If you spend much time on the web, you’re probably familiar with infographics -  those big, long images that creatively represent quantities of data in a visual format. Infographics have become popular because they are easy to share – Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter are riddled with them – and because they break complex ideas down into easily digestible bites.  As a result, people want to know how to use infographics for web marketing.

What makes an effective infographic?

Why do some infographics take off, while others die a quiet, lonely death on their owners’ blogs? We have a few theories. Great infographics tend to have the following:

A compelling story

What’s the point?

I’m not being facetious. There should actually be a point to your infographic – a story you’re trying to tell, a message you’re bringing to life.

Treat it like a school paper – start with a thesis. Gather information and build an argument that supports your thesis. With the right data (see next point) and a good story, you’ve got a shot at a decent infographic.

In a business setting, this story should tie into your broader marketing message. Are you educating clients on the need for your product or service? Demonstrating your expertise and deep industry knowledge? Just be careful not to make it too salesy – nobody likes to share advertisements.

Great data

The best infographic takes otherwise complex data (spreadsheets, for instance) and simplifies it, allowing for faster comprehension by the target audience. This works especially well for data with elements of time (line graphs and timelines), location (maps), and scale (bar charts and visual comparisons).

Visual Style

If you want people to share something, it better look great. People will form an opinion about the quality of the infographic, the information it represents, and the company behind it, in seconds.

The style should support the story, while appealing to the target market. If you’re trying to scare people, use shades of red and menacing imagery. One of the most successful infographics I’ve ever seen did this beautifully:

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/05/09/sitting-down-infographic/

At the very least, it’s important that the visual style add to, rather than distract from, the message you’re trying to convey. Amy Balliett said it best in her fantastic SmashingMagazine article about infographic design: “If infographics were as simple as laying out a bunch of standard charts and graphs on a page, then clients would not need to search out great designers.” She speaks from experience:

http://killerinfographics.com/portfolio

Daniel Dannenberg, infographic designer, says “Bottom line: choose the right designer. Find an infographic designer that has experience, possesses sharp design skills, handles data accurately and shows variety and growth through their work.” Case in point, here’s a recent infographic Daniel created:

http://www.verticalmeasures.com/vm-news/mix-96-9-interview-with-vertical-measures-daniel-dannenberg

Shareworthy, and easy to share

Generally, people only go to the effort of creating an infographic because they want it to reach the widest audience possible.

What makes an infographic shareworthy?

1. It’s timely, or in the news. Take a look at your news feed around the next holiday – you’ll probably see a bunch of holiday-related links being shared. Likewise, if a major event is in the news, and you can create the most authoritative infographic on the subject, you’ve got something worth sharing. Why does this work? You don’t have to convince people the topic is worth discussing – you’re simply adding value to a conversation that’s already taking place.
2. It has a catchy title. Who are we kidding? We’re a superficial society. We judge a book by its cover, and we judge a post by its title. If you want widespread sharing on Twitter, your title better stand out. In the last 10 minutes, there have been 31 new tweets in my Twitter feed. 25 of them contained links. How do you stand out? With an awesome title.
3. It has broad appeal. Let’s use the above example, “Sitting Down is Killing You.” 99% of people who saw that infographic were likely sitting when they came across it. It’s instantly relevant to the masses (Some good old-fashioned fear mongering helps, too…).

What makes an infographic easy to share?

1. Easy embed code. Above or below your infographic, you should include a box with the HTML code required to easily add the infographic to another blog. Take a look at our Facebook usage stats infographic. To embed in your own site, you click inside the textarea (Javascript automatically selects the contents of the box), copy, and paste into your own site. The image will appear on your site, linking back to the original on our site.
2. Easy social sharing. Rule #1 of getting anyone to do anything: make it as easy as possible. Sharing the post should require about as much work as closing the page – the option you’re competing against. Make those social sharing buttons super accessible!
3. Easy to find in search. You can’t share it if you don’t know it exists. Make sure you optimize your blog post for keywords relevant to the infographic so that people find you when doing a Google search. Because of the Facebook infographic mentioned above, we’ve got top rankings for terms like “Facebook usage stats.” It demonstrates our expertise in an area that’s important to our business.

