing to give it a go in order to see if it helps their business grow, whereas large brands may decide to disregard it in favour of more traditional goals such as mass reach and search rankings.

New Tweets

Twitter haven’t exactly been quiet either, recently announcing a tweak to their sponsored tweets to make them simultaneously more prominent for advertisers, but less intrusive to users. Being able to engage a visitor with advertising, without putting them off using the service, is a critical challenge for any social website.

In addition, the update Twitter has announced will put every Twitter user on the same platform, those that are still using an older interface will therefore be forced to upgrade. This can go one of two ways: either those forced to upgrade will dislike the very fact that they didn’t get a choice and thus switch off from Twitter, or they will prefer their new interface and their experience will be enriched.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the latest examples of how social networking has clearly become such a key component to modern marketing. Online social media is expected to continue booming for years to come, with some 52% of all internet users expected to have a regular social media presence by 2013. With the increased take-up, and increasing time being spent on social media, advertisers will play a key role in shaping which platforms thrive, and which ones fall away.

Google investors will also be happy as so far, revenue for Google is estimated to be up by 28% compared to the prior year. Investors polled by Thomson Reuters already expect the search engine to report net revenue of £4 billion.

Here at Gravytrain we managed to get invites to Google+ this week and have been getting to grips with the new social network. Like everyone else in the digital marketing community, a few of us are excited about the new social network and see its strong potential to rival Facebook, while others see Google+ as no competition to the current social media giants.

However, the main feature that most Google+ users seem to like is its privacy settings, which shows that the way we use social media could be changing.

While other social networking sites such as Facebook have seen innovative advances and an increase in popularity around the world, it doesn’t reflect how we actually interact with other people in real life. In real life, we don’t tend to share personal thoughts or content with everyone that we know. We’ll usually share certain things with certain people.

As mentioned in a previous post about Google+, the social network allows us to have different ‘circles’ of people where we can share different content with each group, whilst keeping other information private. Some people will use different social networks to connect with certain people, for example, Linkedin for work, Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for a mix of both. With Google+ and circles, it brings all these different groups into a platform that we can manage in one place, without embarrassment or worry over who sees what!

Arguably, Facebook does allow us to create lists where we can group different people, but to be honest, they are quite fiddly, weren’t really promoted and not clearly visible. Google enables us to have a social network that we can control ourselves, restrict the content that we receive and share information with certain groups, mirroring our online behaviour to how we socialise in real life.

Analysts however, have suggested that Google+ still has a long way to go before it matches Facebook’s popularity. Facebook announced last week that it had over 750 million users and is looking to enable video chats through its joint venture with Skype, which sounds quite similar to one of Google+’s video chat features, “Hangouts”. However, it’s still early days for Google+ and only time will tell whether the project will be successful.

So far, the increased popularity of Google+ shows that they are doing something right; it demonstrates that Google is driving towards success within social networking. Google+ could potentially be something that catches on with individuals and become very powerful, which other social networks should keep in mind.

The idea behind adding the +1 feature to the Google search results is to make each person’s results more personalised and also more social, promoting sites in their results that they and they contacts have liked with the +1 button.

With the new +1 button directly on sites this idea continues, with people being able to +1 individual pages and pieces of content on a site, as well as the actual site itself within the Google search results. But will people use it?

Competition with Facebook and Twitter
When it comes to the Google search engine, the +1 button can completely dominate as neither Facebook nor Twitter can add their buttons to the search results, and therefore the only option to like or promote a site will be through +1. However, when it comes to actual web pages, the Google +1 button may struggle to compete with the Facebook Like and Tweet buttons.

The idea behind the Facebook and Twitter buttons is to allow users to share the piece of content amongst their friends, through their own personal profiles. So, for example, the web browser sees a great blog post about a new Google feature, Tweets it, which puts a link to the post into their Twitter stream, and then the users followers can go straight to the recommended piece of content.

It is the same concept with the Facebook Like button but with +1 the idea seems to fall away slightly. Yes if you hit the +1 button people within your Google address book will be able to see it but you are not really promoting it on a profile or sharing it in an open format.

Sharing Content or Promoting the Site?
With +1 you are essentially saying you approve of the site and are promoting it in your personal search results, whereas with Tweet and Like you are sharing it. +1 then doesn’t seem to really fall in line with the Twitter and Facebook buttons and so may receive less attention because of this.

In fact, it is only early days, but if you look at sites that have already integrated this new +1 button, alongside Tweet and Like, you can see that it is not generating nearly as many clicks.

Of course as people become more aware of +1 and it becomes common on sites it will be used more, but will people develop a greater affinity to +1 than Facebook and Twitter? Google are dominant in practically every area of online but, for now at least, they are 3rd place in the rankings for social.

