Wall Street Journal: Services combine social media, marketing

Impact Media: Google’s MySpace acquisition poses challenges for SEO

Clickthrough Marketing: AdWords Certification can boost SEM

CNN Money: Social Media use increases 82%

ClickZ: 9 insights to help guide your SMM program

Search Engine Land: The 5 rings of conversion optimization

BONUS:

How to use LinkedIn for Business, a (very helpful) free PDF e-book by HubSpot

I did a presentation at my full-time job last week about the importance of social media and what it means to our business, a marketing agency (BIGSHOT). Everyone thought it was a great and informative presentation and I thought I’d share what I offered.

Here’s the video I showed as an introduction:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/BIGSHOTmktg
Free micro-blogging website where users can only post updates (or “tweets”) of 140 characters or less. Good for promoting website links, coupons, and specials. Has grown from 1.6m to 32.1m users just in the last year.

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/bigshotKC
The most popular social networking/media site, where anyone with a valid email address can join for free. Separated into networks of schools (high school and colleges/universities), companies (they have to apply for their own network), and cities (usually only metros and capitol cities, as of now). Now has over 250m monthly active users (as of July 2009), with 120m users logging on at least 1x/day. The fastest growing demographic is adults ages 35+.

MySpace:
Like Facebook, except MySpace offers the ability to completely customize profiles. Bands, Businesses, and Individuals all have profiles, there are no pages. Monthly page views have decreased over 20% in the last year, from 47.4b to 38b. Focus is on music, video, and celebrities.

LinkedIn:
For professionals; focused on business and career networking. Their slogan is “Relationships Matter.”  Had 43m registered users in over 200 countries as of July 2009. Profile focus is on job experience, skill set, what the user is looking for, and recommendations (references) from other contacts.

Why Should You Care?
In the last year, social media has become one of the most influential components of the web. Because of it, newspaper readership has been steadily declining, about 10% from April 2008 to April 2009, according to comscore (during that same time period, online newspaper readership increased 5%). Studies show that internet users also let social media affect their online shopping choices.

More Resources:

• “Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter Statistics”
• “On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep”
• “Compete: Facebook US Traffic Nearing Google, Yahoo”
• “Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media”
• “The Future of Newspapers: Who Killed the Newspaper?”
• “What the Horizon Realty Fail Can Teach You About Social Media”

Headline image from: http://blog.host1plus.com