LinkedIn which is a social networking much like Facebook, geared for professionals to share resumes, and employment related information,  is the first of the social media networks to open up it’s doors to the public shares. Many believe that is why the stocks took off soaring 109% from the original offer. Investors are hopeful that this will open the door for other companies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter and those they will follow through. This would begin a totally new advent and avenue for investors to put their money in. It is the way of the future, the technology frenzy has taken over and everyone wants a piece of it. To give you an idea of the broad scope of opportunities this would open, LinkedIn has around 100 million users, while facebook has more than 600 million followers, and earnings to boast about. If they ever opened their doors to public shares, investors and amateurs alike would go into a mad rush to buy shares of the biggest social media King Company. So far though, no sign of that in the near future.

The news of its rapid growth makes some investors worried that the value of the stock exceeds the $243 million of revenue that the company generated last year. Making it that because of it being one the first social media groups to go public, it was at an advantage surely. The stock market however, as we all know has a mind of it’s own and do what it wants to. For now, people are celebrating their new wealth; investors who had purchased private stocks last year at low prices around the $20 mark are jumping for joy over the amazing growth they’ve witnessed in just one year. However not all investors are hopeful of the quick rise of the stocks, many believe that the smaller network group faces unforeseen challenges from their much bigger social networking counterparts facebook, but who doesn’t right? Can anyone ever become bigger or better than Facebook.

1. Now you can change your YouTube homepage as you desire. Choose in to use improvement for example, recommended and suggested videos supported on your screening history, what your contacts are able to, a lone rest to see the entire videos you have pledged to and additional.

2. You can also deliver a private video greeting. Youtube has built it more easy plus graceful for buddies and family units to keep connected throughout video greetings. So, use the “Unlisted” characteristic to divide videos with an exact URL hence merely those populace you would like to sight a video will watch it.

3. You may modify your private video greeting employing backdrop themes and extra chimes and screeches. You can rapidly build unique videos by various video templates as of 3rd party tools from Xtranormal, Stupeflix and Animoto.

There is a challenge created by Ted and YouTube named “Ads worth Spreading” and you are requested to post an entry. Ted’s task is to increase commendable thoughts around the globe. According to the YouTube, publicity must build you imagine, react and would like to share that is it a great thought or not, a creation that create the globe improved or a plan that might modify the globe. Therefore, generate an ad that builds dissimilarity.

Praveenkodur.com is a Blog with content related to Online Marketing India, Analytics India, Internet Marketing India, PPC India, SEO India, SMO India, Web Analytics India.

The enormous raise is frequently owing to the post of April’s Fool of 2010, which advantaged from a link in a famous position extra on that below. Traffic visit the blog from all over the globe, the first class states delivering visitors in 2010 were the U.K., USA, India, Canada including Germany, but a lot of people visited from further places also. There are 10,604,183 exclusive page clicks and extra than 30% of the total in last year 2010. The post of April Fools’ Day regarding altering its corporation name to “Topeka” had a big amount of page views in huge division because there was a link to its modest blog on the homepage of Google that day.

Launching browser Google Chrome, this publication bringing in its open source operating system was launched in the month of July 2009 and that was the most popular post of 2009. Another post was published in 2010 that Google declare its plan to make and check especially top speed broadband set-ups in some test places across the USA.

Introducing Google TV was one of the exciting posts among the readers; this post got total 314,991 readers. Google expose an innovative practice for television that unites your recognizable TV with the liberty and influence of the Internet.

Google’s latest indexing scheme gives 50% newest consequences for web searches than its previous index and is the biggest compilation of web content it has existed. Additional well-liked posts integrated Google’s new look, the capability to modify the backdrop picture on your Google homepage, Google Instant, a playable PAC-MAN drawing, the aptitude to call telephones from G-mail.

In the year of 2010, Google reserved up with it’s explore and application chain. It launched some new ones which are about small trades utilizing Google’s goods, news from YouTube, big Google narratives from consumers and a group of new “Search On” videos. Google as well shared its opinions on the upcoming of display marketing.

So, in December 2010, Google did up its blog index so you can extra simply search the correct situate to obtain the information you are looking for. You can find by type, category, language or district. Google restored its Twitter directory as well and put in latest directories for its Youtube channels and pages of FaceBook.

Since always, Google is thankful to the entire of its readers and visitors for trusting up with it in the whole year and of course, Google is looking onward to carrying you further stories in 2011.

Praveenkodur.com is an Online Marketing, Analytics, Product Marketing Blog. http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog

Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html

There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites. Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

The Long tail for Traffic Sources can be explained as:

A) Numerous Sources each generating smaller amount of targeted traffic.

