Is Quora still a significant social media destination? When the service was first launched, I was (like many others) flooded with notifications of new followers and invitations to follow back, to the point of annoyance. But that flood began to subside in about April of last year and had slowed to a trickle by late summer.

Blogger interest in the site seemed to follow a similar pattern. At the end of last winter, posts about how cool Quora was, the various uses for the site, and tips for getting the most out of it seemed ubiquitous. Then they began to taper off and disappear.

According to Compete.com, traffic to the site did fall off sharply in February and March of 2011 after an initial surge, but has rebounded to new highs since then (though half a million unique visitors per month isn’t particularly impressive for a social media site).

What do you think—are Quora’s best days still ahead? Will it go the way of MySpace? Or will it fill a niche and level off?

In any case, here are a few of the best Quora how-to guides and insights of 2011. As things stand now, there’s unlikely to be a 2012 version of this post next year.

Why Quora Won’t be “Bigger than Twitter” by Smart Insights

In this amazingly prescient post, Dave Chaffey lists 14 reasons why Quora won’t overtake Twitter (yes, in early 2011, there were people who suggested that it would) including “Asking or answering questions isn’t a daily must for most. But you often do want to socialize and share daily which is what you can do on Twitter or Facebook” and “There are better niche communities where you can get your questions answered, for example specialist communities or LinkedIn groups.”

A Marketer’s Guide to Quora by HubSpot Blog

Brian Whalley provides a helpful basic guide to what Quora is, what makes it different from other social networks and social media sites, how to get started with it, and the marketing applications of this Q&A tool.

33 Quora Q&A Resources: get actual ROI out of using it by SEOptimise

Frequent best-of honoree Tad Chef lists several business uses for Quora, followed by 30+ Quora-related resources covering everything from pros and cons of the platform to how to use it for SEO purposes, concluding “Will you get more out of it (Quora) than you invest in? That’s not clear yet, as it’s the initial goldrush right now.”

Quora SEO: How to Use Quora if You’re an SEO by WordStream Internet Marketing Blog

Tom Demers delves into two different ways to use Quora for SEO. The first is finding topic ideas for tech-oriented content: “take a look at all of the ‘open questions.’ This is interesting because these are questions that people are asking, but that no one has produced a good answer for: demand without supply = opportunity. I can take a peak at this list (here we see 44 unanswered questions) and pull together all the questions that myself or anyone else authoring content for the blog could answer.” The second involves following Google engineers (and ex-Google engineers) on Quora to try to gain insights on the inner workings of Google’s algorithm.

5 ways to harness the marketing power of Quora by iMedia Connection

Ashley Reed provides a helpful how-to guide for marketing use of Quora, from listing to customers and keeping tabs on competitors to commenting on answers and demonstrating expertise in a specific topic area.

WordPress is not only the most popular blogging platform, but is increasingly becoming a leading website content management system (CMS) as well.

Cost and ease of use are certainly factors, but one of the important reasons is its extensibility through plugins. These add-ons make it easy to add an incredible variety of functionality to the platform, from contact forms and photo galleries to social sharing and ecommerce capabilities.

How did WordPress emerge as the leading blog platform? What are some techniques, beyond the obvious, for search-optimizing WordPress content? Which plugins are the most popular / useful / vital? Get the answers to those questions and more here in a dozen of the best posts and articles about WordPress from the past year.

WordPress Guides and Commentary

How did WordPress win? by majordojo
***** 5 STARS

Byrne Reese—former Product Manager of Movable Type and TypePad and employee at Six Apart, now a Partner at Endevver, a Movable Type and Melody consulting company—dissects the strategy used by WordPress to become the dominant blogging platform, in order to “see what lessons can be learned from WordPress so that others seeking to build a successful product can learn from it.” This brilliant article delves into the technological, economic, cultural and environmental factors behind the success of WordPress, and inspired more than 70 comments.

Web Traffic Tracking Alternatives to Google Analytics by uber.la

John McElhenney provides helpful reviews of three simple and free alternatives to Google Analytics for tracking WordPress site metrics: JetPack Site Stats, Wassup Plug-in and Widget (which provides real-time stats including how many visitors are on your site or blog at any given moment) and Gaug.es (another real-time tool, which works on any website).

WordPress SEO – 10 Essential Actions by WP Blog Talk

Rob Cubbon details 10 best practices for optimizing WordPress content, from ideal use of keywords and plugins to sitemaps, redirects and image optimization.

WordPress Plugin Compilations and Reviews

90+ WordPress CMS Themes and Plugins by Tripwire Magazine

Contending that “It’s actually pretty easy to turn WordPress into a CMS if you are using the right WordPress CMS Themes,” Dustin Betonio showcases a huge collection of “the best plugins and (premium WordPress) themes to turn WordPress into a CMS and build a professional website fast.”

Top 50 WordPress Plugins for 2011 to Zoom SEO, SMO & Audience Engagement by Zoom Factor

Pam Moore reviews 50 of her favorite WordPress plugins, divided into categories for social sharing & engagement, design and image enhancements, search engine optimization, and development (e.g., the Flexi-Pages widget for adding sub-menu navigation and Mass Edit Pages for WordPress for making small changes to a large number of pages at once).

14 WordPress Plugins Worth Considering by JT Pedersen

JT Pedersen provides a short list of his favorite plugins for personal and corporate (non-ecommerce) blogs, including both popular favorites (the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget, BackUpWordPress) and some interesting but lesser-known add-ons (Twitter Mentions as Comments, and WP Smush.it to improve load times).

11 WordPress Plugins You’ve Gotta Have by Social Media Today

Writing that he gets the opportunity to work with a lot of different plugins, and that “Every once in a while I’ll come across a new one that is just amazing and I wonder how I ever blogged without it,” Zubin Kutar shares his favorites including Google XML Sitemaps (also on my list of must-haves) and Contact Form 7 (“Probably the easiest to use contact form available” according to Zubin).

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins by Six Revisions

Matt Krautstrunk offers list of “top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings,” among them SEO Rank Reporter, All in One SEO Pack (another of my personal favorites), SEO Friendly Image (automatically updates images with alt and title attributes) and SEO Smart Links.

33 WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section by 1stwebdesigner

Dainis Graveris presents 33 plugins to “power up and evolve comment form possibilities and security,” including Disqus, WP Ajax Edit Comments, Comment Rating and Twitter Avatars in Comments. The English is a little rough but the list is fantastic.

20 Great WordPress Plugins by Online Income Teacher
***** 5 STARS

Once you get past the spammy blog title and the annoying pop-up, Matt Smith has put together an outstanding list of plugins to perform a wide variety of tasks, from the Ackuna Language Translation Plugin (which, as the name implies, allows readers to translate your posts into many different languages) to Google Analytics Dashboard (which lets you quickly check on your GA stats without logging into GA) to Sharebar, a plugin that keeps social sharing buttons visible while visitors scroll down through your content.

15 Essential WordPress Plugins (Presentation) by Mykl Roventine

In the presentation from the Minnesota Blogger Conference, Mykl Roventine (one of the smartest WordPress gurus I know personally) presents 15 of the best WordPress plugins that meet his strict criteria: he’s used it (or someone he trusts has0: it solves a specific problem; it doesn’t hog resources and degrade performance; it’s supported; easy to use and configure; and free (in most cases).

Blog Technology: Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins by Marketing Technology with @iamreff

John Refford lists the top 15 WordPress plugins in order of popularity. Not too surprisingly, All in One SEO Pack, Akismet and Google XML Sitemaps top the list.

The notion of using social media for business has gone from cutting edge to commonplace in an amazingly short time. And for those laggard firms still resisting social media, recent changes by Google now make it all but imperative.

Of course, there’s no single cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing that works for every enterprise. And many companies that jumped in early experienced failures and disappointments, pulled back, and then re-approached social media from a more strategic angle.

While certain aspects of social media have stabilized (e.g., Facebook is the largest social network and is unlikely to fall to any “Facebook killer” application anytime soon; Google is going to keep trying to build its own social network until it manages to create one that attracts more users than lawsuits), many practices are still evolving. What’s the most effective way to grow a company’s social influence? How widely within an organization should social media tasks be distributed? How can an brand establish trust online? What are the best practices for sharing content on each major social network? What common mistakes and pitfalls should be avoided? Is it really possible to measure social media ROI—and if so, how?

Find the answers to these questions and more here in more than three dozen of the best social media guides, insights, rants and reports of the past year.

Social Media Marketing Tips and Tactics

Social Media, What Matters Most for Marketers by iMedia Connection

Noting that the “trend in digital information sharing (on social networks) is still a huge challenge for many companies,” Rick van Boekel advises marketers to develop a strategy, stay involved (or stay away), and integrate efforts among other guidance for marketing success in social media.