What makes a bad infographic?

Alright, we’ve covered the critical parts of a good infographic, but it’s equally important to see bad examples to learn what not to do. Here are a few things that’ll ruin an infographic…

The wrong format

Ask yourself – “Is an infographic the best storytelling device for this content?” Sometimes, marketers try to force content into the form of an infographic. After all, infographics are cool! Everyone loves them. Clients ask for them, account managers promise them, and suddenly you’re turning what should be a blog post into a lengthy infographic:

Source:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/04/10/president-obama-sends-congress-his-fiscal-year-2014-budget

Not only is this not really an infographic, search engines are not able to read any of the text contained within the image. You’ve abused the concept of the infographic, while robbing the page of the possible SEO value of that text!

Confusing visuals

An infographic should reduce confusion by elegantly boiling a concept down to its simplest form. At their worst, infographics can actually make concepts seem far more confusing or complicated than they need to be. Timelines typically start in the bottom left corner and go up, right? They thought so:

Source:  http://pinterest.com/pin/506162445590162643/

Even if you’re trying to present something far more complex, if you can’t come up with an elegant way to present it, you might as well skip the infographic altogether:

Source: http://agbeat.com/business-marketing/piktochart-simple-infographic-creator-online-for-the-busy-professional/

The mass of tangled, overlapping lines is virtually impossible to follow. I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish, but now I have a headache and an irrational fear of healthcare.

No reason to exist

Remember the elements of a good infographic? A compelling story, good data, and a solid design? If you try to come up with an infographic purely to drive shares and traffic, you will eventually find yourself in this category. If you find yourself in a conversation like the following, you’re on dangerous ground:

1: Easter’s coming up. We should create an infographic about it.

2: What should it be about?

1: Dunno. Let’s just find a bunch of facts and throw them together. People will share it because it’s Easter.

The end result: “10 Things You Need to Know About Easter,” an infographic which is devoid of anything you actually need to know about easter (see #4 above).

Don’t waste your time creating something so meaningless. Don’t waste your audience’s time by sharing it. Just don’t.

An infographic case study

We recently launched an infographic for a media buying agency about the history of advertising.

Story - We wanted to create an authoritative visual history of advertising and the various modes of mass communication. It was also intended to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. We realize wall paintings were not intended to be billboards, nor were smoke signals really “over-the-air” ads, but they were milestones in communication.

Judging by the feedback we received, the research paid off. We got some great comments, including this one: “As someone with an advertising degree, this infographic is awesome! It’s amazing to see how long it’s been around and how far technology has come. It will be interesting to see where it is in 50+ years.”

Catchy title – A Brief History of Advertising. Simple. Short. Clear. In retrospect, we might have gotten more action from a title such as “Advertising: A 4,000 Year History” or “Advertising: Not Quite the World’s Oldest Profession,” but we opted to keep it simple.

Visual Style – How do you visually represent 4,000 years of history? We chose to go with a long, winding timeline with silhouette representations of important milestones.

As for the artistic direction, we decided to mimic the Mad Men color scheme and typography. Mad Men was getting a lot of attention in ad circles, and since that’s the audience we were trying to reach, it seemed appropriate.

Shareworthy - We timed the release of this infographic with the season premier of Mad Men, and structured our outreach accordingly. We also put a whole lot of work into the research, compiling one of the more comprehensive timelines of advertising you’ll find anywhere on the web. If we had phoned it in with shallow content and minimal creativity, it wouldn’t have been particularly shareworthy.

The results?

The infographic was picked up by a few authoritative sites. From there, social sharing really took off:

Since then, it has been spread to to many, many more sites. Most of them link back to our client, which has generated a steady stream of referral traffic from relevant sites.

Better yet, because of the links from major websites, search engines will view Ocean Media as a more authoritative source. This will lead to improved search rankings for terms related to advertising and media buying, and more traffic for many months.

It’s still early to quantify the value of this infographic, and I can’t share specific metrics, but referral traffic is up significantly over the last three months.

Feedback?

