Pinterest Is All The Rage, As Of This Writing

When it comes to referral traffic let’s remember, every action in liking, re-pinning and sharing in Pinterest is visually-driven. Recipes, kittens in coffee cups, hot infographics, and inebriated people removing themselves from the gene pool – along with brilliant photographic and video work will get seen, shared (read: lifted and “repinned” to others’ boards) and make you the cat’s meow in Pinterest.

Seldom Discussed Pinterest Fact

Pinterest Is Hardly New. Private beta invites went out in the beginning of March, 2010.

I think it’s just a matter of how long I’ve been using Pinterest and perhaps the OsakaSaul name that people have “seen around” that has caused me to collect likes, repins and a slew of followers within Pinterest.

I have been kicking their tires for nearly two years, and while they’re gotten flashy, I would love to see them be more thoughtful to the user in their user experience.

My ideas for just the most obvious Pinterest UX improvements:

• Close windows after we’ve liked/shared
• Let us multi-share with boxes to tick, rather than having us repeat steps
• Provide us with us more condensed view options – so we can get more done with a lot less scrolling

For me, words are my strength.  Article titles drive traffic from many sources, and terms, or ‘keywords’ within the body of posts draws natural search traffic.  A couple Google Analytics screenshots should speak volumes.

For referral traffic, or page views, StumbleUpon is still doing it for me, with 1,095 page views in the last 30 days (just 4 new articles published in that time), and Pinterest, where I have had an account and boards for about two years, does not even make the top 25.

Also, note the 1.19 page visits (means some people see other pages after the one they came to see, once on my blog) and an average stay of 58 seconds:

Where do I find Pinterest within Google Analytics?  39th place – seven visits in 30 days.

Seven visits, thanks to my six boards in Pinterest and dozens of images, most of which lead to OsakaBentures.com.  While the Time on site of 10:13 and 3.57 average pages viewed would look glorious, I’m not buying it:

1. The sample is too small – just seven visits to my blog from Pinterest, so, I’m guessing that one or more people left their computer on and the browser showing my blog and did other things for an hour or so – before closing the browser or going elsewhere on the internet;
2. My own wife would not listen to me for 10:13 at a time (or read 3.57 of my writing) – even when we were still dating, and she still felt compelled to pretend to take interest in what I had to say.

If you, too, are not using breathtaking images, infographics, or showcasing the People of Walmart in original and shocking ways…

How To Get More Referral Traffic From Stumble Upon

1. Follow people you know, to start, but understand that it will take some time to understand how they are going to use StumbleUpon. I get better and better at looking at a Stumbler’s number of likes, the recency of likes and what they like – and decide if the Stumbler is going to appreciate what I share to them, perhaps “SU-like” on occasion, and maybe not share tons of odd stuff to me.
2. Every couple days, from Profile > Connections > Visitors, from the pull-down menu, see who you don’t already know (they could be people you are already connected to who simply looked at your likes most recently), and see what their stats tell you.  What do they like? How often, and when was the last time they shared content? Follow (or don’t) wisely; you can only follow 500 people in StumbleUpon.
3. Review your own post, and also go through your blog circle, etc. and SU-like your supporting bloggers’ latest posts. The first review on a page is the StumbleUpon “Discovery Review” – and counts the most for StumbleUpon SEO.  StumbleUpon allows you to add as many tags as you like, but actually uses the first five you provide. These, multiplied by the number of likes you have on the page, once reviewed, increase the likelihood that your page will appear “randomly” before Stumblers who are Stumbling their followed topics.
4. For reviews on your own posts/pages – or any that you want to be sure get in front of many Stumblers’ eyes – test your tags in the StumbleUpon “Explore Box,” which suggests acceptable StumbleUpon topics from words and phrases that you input.

If your content is not particularly visually dynamic and/or if you are seeing far better referral traffic results, please share what you are doing differently.

Social Media Revolver is on Pinterest

Click the button below to follow us. Cheers!

Pinterest For Business Book

If you want to learn more how to use Pinterest in your business check out Pinterest For Business Made Easy from Kim Castleberry. [Yep, you guessed it, it is an affiliate link. Still, the book is actually very good!]