Practical Reasons Why Businesses Need Social Media by Social Media Today

Austen Mayor articulates both qualitative and quantitative justifications for social media investments. Among the hard numbers he lists: according to a social media industry study, 72% of companies active in social media report higher website traffic, 62% say it has improved search engine rankings, and 48% say it has increased sales.

Why Aren’t You Promoting Your Social Profiles? 10 Ways to Make it Happen by The Social Media Chef

Chris Tompkins supplies 10 methods to help “promote your social media profiles OUTSIDE of logging in to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter,” such as adding your social media profiles to company email signatures, business cards, advertising and all marketing collateral.

Stop shoving social media down my throat by {grow}

Mark Schaefer explains why be believes it is NOT a good idea to force “social media down the throats of employees at every level of the company,” contrary to advice given elsewhere. People bring different skills to the job. As Mark concludes, “Being adept at social media is NOT EASY for everybody. And we should be able to live with that human diversity.”

50 Social Media Marketing Tips and Tactics by Jeff Bullas

Jeff Bullas lists “50 synergistic social media marketing tips and tactics to market your content and ideas and help them to spread to a global audience,” divided into six platform categories: blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Slideshare.

Forrester: 5 Stages Of Social Media Growth by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Gavin O’Malley reviews research from Forrester on the five stages of social media maturity that corporations typically pass through, starting with the dormant stage (“one in five companies still don’t use any social media. These companies tend to be highly conservative, heavily regulated, or just not interested, according to Forrester”) then progressing through “distributed chaos” and additional steps before reaching the optimization stage.

A quick guide to 5 social media platforms by iMedia Connection

Linda Ireland offers helpful tips to marketers on going beyond the basics to take advantage of the unique strengths of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and LinkedIn (e.g., “If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is a great way to identify, connect with, and build stronger relationships with potential customers by interacting with them through LinkedIn Groups and providing responses to the questions they post on LinkedIn Answers”).

Social Trust Factor: 10 Tips to Establish Credibility by The Marketing Nut

Frequent best-of honoree Pam Moore explains the importance of the trust factor in encouraging brand engagement and offers 10 tips for increasing your social trust factor, such as developing a consistent online brand persona, hanging out with the “right” people in your business social networks, and taking the time to cultivate relationships.

Social Media Marketing – 10 Inspiring Infographics by Jeff Bullas

Jeff Bullas shares some interesting social media statistics (e.g., Tumblr is now attracting over 90 million unique visitors every month; StumbleUpon drives over 50% of all social network traffic) as well as helpful how-to’s (e.g., How to Twitter and LinkedIn Boot Camp) in this intriguing collection of infographics.

How to be a rock star on 8 social media platforms by iMedia Connection
***** 5 STARS

Kent Lewis packs an incredible amount of useful information into this concise post, which outlines tactics for marketing success, illustrated with real-world examples, for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, SlideShare, Quora and Foursquare.

Don’t Let Legal Keep You Out of Social by Social Media Marketing Magazine

Glen Gilmore reviews some high-profile examples of social media legal cases, which, he writes, “have largely been related to cases of egregious misconduct.” He then explains the basic legal and regulatory risks associated with social media, and presents a plan to minimize such risks in business social media use.

Busting Social Media Myths and Avoiding Common Mistakes

Five Social Media Myths You Need to Know by frogloop

Commenting on Facebook’s dominance and huge market reach that, “while it maybe true that your organization needs a better Facebook strategy, it’s also important that you dig a little deeper into social media stats,” Allyson Kapin debunks five social media myths. Though her focus is on fundraising and social media use by non-profit organizations, much of the material here applies more broadly.

Beware Best Practices, They Can Kill Productivity, Innovation and Growth – Adopt Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter by Forbes

For those executives who still block or limit access for their employees to social media sites and mobile devices, Adam Hartung reminds readers that personal computers were once looked at as productivity destroyers (PCs were viewed as toys that lacked the robustness of mainframe applications by some CIOs back in the 80s) and warns that “best practices” (e.g., “We need to control employee access to information” and “We need to keep employees focused on their job, without distractions”) are a dangerous myth.

Four Common Social Media Mishaps by iMedia Connection

Erik Deckers advises against, among other social media faux paus, socialcasting, relying on a single network, or, interestingly, “Putting a B2B company on Facebook or a B2C company on LinkedIn…People go to Facebook to chat with family and friends, not to buy industrial adhesives. People go to LinkedIn to connect with people who can help them do their jobs better, not share their love of your white chocolate macadamia nut brownies.”

Ten Myths About Social Networking For Business by Forbes

Neal Rodriguez provides “a comprehensive guide to social networking misconceptions—each accompanied by a tangible action plan that you can take right now,” such as “Myth 4: You have to spend hours a day on Twitter” (he recommends using Tweetchats—not a bad idea, but not right for everyone).

B2B Social Media Guides

Top social media platforms for businesses by iMedia Connection

Kent Lewis outlines the benefits of social media for B2B businesses, the challenges such vendors face in social media, the essential elements of a B2B social media program, and the best platforms to utilize (blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are obvious; Facebook and Quora somewhat more questionable).

Turn B2B Buying Into a Social Experience by iMedia Connection

Tony Zambito outlines the changes social media has brought to the B2B buying process and identifies four areas where buyer expectations have changed that B2B marketers need to be aware of and address. Another outstanding post from Tony is The New Social Buyer Ecosystem, which delves into the concept of social Buyer Circles and their implications for marketers in engaging social buyers in the B2B realm.

YouTube Tips and Tactics

YouTube etiquette for 2011 by iMedia Connection

Daisy Whitney provides excellent tips for making the most of YouTube, such as paying special attention to the crucial first 15 seconds of every video you produce; entering your keywords in rank order; and uploading a custom thumbnail image for each video rather than relying on the YouTube default selection.

6 Best Practices For Small Business YouTube Marketing by OPEN Forum

Todd Wasserman shares advice from entrepreneurs who’ve been successful with YouTube marketing on best practices for the platform, including buying ads, finding your niche, using technology such as Hot Spots to test the effectiveness of your videos, and tracking ROI.

YouTube It; You Rank for It – Improve Your YouTube Rankings by iMedia Connection

Chris Adams of gShift Labs explains how to optimize video rankings in YouTube, the factors that affect ranking (beyond the obvious) and the importance of analyzing and acting upon YouTube metrics regularly.

Search and Social

When search meets social by Econsultancy

Due to the growing importance of social signals in search results, Nick Jones writes that “2011 marks the year when social media has shifted from being nice to essential…Social elements play a huge part in the traffic generated, but also…citations and “votes” in the form of Tweets and Likes go a long way to indicating to search engines that this content has value and deserves to rank for relevant keywords.”

How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search by Mashable

Shane Snow explains why and how Google and Bing are incorporating social signals into the search algorithms, how these changes may help newer businesses, and which previously helpful SEO tactics are now much less important. The key to success in this new world is creating highly sharable content and building a network of influencers who will share it.

Social Media Monitoring and ROI Measurement

10 Measures of Social Media ROI for Your Brand by SocialTimes

Neil Glassman presents his “ten measures of social media marketing ROI,” though ROI purists may quibble with some of his entries, e.g., raising the quality and quantity of job applicants by creating a “social culture.” But it’s an intriguing list nonetheless.

Forget Social Media ROI by ClickZ

The brilliant Heidi Cohen contends that only a third of companies are attempting to track social media ROI; outlines three reasons why such calculations are difficult (e.g., “Social media interaction tends to happen outside of the purchase process, either before or after”); and presents as alternatives five social media metrics she believes really do matter.

Social Media ROI for Me-Too-ers versus Innovators by SocialSteve’s Blog
***** 5 STARS

Steve Goldner uses a graphical social media activity scale to explain the differences in tactics and related ROI measurements between “Me-Too’ers” (focused on basic activities like setting up social profiles and adding sharing buttons to their websites) and “Innovators” (integrated social media efforts, formalized social media relationships).

Things We Should Ask The ROI Question About Before Social Media by UnMarketing

Scott Stratten makes a concise yet blistering argument against obsessing over social media ROI, noting that social media is held “to a higher level of judgment than most things in business,” then questioning the ROI of things like meetings, logo-emblazoned coffee mugs and employee commute time.

5 Ways to Measure Social Media by ClickZ

Frequent best-of contributor Ron Jones recommends measuring a number of different metrics within categories like Awareness/Exposure (the most basic level), Influence, and Engagement (e.g., number of shares, mentions, comments and retweets).

