For those non-geeks out there, the Wolfram Alpha search engine does computation. Put in math problems or ask the GDP of France in a Google-esque search box.

Go check it out and watch it lay bare who your friends are, when you’re online most often, and what things you talk about most.

Type in “Facebook report”.

Click “Analyze My Facebook Data”. Click “Allow” when the app requests permission.

Enter your information when prompted.

Click “Analyze My Facebook Data Now”.

Allow some time to gather data.

At the top, it shows your basic information on a slightly deeper level.

Your posts are broken down by time period, amount, and type.

Then they are broken down into immense detail.

Statistics about your friends’ interactions with your posts are shown, as well as what your top posts are.

Detailed check-in and app activity are also displayed.

You even get a time breakdown based on what you use to access Facebook.

Information on photos and tagging are all displayed.

Your friends are displayed by their gender, relationship status, age, location, and more.

You also see a visual interpretation of your network, color-coated based on occupation, school, local area, etc.

Original at What Facebook knows about you– a free tool by Wolfram Alpha BlitzLocal

The problem with many of those who complain is that they really have no clear idea what the term “ethical SEO practices” mean or what they constitute. This is particularly true of small businesses; this is why many people think they’re being unfairly targeted by Google’s updates—they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Take the case of an online business that has derived its ranking from the start by using tactics such as article spinning, using inbound links from networks, and buying links: for years the business owner may have used these tactics without realizing that they go against the primary mission of Google, which is to provide its users with only the most relevant search results. One of the reasons for the business owner’s failure to realize this fact is that his online business may have been doing quite well until the Penguin update. Also many businesses underestimate the importance of hiring a white hat SEO company to handle their accounts properly and in the end they got what they paid for.

The fact that you continued to enjoy good rankings, good traffic, and good sales even after the Panda update was launched doesn’t necessarily mean you can just relax and expect to be saved from the Penguin update as well. After all, the very reason why these updates are launched in the first place is for Google to be able to provide their users with the best answers to their queries. Imagine yourself being the one searching for something on the Internet. You wouldn’t want to do a Google search only to be victimized by the manipulative use of SEO services, would you? The best way for site owners to ensure good rankings regardless of what updates Google comes up with, therefore, is to make sure they follow only ethical SEO practices.

The problem lies in the fact that not all webmasters are SEO professionals. This means your webmaster may not really know how much is too much where search engine optimization is concerned. Even if you read Google’s updates and guidelines, they still wouldn’t do you much good if you don’t know the basic rules in the first place. That’ll be like cooking with a list of ingredients, but no cooking instructions. Making even the slightest mistake could ruin the entire recipe. To further aggravate the situation, search engine algorithms are so mercurial that what works today may not necessarily work three months from now. This is why it’s very important for you to keep up with the latest algorithm changes.

To make it easier for you to deal with the Google Penguin and any other further updates, here are three important things the Penguin should have taught you by now:

             1.       Diversity and balance are the key

The reason why Google’s Penguin update focuses on penalizing “spammy” sites is that Google wants to improve SERP quality for the benefit of searchers. If you want to get on top of search results pages, therefore, you either have to buy an AdWords spot there or come up with exceptionally good content for organic rankings. More importantly, you’ll have to forget about shady SEO tactics. Remember that saturating your title tags with keywords, using low-quality back links, and unnatural inter-links are the top targets of the Google Penguin. You should also learn how to mix up the types of content on your site. You can learn more about balancing your page look and feel with content, here.

In this image, the Biltmore website was able to achieve balance by distributing content evenly in blocks. Well chosen illustrations also added dimension to break the monotony of the site. – http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/biltmore.jpg

             2.       Strive to be as Pertinent as Possible to Your Audience

As long as you remain relevant to your target audience, you’ll always be safe from the pummeling these Google updates give errant sites. Take note that Google has recently introduced the Knowledge Graph, which is expected to hugely change the SEO game. Google is changing the way online search is processed; instead of depending heavily on keywords, search results are becoming more and more dependent on concepts that are relevant relative to each other. This means searches are moving away from its dependence on disjointed keywords. What this means for site owners is that the quality of their outbound and inbound links will now be measured according to their relevance and usefulness as well as the importance of the information in relation to the user’s query. This makes it even more important for you to develop connections and authority in your chosen niche. If you haven’t already started, then now is definitely the best time for you to start community building, particularly since community members are usually the best sources for natural links. Community building is also an excellent tool for customer retention.