When I was growing up as a teenager in the 90’s, we were going through the custom built computer phase, and shops building cheap PC’s were all the rage. I remember too well one particular shop in my village back then, which became immensely popular. To start with, the surge in popularity led to lots of new customers and before long queues were out of the door of the (relatively small) shop. The ever so slight flaw in their promising business plan was that they couldn’t actually build computers very well, or at least, didn’t have the time to do so. Before long, there were two queues out of the door, with of them being for people taking machines back that didn’t work. The business doesn’t exist anymore, having lasted all of around 6 months.

The big mistake of this former business wasn’t just that their product delivery was poor, or that they were growing too fast to cope, but that their most disgruntled customers were mixing with new prospects. The small shop with two queues just a metre from each other was a perfect environment for conversation between the two customer groups. The memory of the positive radio ads were quickly erased from the minds of possible new customers, replaced instead with the fear of getting their children a computer that didn’t work for Christmas.

Most businesses, especially those with customer satisfaction issues, understand the importance of keeping a safe distance between new and existing customers, and (sadly perhaps) do quite a good job of keeping them at arm’s length. What many of these businesses don’t realise however is how social media is turning this on its head – if you want to build serious engagement with your customers using social media, you simply can’t afford to have disgruntled customers. If you do have customers milling about with unresolved complaints, you can bet they’ll find their way to your Facebook fan page before long.

Only last week when I was idly browsing Facebook on my mobile during a commute, I saw a status update from a friend – the update suggested that by liking the Boohoo fan page, that she had received 15% off her next order. I’ve used Boohoo a couple of times before when buying presents for my girlfriend, so I naturally clicked with interest to their Facebook fan page.

However, what I saw was not encouraging – page after page of complaints:

Now, one slight caveat is that the page I pasted comments isn’t actually the official Boohoo page, but it does have over 5000 likes, and is being actively shared by users thinking that it IS their actual page. When I found their actual official page, it was better but still suffered from the same kind of problems:

Now, I’m not trying to have a go at Boohoo with this blog post – they’ve obviously had some issues with delivery partners recently and I’m sure they’ll get over this in time, but there’s no doubt that these pages are hurting them. Several people commented that they were put off ordering from them on the basis of what they had seen and it’s exactly how I felt.

The reality for brands using Facebook to reach out to their customers is that they need to be red hot at preventing and managing complaints before they spread to their Facebook page. Failing to do this, is pretty much like giving your most unhappy customers space on your billboards to tell people what they think of you.

Next time you are with a group of your friends ask them “what do you think of Twitter?” and I bet you will get the same response I get from every Jane Doe and Jo Blogs I ask “erm…I have a Twitter account but I don’t really see the point of it…I prefer Facebook”.

Yes, despite having more than 200 million users, Twitter still seems to have this odd reputation as being not as good or important as Facebook. What’s more, it isn’t just individual users who appear to have this thinking, but also many small to medium sized businesses as well.

Every day I seem to come across more and more small to medium sized businesses with well optimized sites, beautiful blogs and fantastic Facebook pages but have Twitter accounts with no Tweets, no followers and not even a picture!

For a few years now many small, medium and large businesses all around the world have been realising the importance of Social Media for online brand awareness, website traffic and Google Rankings. Yet despite these businesses doing excellent things with blogs and Facebook pages, their Twitter accounts seem to have been left behind, given less attention, time and focus.

Why Twitter is Becoming More Important
In recent months we have seen Google release 2 new features to try and make search results more personal, refined and more social. Blocked and +1 have both been developed to help make Google more of a social network, focusing more on individual user’s preferences, connections and tastes, to help deliver the most relevant results for each individual user.

With this, all signs are pointing to the idea that Google rankings are being more and more influenced by user generated content such as comments on blogs, Facebook Likes and of course Tweets! With Google apparently in the process of trying to acquire Twitter and already having access to their vast amount of user data, they appear to be attributing more and more importance to businesses Twitter accounts when it comes to rankings.

Links vs Tweets
It may seem farfetched to attribute higher Google rankings to the number of Twitter followers you have, but as we can see from the latest SEOMoz Ranking Factors data, as well as other research, Twitter seems to be having as big an impact as blogs, keyword focused content and even links.

Of course, this is not to say that traditional SEO methods, such as onsite optimisation, keyword focused content and link building, are no longer important, and a strong SEO campaign should feature all of these elements. However, it is clear that we need to keep pushing Social Media and start giving Twitter the attention it deserves.

We already know how important Social Media can be for brand awareness, online promotion and networking, but now it also appears to be having an even greater impact , affecting Google’s search results.

Right, lets get to it!

Firstly, you’ll need to create an account… but I’ve already got one – I hear you cry!