The ROI of Social Media ROI by iMedia Connection

Scot Wheeler presents a helpful diagram for evaluating social media while also noting that “ROI is not always the best way to evaluate the value of social media engagement to an organization…Often, when management asks for the ROI on social media, what they are really asking for is the value of social media engagement to the business.” He then describes the usefulness of awareness, buzz, reach and sentiment as measures of social media value. Also worth checking out is Scot’s follow-up to this post, The Four Principles of Social ROI Measurement, in which he contends that “the accumulation of ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ and the generation of engagement are not ends in themselves.  These are tactics which are meant to prime a growing and engaged users for eventual transactions, but which are no more directly measurable in terms of revenues generated than is PR, print, TV or radio advertising.”

Explaining “social media ROI” AGAIN. And again. And… again. by The Brand Builder Blog

Olivier Blanchard serves up an entertaining and informative rant about the continued inability or refusal of many social media professionals to explain the ROI of social media, writing “As annoying and curious as it was, back in 2009, when so many so-called ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ couldn’t figure out how to explain, much less determine the ROI of anything relating to social media, it is inexcusable today.” He explains the basics of social media ROI measurement, though conceding in the end that “Not all social media activity needs to drive ROI.”

14 Top Tracking Tools For Your Social Media Stats by Abnormal Marketing

Fiona McEachran takes a look at 14 social media monitoring tools, ranging in price from free to “don’t ask,” including Trackur, Webfluenz and BackType.

Social Media Facts, Stats and Research

INFOGRAPHIC: How Much Does Social Media Really Cost? by Scribbal
***** 5 STARS

Mariel Loveland presents an outstanding infographic detailing the internal and external costs of social media marketing along with the expected savings or return in various business areas, drawing on both statistical and anecdotal data.

The Business Impact of Social Media [Infographic] by ReadWriteWeb

Klint Finley reports on research regarding social media use in Forture 500 companies covering priorities, success measures, rationale, and brief profiles of successful social media use in big companies (Coca Cola, jetBlue, Dell, Red Bull and others).

Facebook, Twitter Shares Outpace Other Social Buttons by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Laurie Sullivan highlights research from BrightEdge showing that “Web site pages displaying the Twitter share button get seven times the social media mentions compared with those that do not…(yet) nearly half of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web still don’t display any kind of social sharing links or buttons.”

10 Intriguing Insights on the State of Social Media and Blogging by Jeff Bullas

Jeff Bullas (again) summarizes 10 key insights from Nielsen research on social media, among them: Facebook dominates the “time spent online” metric—Facebook users collectively spend three times as many minutes with Facebook as they do with Yahoo, and four times as many as with Google. Nearly a quarter of total online time is spent with social networks and blogs. And women outnumber men on eight of the top 10 social networks—but guys are in the majority on LinkedIn.

Social Media Bigger And More Influential Than Ever, Reveals Q3 Nielsen Report [INFOGRAPHIC] by All Twitter

Shea Bennett shares more takeaways from Neilsen research, such as that “40% of social media users access content from their mobile handsets,” with users over the age of 55 driving much of this growth. Social networks and blogs are visited by more than three-quarters of Internet users. And Tumblr is among the fastest-growing networks, tripling its user base in 2011.

Social Media Report: Q3 2011 by Nielsen Research

Want to draw your own conclusions from the research cited by Jeff and Shea above? Here’s the source.

9 Social Media Infographics You Must See by DreamGrow

Mart Prööm presents a fascinating collection of infographics, with stats and findings ranging from the percentage of U.S. adults who use social media every day (65%) and the top buyers of social media monitoring tools (43% are social media managers, 19% are agency professionals) to the leading social networks for small business (78% are on Twitter, 75% on Facebook) and a simple process for creating a social media strategy.

gShift Labs is the first (at least that I’m aware of ) integrated software package for managing web presence optimization (WPO). Given that WPO is the fusion of SEO, social media, interactive PR, and online reputation management, that’s a tall order. But based on a good look at the product, gShift has a great headstart on meeting the challenges of this discipline.

Unlike pure SEO management tools (e.g., Web CEO, SEO Powersuite), social media monitoring tools (e.g., Radian6, Alterian SM2), or inbound marketing suites (e.g., HubSpot), gShift isn’t a point solution, but a single integrated tool to manage all aspects of WPO.

What sets this software apart is its approach as much as its functionality; the people behind gShift understand that SEO, online PR, social media, PPC advertising and other tactics are each pieces of the larger web presence puzzle. They aren’t silos, but tactics that need to be used in a coordinated manner to maximize and optimize an organization’s online presence. gShift is the first software built from the ground up with that approach in mind.

Features

gShift enables marketers or agencies to track unlimited websites, web pages, social media accounts, external pages (e.g. media mentions), competitors and countries. The only limit is on keywords tracked, which is the basis of gShift’s pricing (see “Limitations and Concerns” below).

The software doesn’t provide a way to automatically segregate branded from unbranded search keywords (which would be nice), but this can be set up manually using “Campaigns.” Campaigns are gShift’s method for creating different keyword groups to track (e.g., by product line, country, competitor, etc.). The ability to show country-based rankings (e.g., U.S. results for a company.com site, Canadian results for a company.ca site) is helpful.

gShift automatically tracks organic vs. paid vs. mobile (an increasingly important segment) traffic and goal conversions for each. Yes, you could do this from Google Analytics (GA) as well (in fact, gShift pulls a fair amount of its reporting data from GA) but gShift presents it all in one spot, attractively graphed out.

Backlinks remain a key component of SEO. gShift displays backlinks by site, backlinks by page (very helpful), backlinks by competitor, and even provides a list of “recommended backlink” sources. For your website, gShift will display your top backlinks by authority and referral visits, along with changes in backlinks over time.

For your competitors, the software identifies their target terms (anchor text in backlinks), top backlinks and ranking. From a pure competitive research standpoint, gShift isn’t quite as robust as a tool like SEMRush (which provides AdWords keywords and click costs in addition to complete target organic keywords), but it does offer significant integrated functionality nonetheless.

The ability to track external pages is another nice feature. gShift enables you to set up external pages to track in different categories: Press Releases, Blogs, social media accounts, videos, and shortened URLs (e.g. bit.ly URL links). It also finds and shows you “other pages in your pool,” referring pages you may not know to track. The software displays traffic, conversions, bounce rate, social shares and search rank on assigned keywords for all of these pages. Again, most of this data (other than search rank) could be pulled from GA, but gShift makes it much easier and faster to track these metrics.

SEO is a core element of WPO, and gShift covers this pretty well. It provides daily rank checking (but charges weekly—see “Pricing” below), with comparison to the prior day’s, week’s or month’s rank highlighted in green (improvement), yellow (no change) or red (decline). The tool offers page-level auditing (specific page+keyword combination), showing what’s done and supplying recommendations for optimization improvement across a wide range of attributes (meta tags, keyword density, alt tags, headings, code fixes, etc.). Helpfully, gShift also rates the relative difficulty of each recommended task.

For any given keyword, gShift will show the top ranking page on your site by search engine (though it won’t identify the page with the highest internal gShift score for that keyword, which would be another nice feature). gShift has partnered with WordStream for its integrated keyword research functionality.

In addition to the keywords you are tracking, gShift will display recommended keywords from GA as well as all keywords that have produced at least one goal conversion. What’s more, gShift recently announced capability that gives search marketers a pretty good idea of what’s behind the “not provided” keyword data in GA, by showing you which pages are being accessed along with the top keywords driving traffic to those pages.

gShift features extensive social media tracking capabilities as well, pulling analytics from Twitter (e.g. number of mentions and retweets), LinkedIn and YouTube all into one spot. For your videos on YouTube, gShift displays rankings for those videos on specified keywords with YouTube’s search function as well as Google rankings for those videos by keyword phrase.

Again, most of these social media metrics are freely available, but gShift saves the time and effort of tracking them all down from their native sources. gShift currently provides about 75% of the data available natively from the top social networks, with more metrics on the product roadmap (e.g. expanded LinkedIn metrics are anticipated to be added within the next 30-60 days).

The power of gShift lies in its efficiency for reporting (GA-type site data, social media metrics, and ranking plus performance of external assets like guest posts or news releases all in one tool), its SEO improvement functionality, and its actionable on-site and off-site metrics. Reporting is flexible; gShift enables administrators to add explanatory or analytical text comments to virtually any metric within a report.

Few (if any) other SEO and/or social media management tools provide the type of detailed data about a blog post, web page, external article or news release that gShift does because other tools don’t “ask the right questions.” Competitive tools tend to be more siloed, while gShift takes a web presence optimization-centered approach.

Background

gShift Labs co-founders Krista LaRiviere and Chris Adams come from a digital marketing and software development background. In the early 2000s, they developed the Hot Banana web CMS product, which was acquired by email service provider Lyris in 2006.