B) Cumulatively form a significant percentage of overall traffic.

Advantage of Long tail traffic sources

A) Never be completely dependent on few sources of traffic. Never put all eggs in one basket.

B) Mitigate the risk due to competition & market dynamics.

C) Find New segment of target audience.

a. Forums, Social Networks, New Media formats also attract good amount of targeted traffic.
93% of IT professionals in US find social network helpful for professional solutions.

b. 60% of facebook users login daily.

c. It Industry spends more time in Social Media

How to develop a long tail of traffic sources

A) Optimize sites to support all types of users, media formats (Video, Images, Audio).

B) Do not ignore the needs of even a small percentage of users on your site.

C) Include features in your site for every new type of users as well. For example: Video/Audio/Image content users,

Why the effort?

A) People are increasingly using social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, facebook, answers etc.

B) Support your users to use your product on every social site.

B) Competition on newer traffic sources is less, so it is better to make the first move.

C) It is important to increase the length of the long tail.

D) It is also important to increase the width of the long tail.

D) Develop applications to like Blog, gadget, Facebook application, podcast subscription.

Using the Face Book example, which has more than 230% growth even in countries like India:

A) The idea behind making the site Open to developers was to increase the long tail of traffic.

B) Facebook now supports all type of users & all needs of users.

C) Even the need of small percentage of users to share Books is met by a Book application, which notifies people of best books and rates them. Face book car pool application, Face book Linkedin Application

D) Each application on facebook could have been a new profitable online business altogether.

E) Facebook’s is a collection of multiple brilliant ideas put in one single site. This has exploded the website, traffic, activity and popularity & brand value.

F) Every small & medium business can cash in traffic on Facebook by creating an innovative application for users. By giving freedom to external developers it has allowed them to create products for Facebook. These products meet the needs of even the smallest percentage of users on the site.

G) This is the biggest USP of facebook: satisfying the remote need of the smallest percentage of users with products developed by external developers who in turn get their brand promoted.

Overall Facebook wins by ensuring the long tail grows longer and wider.

Copyright of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com

The core values for such websites are:
A) The focal point of the website is the user generated content and the user himself.
B) Quality of users/user generated content is the quality of the website
C) Users/Moderators can make or break your website
B) Use Product cleverly as a tool to attract right people to use the site and increase activity.

Types of Social Networks & Online Communities.
A) Forums
B) Groups
C) Book Marking Sites
D) Content Popularity Sites (Digg, etc)
E) Answers
F) Social Networking
G) Professional Networking
H) Specialty Search Engines (video, Photos) Like Youtube, Flickr.com

Traffic to Social Media Sites

A) Organic Traffic

B) Word of Mouth Marketing
i) Blogs
ii) Marketing on Other Social Network Sites (Facebook)
iii)Viral
iv)Link Baiting

C) Targeted PPC advertising (very small scale)

D) Product Offerings: This is basically generating gadgets, applications which can be used in external sites and help drive traffic to your website.

Traffic From Social Media Sites

It is true that you can receive huge amount of targeted traffic for Free from Social Networks, this is possible only if you can spend lot of time and effort in each of the social network.

It is important to build reputation on your profile in these sites to drive targeted traffic.

If your business receives good amount of traffic from other social network sites then you must be aware that traffic flow is not consistent over a period of time. There will be spikes in traffic graph from social network sites.

Social Media Marketing

Social Network is a place where users posts content (textual, video, other) about various topics under predefined categories. There is generally a moderator or an algorithm, which monitors activities and gives prominence to few stories/user generated content. Moderator also starts discussion or edits the thread on any topic.

A) Content is clearly divided into Communities, Categories or Tags

B) Tagging is very essential. Location & Keyword tagging are 2 main important tags

C) All pages to have static urls as the content posted by users can rank in Organic results.

D) The Title, Category Heading, Breadcrum trail, Number of Views of the content, Content Url and links in the content post are essential for organic ranking.

E) If right content is not getting exposure the moderator has to work to ensure they get maximum views. Bring them on Home Page or link from relevant other pages.

F) The features and tools must be designed to get right content on Top of user attention.

G) To know the value of social media site,

i) Find the top number of views for any content or category.
ii) Find the number of users on each category at any point of time
iii) What is the average posts per user on each category
iv) Find the top 20% of the users posting maximum posts/threads. The same goes to rating content as well.

H) Moderator/Algorithm must choose the Content, Urls to be placed in the home page of the site.

I) Sharing the content is very essential, Users should be able to share any content with their friends.