             3.       Provide Useful Content

Since you now know that your main focus needs to shift from shady SEO tactics to building your credibility, your target audience’s trust, and your authority in your niche, then you need to understand that the best way to achieve this purpose is for you to keep things real. This might mean overhauling your entire site content. What’s important is for you to start focusing on creating better content, especially in on-page and guest posts. To put it simply, you have to keep your site content clean, clear, and useful.

There is a way for you to avoid getting pummeled by the Penguin and even if you’ve already been hurt, you can still bounce back. The secret is in taking a close look at your site to identify what could have gone wrong and then making the necessary adjustments.

Top Mistakes to Avoid After Google Penguin

If your website has been heavily affected by the Penguin update, you may want to go all out on SEO. However, due to the update, some of the old tried and tested optimization tactics may not work as well as before.

If you are still doing the same things you have been doing before, then there are chances that you may be making some grave SEO mistakes, which may even drive down your rankings even more.

1)      You Are Using the Same Anchor Text – Using the same anchor texts, like “click here” or “find out more” or “click the link” may not do well for your website rankings. However, using these kinds of keywords would make your anchor text profile look natural. Use your brand name in the anchor, as well as your domain name. The key here is to link as naturally as possible by using natural keywords, and avoiding being aggressive.

2)      Spun Content – In the past, the more content out there, which linked back to your site, the better it was for your rankings. However, eventually, article directories became breeding grounds for poorly written articles, which were posted just for the sake of links, and we saw plenty of spun content, which absolutely made no sense. Spun content that do not make any sense and are posted for the sake of placing links will definitely get you penalized by Google.

Spun content is very common but is not helpful for your SEO success at all.

3)       Over-Optimizing – Back in 2010 and 2011, over-optimizing was a very popular thing. People used keywords as many times as they could in a blog post or article. Today, however, over optimization does not give your site that boost and appeal to Google like it used to before. So, avoid forcing keywords in the first and last sentences when they look unnatural, and avoid unnecessarily underlining, italicizing, and bolding the keywords because these do not provide any added value to your site.

4)      Spam Blogs – Using spam blogs can also be bad for your rankings. Spam blogs are basically blogs with poorly written content. Most posts for spam blogs usually do not have any sense, typically contain a wide range of disconnected topics, and are posted only to put links in them. Real blogs that want to rank in search engines need to have a clear focus and should have excellent content that people will take time to read.

5)      Spam Commenting – Some people prowl popular niche blogs and post spam comments. However, this may not work at all. Spam comments include all comments which are placed to simply drop links and do not contribute to or provide any real value to the blog readers.

Some examples of blog spam comments. Image credit.

6)      Ranking Using Only Popular and Paid Blog Networks – Plenty of sites which were dropped by Google Penguin used popular blog networks. Instead of using paid blog networks, you may want to use article marketing instead since this continues to be a solid method for site ranking.

7)      Using Free Directories – Article directories used to be very popular a long time ago and they were the go-to places to find helpful information on the web. However, they became loaded with poor and uninformative content, which is why Google has forced them to take a backseat. Good directories categorize and classify effectively so people can find helpful information easily. However, there are free and poor directories which do not classify their content and also accept poorly written content. These will not help your site at all.

Aside from these mistakes, there is one thing that you should remember. Google dislikes spam. Keep this in mind regularly and remember that any practice that constitutes spamming or providing spam-like content to readers will definitely not be good in the eyes of search engines.

So, take at look at your current practices or the SEO services of your provider and determine if they are currently making any of these mistakes. If they are, then you should stop doing these and use more helpful and relevant SEO tactics instead.

Read Up and Keep Yourself Updated

The key to search engine success is to play by Google’s rules, which changes from time to time. So read up and update yourself about the newest Google updates because a good tactic today may be an SEO mistake tomorrow.

See you at the top!

Traian, the guest author of this article, is the Director of SEO and co-founder of Pitstop Media Inc, a Canadian company that provides top rated SEO services to businesses across North America. To invite the author to guest post on your blog too, please contact www.pitstopmedia.com.

Original at Mistakes and Lessons from the Google Penguin Update BlitzLocal

The Nationals have the least fans (230,581), which is somewhat surprising, considering they have the fourth best record (58.5%) and a relatively big population (601,723, compared to say, St. Louis’ population of 319,294).