Future Plans

gShift aggressively updates the product with new features. Among plans for coming releases are “engagement signals,” which will display, for example, how many people have commented anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) about a specified blog post or other piece of content.

Competition

gShift’s closest competitor is possibly SEOmoz, a powerful SEO suite which just recently added social monitoring. From a straight SEO standpoint, it’s hard to beat the deep functionality of SEOmoz. However, what gShift may lack in depth in this area, it makes up for in ease of use and overall user experience. Put another way, gShift is arguably a better tool for marketers looking for reporting on site and external asset performance, and optimizing those assets for improvement. SEOmoz provides more raw technical data for hands-on webmasters.

Limitations and Concerns

Backlink checking is limited to the “top” 500 backlinks for any site, page or competitor. For internal site pages, that’s generally more than sufficient, but home pages on even moderately popular websites can have far more than 500 backlinks. There’s no way to know what’s missing (other than using a separate backlink checker tool).

The internal keyword tool shows monthly volume, but doesn’t indicate ranking difficulty—a key oversight. It does little good to know how popular a keyword phrase is without also knowing if it’s feasible to try to rank for that phrase. This should be high on gShift’s list of features to add, but for now, users will have to utilize a separate tool or technique for this function.

Pricing

In my opinion, gShift’s pricing is a tad high (for the SMB market) and the model is unnecessarily convoluted. The software is priced on the basis of “keyword rankings” (KRs). A KR is one keyword, on one website, in one country. And each keyword rank is automatically checked on a weekly basis, so a single keyword consumes four KRs in a month (or five in some months, one would suppose).

gShift’s baseline Small Business package (500 keyword rankings at $99 per month) sounds pretty reasonable, until you realize how quickly that can add up. 100 keywords, checked against one website in one country consumes 400 KRs per month. Add all of those keywords to one other country and that’s another 400 KRs. Check 20 of those keywords against three top competitors and that’s another (20 x 3 x 4 =) 240 KRs. In order to really make inroads into the SMB market where this product fits best, the pricing should ideally be somewhat lower and a whole lot simpler.

Bottom Line

While gShift Labs doesn’t necessarily provide the single best tool specifically for SEO management, or backlink checking, or keyword research, or social media monitoring—it is the only software currently available that combines pretty darn good functionality in all of these areas in a single platform.

gShift Labs is the first software vendor to approach SEO, online PR and social media as parts of the integrated whole of web presence optimization. Small to midsized businesses in the B2B space who want to maximize their online footprints and opportunities to be “found” when prospects are searching for what they offer should definitely evaluate gShift Labs.

FTC Disclosure: gShift Labs provided no compensation in any form for this review.

Despite any recent recent rants you may have seen about how blogging is dead or blogs are passé, the fact of the matter is that business blogging is now more important than ever. With Google’s most recent Panda algorithm updates, attributes like content freshness and social signals (strengths of blogs, not corporate websites) will gain increased importance in search ranking.

But as the blogosphere continues to expand (as noted by Diana Adams below), it becomes more difficult to stand out and be heard above the noise.  How can a company launch (or relaunch) a new blog properly? Write great blog post headlines? Promote new content most effectively? Optimize blog content for search? Emulate the best corporate blogs? Take advantage of free or low-cost blog tools and resources?

Get the answers to those questions and more here in two dozen of the best blogging guides of the past year.

Guidance for New Bloggers

20 Common Mistakes Made By New Bloggers by Ink Rebels

Noting that will well over 100 million blogs on the web now it can be challenging to stand out, the effervescent Diana Adams shares a list of common mistakes to avoid such as making your RSS button hard to find, posting inconsistently, and failing to respond to reader comments.

12 things every business blogger should know how to do by Ragan’s PR Daily

Contending that “blogging isn’t that difficult until educated, professional, bright grownups begin to overanalyze things,” Susan Young provides a dozen pieces of commonsense advice for business blogging success, such as sticking to what you know and enjoy, and writing “to express, not to impress.”

The Entrepreneur’s Advisor | Why and How to do a Blog Right by The Entrepreneur’s Advisor

Stuart W. Smith provides some blogging basics and helpful tips for those relatively new to blogging. After making the basic case for a blog, he delves into keywords, developing quality content, links, calls to action and more.

6 Tips for Blogging for SEO in WordPress by Business Insider

Sue Reynolds offers a half-dozen tips for SEO on WordPress blogs, helpful particularly for those just getting started.

Business Blogging Tips, Tactics and Best Practices

8 Ways to Get Your Blog Ready for the Big Time by Blog Engage

Frequent best-of honoree Kristi Hines offers eight tips to get your blog ready for a surge of traffic if you happen to get mentioned or retweeted by a highly influential source. Among the tips: optimize your site for speed, delay your opt-in popup form (or better yet – lose it, they’re obnoxious) and make sure your key pages (About, Contact, Guest Post Guidelines, etc.) are easy to find.

How to Be an Awesome Blog Commenter by HubSpot Blog

Kipp Bodnar offers half-dozen tips for “how to be a thoughtful and engaged commenter” that apply to social networking sites as well as to blogs. Much of it comes down to appropriate social etiquette, and always striving to add value to the conversation.

How to Turn a Lousy Blog Headline into a Great One by The Backlight

Tristan Higbee steps through the creative process of turning a boring blog headline into a better one and then, eventually, into one that is both search-friendly and compelling to potential readers.

26 Ways to Enhance Your Blog Content by Social Media Examiner

Another delightful A to Z post from Debbie Hemley, this one alphabetizing the business blogging process from attributing source material through links and blogging as a hub of social media efforts through YouTube and “Zigzags and Leaps” (“mental moves that might open up things a bit, allow a little more in, including, we hope…discovery”).

7 Key Elements to a Successful Business Blog by TopRank Online Marketing

Lee Odden defines the key characteristics to consider in terms of “branding, community, SEO, PR, recruiting and taking midshare away from your competition” with your blog including the URL, name, design and navigation. (For more on this topic, see also Eight Factors to Consider When Launching a Business Blog previously published here.)

12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post by Content Marketing Institute

Noting that “even great content can go unnoticed,” Brody Dorland recommends 12 steps for promoting your blog content, from the obvious (utilize keywords for SEO, use syndication) to the creative (using a post to answer a question on Twitter, promoting posts via your email signature).

21 Ways Bloggers Engage by Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen details 21 ways bloggers can engage with readers beyond just responding to comments, among them: inviting others to contribute guest posts, providing social sharing buttons, enabling readers to subscribe by email, and participating in Twitter chats.

The Blueprint for the Perfect Blog Post (Infographic) by Business 2 Community

Brian Rice graphically illustrates nine components of the “perfect” blog post, beginning with a compelling post title. in this nicely-done infgraphic. He also shares six blogging lessons learned, including the importance of user experience and letting your audience drive your the conversation.

Displaying Social Proof – What the Marketing Experts Use by KISSmetrics

Kristi Hines studies the AdAge Power 150 blogs to see how leading bloggers are displaying their social clout. Tools and methods used include displaying FeedBurner reader count, a Facebook Like box, LinkeddIn share button, or multi-purpose tools from AddtoAny, Share This, or AddThis.

Blog SEO

SEO success for your blog in 10 easy steps by {grow}

Guest blogger Eric Pratum outlines a “10-step prioritized plan to improve the SEO for your blog without spending a lot of time or money,” from keyword strategy to sitemaps.

How to Optimize Your Blog for Google by Social Media Examiner

In this extensive and detailed post, Dino Dogan walks through the process of search optimizing a blog, from audience targeting considerations and keyword research to SEO plugin settings (presuming you are using WordPress).

Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

Lee Odden lays out a non-technical five-step process for getting a corporate blog to rank well in search. His item #4 (“Use Descriptive References vs. Pronouns”) in particular should be required reading for ANYONE writing online content.

Top 10 Blog Directories 2011 by SEO Wizardry

Writing that “Blog Directories add an important element to your web site traffic generation and search engine optimization programs,” Peter Hollier lists and links the top 10 blog directories along with their Alexa ranks.

8 Steps to Optimize Your Blog Post by Search Engine Watch

Erez Barak recommends a heavy focus on keyword research, selection and tracking among his eight steps for getting a blog post to rank well in search.

Examples of Exceptional Corporate Blogs

The 10 Best Corporate Blogs in the World by {grow}

Mark Schaefer shares a few observations on the state of corporate blogging (e.g. the tech sector produces most of the best corporate blogs, the Fortune 500 lags the rest of the world in this area) as well as his picks for the top ten corporate blogs based on quality. Most of the companies are large, but the variety of industries represented is intriguing.

Outstanding brand blogs you should check out by iMedia Connection

Sarah Kotlova showcases four well-done corporate blogs (or in the case of Cisco, a collection of company-related blogs written by internal subject-matter experts) from both the B2B and B2C worlds.