What are some of the best and worst infographics you’ve seen? Any killer tips we’ve left out?

What’s more, blog posts serve different purposes. Depending on the audience and objective, the definition of “perfect” may change. As a rule, blog posts should improve search rankings, encourage social engagement, demonstrate your expertise, and get visitors to engage with your company in some meaningful way. The “perfect” blog post is structured to accomplish these goals as effectively as possible.

4 Elements of the Perfect Blog Post

1. It’s written for skimming, not reading

Many people will read the headline above and skip right over this sentence. Culturally, we have an absurdly short attention span. Keep that in mind when you’re writing.

This cultural attention span is the reason memes are so popular: you see it, recognize it, read it, and get a laugh within about two seconds. So how do you write for our ADD culture?

• Use lists *cough* likethisone *cough*
• Use images to make your point – nothing sends people running quite like a long page of text.
• Use sub-headings and bold text for main points. Some people won’t stop to read anything else – what’s their takeaway?

The perfect blog post is written for the culture it targets. In our case, that means it can convey the message without forcing readers to do much reading.

2. It’s worth sharing

The perfect blog post has content that is worth sharing. If your blog post doesn’t educate or entertain, you might as well save yourself the time and skip it. Self-promotion is not a good reason for a post – nobody retweets a blatant advertisement (unless it’s particularly entertaining!).

Ask yourself – “Is there anything unique about this post? Or is it just a rehashing of ideas that have been covered thousands of times?” Two million blog posts are published every day – why should someone read yours, let alone share it?

3. It follows a keyword strategy

Many outstanding bloggers drop the ball here. They say “I just write – I don’t know anything about SEO.” If that sounds familiar, you’re in luck! Everything you need to know about blogging with a keyword strategy can be found in this presentation:

Just start by asking yourself “What search terms would I like to lead people to this post?” Simply by emphasizing that term in your post (title, subheaders, etc.), you’re doing real live SEO! (Yes, there’s more to SEO than this, but it’s an important step).

Need an example? The presentation above actually references this blog post. Whoa. Scroll up. Can you tell what keyword I’m targeting? In this post, I’m trying to demonstrate my point by emphasizing “the perfect blog post.” With any luck, a Google search for this term will lead back to this post.

4. It aligns with your business objectives

Educational, entertaining, share-worthy, search-friendly content is useless if it’s not supporting your larger mission. Try asking yourself these questions:

• What are you trying to achieve with your blog?
• Does the post fit with your brand’s identity?
• Does the post help to position you as an expert or leading voice in your space?
• Does it have a call to action that gets people to engage with you on some measurable level?

Without this, items #1-3 on this list are wasted.

Want Some Feedback?

So… how do your blog posts stack up? Post a link to one in the comments and we’ll send you some feedback!

Google Algorithm Changes

• Quiet month. No reported changes.

Twitter News

• The Ravens may have won the big game, but Twitter was the true winner of the Super Bowl. The company was mentioned in 26 of the 52 commercials (compared to 4 mentions for Facebook and zero for Google+). If Twitter had actually paid the $3.8 million each 30 second ad during the Super Bowl costs, the company would’ve paid $98.8 million. I’d say getting close to $100 million in free advertising in front of the largest TV audience of the year counts as a HUGE win.

• The Super Bowl also brought out the best in brands on twitter. During the extended blackout in the middle of the game, companies like Tide and Oreo reacted fast to earn thousands of RTs.

• In all, there were more than 24.1 million Super Bowl-related tweets. At the game’s peak during the blackout, 231,500 Tweets were going out every minute about the game.
• It’s not all good for Twitter though. There were a number of high-profile hackings this month, leading many to question why adding LOLCAT as a supported language is taking precedent over adding two-factor login verification.

Google News

• Google Glass, the wearable computer headset was revealed in an awesome video. At $1500, the cost is going to be pretty steep though.

• Google is going to open its own retail stores before 2013 finishes, reportedly.
• Google is testing a new interface on its website that looks like its UI for Chromebooks and Android.

Facebook News

• Facebook is looking to beef up its advertising platform by purchasing Atlas from Microsoft.

