Tomorrow is the big day for Facebook. The social networking giant is going public! Starting Friday, “FB” will be on the floor of Nasdaq at $38 per share. For months there has been speculation about how Facebook will fare in their Initial Public Offering. Some are worried that Facebook will have the same “luck” as Groupon, who’s IPO was less than satisfactory. We don’t know that yet though. What we do know is that Facebook is the number one social network in the US and there are 188 million active monthly users in the US & Canada alone. Facebook has recently acquired photo sharing start-up Instagram for a cool 1 billion and is partnered with the largest provider of social game services, Zynga. For Facebook, the move into mobile is a crucial one as more and more Facebook users are bypassing the desktop and heading straight for their iOS or Android device.

You may be wondering what the Facebook IPO will mean for users. And for good reason. Monetizing Facebook wasn’t going to last forever, at least, not just on the desktop. Facebook has admitted its mobile platform hasn’t been great and, with the impending IPO, Zuckerberg and team have said they will focus more on mobile once they are public. That means mobile ads, something Facebook users have never seen before.

We may not know exactly what will happen tomorrow, but we know one thing is for sure: Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. They are a strong force in the start-up social world and have been an inspiration to many young technological professionals. If all goes well tomorrow, they will be the largest tech IPO in history. Good Luck Facebook!

Here at Single Throw Internet Marketing we offer a Viral Video solution called VISUALIZE^TM to our clients. This year we decided to “Visualize” ourselves! We’ll be releasing the videos over the course of the year and cannot wait to hear your feedback on them. Below is some behind the scenes footage taken during filming that shows what’s to come. Enjoy!

About Visualize:
Few things have the power to create a connection like video does. People buy from people and they only buy from the people they like. Video marketing presents a unique opportunity to indirectly develop rapport. Video marketing gives your business the ability to showcase unique value to potential customers by displaying personality and prowess. There is little argument that the proper video can yield amazing results, assuming your potential customer can find it. Single Throw has the Internet marketing know-how and expertise to not only help you develop a powerful video series but to get your videos found by potential customers. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, which means if a customer is not looking for your product or service in Google they are searching for a video about it on YouTube. The only way to show up in YouTube is to have a video and to know what it takes to get to the top on the search results. That’s where we come in.

Google’s recent Penguin update has had the SEO industry in quite a tizzy. Many websites have been affected by the recent update, and you may be wondering if your website will be affected as well. The updated algorithm, while not the first in Google’s history, was created to discourage “black hat” SEO tricks by keeping spammers in check.

If your website uses any of the following then you’ve probably already been hit:

• Hidden text or hidden links
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Automated queries to Google
• Load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
• Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• “Doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches

How can you tell if your website was hit? Check your analytics to see if there was a major drop in visits at any point over the past 30 days. You should also check your keyword referrer report to see what, if any, keywords were affected. Once you know when Penguin hit, you can take steps to move forward by applying white hat SEO techniques and re-building your website’s ranking.

Google’s Matt Cutts said there was another update of Google Panda right before the Penguin update hit. Between the two updates, Google is really stepping up the SEO game and making Internet marketers work for the top spot.

For more about the Penguin update and white hat search engine optimization techniques contact one of our Internet marketing consultants.

It was bound to happen. Facebook has upped the game on advertisments with it’s new ad format. Sponsored Stories turns your friends’ actions into promoted content. This article from Mashable has the scoop of what this means for social media, Facebook users and businesses alike.

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Facebook is rolling out Sponsored Stories, a new ad format that turns your friends’ actions into promoted content.

Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout the News Feed,” Facebook Product Marketing Lead Jim Squires told Mashable. Companies can choose to take certain user actions — such as checkins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in the column on the right side of the News Feed.

For example, if you’re Whole Foods and you’re looking to increase your exposure on Facebook, you can pay to have a percentage of all checkins to Whole Foods featured in a Sponsored Stories slot in the right-side column. Your content wouldn’t be shown directly, but the actions of a user’s friends would appear. Users seeing their friends “liking” or checking in to Whole Foods will drive increased trust and increased traffic.

“The advertiser is not controlling the message; it’s about actions,” Squires said.