Blogging Tools and Resources

Huge List of Useful Tools for Bloggers by ShoutMeLoud

Exactly what it says–a big list of tools to make your blogging more productive. This post lists and links to tools for SEO, writing, blog marketing and more.

Stock.XCHNG

Need an interesting photo for your latest blog post but don’t want to shell out big bucks, go through some convoluted licensing process, or risk violating a photographer’s copyright? This may be the site for you. Owned by Getty Images, Stock.XCHNG bills itself as “the world’s best free (image) stock site.”

veezzle

A free stock photo exchange where you can search, use, share and create collections of images for online use.

fotoglif

If the free sources above don’t have quite what you need, fotoglif offers reasonably-priced photographic images, in a range of categories including news, politics, business, technology and lifestyle.

TradePub has just launched its first report in a series for 2012, the Social Media Wrap Up report. Each report will highlight a selection of the best social media posts from leading authors published the preceding month.

The inaugural report includes posts from authors such as marketing agency veteran Drew McLellan; Marc Meyer, digital and social media strategist at DRMG; and author, speaker and SVP of Social Strategies at Social 5150 Neal Schaffer.

The topics covered range from social media strategies and hiring a social media agency to guidance on Tweetchats, blogging and measuring social media ROI.

Again, a new summary of some of the best social media blog posts will be published each month in 2012. You can grab the first free report here.

In just a few short years, Twitter has transformed from an odd little sort of public IM service where people posted what they just ate for lunch or what their cat was doing at the moment into one of the big four social networks and a significant channel for news, PR & marketing, politics and more. It has enabled revolutions in real life as well as in digital marketing.

Twitter’s 200 million users collectively tap out a billion tweets per week. Nearly 3/4 of active Twitter users are bloggers. More than 80% of U.S. governors, senators and congressional representatives use it, as do 87 of the Billboard Top 100 musicians. Twitter users are twice as likely to purchase from companies they follow than are Facebook users.

So how can marketers and PR professionals use Twitter more effectively? What’s the best way to build a quality, relevant Twitter following? Of the hundreds of third party Twitter tools out there, which are really worth utilizing? How can Twitter to used to support SEO efforts?

Discover the answers to those questions and many more here in 45 of the best guides to Twitter tips, tools and tactics of the past year.

Twitter Tips, Tactics and Techniques

40 Examples Of Creatively Designed Twitter Backgrounds by Tripwire Magazine

Got a boring Twitter background and need some inspiration to help you liven it up? Dustin Betonio here presents 40 “awesome and creatively designed Twitter backgrounds which use various and innovative illustrations to create a visually attractive and appealing look to their profiles” to get your creativity kick-started.

25 Suggestions For How To Use Twitter by Dave Fleet

Dave offers “25 ideas for ways you can get value out of Twitter, with a mix of business and personal focus,” such as meeting new people, staying on top of the news, influencing the influencers, and re-purposing content.

10 Twitter Features You Might Be Missing by GigaOM

Aliza Sherman highlights 10 features of Twitter that not all users may be aware of–including a few that may be news even to power users–such a list of helpful Twitter keyboard shortcuts.

How We Increased Our Twitter Followers By 250% – Whiteboard Friday by SEOmoz

Community manager Jen Lopez explains how SEOmoz increased its total Twitter followers by 250% to over 27,000 people. Hint: it helps to have a community manager.

Top 7 Ways to Save Time on Twitter by OPEN Forum

Noting that the top barrier to increased business use of social media is a lack of time and resources, Leyl Master Black shares “seven Twitter tricks from the pros that allow you to spend less time on the mechanics and more time engaging.”

20 Guidelines for Twitter Success by Global Copywriting

Sarah Mitchell presents 20 tips for success on Twitter, divided into four categories: Always Try To (e.g., answer every mention), Never Fail To (e.g., say “thank you”), Things NOT To Do, and “Keep in Mind.”

The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing by Copyblogger

Curating the curator here, as Gabrielle Conde links to and summarizes 100 educational posts about Twitter, covering the gamut from setting up a Twitter account to using hashtags to marketing and prospecting strategies, from authors like Marian Schembari, Michael Brenner and the ebullient Diana Adams.

12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats by The 12 Most

If you’ve never sat in on a Twitter chat, it’s quite an experience. If you have, you understand the metaphorical meaning of “drinking from a fire hose.” Think of those people-talking-over-each-other Sunday morning political talk shows and multiply it by a large number. In some cases, a very large number. Among the 12 best Twitter chats chosen here by Daniel Newman are Blogchat, hosted by Mack Collier; GetRealChat, moderated by the exuberant Pam Moore; and LeadershipChat, hosted by my fellow Lebronian Lisa Petrilli and Steve Woodruff.

The Right Way to Build Brand(s) via Twitter by iMedia Connection

David Sonn recommends a strategy combining a corporate Twitter account with accounts from key executives and other (properly trained) key individuals within a company to maximize credibility, interaction and business impact.

55 Tips to Get Retweeted on Twitter by ZoomFactor

The awesome Pam Moore supplies an extensive list of tips for getting retweeted more frequently and consistently, such as using your real picture, knowing your audience, knowing Twitter lingo, and making people laugh, cry, or learn something.

The Hidden Guide to Using Twitter Effectively by KISSmetrics
***** 5 STARS

The delightful Kristi Hines digs deep into Twitter, explaining how to do things like deleting a “Recent Image,” create customized RSS feeds from Twitter, use Twitter’s Advanced Search, search Twitter results using Google, get the most out of your Twitter bio and more.

Twitter: Marketers Still Struggling To Understand Social Channel by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Laurie Sullivan summarizes a report from Forrester Research outlining the challenges and opportunities marketers face in using Twitter effectively. One key finding: “Forrester analysts believe it’s not only the 1 billion tweets that matter, but rather the 6.2% of online adults creating 80% of the influence from impressions. The research firm calls these users Mass Connectors…Along with Mass Mavens—representing 13.8% of online adults creating 80% of the posts, comments, rating—they are small in number, but strong in power when it comes to influencing others.”

Twitter’s New Look and Feel

Twitter gets new, Facebook-like feeds & features by DevBeat

Jolie O’Dell summarizes the changes in Twitter’s new interface, such as the “new Activity tab, which shows all the non-tweet activity from people you follow. You can see new follows from your friends, friends’ retweets and their favorites.” Overall, the UI is an improvement—with the exception of losing the ability to see how many lists a person is on. Hopefully, Twitter listens to user feedback and restores that feature.

Twitter Just Announced Brand Pages and a Redesign – What are all the details and why does it look like Facebook? by iMedia Connection

Katelyn Watson explains how Twitter’s recently announced brand pages work, what Twitter is aiming to accomplish with the redesign, and the benefits brand pages will provide to marketers.

Twitter Tuesday: Twitter’s New Changes – What You Could Expect by Hubze Blog

David Foster summarizes Twitter’s design changes and new capabilities, including four-tab navigation and the ability to embed tweets on any website.

Twitter and SEO

The Tweet Effect: How Twitter Affects Rankings by The Daily SEO Blog

In this somewhat long-winded but thoroughly researched post, John Doherty describes a number of experiments he ran to determine the effect of Tweets on a page or blog post ranking. The conclusion? Even a single tweet helps a page or post get indexed more quickly, though it has little effect on rankings. Retweets from relevant and highly influential Twitters, however, can have a significant impact on ranking.

7 Key Ways to Optimize Twitter for Search by HubSpot Blog

Anum Hussain details seven techniques for optimizing your Twitter presence for search, among them, “Don’t completely believe the “nofollow” warning…both Google and Bing (have) confirmed that tweeted links are in fact a signal for a search engine’s organic and news rankings,” create a special list of Twitter keywords, and use 1-2 core keyword phrases in your bio.

Finding Twitter Followers and Interesting Twitterers to Follow

How To: Get More Qualified Followers on Twitter by Social Media Today

Tracy Gold suggests eight tactics for increasing your Twitter following the right way—gradually building a relevant group of followers by using best practices such as hashtags, retweets and replies, as well as creating and adding followers to lists.

How to Find Twitter People that Don’t Suck by Soshable

JD Rucker presents a series of steps, starting with defining your goals on Twitter, to help find quality people to follow on Twitter. Each section is divided into guidelines for personal accounts and for business.

How to Get More Followers on Twitter by Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Michael Gray lays out an effective seven-step fan for gradually building a relevant Twitter following, starting with “raiding” the accounts of competitive and complementary Twitter accounts and using tools like Raven Event Tracking and manageflitter.

Twitter for B2B Marketing

5 Ways Twitter Can Be Leveraged for B2B Search Engine Marketing by Search Engine Watch

Derek Edmond details five ways B2B marketers can use Twitter as one of their online marketing channels, such as for link building initiatives and brand monitoring.