There is no significant difference in the frequency or quality of the posts made by the Yankees and the Nationals.

Original at Comparing Social Metrics to Real-World Data with Major League Baseball BlitzLocal

• Chase: 3,364,793 fans, Capital One: 2,556,273 fans, American Express: 2,470,220 fans
• These three banks account for about 85% of the market share

Since engagement percent is calculated with fan count in the denominator, smaller pages tend to have higher engagement.

• YOUR Community Credit Union with 39.01%, while TDECU has 23.89%
• Banks hold the top seven spots for highest Share of Voice (% of interactions across the industry).
• Citi has 22.41% SOV, BOA has 16.8% SOV although it should be noted that BOA suffers from more negative sentiment than most other banks.  Wells Fargo is at 15.92% after that there is a steep decline; American Express has 8.33% SOV.  

Which is better: Fan count or engagement?

• Catch 22. We want to raise both!
• Use sponsored stories to:
• Page Like Story: Build fan base
• Page Post Ad: Push good content to friends of fans.

Content:

Most of these banks heavily rely on pictures and questions that encourage users to respond.  Both banks and credit unions try to show that they support their local communities by giving away scholarships or sponsoring some charitable events or functions.

The biggest difference between banks and credit unions is the more socially successful credit unions generally offer far more incentives like giveaways and other promotional strategies that are then publicized on the wall for the whole community to see.  Trips to Hawaii, $1,000 giveaways every day, etc, can be very powerful tools to foster community online.

Customer Relationship Management:

Complaints, even in financial institutions that are thriving in social media, are commonplace throughout the industry.

The faster a customer service representative responds to complaints, the better.

• YOUR credit union has an average response time of 21.36 minutes
• Usually complaints are responded to in the first hour. Otherwise others tend to jump in and express their dissatisfaction as well.

Action:  

Credit unions need more fans and banks need more interactions.  The credit unions need to use ads in tandem with their giveaways to attract more fans and more account holders.  Banks should take a cue from credit unions and offer better incentives for participation.

Original at Banks and credit unions can learn from each other through social media BlitzLocal

Niche Modern recognized the chance to connect with fans and replicate their in person customer service skills by engaging fans on their wall and building a vibrant community of loyal supporters.  Of course it’s easy to engage with fans when they’re stroking your ego but what about customers who are disgruntled? Niche Modern responds by empathizing with them and then doing whatever they can to resolve the issue and then leaving the post on the wall.  This shows the community that they care about their customers experience and will do everything in their power to rectify any grievances.

How do you post engaging content? There is no magic bullet to produce engaging or viral content, if there was, everyone would be doing it.  That said here are some tips: pictures and videos generally work better than just words, ask questions that encourage your fans to respond, post exclusive offers and understand your fans with Facebook Insights.  With your posts be succinct, 100-250 characters is a good rule of thumb.  Post at least twice a week, creating a content calendar will help.If you’re just posting to your wall less than 16% of your fans are going to see the post but with page post ads that number can shoot to 70-80% of your fans and can be done on a shoestring budget.

Use ads to find fans.  Entice them by showing them value and targeting the people that are most likely to be interested instead of just blasting your message across Facebook to everybody.  A combination of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories as well as Page Post ads, to keep your current fans engaged, will be the most beneficial strategy for attracting fans and keeping them coming back.  The ads may find the people but it’s the social component that will clinch the like.

You don’t need to be some conglomerate or multinational corporation to excel at engagement marketing;  anybody can do it.  A vivacious Facebook community offers a variety of tangible benefits: people are 51% more likely to buy a product after liking them on Facebook, fans report visiting and purchasing an average of 2x more than non-fans, more in-store traffic can be generated with exclusive Facebook coupons, you will have a new feedback channel to poll customers, you will have increased participation in promotions. Ultimately engagement marketing boils down to four steps: build a Facebook page, connect to fans with ads, engage fans with quality content, and influence the friends of your fans.  Although the ROI may be difficult to quantify, if done correctly the end result will pay off in spades for a long time to come.

Original at How-to: Engagement Marketing on Facebook BlitzLocal

“Hey Dad, It’s drinking again. Sorry I missed your call. I’m around for a while (248) 996-7926. I will put my phone off of 51, so I’m here at this time. Thanks bye bye. 
Play message“

Original at Google Voice Translation Fail BlitzLocal

You can use this tool inside Facebook’s Graph API to find multiple pages for any business or brand! First, go to the Graph API inside the Facebook Developers page. Scroll down until you get to the ‘Searching’ section. You will see that Facebook supports search for many different objects. We’ll use pages to search for all Fuddruckers’ Facebook pages.