[image credit: photostock]

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Saul Fleishman. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: How To Get More Referral Traffic: Pinterest vs. StumbleUpon.

Twitter Inc. has just turned 6 last month and have currently about 500 million users worldwide. Twitter was valued at $8.3 billion in 2011 and it’s the second most popular social media network after Facebook. Twitter has 900+ employees and is based in San Francisco, California with additional servers and offices in New York City.

With 500 million users you’d think that everybody would already know how to use Twitter. Well, apparently not so. Here at Social Media Revolver we get lots of questions from people and small business owners what Twitter really is, what it does, and how to use it.

This article is for those who are still wondering what this crazy Twitter thing is; or who already have a Twitter account, but haven’t used it much yet.

First, we have the ‘official’ definition from Twitter themselves:

Well, that’s a bit vague isn’t it? Let’s have a look what Wikipedia has to say:

Ok, that one is a bit better. In short, Twitter is a communication tool which allows you to be in touch with like minded people via Internet and Smart Phones.

People who are connected with you are called followers. Some people have millions of them, especially musicians, movie stars and celebrities,.. and president Obama.

For instance Lady Gaga has over 22 million followers! Can you imagine how powerful one message, or tweet from the Mother Monster can be?

New York Times has close to 5 million followers, so when they send out a tweet it does reach a serious volume of people!

How To Use Twitter – Infographic

Check out this wonderful Infographic from Twiends that presents most of the important Twitter features as well as some interesting facts. Learn these and you’ll be bonafied! [Sorry @SnoopDogg I just had to put that in!]

Twitter User Name

This is an important piece of online real estate that you should take seriously if you are running a business.

Twitter user names are unique web addresses, and you should own yours. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use, or even need your Twitter account at the moment, it’s still important that you own your own Twitter user name rather than someone else.

So, if you don’t have a Twitter account for your business or brand, please go and register your business name today before someone else does.

[See related post: How To Change Your Twitter Username]

How To Use Twitter – Video

Here is a great (and a bit humorous) video presentation from Blinklife about Twitter and what it can be used for:

How To Use Your Twitter Account Effectively

When you first get your Twitter account it does not look like much. You will get much more out of it if you customize it a little bit.

Here is a Top 10 list how to get most out of your Twitter account; either personally or for your business:

1. Use a profile picture. As you saw in the Infographic you will get 10 times more followers if you have a picture of yourself than if you don’t. This is fairly logical. Twitter is a network of people, and people relate to other people better if they see their faces.
2. Customize your Twitter background. Use this area to tell more about yourself or your business.
3. Fill in your Bio information. Again, you will get more followers if you tell people something about yourself.
4. If you have a website or blog put the URL below your Bio.
5. Start following people in your interest areas. Twiends and Twellow are good places to start.
6. Tweet about your interest areas. At least once a day. Twice would be better.
7. Follow back people who follow you. You can use some free automated services for this (such as SocialOomph). Remember not to unfollow automatically as you will risk losing your account!
8. Retweet often. When you see an interesting tweet in your Twitter feed, or timeline go ahead and retweet it. This is good interaction between you and your followers and will get you some retweets as well.
9. Reply to direct messages and conversations unless they are obvious automatic messages.
10. Use images. Twitter teamed up with photo sharing website Photobucket last year and introduced image sharing on tweets. It has quickly become a widely popular method for sharing some of the coolest pics on the web.
11. BONUS TIP: Do not hard sell! If you use your Twitter account trying to get people to buy stuff you will start losing your followers quickly. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t promote your business on Twitter, but make it so that your tweets are not obvious ads. Use the 80/20 rule on this. Tweet 8 messages of good, interesting and shareable material and throw in 2 commercial tweets once in awhile.

If you follow these simple rules your Twitter account will start working for you and before you know it, you too can become a Twitter superstar!

The Power Of Retweeting

Alyssa Milano

[Added 19.4.2012] Retweeting is one of the most powerful features on Twitter. When someone with lots of followers retweets your post you can end up with a huge increase in your followers as well as hits to your website or blog post.

As a matter of fact, this was exactly what happened with this post when American actress Alyssa Milano retweeted this post a few days ago. Alyssa has over 2 million followers on Twitter, so when she makes a tweet or retweet it makes a difference!