9 Twitter Tips for B2B Marketing Success by Modern B2B Blogs

Maria Pergolino shares nine tips for B2B marketing success on Twitter, such as sharing the workload for the corporate Twitter account among several people, sharing valuable content, and using Twitter tools (see below) to maximize productivity.

Twitter for PR and Media Pros

9 easy steps to add Twitter to your PR mix by ragan.com

The illustrious Anne Deeter Gallaher lays out a nine-step path to Twitter expertise for PR professionals, including using TweetDeck to follow multiple topics of interest simultaneously.

4 Ways to Build Your Influence on Twitter by Laura Kinoshita

When building influence on Twitter, start by following 10-20 people with modest follower counts (which makes it easier for you to stand out) who are connected to a key influencer in your market, then gradually build an influencer map for your industry.

Twitter Launches Twitter for Newsrooms by BizCloud

A review of the Twitter for Newsrooms guide, designed to “help reporters get the most out of the micro-blogging service. The guide contains valuable resources that will educate journalists and media organizations on how to best leverage various Twitter tools for finding sources, publishing their stories, and also for promoting their content.” Something PR professionals may want to take a look at as well.

Twitter Tools

Headhunters Using Twitter – The New Productivity Check by Minervity

Though his English is a bit spotty, Richard Darell provides helpful reviews of eight tools corporate recruiters can use to evaluate potential hires (and the rest of can use to evaluate anyone) on Twitter, including Retweet Radar and Twitalyzer.

These Two Twitter Clients Are The Best Conversation Agents for Digital Marketers by iMedia Connection

Noting that “88% of small businesses and 74% of midsized organizations now use Twitter as their social media application of choice. However, marketers do have a preference when choosing their conversation agent,” Courtney Wiley reviews her two favorite Twitter clients.

15 Useful Twitter Tools for B2B Social Media by Social Media B2B

Frequent best-of contributor Adam Holden-Bache reviews 15 helpful tools for managing Twitter, including Twtpoll for polling, Tweetreach to see how far your tweets travel, and Backtweets for better Twitter search.

The Top Ten Twitter Statistics and Analytics Tools by Dead Dinosaur

Chris Norton sorts through the hundreds of Twitter measurement tools available and reviews his top 10 here, among them TweetStats and Twitterholic.

Two Great Twitter Visualization Tools: Twiangulate & MentionMap by Affiliate Marketing Blog

Geno Prussakov reviews two helpful tools for finding relevant new Twitter followers. Twiangulate, which looks very cool, lets you “see the biggest (or the most influential) followers of any two or three Twitter users, as well as mutual followers and mutual friends, compare lists, and do much more,” according to Geno.

5 Great Twitter Track Tools to Organize Followers by Search Engine Journal

Noting that unlike other social networking sites, Twitter is an “open-format chat setting that invites communication and connections with anyone who happens by. This is why you might need a little extra something to help keep track of all of your followers,” Ann Smarty reviews five helpful tools to help accomplish that task.

10 Twitter Tools to Increase Your Productivity by SloDive

Leo Widrich outlines the features of 10 popular Twitter tools (including his own Buffer App for scheduling tweets) as well as what makes each one “killer.”

Twitter Noise Reduction: The Twit Cleaner by Social Marketing Forum

Jim Ducharme review Twit Cleaner, a handy tool to help keep your tweet stream clean by identifying people you follow who are Dodgy (spam phrases, @ spamming, duplicate links etc.), Absent (o updates in a month, or fewer than 10 tweets), Repetitive (igh numbers of duplicate tweets or links) or guilty of other Twitter sins. You can also have the tool evaluate your own behavior to make sure you aren’t crossing any lines.

6 Ways To Monitor Your Brand On Twitter by OPEN Forum

Heather Allard discusses six tools for monitoring brand conversations on Twitter, including Backtweets, Monitter and Sprout Social.

Organize Your Twitter Following with Formulists by Business2Community

Kristi Hines explains the features of Formulists, “a service that will allow you to create customized Twitter lists and automatically update those lists with new followers that fit your specifications”—ideal for organizing large numbers of Twitter followers without manually picking through all of your followers.

How Twitter Web Analytics Will Help Your Business by PCWorld

Angela West looks at how Twitter analytics (based on their acquisition of BackType) work and the key benefits they provide to business users.

The 11 Twitter Tools and Apps I Use Every Day in 2011 by Business2Community

Neal Schaffer recommends HootSuite, Buffer, tweetspinner, Triberr and other tools for functions like SEO and content curation among his favorites.

14 Twitter Tools for Enterprise Business by Sprout Insights

In a slightly different twist, Susan Gunelius presents 14 useful Twitter tools based on the function that would benefit from them (Marketing and Customer Service, Human Resources, and Communications and Networking).

10 Tools to Significantly Increase Your Twitter Efficiency by arkarthick.com

Guest poster Leo Widrich details his top ten tools for Twitterers to “check out to step up your Twitter game and significantly increase your efficiency,” including Twinbow, Buffer, Tweriod and PeerIndex.

Twitter Facts and Stats

Twitter Growth Skyrockets, Settles Privacy Case With FTC by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Laurie Sullivan reports on some interesting Twitter statistics, such as that Twitter users now collectively post about one billion tweets per week, and mobile use has increased 182% in the past year.

Twitter Stats that will 100% get you tweeting by Carvill Creative

Michelle Carvill amplifies some stats to win over Twitter skeptics, among them: there are 200,000,000 registered Twitter users,with 450,000 new accounts created each day. There are 1.6 billion Twitter search queries every day. The majority of twitter users are between the ages of 30 and 49. And 67% of users are likely to recommend a brand they follow to others.

Big Brands Tested On Twitter Effectiveness by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Mark Walsh reports on an experiment by a digital agency “not to see whether corporate Twitter hands could answer tough questions, but to find out if they would engage in a conversation at all.” Among the findings: of the Fortune 50 companies in the study, 16 apparently don’t have corporate Twitter account. of the remaining 34, 23 responded to the test tweets, with GM, UPS and Best Buy responding most quickly.

Twitter: The Single-Greatest Relationship and Branding Tool by Bruce Clay

Guest author Shannon Downey extols the virtues of Twitter for enabling Tweetups and shares some interesting stats showing that brand followers on Twitter are roughly twice as likely as brand fans on Facebook to purchase a brand after following, and 50% more likely to recommend it.

Twitter’s Changing Complexion by iMedia Connection

Daniel Flamberg shares some fascinating intelligence on Twitter users, such as that:

• • 72% of active Twitter users are bloggers
• • 61% write at least 1 product review per month
• • 56% write articles for third-party sites

Twitter By The Numbers: Are You Listening to 100 Million Voices? by B2B Marketing Insider

Michael Brenner makes the business case for using Twitter, answers some common questions about the network and shares a selection of stats like: 84% of U.S. state governors, 82% of U.S. congressional representatives and 83% of senators use Twitter. 87% of Billboard’s top 100 musicians are there. And more than half of all Twitter users log in daily.

Since its inception, the B2B Marketing Zone has been the one place to catch up on all the latest posts from the leading B2B bloggers, writers like Brian Carroll, Chris Abraham, Ambal Balakrishnan, Ardath Albee and many more. Over time, the site has evolved and added new features to enhance its value to readers.

The latest addition: Aggregage, the platform that powers the B2B Marketing Zone (or BMZ) has added a robust personalization engine.  Readers can now sign-up and have content from the site personalized based on their interests.

Sign up and sign in to personalize your content from the B2B Marketing Zone

To check it out, sign-up using the “Personalize Your Content” button at the top right of the BMZ home page, as shown here.

The BMZ always features great, fresh content from the leading B2B bloggers. The home page is updated daily, plus it’s easy to search posts by blog, topic category, date, company mentions and more.

Now, personalization makes it even better. Curators find the best sources of content.  The BMZ then uses social signals from sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and delicious as well as clicks and views.  The algorithm that determines what makes it to top of the front page of the site looks at attributes like average values for the source , who is providing the signal, reputation and influence, and other factors.

What’s changed is that now the BMZ enables you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn info. The personalization engine will then examine your activity on these sites and what kind of content you share.  It uses that data to evaluate your interests as well as to cluster you with other like-minded readers based on interests and sharing.  You can further control your interests via the Subscription page.

The personalization engine “learns” about you over time and combines three pieces of information to predict what will be most interesting to you:

• • Social signal score – are other readers finding this content interesting?
• • Topic match – does the subject match your interests?
• • Like sharing – are other individuals similar to you sharing this content?

The engine then uses these signals to both personalize the ranking of posts on the site when you log in, and to produce customized Daily and Weekly newsletters for you.

