As a small business owner, you have to know how to get the most for your marketing efforts . The battle between Google and Facebook (FB) to be King/Queen of the pile will be interesting to watch over the coming years. #1 Google+ rivals FB since Google already has millions (billions?) of gmail users that can easily activate their Google+ accounts.  It is free to list your business with Google and create a Google+ account with it. #2 Blogger (blogger.com) is a free blog service that is owned by Google. And, yes, all those blog posts are automatically distributed to Google+ users. FB posts stay in FB and get little, if any, attention in Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results. #3 Google is the number one search engine used around the globe. Do you think their search results favor Google+ accounts and posts made with Blogger? Proof is Here.... The other day I logged into my gmail account and searched, in the Google search engine, for a local business - using a ke...

Facebook (FB) is expanding it's perception beyond a social network. What this means is pretty important if you are a small business owner wanting to sell more products. You already know that goofy "Thumbs Up" icon where everyone can bless you or hate you courtesy of FB. Imagine a world where you can sell your products online to anyone in FB. That means accepting payments online through FB - what a concept. That is in motion now as FB ramps up its' FbStart program, literally giving selected  businesses $30-60K to develop FB apps. Some say this eliminates the need for a web site or blog. Really?  Sure, FB has some advantages to doing networking. It's difficult to measure the clients it generates for business pages listed there. I see it more as a free "Angie's List."  I have never met a new client using FB, and only know of one business who has. But, FB is great as a search engine because it's a global repository of information ...

Over 11m teenagers and college students have left Facebook since 2011, an analyst claimed today. Digital consultancy iStrategy Labs today released a study it says uses data from Facebook’s own Social Advertising platform to come up with the shocking figures. Experts believe that young people are increasingly abandoning the site to turn to apps such as WhatsUp, Snapchat and others. According to iStrategy, Facebook has 4,292,080 fewer high-school aged users and 6,948,848 college-aged users than it did in 2011. Late last year Facebook shares went on a 24 hour rollercoaster after the company's chief financial officer admitted that teenagers are losing interest in the site. Shares in the social network soared around 15 per cent to $57.98 (£36.16) following the site's latest quarterly earnings announcement, before suddenly failing to $47.40. The dip was attributed to comments made by Facebook's chief financial officer David Ebersman about a decline in ...

Any change to Facebook, whether it's a tweak in its site design or an overhaul of its privacy settings, generates a groan or two. In another effort to improve its users' experience on the social network, Facebook is getting rid of an old and sometimes glitch-prone privacy option that will now render every Facebook user searchable to any other user. The old privacy setting -- called "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" -- gave users the option to not appear in Facebook search results. If Mark Zuckerberg himself wanted to keep all Facebook users from looking up his Timeline and activity via the Facebook search bar, he could toggle the setting so that only friends, or friends of friends, could do so. However, according to Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Michael Richter, that led to some problems with the search function itself. "People told us that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally and couldn't find t...

Google rules the West but Japan still prefers Yahoo: Map reveals how different internet giants dominate countries across the globe Google has become so much a part of everyday life many people now use the brand name as a verb for searching, but a new map highlights exactly how far and wide the site spreads across the globe.   The map, created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, used data from millions of people's browsing history worldwide and shows Google as the most popular site, in 62 countries.  Facebook was the second most visited site globally, in 50 countries, while the third place site - China's  Baidu search engine, was popular in just two countries. To work out the number of visitors, Dr Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata from the institute combined the number of estimated average daily unique visitors, with the estimated number of page views for that site from users in a particular country, for a particular month.  The data show...

Concerns over online privacy are leading Facebook users to commit "virtual identity suicide" by deleting their Facebook accounts, according to new scientific research. A survey of around 300 Facebook users and 300 quitters of the social networking site by Austrian psychologists at the University of Vienna assessing what motivated them to use or abandon Facebook revealed an emerging counter-movement against social networking. Among those saying they were quitting Facebook, almost half were leaving because of privacy concerns. Others said that the shallow nature of online relationships and feelings that they were becoming addicted to Facebook were reasons for abandoning their virtual social lives, according to the research on users and quitters from 47 countries. see article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/20/facebook-privacy-concerns-prompt-virtual-identity-suicides.html

1. Consumers are saying that blogs are more influential in shaping opinion than Twitter, and when it comes to affecting purchase decisions, more important than Facebook. ( link to study ) 2.  Blogs are the third most important influence that affect consumer spending. ( link to study ) 3.  Eleven case studies in new marketing ideas that use blog to create businesses and gain online exposure. ( link to studies ) 4. Seve reason to help you formulate your blogging strategy. ( link to report ) 5. Ten tips to get your blog going, blogging 101, or enhance your existing blogging ( link to report )

Barack Obama is political king of the fake Twitter followers, with more than 19.5 MILLION online fans who don't really exist Among influential U.S. political tweeters, President Barack Obama is the undisputed king of the fake followers. A MailOnline analysis ranks his sizable Twitter following as the most deceptive total among the 21 most influential accounts run by American politicians: More than 19.5 million of his 36.9 million Twitter followers are accounts that don't correspond to real people. The four phoniest accounts in the sample, which included Democratic and Republican Party leaders in Washington, D.C., were those belonging to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, first lady Michelle Obama and the White House communications shop. Of the president's 36.9 million Twitter followers, an astonishing 53 per cent – or 19.5 million – are fake accounts, according to a search engine at the Internet research vendor  StatusPeople.com . Just 20 per cent of Oba...

More news today about tech giants scrambling to reinvent business models to stay in business. Geez, look at Facebook at Google. Both lost billions of company value in stock drops because they are not keeping up with the pace of mobile computing.  Here is a link to one article . All this means to you is a wake up call. If your web site isn’t friendly to mobile devices, you are literally driving away traffic from your pages - shunning potential buyers of your products and services. Here is a link, click here , to understand the pros and cons of going mobile. This mobile computing trend is reshaping the market in technology, according ot the New York Times article . Demand for Intel chips inside computers — which are much more profitable than those inside smart phones — is plummeting.  At Microsoft, sales of software for PCs are sharply declining.  At Google, the price that advertisers pay when people click on ads has fallen for a year. This is partly becau...