Photo by BrianBloom

Fans of Seth Godin are no doubt aware that he recently released a new book, The Icarus Deception. Here’s the premise: Industrial society has trained mankind into the safe, the comfortable, the mundane. Study hard, get good grades, and maybe you’ll get into an elite school. Once there, study hard, get good grades, and maybe you’ll get a job at an elite company. Work hard, keep your head down, and you may work your way up to management and retire a little better off than your parents did.

In this book, Godin argues that the comfortable path is no longer safe. He argues that now, conformity and predictability are liabilities, and that we should all be taking the path of the artist, no matter what our vocation. He’s not arguing that we must all paint, sculpt, dance, or create music. Instead, we should approach everything we do with the creativity and courage of an artist.

Sounds great, but what does that really mean for those of us in the corporate world? Here are a few characteristics of the true artist:

• He ships. Art isn’t art if nobody else sees it.
• She creates an emotional connection. With human beings. You can’t do that if you don’t ship.
• He doesn’t pander. Growing and evolving because of feedback is part of being an artist. Selling out to give your audience what they think they want is not.
• He keeps trying. Great art comes from passion. Passion will not be extinguished by a few failures. The artist learns from those failures and refines his craft.
• She takes risks. Art worth remembering defies convention and traditional classification. If there’s no risk, she is pandering, imitating, or hiding. Even the best books, movies, restaurants, gadgets, and brands have critics.

Why am I writing about this?

I read this book, as I do most of Godin’s books, looking for new insights or ideas I could bring to the work we do for our clients. I was pleasantly surprised to find that what he describes is what we strive to do every day.

Our industry is hitting an incredible level of saturation.

• 371,777 people mention “Social Media” in their Twitter bios. 105,785 mention “SEO.” 216,686 people identify themselves as bloggers in their bios. Source
• More than 500 MILLION tweets are sent every day.
• 532 million Facebook status updates are posted.
• 2 million blog posts are published daily.

Web marketers have adopted a formula: write enough blog posts, tweet enough, post to Facebook enough, and you’ll succeed. Comment on enough blogs, exchange enough links, and your search engine rankings will improve. The problem is, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people doing this, and the definition of “enough” keeps growing. Comfortable is no longer safe.

Most of us like to play it safe. We don’t go out on a limb because limbs can break. We can fall. This applies to marketing strategy as well. “Create more content. Good content. But stick to what we know works.” To do otherwise is dangerous. We risk failure, scorn, loss of a client, being fired.

What we’ve found, though, is that some of our biggest successes came from the most risky, creative, unorthodox ideas. Allow me to share a few examples:

The Sweetest Sixteen Recipe Tournament

What began as an idea to generate new recipes using pie filling turned into something so much larger and more powerful for the brand. We recruited 16 of the top baking bloggers in North America to participate in our tournament. We mailed care packages of Solo’s products to each one of them. Yes – a web marketing company mailed physical things to real people via the US Postal Service. The outcome?

Oh, and we got 16 spectacular recipes out of the bargain, while making friends with some seriously talented bloggers.

To get the most mileage out of this, we’re taking it a step further. We’re compiling all of the recipes from the contest into an e-book. We’re partnering with No Kid Hungry, selling the e-book for $1.99, and donating 100% of proceeds to their mission. Now all of those tasty treats will help feed hungry children!

DevOps – A Valentine’s Day Fairy Tale

It started with a conversation that went something like this: “This will either be the dumbest thing we’ve ever written, or it’ll be an amazing story that people will want to share.” It’s a story about two people finding love. It also happens to be an analogy for Development and Operations working better together when it comes to application support and server monitoring. Sounds insane, right?

This post resulted in a massive traffic spike on Valentine’s Day due to dozens of retweets and enough votes to make it to the front page of HackerNews (a prominent community site in the IT world).

Visualizing Facebook Activity of TV Shows

Ocean Media provides media buying and media planning services for major brands. They’ve recently ventured into social media as well, so they wanted to showcase an expertise at the intersection of TV and social media. So, we created a data visualization tool. Every day, our tool pulls Likes and Talking About numbers for 30 prime-time TV shows that debuted this season. That data is then charted over the course of the season so you can see the popularity of each show on Facebook, color-coded by network:

To get the full experience, click the image above and try it out for yourself. We’re taking public data, using a free visualization tool from Google, and creating something interesting and unique.