Below is the original retweet from Alyssa:

How To Use Twitter – Beginners Guide goo.gl/w7N6g /via @KrisOlin @jkcallas @heykim

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 16, 2012

Alyssa’s retweet caused 50+ other retweets from her followers and all this resulted in a huge jump in views (over 1,000 clicks/day). Thanks Alyssa! Social Media Revolver will follow you forever!

Very nice when something like that happens, eh?

Follow Us

Yes, Social Media Revolver is on Twitter as well! Follow us and stay in touch with the latest news and rumours from the exciting world of Social Media. Follow @SocialMediaRvl

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: How To Use Twitter – Beginners Guide.

While everybody and their social media consultant is talking about the new Timeline for Facebook Pages I thought I’d be controversial and talk about something else. I’m going to show you how you can get the most out of your Facebook Groups.

Additionally to Facebook Pages Facebook Groups are the other main option Facebook is offering for businesses and brands. Facebook Groups are often overlooked, but can be as powerful as Pages if configured and managed properly. They have some cool features Pages can’t offer; for instance group chat and their own Facebook email address. For companies offering online support Facebook Groups are far superior option than Facebook Pages, or Twitter for that matter.

Three Steps To Customize Your Facebook Group

While the social media world has been preparing for the massive Facebook Pages update lately Facebook Groups have under gone their own updates somewhat unnoticed. They are, however now in very good condition both visually and feature wise to be used in lots of commercial and non-commercial applications. You just need to do a few important customizations and you’re all set. Let me show you what needs to be done.

There are three main areas of interest here. First we’re going to replace the image area at the top with a custom banner. Then we’ll sort out the Group Info box and finally we’ll set you up with a custom Facebook URL.

1. Customize Your Facebook Group Banner

The default mode for the image area in Facebook Groups is to present a flow of pictures from the Group. In most cases this is both impractical and visually unappealing. We’re going to fix that with a cool custom banner.

Click the top right hand corner of that photo area and you should see a pop-up menu for uploading a photo. The best size for a custom Facebook Group banner is 800 x 200 pixels, and it’s better if you already make your banner exact to these measurements so that the Facebook image robot doesn’t crunch it to something ugly and weird. Yes, it does that believe me!

Upload, and click the Save Changes -button.

Your new banner image replaces all those little images that were fed into the picture area originally. Now, isn’t that so much better!

Notice that there is a semi transparent area of 30 pixels at the bottom of the banner, so make sure you don’t put anything important there such as phone numbers, web addresses and so on. Next we’ll have a look what you can do with your Facebook Group Info box.

2. Customize Your Group Info

The Facebook Group Info box is useful for presenting the basic details of your Group. You get to this area by choosing Edit Group from the pop-up menu on the right next to Notifications. You can write as much as you want there but only the first ten lines are visible at first glance.

The important thing to remember here is that if you go over those ten lines don’t put your Website, Twitter, blog or any other URL’s in the end as they would not be visible with out clicking the See more -hotlink. I usually put them right at the top.

The other tip is when you write your URL’s make sure you write them including the http:// in front of the www. This way they will become live links that people can actually click on.

3. Get Your Own Facebook Group URL

When you first set up your Facebook Group it will have a very generic URL address with lots of numbers in it. Something like http://www.facebook.com/groups/283445239392807/. Not very nice if you want to print it on your business cards or stationery, yet alone remember! Luckily there is a way to get a custom URL for your Facebook Group instantly right after setup. With Facebook Pages you have to have at least 30 fans in order to get a custom URL but that rule does not apply with Groups. You can get your custom URL straight away if you know how to do it. Let me show you.

Again, you choose Edit Group from the pop-up menu on the right. You will see a button that says Set Up Group Email. Click it. A box opens up where you can write your email address for the Group. The email functionality is very cool by itself as emails sent to this address will go to all the Group members, but that is not the main issue here.

Ok, are you ready for this? [drum roll here] The name you put in front of the @ sign becomes your custom Facebook Group URL!

Once it is accepted it gets locked in and it’s yours! Now, how cool is that? You don’t have to wait for 30 fans to show up or anything! So now, instead of having the awkward http://www.facebook.com/groups/283455239392807/ you can have something like facebook.com/groups/SocialMediaAdvertising. Much easier to remember, print and use don’t you think?