Well, nonetheless I would strongly suggest that you create a separate account for Facebook advertising – just to keep it totally separate from your personal profile. It does look like you can allow other people access to the advertising part of your account, without them seeing your personal profile… But still – I’d consider it ‘best practice’ just to keep them separate – our account manager at Facebook recommended we do it that way too… Better safe than sorry, eh?

So once you’ve created a new account, click on the ‘Advertising’ link at the bottom right of the page. Should you wish to, you might like to checkout Facebook’s Guide to Advertising – probably worth a look; although it’s fairly straight forward.

The first step is to create your advert…

Pop in your destination URL – you’ll then see that there is an option to suggest an ad – click on it if you like; quite handily Facebook will grab a couple of the images from the page – which may be the ones you want to use.

Less handily the auto-generated ad text is pretty rubbish, but you can amend that

Bear in mind that your ad needs to attract attention, so don’t be afraid to get a little creative with your headline and body copy. Also, you can of course upload any image you like… Just make sure you own the rights to it!

Just for fun, I’ve created an ad targeted specifically to Coca Cola employees – (don’t panic all will become clear in a minute).

I’ll now click on continue, to move on to targeting options…

Targeting on Facebook…

Here’s where Facebook is actually pretty awesome.

Remember my Coca Cola ad? Well thanks to the magic of Facebook I can get it to show up only to people who work for Coca Cola.

There are tons of options here – you can target by location, age, gender, sexuality,  relationship status, languages, their likes & interests, plus education & where they work. So, you can be as targeted or generic as you like.

The marketer in me, says ‘be targeted’ – but I guess it really depends on what it is that you’re looking to do. For example – if you were running some adverts for an online job site which covers all sectors and locations – you might just elect to be pretty generic.

As before, when you’re done, click continue…

Campaigns, Pricing & Scheduling

This bit is pretty self-explanatory – just set your pricing, scheduling etc and then hit review advert…

You’ll then get the opportunity to either ‘place order’ (which is an odd turn of phrase, but heigh ho) – or go back and edit your ad.

Then simply lather, rinse and repeat to create as many ads as you like.

The targeting is set at a campaign level – but you can create as many campaigns as you like – just be a bit careful if you are creating multiple ads for campaigns – as if you’re not careful you can find yourself adding the adverts under the wrong campaign.

To be honest the system is pretty slow, clunky and has an irritating tendency to crash. It would be really handy to have an offline Facebook Editor (as with the Google AdWords editor) as I’m pretty sure that this would speed up the process – perhaps something for the future eh, Facebook?

So… hopefully you’ve found this useful – as usual, any feedback, questions or declarations of love via the comments please

Piqued your interest? Me too. Essentially CMB Consumer Pulse (the company who undertook the research project) asked the following questions:

To the Facebook ‘fans’:

Are you more likely to buy since becoming a fan?

Are you more likely to recommend to a friend since becoming a fan?

To the Twitter ‘followers’:

Are you more likely to buy since becoming a follower?

Are you more likely to recommend to a friend since becoming a follower?

The results were as follows:

Facebook ‘fans’:

51% of respondents said they would be more likely to buy from at least one brand since becoming a fan.

60% of respondents said they would be more likely to recommend at least one brand since becoming a fan.

Twitter ‘followers’:

67% of respondents said they would be more likely to buy from at least one brand since becoming a follower.

79% of respondents said they would be more likely to recommend at least one brand since becoming a follower.

On the face of it at least – Twitter followers look pretty engaged, no?

But the Facebook fans? Surely if 51% said they would be more like to buy; then 49% said either they didn’t know; or would be less likely to buy. Not exactly compelling. Oh, and it gets worse – 49% said that one of the reasons they became a Facebook fan in the first place was because they were already a customer. So we’ve an uplift… but only just…

This is getting messy now, right?

I’ve also got concerns with the research methodology used -  I think that the questions asked are a bit confusing/complex:

‘Are you more likely to buy since becoming a fan/follower?’

This question asks you to think about the likelihood of a future purchase – which is pretty woolly anyways, right? Then adds additional complexity by chucking in the ’since becoming a fan/follower’. Are you asking if becoming a fan/follower influences purchasing decisions? Is that a question that someone can really answer?

I’d be far more interested to see what people have *actually* done. Not what they think they might do, one day, perhaps, maybe, possibly – you get the point.

Now a question like this might be more interesting -

‘Have you purchased from <brand x> since you became a fan/follower?’

Likewise:

Have you recommended <brand x> to a friend since you became a fan/follower?’

One of the first things I was taught about market research was that what people have done is far more predictive of their future behaviour than what they ‘think’ they might do. I’d love to see the results of those questions (if they were asked). Sure, they might not make for such a compelling headline; but they would at least be genuinely useful.

However, the cynic in me suspects that this piece of research was really about linkbaiting – and we’ve (the search industry) all bitten, right? On that front, they’ve done really very well indeed…