After clicking on the ‘Pages’ link, we are taken here. The search is defaulted to search for platform, and we can change where it says platform to Fuddruckers in the url so now it starts with:

https://graph.facebook.com/searchq=Fuddruckers&type=page&access_token=

To pull more than 25 search results, add:

&limit=200

The search will now pull 200 results with the name of each page, its category, and id number

We are interested in the id number because we add it to the end of www.facebook.com/ to bring us to their page

Select all, and copy to a new workbook in Excel, and run a simple ‘Sort’ on the data so we can isolate the user id for each Facebook page.

After the sort, you will end up with a list where all of the id numbers are together. Isolate these and paste them to a new workbook.

We will now use the find and replace feature to:

find: “id”:

replace with: www.facebook.com/

click replace all

Use the find and replace tool to clean up the rest of the apostrophes and spaces, replacing them with no characters. Your list of the top 200 Fuddruckers pages is now be ready to go!

Original at Graph Hacking BlitzLocal

Adele was mentioned over 3.8 million times on Twitter, and spiked at over 700,000 mentions at one given time. That tops any Actor/Actress Mentioned at the Academy Awards, with Brad Pitt being the most talked about actor (62,025 mentions) and Meryl Streep most talked about actress (38,202 mentions).

As you might expect, the Oscars generated the most buzz at the end with over 125,000 mentions per 5 minutes during the announcement of Best Actress (Meryl Streep), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin mentioned 64,000 times), and Best Picture (The Artist). Most mentions were directed at “The Artist” – the first silent film to win an Academy Award since 1929.

The Grammy awards generated the most attention during Adele’s performances, award speeches, and a performance by Rihanna that generated over 700,000 tweets. Comparing that to the Academy Awards, no single celebrity could match any of the Grammy traffic, even as Oscar traffic is still very timid.

Though the awards themselves may not have generated much talk during the show, the Academy may make up through the memes now spreading around the Internet. These moments include the Angelina Jolie Leg-bomb now being photo-shopped across the world into famous pictures, The Robert Downey Jr. Tebowing, and Sasha Baron Cohen dropping the supposed ashes of deposed dictator Kim Jong Il onto the unsuspecting Ryan Seacrest (326 Tweets).

Social TV sites such as GetGlue did help pull in the Oscar ratings creating an extra 60,000,000 impressions across Facebook and Twitter, but is unclear whether this helped or deterred conversations.

As an advertiser, one has to think hard about next year’s awards show season and where to start placing budgets. Crowd sentiment played a factor at The Grammy Music Awards, where Adele – the top mention and new Social Media favorite – had recently overcome vocal surgery. Many tweets were sent because of the inspiration they gave; unfortunately there were no such stars at this year’s Academy Awards. Best advice for advertisers; keep track of the stars rising and falling. If there is a star about to undergo major surgery or a big life changing event who also is up for an award, you can bet it will generate a huge amount of traffic when the award is announced. Also, look next year for the Oscars to be brought to online viewing, as this will also play a huge factor in viewership and interaction.

As Billy Crystal put it best, “There is nothing Americans enjoy more than watching millionaires giving each other Golden Statues.”

About the Author:
Andrew Corliss Facebook Analyst for Blitzlocal. Graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2011 specializing in Marketing and Analytics. He has worked on a variety of projects in advertising and brings his wealth of experience and knowledge to BlitzLocal.

Sources: http://z6mag.com/arts-entertainment/oscars-2012-social-media-guide-on-twitter-news-coverage-165870.html

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/02/oscars-2012-ranks-as-second-most-popular-event-in-social-media.html

http://www.socialmediadelivered.com/2012/02/23/and-the-oscar-goes-to-social-media/

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/27/tweetreach-reveals-twitters-oscar-buzz-over-2-million-tweets-with-a-spike-of-18718-in-one-minute/

Original at Oscars vs. Grammys: Twitter Traffic Analysis BlitzLocal

Original at Facebook Studio Awards Recognizes Gordmans’ App Success BlitzLocal

Original at How to best leverage Facebook BlitzLocal