Social Media Feed on Google Reader

I have mentioned in my last post about RSS is a Good resource to obtain latest news and update quickly and easily. I like to use Google Reader to follow and track my RSS. The picture above shows a quick glance of the Social Media feeds on my Google Reader.

I follow 45 Top Social Media Feeds Everyday

There are 45 social media feeds that I follow daily and I think you must subscribe to these feeds too if you are serious to learn about social media. These feeds will share with you all the latest development and technique on how you can use social media to bring traffic to your sites and also how to build up your reputation using social media.

If you are doing all the right thing on social media, you can generate sales and improve conversion on your ebusiness.

Subscribe to these 45 Social Media Feeds Now

To make your life easier, I have created a RSS feed bundle so that you can import into your Google reader easily to start tracking the news from these top social media feed. Following the steps below.

1. Sign in to your Google Reader first.

2. Click on the following image to import and subscribe to these feed!

Social Media RSS Feed Bundle

3. You are done! Enjoy reading and applying social media technique on your ebusiness!]

Reference of the 45 Social Media Feed

1. 10e20
2. All Facebook
3. Altitude Branding
4. Brent Csutoras
5. Brian Solis – PR 2.0
6. Chris Garrett on New Media
7. chrisbrogan.com
8. Collective Thoughts
9. Conversation Agent
10. Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide
11. Daily Blog Tips
12. Dan Zarrella
13. danny brown
14. Dosh Dosh
15. FreelanceFolder
16. Inside Facebook
17. Instigator Blog
18. Mashable!
19. Matt Mecham’s Blog
20. Milblogging.com : The World’s Largest Index of Military Blogs (Milblogs)
21. One Man & His Blog
22. Online Social Networking
23. Our Social Times
24. Reciprocal Consulting Blog
25. Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog
26. Simple Strategy Be Profitable
27. SmartBlog On Social Media
28. SmartBrief on Social Media
29. Social Cloudcast
30. Social Media Explorer
31. Social Media Explorer
32. Social Media Marketing
33. Social Media Marketing
34. Social Media Today
35. Social Wayne on the Social Web by Wayne Sutton
36. Social Web Blog
37. SocialTimes.com
38. Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg
39. The Center for Social Media
40. The Future Buzz
41. The Viral Garden
42. TwiTip
43. We Are Social
44. Web Strategy by Jeremiah
45. WebStudio13

Google Wave

What is a wave?

According to Google,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

I have just accepted a preview to Google wave and I am now testing it. I will update my experience on Google Wave on this blog shortly.

Twitter Advertising

It is a lovely Sunday afternoon and the great sun is now hiding behind the cloud. I wish it will rain in just a short while to cool down the heat. I was reading some news and I saw an article that “Twitter opening up to advertising“.

Cool… this is something interesting to note. Twitter has been a very successful micro-blogging platform recently and it has attracted lots of attention. That was one of the reason why Facebook wanted to acquire it before.

What type of Advertising is Twitter Offering?

However, the question now hanging in the air is what type of advertising Twitter is going to offer. Is it PPC, Impression, CPA???

Definitely, we would be very interested to know. Just that Twitter keeps its mouth zip at the moment.

Facebook on Android

I have come across a news saying that Facebook has launched an app on Android platform. However, I also read another news that creator information on the Facebook app is not from real Facebook email address.

So, is it real or fake that Facebook has launched an App on Android platform… I am still looking for confirmation..

Social Media Marketing

I came across an article “Why Social Media is a Fad“. I think it is a great article and therefore I like to talk about it.

Due to the rising popularity of social media or social networking, many people has jumped into social media marketing hoping to increase leads, increase sales and increase revenue. I fully agree that Social Media is a powerful marketing strategy.

But the trick is: You need to use it RIGHT!

Why Social Media is a Fad

If you read the article “Why Social Media is a Fad”, it asked you a simple question, “What come to your mind when people taking about social media?”. Do you immediate say Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter… Well, if you do, you might have used social media wrongly and you might have fallen into the trap of “Social Media is a Fad”.

Not Getting Result on Social Media

If you merely focus on those Big Names like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter… bra bra bra… of course there are a lots more. Your mind automatically lead you to focus on participate in more social networking sites. That’s a disastrous path. Involving yourself in too many social media sites will result in loss of focus, loss of motivation and eventually tiredness and giving up.

This is the main reason why many internet marketers failed in social media marketing. So, we all sometimes easily got too excited at the beginning and we focus on signing up many sites, we then, also easily lost the quality to build relationship and engage with fellow members. Without relationship and rapport, there is no trust you can gain from fellow members and therefore, all your effort will just easily go into the drain.

Why am I say this? If you are serious about building social media, don’t get too ambitious at the begining, plan properly and plan carefully. Pick a social network that you are comfortable and start building relationship with fellow members, contribute values to fellow members and you will see the result. (Here’s an article on how you can generate sales on Facebook for your reference).

Remember, “Giver Receives”… that’s the principle of the universe. Contribute values first and you will see result in social media.

Facebook May Expand Staff by 50%

I have mentioned in the earlier posts that social networking is unavoidable if you like to expand your business online. In order enjoy the first mover advantage, you must closely watch and follow the latest development in the World #1 social networking site, Facebook.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a Bloomberg interview that Facebook Inc. may expand its staff by 40 percent to 50 percent this year as it benefits from a surplus of engineers amid the recession.

Facebook announced recently its acquisition of friendfeed and it also announced allowing Facebook page to send tweet to tweeter page.

Adding on the latest speech from facebook CEO that they are adding staff strength, you can definitely expect more and more development is in the working pipeline and therefore, you must watch closely on Facebook annoucement so that not missing some good news for ebusiness owner.