The success or failure of this project has yet to be seen. We’re still building and gathering data. We’ll find out soon whether it resonates with the public or not!

Fortune Favors the Bold

There’s still a place for “safe.” Safe will still generate incremental gains. You might see 1-2% growth in traffic each month by playing it safe. But safe never goes viral. Safe doesn’t get many retweets. Safe is unremarkable. Occasionally, you need to mix it up with the risky, crazy, quirky, weird ideas that will knock people out of the flood of mundane and say “Wow, that’s different.”

To our clients, current and future, we’d like to make a few requests:

With your permission, we’d like to take more risks.

With your permission, we’d like to try things that might fail.

With your permission, we’d like to fly a little closer to the sun.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to receive emails about posts like this (roughly once a month), Subscribe to our newsletter.

Brainstorming can take up time and energy, but often the most unique and linkable ideas come from a dedicated brainstorming session. If you’re a beginner to brainstorming ideas or looking for news ways to tackle brainstorming, read our basic tips on how to brainstorm:

Blog Post Brainstorming Tip #1 – Get out of the Workplace

Sometimes a change of scenery can really boost inspiration and change your outlook. If you’re typically stuck in an office all day, take a brainstorming trip to the park or local coffee shop. New environments can quickly change perspective and jump start conversations.

Blog Post Brainstorming Tip #2 -Diversity

While brainstorming for posts, include people from all backgrounds and viewpoints. By having a wide range of experiences from people to bounce ideas off, you can get ideas that appeal to all types of people. You may also find new things about a particular demographic that you didn’t know before.

Blog Post Brainstorming Tip #3 -Think Big

If you theoretically had thousands of dollars to do a large project or post, what would you create? Getting these big ideas out in the open can inspire scalable ideas of similar grandier. Plus, others may know of tools or resources you aren’t familiar with. If there was an easy way to complete a large project would you do it? Explore all options during brainstorming for the best results.

Blog Post Brainstorming Tip #4 -Be Quick

While sometimes you want deep conversations, there are other times where it’s appropriate to just start shouting out ideas. Set down a timer for 3 minutes and come up with as many crazy ideas as possible. Once you’ve stopped, you’ll surprise yourself with original ideas that you would have never come up with. Now take these ideas, modify them, and make them happen.

Blog Post Brainstorming Tip #5 -No Room for Negativity

Never shoot down a “crazy” or “silly” idea. Encourage them! Once you shoot down someone’s idea they are automatically less likely to speak up with others. Plus, those “crazy” ideas can spark the imagination and deliver unique content that no one else has. Hearing out every idea has a positive effect on the brainstorming session and on the people participating.

Brainstorming for blog posts and content creation is as important as ever. There is always something new and hip going on online, and your best chance to be a part of it comes from your updated blog. So get creative and get to brainstorming!

In 2007, Microsoft bought into facebook for $240 million (receiving a 1.6% stake in the company). Fast forward four years, and Facebook was now raking in a billion dollars in profits. Facebook continues to bowl forward, buying Instagram for a billion dollars, and also holding its IPO. The IPO was deemed a “fiasco”, but the company remains worth more than $100 billion because of its amazing user base.

More than 1 billion people use Facebook, with more than 1.1 trillion Likes since 2009. Enough photos have been uploaded to circle the earth an obscene number of times, and more than 200,000 years of music has been streamed through the site. There’s even a recognized psychological disorder centered around Facebook addiction!

Check out our infographic below for all the Facebook stats you desire! (We’re proud to introduce the internet to “Winking Zuckerberg” as well)

Facebook Usage Stats Infographic Embed Code:

<a href="http://www.optimaworldwide.com/social-media-marketing/facebook-usage-stats-infographic"><img src="http://www.optimaworldwide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/facebook-usage-stats-infographic.gif" width="600px" alt="facebook usage stats 2013"></a>

Welcome to our countdown of the most popular presidents in US history on the internet. If we include ALL presidents, Obama would obviously win, so we want to focus on the presidents that served out their terms before the internet became a thing. One thing to keep in mind, “popularity” does not equal favorable opinion in this study. We’re focusing solely on the number of times the name comes up or is referenced in a variety of mediums across the web.