The goal of the BMZ has always been to make sure readers don’t miss the best and latest content from the leading thinkers and writers in the world of B2B marketing and sales. Now, with personalization, there’s even less chance that you’ll miss a post that is really important—based on what it is exactly that’s important to YOU.

Social media, content aggregation and curation, user-generated content and other developments have dramatically changed the B2B buying cycle over the past few years. Marketers need to think like publishers not only to improve their company’s visibility in search (which is where 93% of B2B buying cycles now start) but also to address the differing information needs of buying team members, at different stages during the decision process.

This evolution has changed life for sales reps as well. Prospects often don’t surface until much later in the buying process than they did just a few years ago. Buyers are better informed (and expect sales reps to be better informed about their industry and likely challenges as well), and often need only a few key questions answered (most critically, price) by the time they contact a sales person.

How can B2B organizations, marketers and sales professionals adjust to, and thrive in, this new environment? Find out here in some of the best blog posts and articles of the past year offering strategic guidance and insights for B2B marketing and sales executives.

B2B Marketing Trends,  Tips and Strategies

The Top-10 B2B Marketing Trends for 2011 by Everything Technology Marketing

Holger Schulze laid out these ten predictions in January 2011. For the most part, the predictions were on target. And also, for the most part, these predicted areas of focus (e.g. social media ROI, lead quality, content marketing) will remain priorities in 2012.

Just What Do Marketers Do, Anyway? by MarketingProfs

Barbara Bix and Olga Taylor craft an intriguing case for focused market research and targeting using the example of a violin virtuoso playing in a subway for $32, after having sold out a concert with $100 tickets just days before. Bix and Taylor explain that “Quality and price are important, but only in front of the right buyer, at the right time and place,” then provide guidance on determining those attributes in order to maximize profits.

You’ve Got New Visitors at Your Site. Now What? by MarketingProfs

Contending that “Only by creating rich experiences—in the form of content, features, interactivity, and the like—can businesses convert visitors into more than just passing window shoppers,” Gretel Going details a process for creating the right kinds of content based on buyer types, stage in the buying process, and differing content preferences, utilizing an array of different formats from ebooks and webinars to video and mobile apps–in addition to great web page copy.

B2B Websites NOT Great At Demand Gen by Business2Community

The insightful Ardath Albee picks up on the theme of the post above, noting that while B2B marketers expend great efforts on SEO and social media marketing to attract visitors to the websites, research shows that their websites are then often “ignoring the very audience they worked so hard to attract.” This post details a conversation she had with Craig Rosenberg about B2B website usability, effectiveness and conversion rate optimization.

Is Youtility the Future of Marketing? by iMedia Connection

Frequent “best of” contributor Jay Baer writes that “The difference between helping and selling is just 2 letters. But those letters make all the difference. Your company needs to become a YOUtility. Sell something, and you make a customer. Help someone, and you make a customer for life.” He illustrates the concept of YOUtility with real-world examples and explains how any company can do this.

3 Tips on How to Use Search Engine Marketing Effectively by ePROneur

Because “getting to the top of the search results requires work and the understanding of not only what tactical methods you need to use to get there, but also what foundation you need to build and have in place to be most effective,” Rania Kort outlines three high-level strategies for optimizing a company’s presence in search.

101 awesome marketing quotes; A presentation by Thewebcitizen

Ilias Chelidonis shares 101 marketing quotes from a HubSpot presentation, such as “Remarkable social media content and great sales copy are pretty much the same–plain spoken words designed to focus on the needs of the reader, listener or viewer” and “Make the customer the hero of your story” (so true).

10 rules for entrepreneurial survival by TECHdotMN

Getting your attention by opening his post with “If you’re an entrepreneur, there’s something wrong with you. You have a genetic predisposition for risking it all…You are a masochist who is mentally prepared to run an ultra-marathon with an invisible finish line. Yet, you are confident in the pursuit of your destination,” Lief Larson of Workface goes on to list 10 survival rules for entpreneurs. For example, #8: “There are no shortcuts. There is only one right way to do things: the right way. Dig your heels in and be prepared to endure. ‘Overnight success’ can take years in the making.”

Why lead generation and branding aren’t mutually exclusive by iMedia Connection

Chris Chariton shares five ideas on how “sales and marketing can work together to generate leads and build the brand as part of the same effort.” Among her ideas is increasing your company’s “findability.” As Chris notes, “pushing information out to customers and prospects is not nearly as effective as it once was. Instead, you have to make sure they can find you when they’re looking” (which is why web presence optimization is crucial).

Addressing Changes in the B2B Buying Cycle

No One Wants To Read Your Whitepaper. Let’s Hope They Recycle It. by Marketing Automation Software Guide

Writing that “I have no interest in reading a War and Peace-style sales pitch — and, let’s face it, that’s what most whitepapers are these days…Companies need to find new and more direct ways to reach the buyer 2.0 without going all Tolstoy on them,” Lauren Carlson recommends alternatives focused on providing the information that buyers need, when they want it, in forms that are more digestible and engaging.

The Future of Buyer Relationships by Business2Community

Tony Zambito outlines seven aspects of changes in the buying cycle brought about by social media and the explosion of user-generated content, including the importance of building an online reputation, understanding how social algorithms work, and producing real-time content.

The Blurry B2B Buying Process | New Breed of B2B Buyer #2 by Chaotic Flow

Joel York offers his insights on reaching “the new elusive B2B buyer” who seeks to engage with sales “only when there is clear value to be gained, not just to get information.” He demonstrates the imperative of marketing automation through some interesting variations of the traditional sales funnel model.

Five Ways B-to-B Marketers Need to Change Their Game by Biznology

Citing dramatic changes in the typical B2B sales cycle – “Buyers don’t really want to talk to vendors until somewhere akin to 70% of the way down the road, at the stage of writing RFPs and getting quotes…Business buying processes are getting longer, and—most important—involving more parties than ever before.  The so-called Buying Circle in large enterprise B-to-B—the influencers, specifiers, users, decision-makers—comprises as many as 21 people, according to Marketing Sherpa”—Ruth Stevens challenges marketers to “think differently” and use these specific techniques to maximize impact with buyers.

B2B Sales Trends and Strategies

Salesmen are Dying and Other IT Trends by IT Marketing World

Tom Pisello details changes in the B2B buying cycle resulting from the immediate access to vast amounts of information now available online. It isn’t exactly “death of a salesman” but it does mean death to the old way of selling. Pisello concludes that “Advanced ROI business case tools and training should be provided to direct and channel sales professionals to help them advance from traditional product / solution selling, to the value selling buyers now demand.”

Gartner: 5 Questions for Anyone Selling Technology by Inflexion Point

Bob Apollo shares five questions posed by Steve Prentice of Gartner in a presentation on the use of technology to drive business innovation, along with his interpretation of what those questions mean to those focused on selling technology-based products or services in a B2B context.

5 Ways To Influence B2B Group Buying Decisions by Social Media B2B

Noting that B2B purchases are normally group decisions, Adam Holden-Bache suggests “five things to consider as you create social media content targeted at B2B group buyers,” including highlighting the value of your offering (based on buyer roles) and showing how it will integrate with the buying company’s existing tools, systems and processes.

And Finally…

Future Trends: 2012 Online Marketing & Technology Predictions by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

This post opened with Holger Schulze’s predictions for 2011, and fittingly closes with Lee Odden’s prognostication for 2012. He challenges marketers to think how their audiences will be consuming information in the coming years (evolving online and device technology) rather than narrow concepts, then presents seven compelling reports and infographics outlining “key technology, social business and digital marketing trends for 2012 and beyond.”

You know the statistics: Facebook is the most popular method for sharing online content. It’s approaching one billion users worldwide. 85% of B2B journalists are on Facebook. 61 of the world’s 100 largest companies maintain Facebook brand pages, as do 71% of B2B firms. Three-quarters of North American advertising agencies say their clients run PPC campaigns on Facebook.

While having a presence on Facebook is no longer an “if” question for most companies, many “how” questions remain. How can I design my company’s Facebook page for maximum impact? How can I grow my company’s following? How can I increase the probability that my fans will see my content updates?

Find the answers to these questions and many more here in more than 30 of the best articles and blog posts on Facebook marketing of 2011.

Facebook Marketing Tips and Tactics

The Best Facebook Page Strategies and the Pages That Use Them by Inside Facebook

Contending that “there is a great deal of nuance to creating a successful (Facebook) Page,” Josh Constine highlights three strategies with examples.

How To Make a Facebook List (& 6 Ways To Use Them) by Search Engine People

Ruud Hein steps through a quick process for creating Facebook lists, and recommends various uses for them such as sharing information with only a specific subset of your contacts, or using Facebook lists as a CRM tool.