Most importantly as there can be several Facebook Groups with the same (visual) name there can only be one Group with a properly customized name. If your Facebook Group has the name of your business or brand, please make sure that you set up it’s email address and secure the custom Facebook URL.

Ok, there you have the three most important Facebook Group customizations. Do these and you’ll get much more out of your Group. Next week we’ll have a look at what Facebook has done to our beloved Pages. It’s not all good unfortunately. Stay tuned and subscribe to RSS.

Let me know if you are already using or planning to use Facebook Groups in your marketing.

[image: photostock]

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: How To Customize Your Facebook Group In Three Easy Steps.

Twitter has been around since 2006. It was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone in San Francisco after a prolonged board meeting at a directory website called Odeo. The first tweet ever created was when Dorsey wrote ‘Just setting up my Twttr‘ on March 21, 2006. With the impact of the Obvious Corporation Twitter became a proper company in April 2007, and the rest is history.

I joined up in 2008 and since then I have created several Twitter accounts for different online and offline business entities.

If you are wondering how old your Twitter account is, here’s a handy little tool that will tell you all sorts of interesting things about your account http://tweet.grader.com

For instance you can see from my report that I have been using the Social Media Revolver Twitter account since June 2009. That is not actually the case as I didn’t even have Social Media Revolver back then. What we are looking at is the data from a Twitter username, or handle that used to be called SocialMediaAds. I just changed it to SocialMediaRvl a little while ago, and now I’m going to explain how you can do that too.

If you were one of the early adopters of Twitter then your account might not reflect the true nature of your business any more. Your Twitter handle might not be as suitable or as cool as you’d want it to be; and you might find yourself hoping that you could change it for something better.

Well, you’re in luck, as now you can do just that; and even without losing any of your valued followers! Just follow these two simple steps and you’re all set.

How To Change Your Twitter Handle (Username) Without Losing Any Followers

I did this operation just a few weeks ago as I was re-branding my blog and I needed to change my Twitter handle as well. Actually, I had two choices; either create a brand new Twitter account with zero followers and start from the scratch, or use one of my existing accounts and just re-brand it to fit the new purpose. Luckily I had a suitable account available so I chose the second option.

Ok, if you’re thinking of changing your Twitter username too, here’s what you need to do. Log in to your Twitter account first.

Step 1 – Change Your Twitter Account Username

Click the top right hand corner of your account and go to Settings > Account. You should see a page something like this:

Write your new preferred username in the Username -box. As you type Twitter will tell you whether this name is available or not. Bearing in mind that you can only use 15 characters on this, and there are already about 500 million Twitter users you might not get the exact name you’d like. If that happens give it a go with some variations until you find a Twitter handle that is not registered yet. If it suits your new profile grab it as it might not be available for long!

While you’re there you might want to change your contact email address as well. For instance if you are using a different domain name with this re-branded Twitter account it would be useful to update the email as well. Twitter will send you a confirmation email if you decide to do the change.

Click the Save changes -button.

Step 2 –  Change Your Twitter  Profile Name

Click the Profile -link on the left hand side menu and you will get a new panel with your account profile details on it.

Here you should change a few things. First, change your Twitter profile name. You can choose any name you like as long as it fits into 20 characters. Your new profile name should, however, reflect your new Twitter username. I’m not sure if you can see it in the image but I had to put the words ‘Social’ and ‘Media’ together as I was one character over the limit.

Next you probably should have a critical look at your old profile picture. Is it still valid after all these years? If not, then go ahead and upload a new one.

If you also have a new domain name, like I did you should make the change in Web -box as well.

Finally, have a look at your Bio details. If they are out dated as suspected, go ahead and update.

Click the Save changes -button and you’re done!

Congratulations! You have now successfully changed your Twitter username and re-branded your account.

If you were using a custom Twitter background you might want to update that as well. Creating a custom Twitter background is a great way of branding your account and as such is a topic for a separate blog post a bit later. Subscribe to RSS feed and stay tuned for that one!