Are you already using social network marketing? If you have not, it might be time to start planning for it.

Social Networking is A Huge Gold Mine

Social Networking Is A Big Gold Mine

I have seen the headline that “Social Networking is A Big Gold Mine” on newspaper, magazine or many internet marketing sites. I would like to share with you that I fully agree with this statement. However, I also like to share a mistake and learning that I made to prevent you from making the same mistake.

When I first heard the success of social networking, I thought I have found a Big Gold Mine. I thought I have found a secret. My excitement overwhelmed my logical thinking. I start creating many social networking accounts on many social networking sites imagining that I will get rich from there. This is a painful lesson.

As I started involving myself on many social networking sites with too many accounts. I focused on the number of accounts and number of sites. I have no time to get to know each other and contribute to the community. I wasted lots of time building hardware, creating links, leaving one time note or conversation.

This was not leading me to my goal, the end result, I was exhausted and I lost my faith and interest on social networking.

As you continue to read this article, please prepare yourself for this:

Social networking is definitely a profitable strategy, but it is not a Get Rich Quick scheme.

Social networking is about building relationship and contribution to others. You will need to spend time to build quality relationship and contribution. Do not fall into the trap of quantity.

I read an artile on Mashable about 5 essential tips of using social media. I found it very useful and it is a good guide for me to focus on relationship and contribution. You can read more about that and I am sure you will find success in social network marketing as well.

Facebook Page to Tweet

As Facebook just acquired FriendFeed last week and I thought Facebook would start launching offensive campaign to fight with Twitter. However, I am suprised to hear today that Facebook announced today that it will allow Facebook Page owners to syndicate their updates from Facebook to Twitter.

Why Facebook Do That?

I have been scratching my head to think why Facebook will endorse or allow syndication with Twitter. I looked at the Facebook blog page and there I found out something.

Simple Reason : There is a DEMAND

Facebook blog stated that many people have asked them to make Facebook and Twitter work better together. If Facebook simply allow syndication to Twitter, this might resulted in a loss of attention on Facebook and give Twitter a big advantage. If you look closely again, Facebook is now making use of this demand to turn it around to give Facebook a bigger advantage instead.

If you look at the following image that I found on Facebook blog. You can now see a small footnote appearing below the tweet, showing that this tweet was sent via Facebook. That allow Facebook to penetrate into the Twitter community and that helps Facebook instead.

Facebook Page to Twitter - See Facebook footnote!!!

Facebook Allow Page To Sync Only

You can also see another limitation that Facebook is imposing on this strategy. Facebook allow tweet on Facebook Page only, but not allow tweet on Facebook profile.My rational is that Facebook page is always opened to public.

If the page owner has a tweet that link back to Facebook page. As facebook page is opened to public, all incoming traffic can definitely see the content and that helps to improve the user experience and that can motivate the incoming traffic to sign up for facebook.

On the other hand, when an incoming traffic comes to a facebook profile page, there is nothing to see there unless I sign up for facebook and obtain the friend request approval first. The user experience is stucked there, not as instant as Facebook page. Therefore, this type of experience is not helping Facebook at all.

This is just my 2 cents worth to analyse on the latest development between Facebook & Twitter.

Implication to eBusiness Owner

If you are running a online business or running a internet marketing campaign, you must now start to create a Facebook page and start to get ready to sync between Facebook & Twitter now. As this is still the most powerful combination in the social networking arena. All the best to you!

Facebook Acquired FriendFeed

If you do follow the latest internet industry news, I am sure you will have heard that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed. This came about after the facebook failed to strike a deal with twitter months ago.

Facebook paid $50 millions to buy friendfeed. This was about one-tenth of what it was willing to pay for twitter. There are some people believing that this is a smarter choice for facebook as friendfeed has the talents who are ex-google engineer. This will definitely be useful to help facebook pumping its search technology.

Facebook now has about 250 millions users, adding on the capability that friendfeed offers now. This will definitely stir up some revolution again in the social networking space.

What will be the impact? Well… we shall keep an close eye on it as it may offer some good business ideas as well.

Best Social Networking Sites

If you are doing online marketing or ebusiness, you must not ignore the power the social networking sites. Social networking has become one of the hottest online trend and behaviour people interact in the cyberspace. If you do social networking well, you will be able to leverage on it and bring you tremendous amount of traffic and profit to your ebusiness.

Facebook is Now the Big Brother in Social Networking World

There was once MySpace was the #1 social networking site. However, Facebook has finally overtaken the #1 position and become the #1 social networking site. I have been experimenting with Facebook and indeed it can help me to create lots of awareness and traffic to my site.

The best feature I like on Facebook is that it recorded down all your key activities on the platform and share your activity with your fellow friends. So, your friends will be informed on their newsfeed about your online activity. You can then leverage on this update to tell your friends about your website or your promotional event.

My Preferred Best Social Networking Sites

Facebook is definitely a must have if you like to expand your marketing campaign on the social networking sites. But Facebook is not the only one.

There are thousands and thousands of social networking sites out there, which one should you use? I have read some social networking report tell me to participate in 50-100 social networking sites. However, let’s face a practical fact, both you and me have only 24 hours a day, taking away our working time, sleeping time and some family time, we hardly have any more time to participate in 50-100 social networking sites.

Let’s be practical, I have been testing a few and I personally found the following are the best social networking sites:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Multiply
• Friendster
• Orkut (Lots of participants from India, but it is google powered, surely google will index it often and it can give you some edge on search engine optimization)

If you do come across any other good social networking sites that you like, leave a comment here and  I will be interested to know more.