We’re using Ronald Reagan as the cut-off point for presidents before the internet era. The internet began to really grow into its own at the tail-end of the first Bush administration, and most of his web presence is hard to distinguish from that of his son.

The first ranking comes from the term order for each President. Earlier Presidents get the benefit of living in an era where very little has been digitized, while a President like Calvin Coolidge from the 1900s has a great chance of news articles or books being excerpted and digitized. This acts as something of a leveling agent for the whole post. We add up all the rankings from the various factors tested, and the winner has the lowest score.

Google Factors

Let’s face it, Google pretty much owns the internet, so we took into account five different ranking factors: broad search results, exact search results (place the name in quotes), broad search volumes per month, exact search volumes per month, and cost-per-click in AdWords.

Some interesting takeaways:

• George Washington and John Adams lose an awful lot of search results when flipping between broad and exact match. There must be many guys and ladies living in Washington state named George.
• John Tyler and the Andrews Johnson & Jackson also get a boost here based on how common their names are.
• For some reason it’s more than $5 to buy an ad on the search listing for president “Andrew Johnson”, while it doesn’t even cost a dollar to advertise on Lincoln’s listings.
• George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the most commonly searched for presidents, while Chester A. Arthur is searched for the least every month.

YouTube Factors

We measured the number of video results each president has on YouTube for our next popularity factor. This helps us see who has more documentaries, weird amateur rap videos, and Illuminati conspiracy videos made about them.

Some interesting takeaways:

• The most popular (JFK) has 43576.5% more video results than the least popular (Rutherford B. Hayes)
• Rutherford B. Hayes has a mere 680 results – a full 90,720 less than MC Hammer.
• John Tyler continues to benefit from having such a common name, coming in at #6.
• The 39 presidents combine to only have 200,000 more video results on YouTube than Justin Beiber

Wikipedia Factors

We measured three different factors on Wikipedia: article length, article references, and backlinks to the page. The more popular the president, the more the people editing Wikipedia should want to write about him, and the more references there will be out there to cite. As the internet’s leading encyclopedic resource, Wikipedia should also give us a solid gauge of how often people talk about the Presidents on the web, and link to their page for more info. All link data comes from Open Site Explorer.

Some interesting takeaways:

• The longest article on a US President on Wikipedia belongs to Warren Harding (16,437 words)
• The shortest article on a US President on Wikipedia belongs to Millard Fillmore (3,400 words)
• By my count, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover have the same amount of words in their Wikipedia articles (11,119 words)
• Only 25 references are cited in Martin Van Buren’s Wikipedia article, compared to 376 for Ronald Reagan.
• If not for a terrible presence on Wikipedia, John Adams could’ve ended up the most popular president. He picked up a full 70 points from Wikipedia, leaving him as the sixth most popular president.

Social Factors

Using Topsy, we measured the number of times a president’s name has been mentioned on Twitter.

• Abraham Lincoln wins in a landslide, probably because of his vampire hunting skills and the Spielberg flick
• This was Jimmy Carter’s best category, coming in at #5

The Internet’s Least Popular Pre-Internet US President

It really isn’t even close. Our 13th president, Millard Fillmore, loses in an absolute landslide. As you’ll soon see, first and third place were only separated by 7 points, while Fillmore was a full 29 points behind even coming in next-to-last. That is a pretty bad-ass portrait though, so at least he has that going for him. I bet if he wore an eye patch, he’d have come in first.

The Internet’s Top 5 Most Popular Pre-Internet US Presidents

5. Ronald Reagan (87 points)

The movie career certainly helps President Reagan out, as does his deity-like status among conservatives.

4. George Washington (70 Points)

I thought for sure an awesome Dodge commercial would catapult our first president to the number one position…

3. John F. Kennedy (66 Points)
The conspiracy theories surrounding his assassination played a big role in coming in at number three.

