July 5th, 2011.
I will be honest, I am pleasantly surprised by how quickly Google+ has gotten so many users inspite of being in Beta and giving out limited invites. I now hear that Google has opened the flood-gates – you can now can get Google+ by just signing into your Google account.
The biggest reason for this really fast adoption seems to be that Google owns more touch-points to the internet than Facebook and Twitter combined! The Google+ notifications currently work on YouTube, Gmail , Picasa, Blogger, Maps, Android, Chrome and Analytics. All of these properties are HUGE heavyweights in themselves. Facebook and Twitter just have their individual websites.
WHAT ABOUT BUSINESSES ON GOOGLE+
Historically, Google has always favoured its own properties when deciding search engine ranking – remember Blogger and Knol?
Here in India, I am already starting to see a few businesses join Google+. While these are early days, I am interested in seeing if they take a different approach from the 4-posts a day engagement activities on Facebook Pages. I am willing to bet that Google has already started to measure how we are interacting with each other on Google+.
Google can start Business Pages in the future. When that happens, Google can start tracking mentions of the business, see what pages from the website are more popularly Shared and do basic Sentiment Analysis to measure if the content is positive or negative. Then decide SERP rankings based on this analysis! In this scenario, businesses will jump over each other to get onto Google+.
Incase you didn’t know, Google already does this with your tweets. Facebook however, still remains the largest Black Hole of the internet – a place which still cannot be crawled by search engine crawlers. Any engagement/ interaction here still does not have any impact on SERP.
I am not predicting that Facebook and Twitter are going to be dead. Companies in the future will spend more time and resources in BEING SOCIAL across platforms than DOING SOCIAL on many platforms.
December 24th, 2009.
When I wrote earlier that bookmarking chicklets are useless, I meant it. I mentioned there is no way of knowing which buttons are more effective and which aren’t, we don’t know the most optimised order in which these work best, we don’t even know which designs work best.
My interest was piqued when ShareThis posted a social bookmarking study on its blog which explores the social engagement value of sharing and I have mentioned my thoughts below.
The ShareThis study breaks down the stages of interaction into share, clicks, and engage.
From the graphic above, you can see that email is still the most popular way to share content on the internet.
Its interesting to see that while most people will share content via email, a lot of the recipients dont respond by clicking on the article link in the email. On the other hand, those on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook have come to accept links and readily click on them.
What Twitter and Facebook Users Are More Likely to Click
According to a user sample released earlier this year by Chitika, Twitter users most frequently clicked links directing to information about current events and news.
- Current events and news: 28.49% of referrals
- Movie-related sites: 22.56%
- Technology sites followed with 13.39%
- Medical sites: 7.98%
- Video games: 4.64%
- Celebrity: 3.94%
- How-to: 2.88%
Facebook users, however, click differently:
- Technology sites: 30%
- Lifestyle: 18.29%
- News: 18.25%
- How-to: 4.55%
- Movies: 2.96%
- Medical: 2.62%
The ShareThis study also found that visitors to your website from Twitter are the least engaging and visit an average of 1.66 pages per visit. In contrast to this, when you have managed to gain a visitor via email, they are likely to visit 2.95 pages per visit.
In all of this data, one thing that stands out is the performance of other social networks apart from the big three – twitter, facebook and email – and to put it bluntly, its abysmal. If you fancy bookmarklets, its best to keep them to a bare minimum with email, facebook and twitter.
The way forward for the Social Bookmarking industry would be to provide analytics for shared articles via every active button. Apart from that, it would also help to see which layout of buttons works best. The icing on the cake however would be to see all this data integrated with Google Analytics.