Remember that once you change your Twitter username you can’t log in to your account with the old name anymore. Also, if you have been using Twitter tools such as TweetDeck, Buffer or similar services you need to update the info there as well.

Kim Castleberry recommends in her fine article about this same topic that once you have done this change over you should re-register the old Twitter handle back. This is actually a good idea; you know, just to keep it away from your competitors and such.

If you decide to use one of your old Twitter accounts for a new purpose, like I did, please make sure that your target audience on that old account is similar to your new re-branded account.

As mentioned earlier, I changed an account called @SocialMediaAds to @SocialMediaRvl. I had been using the old Twitter handle with a website which was about social media advertising. As the two audience profiles were quite close to each other I managed to pull it off with flying colours and didn’t lose any followers. In fact, I have been gaining quite a few since the change.

Have you changed your Twitter username handle lately? Let us know how it went. Or, if you are currently planning to do so, throw us a comment if you have any questions.

[image credits: Renjith Krishnan, jscreationzs]

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: How To Change Your Twitter Username Handle And Rebrand Your Account.

As a marketer you don’t really want to pay for banner ads on a website that has no traffic or reach. Sometimes website owners give you traffic data from their Google Analytics, but there is no way you can be certain that those facts reflect the truth.

- You are better off doing the research yourself.

Luckily you don’t have to be Einstein to do that; but those guys who developed these methods sure came close! Especially Larry Page who calculated the formula for the Google Page Rank algorithm.

How do you find out which website is better than the other?

As there are millions and millions of websites not all of them were created equal. Some are more useful for marketing purposes than the others. Some have thousands of daily visitors, and some have just a few. Luckily there are a few clever tools we can use to separate the good from the ‘notsogood’.

How To Evaluate A Website For Marketing Purposes

Several companies gather information about websites and publish them freely. Companies such as Alexa, Quantcast, Compete and Google collect vast amounts of information we can use for evaluating websites for marketing and PR initiatives. I will cover these in more detail:

Alexa – The Web Information Company

Alexa has been around since 1996 providing us free, global web metrics data. Alexa was founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in San Francisco and later acquired by Amazon for $250 million in 1999. The company’s somewhat strange name was actually chosen after the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt.

Alexa is mainly used for evaluating global traffic on websites and blogs. You can search the Alexa database by keywords, categories or countries. Alexa puts the websites in order of relative importance by their one month Alexa Traffic Rank. This monthly rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views wins and gets ranked at No. 1.

Alexa website lists the Top 500 Websites in the world at any given time. Most often Google is No. 1 and Facebook No. 2 but sometimes they swop places. See a related post of the Top 20 Most Popular Websites In The World.

Alexa provides competitive analysis, benchmarking and market research. Alexa also gives you a handy option to compare up to 5 websites in relation to their traffic data.

Below is a comparative chart of Google, Facebook and Twitter according to their Alexa Traffic Rank:

Google, Facebook and Twitter Alexa Ranking

When you evaluate a website according to their Alexa score you can forget all websites that have more than 1 million Alexa Traffic Rank. They simply don’t have enough traffic to make your efforts worth while.

It is recommended to concentrate on websites and blogs which have better than 300,000 Alexa Traffic Rank. The lower the number the better the website is – Twitter is No. 9 for instance. If a website is in the top 100K you can be sure it has plenty of traffic and it would be well suitable for any marketing efforts you might have in mind.

You can also register your own websites or blogs with Alexa. As a registered user you can control the information about your sites as well as get additional info. Basic registration is free.

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google search engine. The name ‘Page Rank’ does not actually indicate ranking of a web ‘page’ but rather the name of its inventor Larry Page (co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin). Page Rank is a trademark of Google Inc. but the Page Rank -process itself has been patented to Stanford University. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from the university. Stanford received 1.8 million Google shares in exchange for the use of the patent and later sold them for $336 million. Nice…

Google Page Rank

Page Rank algorithm assigns a numerical weight (0-10) to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents (website) with the purpose of measuring its relative importance. The rank value indicates an importance of a particular web page. The higher the value the better.

A hyper link to a web page counts as a ‘vote’ of support. The Page Rank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number of all other web pages linking to it. These are called inbound, or incoming links. A page that is linked to by many other pages with high Google Page Rank receives a high rank itself. [deciphered from Wikipedia tech jargon]

Ok, enough of that scientific stuff.