2. Abraham Lincoln (60 Points)

Honest Abe also holds the distinction of being the only president to share the stage with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, so he’ll always be #1 in my heart.

1. Thomas Jefferson (59 Points)

When I began, I was not expecting to see Thomas Jefferson end up #1. I knew he had the potential to be amongst the most popular, but this seems to me to be quite the upset.

Exclusive Breaking News – Jefferson Responds to Being Named #1

Here is the complete list of Presidential rankings from our research:

Looking for a way to spruce up your website for Valentine’s Day? Well look no further and check out our Valentine’s Day social media icon set. It is free for you to download and use for commercial or private purposes and it is a great way to make sure your website is ready for the special day. This social media icon set includes:

Facebook Social Media Icon – Heart

Twitter Social Media Icon – Rose

RSS Social Media Icon – Engagement Ring

Pinterest Social Media Icon – Stuffed Bear

Google Algorithm Changes

• January 22nd – Panda update impacting 1.2% of US searches.

Facebook News

• Facebook launches a new search feature called Graph Search! While it could prove to be useful and amazing, I don’t think Google is shaking in their boots about it.
• Oh wait, what’s that? Bing will provide web search results right inside Facebook? That could be a game-changer.
• Facebook was willing to work with Google though, it just found Bing more flexible in privacy matters.
• Facebook also adds more emoticons for sharing status updates.

Twitter News

• Twitter launches Vine, which is completely amazing in every way. The 6 second looping video is the next generation of animated gifs.
• Brands are already warming up to Vine.

Google News

• Google DID NOT kill a donkey.
• Check out what happens when you run the theme song from the TV show “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” through Google Translator 64 times (every language in the system).

Misc. Search and Social Media News

• Of the 50 biggest US companies, only 18% of CEOs use social media.
• MySpace opens up the the public again, piggybacking on investor Justin Timberlake’s new song:

Since its launch in June 2011, Google Plus has been ridiculed for being the desperate social media platform that nobody uses.

We think that might be a little harsh. Google plus is the desperate social media platform everyone NEEDS to use. Google has leveraged its social media platform into one of the most appealing web presence management tools for businesses.

In fact, you might already be on Google+ and not even know it! Remember Google Places for Business? Google+ and Google Places are now rolled together, and each business is listed online as a Google+ page. If you haven’t optimized your local listing for Google in a while, do so immediately.

So, why exactly do you need a Google+ page? Here are the top 8 reasons.

Unrestricted Data – Facebook and Twitter restrict Google from accessing much of their data. This means your profiles on Facebook and Twitter won’t rank very well. Google Plus eliminates any restrictions and streamlines your company’s data directly to Google results.

Followed Links – You can embed a followed link into your Google+ profile. Better yet, you have full control over the link anchor text.

Instant Indexing – Google indexes a webpage instantly when shared on Google+. Otherwise, it might take days or weeks for Google bots to come crawl your site.

Optimized Sharing – When sharing a link on Google+, your entire first sentence of text is considered the title. This method is easy and accurately indexes your links.

Integrated Google Accounts – Gmail, Youtube, Google+, Calendar, Drive, etc. are all combined accounts. Optimizing your Google+ page will flow over to each of these Google tools making it easy to manage each one.

Circles – Similar to Linkedin, you can filter your friends, colleagues, and family members by posting in certain specific groups called circles. This has proven to be beneficial for professionals.

Improved Google Places Page – Google+ will create a Places page for your business if you don’t. If you claim your business on Google+ you’ll be able to update your businesses profile with better pictures, store hours, directions, and a sales pitch.

High Ranking – Since Google likes itself so much, Google+ pages will often outrank all of your other pages with far less effort. Not only that, but click-through rates are significantly increased using the rel=”author” tag and specifying a Google+ profile. Your picture will appear beside your article, making it stand out among the rest!

So, call Google+ desperate, needy, and overly attached if you want to. The fact still remains Google+ has a place in web marketing – a very big one. If you have any questions about Google+ give us a shout on Twitter and Facebook or leave us a comment below!