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Today, I’m going to review how James Patterson uses social networking to connect with his fans in a personal way.  Jamespatterson.com receives 46.34% of its traffic from Google, 12.2% from his newsletter at the Hatchette Book Group, 10.98% from Facebook, and 8.54% from Yahoo!  Other than the newsletter, which I do not receive, his social media marketing efforts seem to complement his traditional marketing efforts in the same way that Stephenie Meyer’s and Stephen King’s complement their endeavors.  Though, Patterson goes a step beyond that in that he offers his fans a personalized social networking sites.

Jamespatterson.com receives 7.32% of its traffic from his personalized Ning site, myjamespatterson.com—The James Patterson Community.  There are almost 50,000 member, 52 groups, and countless discussions throughout this personalize social networking site.  The setup is pretty much the same as it is for any other Ning site.  Honestly, more could be done to give it a more personal feel, but with nearly 50,000 members I think Patterson can find better ways to spend his money.

Patterson gives his most loyal fans a place where they can connect with one another and himself (on occasion) without wondering if they’re just connecting with another generic social networking author page.  There are only 17 sites linking into myjamespatterson.com, and it only receives traffic from direct traffic, Google, and Jamespatterson.com (perhaps from the occasional other page).

So, while James Patterson uses social media to complement traditional media, he goes a step further by offering his fans a place where they can get to know one another and play Soduko.  Yes, I said Soduko.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Today, let’s look at how you can use your Facebook visitors to determine what types of people are visiting your site.  If you didn’t read my blog yesterday, you might want to read yesterday’s blog Welcome to Google Analytics Sniper Training School before you read today’s blog.  For those who read yesterday’s blog, after you’ve figured out what pages or blogs people are going to on your site from Facebook the most, determine what about those pages or blogs attracts people.

Once you select Landing Page and Visitor Type, two more drop down boxes will appear.  You can use those tabs to find out more about your new and returning visitors from Facebook, such as how many pages those users who visited particular blogs visited, the average amount of time they spent on your site, the average bounce rate, and more.  Most visitors to my site from Facebook go to my homepage, but I determined my most popular was Using Google Analytics as a Social Media Monitoring Tool.

Once you’ve determined which of your blogs receives the most amount of attention from your Facebook friends, open a new tab to determine how those visitors interacted with that blog compared to visitors from other sources.  To find this go:

Content >> Top Content >> Find that blog from the bottom, right section of the page

That blog was one of my more popular blogs with all my visitors.  When you click on it, you can compare visitors to that page from Facebook to visitors to that page in general.  My Facebook friends seemed to appreciate that blog more than visitors from elsewhere, which means I might want to write more blogs like that to attract more of my Facebook friends.

Again I can use this method to find out more about people who visit my site via Twitter and other social networking sites.  Of course, I can also use this method with people who find my site via search engines, but unless that person leaves a comment you can’t interact with that person.  Okay, so you may not be able to interact with people who visit your site via social networking sites unless they comment on your blog or retweet it or other.

Though, regardless of whether you have 100 or 5,000 friends on Facebook and 10 or 20,000 followers on Twitter, a certain type of person befriended you or follows you.  I mention this to say that just as those blogs that were the most popular to my Facebook friends are my most popular blogs all around, people who befriend and follow you are a pretty good barometer of the type of people who are coming to your site via search engines.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Among the leading stories this week is the redesign of Myspace.  Just a few weeks ago I told someone MySpace is far from dead, but if they want to survive they need to become more of a niche based social networking site that focuses on the music and entertainment industry.  Now, I wonder if my conversation was being bugged.  Anyways, I went onto my account, which I haven’t been on in more than six months, and nothing seems too new.  I guess they’ll roll out new features in the months to come.  Here are some other stories.

Facebook and Paypal Monetize Social Media – I’m taking a finance class, so I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The easier a sales person can make it for you to purchase, the more likely you are to purchase.

Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga to invest in social media start-ups – If you have an idea, this could be your chance to get some change.

Yahoo! integrates with Facebook and Twitter – I think I posted something about Yahoo! moving into the social networking arena last week.  Maybe they should develop a social networking site, and call it Yippee!

Scholastic Launches Social Networking Site – YouAreWhatYouRead.com is a social networking site for book junkies like me.  It’ll be interesting to see how many Randians will use this site to proselytize miss Rand’s philosophies.

IBM makes additions to Cognos 10 – IBM reminds me too much of the days when computers were only for nerds. They’ve figured out a way for those nerds to collaborate through Wikis, blogs, and workrooms.

New Trojan Virus Attacks Macs – Mac users, I suggest you read this article.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Have a great weekend.

Stay social my friends.

Erick

Today, let’s examine Retaggr and SocialNetwork.in, which are two sites that will help you and your audience connect with each other.

Retaggr allows you to integrate your social networking sites onto one site (ErickWrites on ReTaggr).  Here, you can find all my contact information, including which social networking sites I use.  If you want to e-mail me, but you’re not sure where to find my e-mail address, you can find that in the “Interact with Me” section.  Click on Status Messages or scroll to the bottom of the page, and you can view streams from microblogging sites I use.

Okay, now onto SocialNetwork.in.  This basically does the same thing.  I’m still setting up my profile, but you can tell people which social networking sites they can find you on.  You can find my profile here (It may be set to private while I am building my profile).  This site may not have the functionality of Retaggr, but it allows you to add numerous more sites where people can connect with you.  And SocialNetwork.in even categorized them, so you can find new sites where you can network with people.