In short, Google Page Rank is a simple figure to determine the importance of a website. Zero is bad, ten is unbelievable good and almost unattainable by normal websites. Even Facebook and Twitter have only 9 Page Rank!

From the marketing point of view you should ignore all websites with a Google Page Rank of 0, 1 and 2. Starting from 3 they are usually good enough for spending some quality time with. In some occasions you can still go with a Page Rank 2 website provided that it has a good Alexa (or some other) traffic rank.

Here is a nifty little tool to check out the Google Page Rank of any website or blog: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Quantcast

Quantcast was founded in 2006 by Konrad Feldman and Paul Sutter in California. Quantcast collects real time information about websites and their visitors to marketers. Quantcast measures over 25 million web audiences around the world and more than 300 billion Internet media consumption events each month. Quantcast keeps a list of Top 1,000.000 Websites ranking them by their traffic.

Quantcast provides a free audience measurement service with detailed visitor information and audience insights. The data includes measured and estimated website traffic, demographic and geographic information, business activity, site affinity and audience likes and interests.

Quantcast gives you nice visual reports; for instance this Quantcast data report shows a range of 7.000 to 12.000 monthly page views for this blog you are reading right now.

Quantcast Page View Metrics For Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing Blog

(I must remember update that figure to the ‘Advertise Here‘ section.)

From my Quantcast report I can also see that 59% of my readers are male, 62% have no kids and 70% went to college or grad. school. Also my visitors are interested in science, nature, technology, politics and photo/video sharing among other things. Very interesting and important information, won’t you say?

Not all websites are measured by Quantcast. You will have to apply to get measured. This is why Quantcast is a good metric as a web master must create an account with Quantcast and insert their special code onto their site. You just wouldn’t do that if your website performance was crap, would you?

Quantcast measurements are calculated per target country so they are all different depending on where the audience lives. As a rough guide for US you might be happy with a website that is in the top 1 million but for UK it should be in the top 10,000 to make an impact.

Here is a nice video about Quantcast features:

[Video by Lisa La France]

Compete

Compete.com is a Boston based web traffic analysis service launched in 2000 by Bill Gross. Compete publishes website profiles, search and referral analytics as well as the approximate number of visitors to the top 1 million websites in the world.

The Compete scores are computed from different sources such as internet service providers, opt-in panels, application providers and users of the Compete toolbar. The data comes from clickstream behaviours and opt-in survey responses of 2 million consumers across the United States.

Compete counts visitors only once, no matter how many times they visit a site in a month; these are defined as ‘Unique Visitors’ as seen in the sample report below. Repeat visits and other metrics can be seen if you subscribe to a Pro account, starting from $199/month.

Below is a sample report of the famous Swedish Vodka brand Absolut. Well, it is not actually Swedish anymore as it has been owned by the French firm Pernod Ricard since 2008.

Compete Score Absolut Vodka

In the Compete report we can see the amount of monthly unique visitors to the Absolut website. We can also see a ranking measure reflecting the popularity of this site based on how many visitors came to the site in a month. As Compete data represent traffic from the United States it is useful only if you are targeting a US based audience in your marketing.

Probably the best feature here is the Competitive Rank which shows related and/or competitor’s scores to the website being evaluated. Competitive Rank shows four related websites; in this case it showed Absolut Drinks (their own), Stolichnaya, Skyy Vodka and Grey Goose Vodka. For some reason it failed to recognize Smirnoff, which is probably the biggest competitor to Absolut; Smirnoff has 13,334 monthly visitors which is almost as much as Absolut’s 17,104. Compete produces this info through a partnership with SimilarSites.com.

If you click the View Similar Sites -button at the bottom of the screen you can see a total of 25 related websites.Very useful to comparative research but not much else due to the fact that it is US based only.

Website Quick Analysis

If you are short on time or just don’t feel like doing in depth research, here is a quick method to see whether a website is worth your marketing attention – or not.