J) Having a Personalized and customizable user profile is very essential.

K) Rating of Users by different level of activity on the site is good feature.

L) User Voting on the content is important aspect of the website.

M) The best content or Top Viewed/Rated Content must be clearly highlighted.

N) Users could be stalked by other users. Send a Add a friend request to other users.

O) All the content on the site to be made available to search engine crawlers.

P) Link back or track back Urls are essential. giving a link to posts which link to this content.

Q) In Q & A, giving rating to answers, users, and choosing a best answer is very essential.

R) Commenting is another most important aspect of the Social network. Giving a comment on every post increases the overall content on that page, helps it rank better in site search as well as organic web search.

S) Sending personal messages to other users is an important feature.

T) The user profile must exist in unique static Url which can be shared, linked from elsewhere on the web.

U) RSS feeds of user generated content is important. Users must be able to subscribe to other user generated content.

V) Including a plugin code which can help embed user generated content into an external blog, website is a useful tool.

W) The website must be able to assess the semantic relevance of the content posted by user and associate a relevant category or a tag to it.

X) The content posted by user should be sent as feed to various other vertical search engines and meta search engines.

Y) Every location or geography must have unique domain and contain local content.

Z) On every content page there must be links to other similar content.

AA) Marking a content as favorite is essential.

AB) Generating Quality Traffic & exposing Quality content. Both are reciprocal, you need to expose quality content to users and search engines and hence attract quality users to site.

AC) Moderator must be experienced and very good in promoting the right content.

AD) Users must be able to Bulk edit and manage the content submitted by them.

AE) License for every content submitted is essential

AF) Giving a number on every element based on its activity is very essential.

i) Number of Views of a content.
ii) Number of Votes to a content or answer.
iii) Number to every user based on his level of activity.
iv) Number of Comments on a content.
v) Number of Friends to each user.
vi) Number of webpages linking to each content.
vii) Number of categories, tags through which you can find this content.
viii) Number of Favorites for this content.

Copyright  of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com

Here are some of my suggestions on how Youtube can win both companies’ as well as users popularity.

1) Discriminate the content on Youtube as User generated, Copyrighted.

2) Make deals with TV channels to publish Youtube’s user generated videos on TV program’s such as Top videos of the week. Top funny videos etc.. This would encourage people to post personal videos as viewer ship increases.

3) Ask big brands to purchase users videos which become popular. For example Nike could copyright popular user videos on football etc…

4) Reward the users whose videos get selected for TV broadcast or get Branded. These videos will be of course original videos

5) Distribute & publish popular Youtube videos across various other sites on Internet

From Advertisers Perspective:

1) Display Image Ads & Text Ads beside videos of similar theme.

2) Advertising costs are higher for Ads showing alongside videos that generate high volume of traffic

3) Upload advertiser’s videos which are displayed alongside popular videos of similar content.

Copyright of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com

Most Social Network community generally has following options:

1) Anyone can join / Moderator regulated
2) Forum Postings ? anonymous / non- anonymous
3) Messages ? Allow /Disallow members to send messages to each other.
4) More the number of people joining the group higher your community appears in search results.

Advantage Users: Ability to connect to interested people, share all forms of content. The users can join communities or create communities and invite other users & interact with them.

Advantage Advertisers/Marketers: Find group of similar interest people and find their target audience in one single location. The people on the network are at high interest levels therefore would increase the chance of generating prospective leads.

The Useful tips for Marketers for promoting their websites and brands on social networks are.

1) Create Communities Online related to your industry and company. But remember to keep it general & non profit as a social contribution and not at all as marketing & promotion technique

2) Invite people to join your network.

3) Offer help, advise, technical assistance and guidance to people. Even if it means acknowledging the advantages of your competitors products/services.

4) Ensure that you maintain your reputation in the community & network online

5) Communicate with the aim to increase your target audience’ awareness, & knowledge.

6) Join Other Communities and Groups. Ask their members to join your community.

7) Publish the Top messages, discussions on blog, website etc?create a RSS feed and ask users to subscribe.

Distribute Viral to community members

9) Tag your community with the right keywords, synonyms

10) Communicate you target audience with good enriching content.

11) Identify & be aware of your target audience. Send specific high interest messages to specific audience. Give individual attention & listen to your audience. Do not copy past a standard template and send it across to everyone..

12) Be an active blogger.

Top Social Networks

1) Youtube
2) Linkedin.com
3) MySpace.com
4) Orkut.com
5) Facebook.com (Most College Students from Top Universities worldwide & Professionals from Companies)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Copyright of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com