Here’s an example of an action that could potentially be sponsored:

And here’s what it might look like as a Sponsored Story:

Starting today, four specific types of user actions can be turned into featured stories: likes, checkins, actions within custom applications and Page posts. If a company has a custom app (e.g. Starbucks Card or even FarmVille), it can promote the actions users take within them. The same is true of users posting on the walls of their favorite brands.

Facebook’s roster of launch partners includes Coke, Levi’s, Anheuser Busch and Playfish. Also, the social network is partnering with a slew of nonprofits for Sponsored Stories, including Donors Choose, Girl Up!, Malaria No More, Amnesty International, Women for Women, Autism Speaks, (RED), Alzheimer’s Association and UNICEF. However, anybody will be able to bid on Sponsored Story slots (by a per-impression and/or a per-click basis) starting January 25.

We haven’t seen Facebook play with new ad formats for a while — most of its revenue comes from the targeted advertising that appears on most Facebook pages. It has been timid about new ad formats after the spectacular failure of Beacon. Sponsored Stories seems like a simple and logical way to introduce new forms of advertising into Facebook’s system, though.

Sponsored Stories has a lot of similarities to Twitter Promoted Tweets. Both are trying to use content from within their networks and turn them into advertising dollars. There is one key difference between Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets, though: The user defines the advertised content in Facebook’s format, not the advertiser.

It’s that one little difference Facebook hopes will turn into big bucks.

Mashable

By: Stefanie Chernow

Source: editorsweblog.org

Twitter hasn’t quite reached the must-use status of fellow social network Facebook: Twitter only has 145 million users while Facebook dominates the social network sphere with over 500 million users. The Guardian, however, recently reported on the strengths of Twitter that no other new media source can currently provide. “For people in the media business, [Twitter] has rapidly – in less than four years – become their peripheral nervous system,” writes journalist Charles Arthur. “It tells you what’s going on around the world, or within your sphere of interest; it helps for bouncing ideas around, for staying abreast of what you have to know.”

Twitter offers instantaneous delivery of news without social barriers. On Facebook, users are required to befriend others in order to access their online activities, while Twitter allows people to follow whomever they want and thus encourages a liberal flow of information. This permits reporters to search for real-time content that is vital to today’s face-paced news industry. “Reporters who once sat glumly watching news wires now watch and comment in carefully curated Twitter search streams,” notes Arthur. “Once you follow a certain number of the ‘right’ (connected) people, it becomes an indispensable news source.”
Facebook may seem like the primary source for spreading news, as users are more likely to trust article recommendations from friends rather than strangers. Arthur disagrees with this sentiment, claiming “Facebook isn’t meant for spreading news; it’s meant for linking up people who know each other. News doesn’t work that way: news, after all, is often about people you don’t know personally but discover you’d like to.”

Robert Hernandez, Professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, explains the necessity of Twitter for today’s reporters. On Annenberg’s  website Neon Tommy, Hernandez states “[Twitter] allows me to find potential sources who are actually there. And because this person is announcing to the world that they’re there, that increases the likelihood that they’re willing to talk. Instead of going to a place, or cold-calling, or going up to people and interrupting them or going on a fishing expedition, you can find very specific eyewitness sources.”

Likewise, Hernandez cautions journalists to be wary of content on social media networks, emphasizing that Twitter sources can not replace traditional forms of journalism and fact-checking. “You can also use crowd sourcing, but you’re a lazy journalist if all you do is rely on social media for your reporting. And you’re a lazy journalist if you don’t use social media at all.”

While claims can be made that Facebook is a satisfactory means of information consumption for “news gazers,” Twitter is vital for media professionals. It’s safe to say that Twitter is becoming a serious tool in the journalism industry, and tweets should be regarded with the same professional integrity as other forms of reporting.

Twitter is also making strides in keeping up with technology trends, such as geotagging tweets (Which is similar to Facebook’s Places application). This could indicate that Twitter will probably be a useful tool for content sourcing in the future. Will Twitter’s split-second distribution of breaking news ever be regarded as the main source of information for the general public, or will Facebook continue to dominate new media?

Source: editorsweblog.org