Social Media Monthly Round Up For October 2009

Social Media Monthly Round Up For October 2009

Social Media Monthly Round Up For October 2009Straight from the deep depths of spooky October I bring you the October Social Media Monthly Roundup!

Twitter Results Moving To A Search Engine Near You!

Finally realizing the power of real-time search, both Google and Bing are including tweets in search results. The search engine mainstays have entered into an agreement with the hot social media site Twitter to display 'real time' search results. According to the terms of this deal the two search engines will have access to Twitter’s vast amount of public data in real time, which will enable them to track trends with a higher degree of accuracy.

Google's announcement came through Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Meyer.  That itself shows how much importance they're giving to this deal. Microsoft has also made a similar deal with Twitter and Facebook that will give Yahoo! access to this real-time data. You can expect to see Twitter updates and Facebook posts in Bing searches as well.

Not only will this create a new search engine optimization  environment, but also it will enable business owners to use Facebook and Twitter to deliver marketing messages. This step by the search giants will certainly equip SEO gurus with an extra tool to improve search rankings.

As a standing testimony to the growing social media buzz, a greater volume of users started using different online social mediums for search and content discovery. Nielsen released a new study showing that social media accounts for 18% of the information search market.

Nielsen Study

Facebook Buzz

Facebook continues to be a dominant force in the social networking arena. The Hitwise report released in October shows that Facebook accounted for 58.59% of all U.S. visits among a custom category of 155 social networking web sites in September 2009. The Facebook share was the highest among all social networking sites. The U.S. visits to Facebook increased a staggering 194 percent in September 2009 compared with September 2008.

Hitwise-Facebook-Report

Sending a strong message to illegal spammers, Facebook was awarded $711 million dollars as compensation in an anti-spam lawsuit against internet marketing company Sanford Wallace, whom Facebook claimed illegally accessed it members' account details and used it for marketing. Facebook officials say they don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award from the now bankrupt Sanford Wallace. They hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these types of practices.

Facebook also announced changes to their homepage. This involves how users view the status updates and shared items from their Facebook network.

Twitter Talk

Studies from Pew Internet & American Life Project show us 19 percent of Internet users use Twitter or other micro-blogging services to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This is a significant increase in percentage as compared to 11 percent  from the previous survey conducted in April 2009.

It was announced a month ago, Twitter has just made their new enhancement 'Twitter lists' into reality. This new facility allows users to create their own lists, a way to categorize Twitter members into groups of interest by Twitter users.

Social Media Scan

Here are some of the other newsworthy items occuring in the social media sphere in October 2009;

  • Google integrates social search in Google Labs, here is the internet marketing weekly glance to catch the latest  information on Google updates on hand.
  • Delicious,Yahoo's social bookmarking site has undergone another slew of notable updates including search refinements, iphone optimization (m.delicious.com), and visual representation of data. Also there is a new enhanced sharing option which will now show up your shared bookmarks under your tags.
  • Stumble Upon transitioned to a new design last week which remodeled the service as a social search engine “somewhere between a Twitter and Google,” says founder Garrett Camp. Search is the key area where major improvements have been added. The enhanced search makes it possible for users to search within their favorites, friend's favorites or the entire site. Also community ratings and reviews are there.
  • YouTube allows search for comments in real-time search. 
  • The largest de facto blog search engine Technorati was in the news with a major revamp on its design. By adding new features, Technorati recasts its site in a sleeker and better design.  The new design has an expanded top 100 blog list and new feature that permits blog owners to post content directly to the site.
  • The leading search provider in Russia and the second largest in Europe, Yandex teams up with Maxthon, a popular Chinese browser for Russian language browser.
  • Genetech Chairman Arthur D. Levinson has relinquished his position as a Google Board Member, but retains his position on the Apple Board. In our August social media round up we pointed to the resignation of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the Apple Board. Is Mr. Levingson's resignation any direct (or indirect) result of the ongoing dispute between Google and Apple which is currently under the consideration of FTC?

As you've read, it's been another month of feverish activity in social media. The Twitter deals made by Google and Bing show that real time search is here to stay – something that just cannot be given a blind eye to. With Facebook showing us continuous growth, it seems that the battle for online supremacy is well and truly heating up.

It's a competitive market. Contact us to learn how you can stand out from the crowd.

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1 Comment

  • avatar

    Nice read through. Probably the most well-covered round up for anything related to social media business on the web.
    Thank Asha. Keep going.

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