Page Rank 6 Alexa Traffic Rank 152,982 - RollingStones.com

Use A Combination Of The Google Page Rank And The Alexa Traffic Rank

The rule of thumb for this method is that a website you are researching for marketing purposes should have a Google Page Rank of 3 or more, AND it should be ranked in the top 300,000 on the Alexa. You could call this the 3/300 rule of website research.

These two metrics (Alexa being the more important one) can quickly tell you if a website is worth considering as a marketing vehicle for you.

Using this method for instance The Rolling Stones website that Albert was studying in the title image has a Google Page Rank of 6 and Alexa Traffic Rank of 152,982. This would qualify for a website that has enough action from the marketing point of view. Further research confirms this as the site gets reasonably good scores on Quantcast (62,430 US) as well as on Compete (57,653).

Here are some other famous websites with their respective Google Page Rank and Alexa Traffic Rank scores:

Mashable.com Page Rank 8 | Alexa 182

Laughing Squid Page Rank 7 | Alexa 6,794

Keith Richards Page Rank 5 | Alexa 628,247

Elvis Page Rank 5 | Alexa 104,587

Copyblogger Page Rank 6 | Alexa 2,897

DIYblogger Page Rank 3 | Alexa 151,939

Huffington Post Page Rank n/a (This is odd?) | Alexa 88

BarackObama.com Page Rank 7 | Alexa 5,715

HillaryClinton.com Page Rank 5 | Alexa 891,643

James Bond Page Rank 6 | Alexa 480,169

Based on these Quick Analysis figures I would not advertise guitar strings on Keith Richard‘s website, I would post comments on Mashable and I would write a guest post on DIYblogger; which I have done actually. You can read the article here if you’re interested. It is a true story about the World’s First Dream Commercial.

How to make the website research really easy for you

Let’s face it, research is a bore. If you have lots of websites you need to evaluate it’s even a bigger bore. To help the situation you can use some clever browser plug-ins so that you can do the Quick Analysis effortlessly while you are browsing.

Using a plug-in or add-on with your browser you can check these quick metrics as well as other important data for any website in no time. There are plenty of good ones available but here are the ones that I use and recommend. They are free to install and use.

Firefox Addon

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webrank-toolbar-pagerank-alexa/

Google Chrome Extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mkhilblbmkdnapffblmecglknalglfji

Both of these fine plug-ins are produced by WebRankStats. What about a plug-in for the Internet Explorer then? I’m sure there are similar extensions available, but Internet Explorer itself is not really a worthy browser for research… or anything for that matter. If you are still using it, do yourself a favour and upgrade to Firefox or Google Chrome.

Let me know if you have been using any these research methods or if you have a trick of your own that you would like to share.

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: Albert Einstein’s Guide How To Research A Website For Marketing Purposes.

Earlier this week I was watching some nice PowerPoint presentations and quite a few were hosted at SlideShare.net. That got my attention so I decided to do some research and found out that SlideShare was huge!

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing all kinds of presentations, not just PowerPoints. It gets over 50 million monthly visitors and is one of the most visited 250 websites in the world. SlideShare content spreads virally through blogs and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Spreads virally, eh? That mention got my interest! I decided it was time to make my first SlideShare thingy. Here it is, but don’t start watching it now. Read on, ok?

Ok, once I created this 15-slide master piece of mine it was time to upload it to SlideShare. I logged in to my dormant account and uploaded the beast. Once there I added some keywords and descriptions to the file and thought, cool. -But whos’ going to see this?

Then I saw some familiar looking social sharing buttons next to my presentation and clicked a few. When I clicked on the LinkedIn share -button a pop-up window opened up with some choices. There are several options how you can share stuff on LinkedIn. You can share normally on your own wall or you can post to LinkedIn Groups. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I posted this thing to all the groups I belong to? So I did, and went on my well earned lunch break.

During lunch something had happened. I received an email from SlideShare. Bang!

“Facebook Advertising Guide” is being talked about on LinkedIn more than anything else on SlideShare right now. So we’ve put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the “Hot on LinkedIn” section).

Well done!
– SlideShare Team

My presentation was being featured right on the SlideShare homepage! At the bottom of it, and below the fold, but still I was happy as a clam about this unexpected fame. Excited about this I did a few more Tweets and a few Facebook posts and I was trying to email all my contacts about this but SlideShare couldn’t import my Gmail account for some reason, so I left it at that and went on doing some other important stuff for the day.