So, what’s the point of all this?  Well, everyone should have a Facebook and Twitter profile, but everyone should try to branch out and connect with their audience.  These sites allow you to determine where you can best connect with your audience, and tell your audience where they can best connect with you.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Well, it’s the end of another week, and there’s been much abuzz in the world of social networking.  For those who follow SEO Bridges on Twitter, you may have seen the challenge I put out there for someone to show me proof that search is dead.  According to Alexa, search is anything but dead.  And aside from that if search was dead, Facebook and Bing wouldn’t have struck a deal to include Bing search results on Facebook.  Anyhow, if anyone wants to answer that challenge, it’s out there.  In the mean time, there were no major buyouts this week, Google continues to build a social networking site called Google Me, and Steve Jobs made the major announcement that he switched toothpastes.

Starbucks’ Digital Network – That’s right! It’s not good enough for Starbucks to test how many of their Coffee-holics also like the happy juice, they also want to keep them glued to their computers so they lose all sense of time (Las Vegas uses that tactic to keep people in their casinos, just with no clocks).

Anntensity360 and VMS’s InSight 3 – Social media monitoring services continue to look for innovative ways to capitalize on the social media market.

SWIX Social Marketer – SWIX introduced a new app that tracks sales and the ROI of marketing offers using social media.  It’s free, while it’s in beta, when you sign up for a SWIX account.

Attensity partners with Twitter – Attensity now has access to Twitter’s “Firehose” (Twitter’s 900 million daily Tweets).

Apple and Facebook – Yep! There’s a deal in the works to streamline the world of commenting even more.  It’s just a matter of time before you can highlight any text, right click your mouse, and Tweet or comment anything.

Hootsuite Social Networking App – This one’s for Blackberry, and it’s available as a free download.  Or you can pay a monthly fee for a Pro account.

Yahoo introduces Y Connect – Yahoo wants to make it easier for everyone to connect to their favorite social networking site.

Will Apple buy Facebook – Hmmmmmmmmmmm.  The question is can Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg co-exist?

There have been many other things that have happened in the world of social media over this last week, but those are some of the top stories.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#social#networking #Twitter #social#media #windows#Live

So far the four most trafficked sites in the U.S. have been those four I’ve looked at. There are some socialization capabilities to the site ranked 5^th according to Alexa (Amazon), and pretty much anyone can add content to the site ranked 6th (Wikipedia). But I wouldn’t consider them social networking sites. It’s hard to even think of Youtube as a social networking site. Twitter is ranked 7^th according to Alexa, and Microsoft’s search engine Windows Live is ranked 11^th. Here are the numbers:

Twitter

8% of all Internet users use Twitter

Live

14.96% of all Internet users use Live

Twitter

About 6.2% of their users come from search engines, so their user base would decrease by less than 1% without search engines.

Live

About 4.4% of their user come from search engines

Twitter

Immediately before visiting Twitter, 12.04% of their users visited Facebook, 9.48% visited Google, 2.66% visited Youtube, 2.11% visited Yahoo, and .94% visited Live (Twitpic and LinkedIn are in there). Immediately after leaving Twitter 11.28% of their users visit Facebook, 9.48% visit Google, 2.88% visit Youtube, 1.91% visit Yahoo, and  .85% visit Live.

Live

Immediately before visiting Live, 13.64% of their users visited Facebook, 5.81% visited Google, 3.49% visited Yahoo, 2.42% visited Youtube, and to small of a portion of users come from Twitter for Alexa to rank them. Immediately after leaving Live, 14.6% of their users go to Facebook, 4.83% go to Google, 2.86% go to Yahoo!, and 2.07% go to Youtube. I should also mention that 10.79% of all users who use Live come from MSN and 15.94% go to MSN.

It doesn’t appear Twitter and Live have a very good relationship. That’s okay because once again the numbers show that search and social must coexist. Live receives 16.06% of their traffic from social networking sites, and Twitter receives 13.33% of their traffic from search engines. It looks like search needs social a little more than social needs search in this battle. Come by tomorrow as our last two contenders duke it out.



Stay social my friends,

Erick

Related articles

• You: The social networking tools you need for business – Feature (earthtimes.org)
• Brand Challenges & Opportunities With Social Media & Mobile (searchengineland.com)
• Digital News Roundup: Oct. 11, 2010 (360i.com)
• Twitter Targets 1 Billion Users, Challenging Facebook for Ads (businessweek.com)
• Twitter predicts it will have 1 billion members (sfgate.com)
• SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2010 (searchengineland.com)

#Facebook #Google #social#networking

You’ve probably heard at least one person say search is dead, or maybe you are that one person.  Let’s look at the argument in perspective, using Alexa to compare Google and Facebook—the two most trafficked sites in the U.S. and the world.

Facebook

In the last three months, 35.66% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used Facebook.

Google

In the last three months, 43.22% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used Google.

Facebook

6.7.% of all traffic to Facebook comes from search engines, which means their traffic would decrease by 2.35% without search engines.

Google

3% of all traffic to Google comes through Google.  In other words people searching for Google Analytics, type in “Google Analytics” into their search engine.

Facebook

7.37% of all people who visited Facebook visited Google immediately going to Facebook, and 7.86% of all Facebook users go to Google immediately after leaving Facebook.

Google

4.61% of all people who visit Google visited Facebook immediately before visiting Google, and 4.15% of all people who use Google go to Facebook immediately after they leave.

We can take these numbers and draw any number of conclusions, but it seems these numbers suggest that search engines and social networking sites need one another.  Neither is dead, rather they have become so integrated that they cannot be separated without negatively impacting the other.  I invite anyone to chime in, but I would especially welcome the rebuttal of anyone who believes search is dead.  The numbers simply do not suggest that.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Related articles

• Google versus Facebook is about ‘fast’ versus ‘sticky’ – which is the best strategy? (zdnet.com)
• Facebook taking on Google on new fronts! Will they succeed? (trak.in)
• Facebook Shuns Google, Not too Social (arnoldit.com)