Facebook is FOREVER by iMedia Connection

Lucia Davis uses an infographic titled “Obsessed with Facebook” to argue that Facebook has become so ingrained into our lives that it will never go away. And given that all of the attacks from would-be “Facebook killers” along with Mark Zuckerberg’s own complete disregard for data privacy or user experience still haven’t doomed the platform, she may well be right.

Five Top Facebook Marketing Tips by LiveWorld

Bryan Person shares highlights of a presentation from Ekaterina Walter on five best practices for Facebook marketing, including optimizing wall posts for the News Feed and using Facebook Insights data to better understand your fan base.

A Big Brand’s Social Strategy Really Means ‘Facebook’ by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Justin Archer notes that despite the fact that for much of the Fortune 500, “social media” really means “Facebook,’ many still fall short in this area. Socialcasting the latest company updates is a fail; planning and engagement are key.

Ranking in Facebook Search by Vertical Measures

Kaila Strong notes that Facebook now accounts for close to 3% of all U.S. searches—a still small but rapidly growing and not insignificant figure. She then shares three ranking factors in Facebook organic search and three tactics that can be used to improve ranking for your company Facebook page.

The Basics of Advertising on Facebook by Practical eCommerce

Paul Chaney walks through the process of creating a Facebook ad campaign, from identifying your goals and target audience to designing ads and setting pricing.

15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook by Socialmedia.biz

JD Lasica starts by pointing out that, “Your brand isn’t reaching as many people as you think through its Facebook Page…88 percent of Facebook members never return to a Page once they’ve clicked the Like button. Your opportunity lies in engaging with fans through their News Feed. But…only 1 out of every 500 updates makes it into your fans’ critical Top News feed, which is how 95 percent of Facebook members get their updates.” Ouch. Fortunately, he also notes that turning “your Facebook presence into a larger conversation strategy for your brand” can dramatically increase a company’s visibility on Facebook, then delves into 15 tactics to support that strategy.

Facebook Pages Just Got Easier for Brands by Dose of Digital

Though it’s no longer news, Jonathan Richman here provides one of the best and most comprehensive summaries of the changes Facebook made to Pages earlier this year, as well as tips and techniques to capitalize on the new features. This rather long post is also conveniently available in PDF format.

10 Tips to Fully Utilize Facebook’s New Page Design by Mashable

For those who prefer a more condensed summary of Facebook’s switch to iFrames earlier this year, the brilliant Jeff Ente explains how iFrames work and why they are potentially very, very important to marketers.

20 Tips to Get Your Content Seen on Facebook by HubSpot

Ellie Mirman explains how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works, then offers 20 ideas to make your content more visible, including posting a variety of content to attract interactions, including images on blog posts, and asking questions to solicit feedback from your fans.

Easy ways to attract more fans to your Facebook page by Facebook Toolkit

10 tips to make your page more visible and encourage “likes,” such as using the photo strip call to action, investing in Facebook ads, and featuring influential fans as your favorite users.

20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know by Hongkiat.com

Learn how to place Facebook chat in a sidebar in Firefox, how to update Facebook without using Facebook (e.g., through Ping.fm [http://ping.fm/]), how to specify which of your friends’ photos display on your Facebook profile page, how to create quizzes, block ads and more in this helpful post.

7 Awesome B2B Facebook Fan Pages by HubSpot Blog
***** 5 STARS

While there are lots of posts written about “great Facebook brand pages” that highlight large consumer marketers, few include examples from the B2B world. Eric Vreeland addresses that gap in this excellent post, showcasing companies like Saleforce.com and Forrester Research, and also provides tips and guidance on how B2B marketers can make the most of the world’s largest social network.

15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook by Practical eCommerce

Paul Chaney recommends including a “Like Us on Facebook” link in marketing emails, investing in Facebook ads, providing incentives for fans to spread your message, and posting multimedia content among other tactics for growing your fan base on Facebook.

How to Build the Perfect Facebook Fan Page, 2011 Edition by techipedia

Writing that “With the new layout providing so much screen real estate for visual branding, it has raised the bar for a Page’s visual branding on Facebook. The new layout offers the opportunity to claim visual ownership of your Page,” Tim Ware outlines the six key areas of a Facebook brand page and how to optimize the use of each area.

Make the Most of Your Facebook Marketing by Alison Zarrella

Alison recommends cross-promotion (e.g., through Twitter, marketing emails and your blog) and utilizing the many types of Facebook updates and tools in order to maximize the probability that your fans will actually see your Facebook posts.

Facebook Publishes Guide to Social Marketing Best Practices by ReadWriteWeb

John Paul Titlow outlines and links to Facebook’s 14-page PDF Best Practice Guide: Marketing on Facebook which “serves as an official resource on how to take advantage of Facebook’s advertising products, social plugins, analytics and other tools to grow one’s business.”

Facebook Apps and Tools

5 Facebook Applications to Add Useful Tabs to Your Facebook Fan Page by Search Engine Journal

Frequent best-of contributor Ann Smarty reviews five Facebook apps to help extend the functionality and engagement value of a Facebook fan page (though note that Facebook has moved away from support for Static FBML).

The Definitive List of Facebook Video Apps for Facebook Pages by ReelSEO

Mark R. Robertson lists and briefly describes more than 40 Facebook video apps, organized into categories for YouTube, Vimeo, live video streaming, video chat/calling, Facebook video, and miscellaneous video apps.

10 Killer Facebook Page Creation Tools by All Facebook

Brian Ward (no, not Brian “St. Paul” Ward) reviews 10 tools “that can help your brand build a more enticing page” on Facebook, such as ShortStack and Pagemodo.

3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages by Practical eCommerce

Paul Chaney (again) summarizes the problems that Facebook’s switch from FBML to iframes created for Facebook page developers, then reviews three tools that simplify the creation of iframes apps.

4 Free Facebook Landing Page Creation Tools by DreamGrow Social Media

Priit Kallas reviews ShortStack, Pagemodo, Wildfire iFrames and TabSite, then offers his recommendations. A follow-up post, Facebook Cheat Sheet: Sizes and Dimensions, details the real estate (dimensions, text characters, file size etc.) available on each key area of a Facebook brand page.

Facebook Stats, Facts and Research

More Inc. 500 Companies Succeeding With Facebook by MarketingProfs

Among the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., Facebook has become a key marketing platform: 71% of Inc. 500 companies use it, with 85% calling their efforts successful. About 60% of those companies also use Twitter, and roughly half maintain corporate blogs.

Facebook Demographics: A Comprehensive Guide (Amazingly Squeezed Into One Page) by Soshable

JD Rucker highlights an infographic and slide deck with detailed Facebook demographics, showing Facebook’s population broken down by country, age, gender and more. The top-line number (just under 600 million) is a tad out of date though.

Survey: Facebook Strategy Should be About Deals Not Engagement by Social Commerce Today

A UK study found that 19% of users follow brands on Facebook, and more than half of those people have recommended a brand there. However, 70% follow specifically to get special offers, and most will unfollow a brand if they stop getting them. No mention of “engagement.”

Facebook Skeptics, Haters, and Tellers of Uncomfortable Truths

Why Only Idiots Promote Their Brand’s Facebook Page via Traditional Media by iMedia Connection

Think Facebook is the ultimate brand marketing platform? Or even remotely close? Kent Lewis reminds marketers about what’s “not to love” about Facebook from a marketing standpoint, such as the fact that Facebook owns all content on the site, can (and does) change page design and functionality at any time, the analytics are limited, and the UI is distracting.

Designing Email Campaigns for Facebook Messages by Campaign Monitor

Ros Hodgekiss details the capabilities and limitations of Facebook Messages for email, and concludes that “its limitations as an email platform will most likely prevent it from being widely used as an everyday email address. Plus, would you take a job applicant really seriously if they were sending from a @facebook.com address? Really?”

8 Reasons Marketers Can’t Trust Facebook by iMedia Connection

Douglas Karr details eight lessons learned about what can—and at least sometimes does—go wrong with Facebook as a marketing platform, from access control issues to lack of recourse / customer service to the risk of data loss.

Why I Don’t Use Facebook by PC Magazine

Professional curmudgeon John C. Dvorak writes that he doesn’t use Facebook because it’s a closed system, it’s essentially AOL 2.0, and, in his view, “There is no reason for anyone with any chops online to be remotely involved with Facebook.” Hmm, I wonder what he really thinks?

Is Facebook Losing its Marketing Mojo? by Oz2 Blog

The delightful Catherine Lockey details some of the problems induced by Facebook’s design changes earlier this year, and offers partial solutions, but concludes by noting that “Facebook is not your brand. Facebook is Facebook’s brand…If you put all of your marketing eggs in Facebook’s basket then you’re in trouble.”