Six hours later I received another email from SlideShare. Double Bang!

Your presentation Facebook Advertising Guide is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team. We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everyday.

P.S – Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about this awesome masterpiece you have created? We have tweeted about this here.

Wow! I was now being featured on their ‘Featured’ -section at the top part of the screen. There it is on the first row on the right hand side:

As you can see my little presentation had gained 1.857 views so far. And this is just in a few hours from producing it and uploading it! Is that crazy or what?!

Ok, time to calm down now and do some semi-scientific analysis of what just happened.

In my view the reason I received this awesome treatment on SlideShare must lie in LinkedIn. When I posted on the LinkedIn Groups (about 15 of them) that action was recorded by SlideShare and gave me the position on their homepage in the ‘Hot On LinkedIn‘ -section; so that sort of broke the ice.

Once it hit the SlideShare home page the presentation was gaining rapidly some additional exposure and this elevated it into the ‘Featured‘ -category. I don’t think I would have received similar results if I hadn’t posted it on the LinkedIn Groups.

How To Use LinkedIn and SlideShare To Get Some Crazy Traffic To Your Website

So, the recipe to get some good traffic is this:

1. Make a short presentation of the thing that you do

2. Upload it to SlideShare

3. Use the built in sharing functions that SlideShare offers. For me the trick was sharing it with my LinkedIn Groups, but for you you it could be Facebook or Twitter.

4. Repeat with your next presentation

Ok, that’s it. Thanks for reading so far! It would be cool if you could click on some of the social sharing buttons on this post to help me spread the word.

Next week we’re going to talk more about LinkedIn as I’m presenting a guest post from Mr. LinkedIn Marketing himself, Lewis Howes. It should be great!

Let me know if you have been using SlideShare and or LinkedIn in your marketing and what kind of results have you been getting. If you haven’t used SlideShare yet, maybe it’s time to do so.

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: How To Get Crazy Traffic Using SlideShare and LinkedIn.

Connecting Your Twitter Account to Your Personal Facebook Account

In this connection when you write a message on your Twitter account it gets automatically posted into your Facebook status and Wall. Here are 5 simple steps how you can make that connection. You need to be logged into your Facebook account in order to do this.

Step 1 – Locate the Twitter Application

The Twitter application as well as many other cool applications are stored in the Facebook Applications area.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php

Alternatively, you can access it directly at the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2231777543

Once you have located the application click the blue ‘Go to Application’ -button.

Step2 – Allow Access

By clicking the ‘Allow’ –button you will authorise Twitter and Facebook create the connection needed. Go ahead and … click.

Step 3 – Log on to Twitter

Next you will need to log in to your Twitter account to make the connection happen.

Since we are creating a connection to your personal Facebook account you should use your personal Twitter account here as well.

Step 4 – Allow Twitter updates

In order to get the automatic update from your Twitter account to show up on your Facebook status you need to click the ‘+ Allow Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status’ –button.

This enables the connection and sends you to the next screen.

Step 5 – Authorisation

This is a bit unnecessary step but you need to click the blue ‘Allow Status Updates’ –button to finalise the operation.

The only good thing about this page is that it gives you the page URL where you can change the settings of this Twitter application as well as your other Facebook applications. Here is the direct link to that page: http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php

Once you click the button you will be back on the previous screen. From this screen you can also update your Facebook status. This will be posted automatically to you Twitter account as well. Please note that when you update your status on your Facebook profile page as you would do normally, it does not post to your Twitter account.

…and you’re done!

Congratulations!

You have now connected your Twitter account with your personal Facebook account. Everytime you  write a new Twitter post it will now automatically show up on your Facebook Profile. Next time we will have a look how to connect your Facebook Business Page to your Twitter business account.

This article is Part 2 of the illustrated bonus guide ‘Linking Facebook and Twitter‘ which you can get free by ordering the Facebook Advertising Guide.

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

* * * This has been yet another awesome post on Social Media Revolver by Kris Olin. Social Media Revolver is a magazine style blog covering latest discussion, news and tips from Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. You can read the original article here: Connecting Twitter to Your Facebook Account In 5 Easy Steps.