Social Media Blog & Work at home business

Today is the time when social media is rapidly redefining the marketing landscape. Companies are eager to join the social media band wagon and are willing to spend money and time on social media marketing.

By doing social media marketing the right way, companies can successfully spur the web traffic to their website and establish themselves as a brand in their respective industries. Amongst the various sites that help in brand building, Facebook leads the league.

Facebook hit the 175,000,000 active user mark, just 5 weeks after it hit 150 million users in January. At this rate, Facebook has been growing by a whopping 600,000 users per day over the last several weeks,

Facebook has been instrumental in getting increased attention from fans, especially if the company is already a brand. Brands get more popularity from Facebook because:

1. Peoples already know about their products and services.
2. They are popular in their competition.
3. People regularly search for popular brand names.

Here’s a comparative study of Coca-Cola/Pepsi & Microsoft/Oracle to see how bigger brand get better results from Facebook:

Coca Cola(Facebook Fans Page)

Details

2008 Sales (mil.) $31,944.0
2008 Employees 92,400

Competition
PepsiCo

PepsiCo(Facebook Fans Page)

Details
2008 Sales (mil.) $13,796

Competition
Coca Cola

Pepsi is also popular but when they created a fans page on Facebook Coca Cola outnumbered them. The reason being people started showing more interest in Coca Cola as it is a bigger brand, thereby making it more popular!

Here’s another example that shows how more popular brands get better returns from Facebook.

Microsoft Vs. Oracle

Microsoft(Facebook Fans Page)

Details
2009 Sales (mil.) $58,437.0
2009 Employees 93,000

Competition
Oracle

Oracle

Details
2008 Sales (mil.) $22,430.0
2008 Employees 84,233

Competition
Microsoft

Here Microsoft & Oracle both are popular but when it comes to Facebook people started showing there interest in Microsoft & Microsoft became more popular then oracle on Facebook as well.

So Facebook helps companies to create there own brand but if you are already a brand then Facebook helps you to get attention from millions of fans.

1. Google.com

As we all know that Google is the undoubtedly the number one search engine available today. Most of the internet users flock over to Google.com for every bit of the information they need. With internet blustering with Web 2.0 and Social Media sites the powers of google as a search engine has been more influential. As google indexes all stories, videos and pictures submitted in social media sites quiet easily the number of users have increased tremendously.

We can search latest news, Images, videos, blogs, articles which we can submit to social networking sites & share with our friends as well as with entire world.

2. Google Reader

Google reader helps users to subscribe their favorite blogs, News, websites, articles etc in one place from where they can easily see the updated blog posts & latest news. They just need to subscribe to the RSS feeds of their favorite blogs & news websites.

If they like that post then they can easily share that post to social networking sites from the same platform.

3. Google Images

Google images help users to search images from their interest & they can save that public Images to any image hosting sites like flickr, imgur, imageonto etc.

After adding these images they can easily share those images with any social bookmarking sites like Digg, stumbleupon, reddit etc.

4. Google videos

Google Videos helps social media users to search videos from their interest & they can share these videos with any social bookmarking and micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Jaiko etc.

5. Google News

Google news will help users to search the latest news from all over the world. They can easily search the latest news from this channel from their interests & they can easily share that news with friends & world through social media.

6. Google Blogs

Google blogs search help users to search the latest blogs on the net. They can easily search the updated blog post from this channel of their interest & they can easily share that blog with friends & world through social media.

7. Google Alerts

Users can add Google alerts with there specific interest & get the updated latest news, blogs, Groups etc as-it-happens. Once they like any post they can share those post with social networking sites.

The Facebook fan pages have been launched since two years now and since that time they have grown enormously. When Facebook announced the Fan pages, there were a number of mixed reviews. Some were hailing it and its integration to the new advertising platform and some hated it – claiming it was turning Facebook into Myspace.

Below are the top 8 fan pages on Facebook from different profiles. Just have a look and you will be astonished to see the fan numbers.

According to the Comscore US rankings of the crowning web widgets, widget from MySpace, Slide.com and Clearspring mutual the first, second and third spots. For many of you who do not completely understand what a widget is, it’s essentially independent objects or an object that crapper be embedded or downloaded onto another site and crapper be used as a tool, have automatic content updates, or are or crapper be interactive. Though they go by the name of “widget”, Facebook calls them “applications” and Google calls them “gadgets.”
In light with the stats of November 2007, almost 148 meg U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, representing 81 percent of the total audience. MySpace.com widgets by far had the largest audience, reaching more than 57 meg Internet users, while Slide.com hierarchical second with 39.2 meg viewers. Google.com has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 meg viewers.

Obviously MySpace is the dominant player here but look at the others on the list. Slide for example is the largest personal media network in the world, reaching 144 million unique global viewers each month and more than 30 percent of the U.S. Internet audience. They help people express themselves and tell stories through personalized photos and videos created on Slide.com and viewed anywhere on the web or desktop.

Slide’s products — including Slideshows, FunWall and SuperPoke! — are popular on top social networking and blog platforms, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and Blogger. Slide is also the leading developer on Facebook with more than 84 million applications installed and the most active users than any other developer.

Clearspring though is NOT a social network. Clearspring is the leading provider of cross-platform widget services. Their goal is to make it easy to use content and services from across the Internet to weave personalized experiences.

RockYou is a leading provider of applications and widgets on the web. RockYou widgets include photo slideshows, glitter text, customized Facebook applications and voicemail accessories that are simple to use and enable people to frequently refresh their online style. RockYou has over 35 million users, serving over 180 million widget views per day in more than 200 countries. RockYou applications are customized for easy integration across all social networks including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Tagged and hi5.

Photobucket Owned by News Corp is the most popular site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics. Photobucket, According to Comscore is:
• 24.1 Million Unique site visitors/month in the US, and 34.6 Million unique site visitors/month worldwide.
• #1 most popular Photos site in the US.
• #3 most popular Entertainment/Multimedia site in the US.
• #7 most popular Entertainment/Multimedia site in the world.
• #24 in Top 50 Sites in the US and
• #47 Top 100 Global Sites

The next one is BunnyHerolabs, bunnyhero pets bebo app the pets have been available on bebo for a while now as “widgets,” but now bunnyhero pets are available as an application on bebo’s new application platform.

Next in the list are the Musicplaylist.us and myplaylist.org widgets, which are a no brainer in the land of “can’t-miss” and “must-have”, widgets. And lastly if you ever wondered where all of the kitschy graphics on the MySpace pages was coming from, look no further than, and the name seems awfully apropos.

BlingyBlob.com, for us uninitiated, is the hottest source for FREE high quality graphics, animations, Flash and much more for your MySpace page, personal site, or blog. Makes you giddy, doesn’t it?

Look for music, video and image sharing widgets to continue to evolve to an extent that perhaps one day they become part of someone’s v-card or email signature, along with the location of their MySpace, FB or Linkedin pages.