Three Ways to Leverage Facebook’s Graph Search

Facebook’s Graph Search will change the search marketing game.

Search results are increasingly about connections. They are heavily reliant on consumers to share their experiences with various businesses within their networks. Without user data, Graph Search becomes virtually useless. Other search engines will not have the opportunity to evolve using a similar path.

Graph Search’s influence will be felt far beyond the relatively insular walls of Facebook. It has the potential to alter the future of search marketing and SEO — for better or worse.

Evolution of Facebook Advertising

Although Graph Search is still in beta, marketers have been able to leverage Facebook for paid advertising for nearly seven years. Facebook ran its first banner advertisement in August 2006 through a partnership with JP Morgan Chase to promote the Chase credit card. Seeing the potential for future revenue growth from advertising based on the success of this program, Facebook wasted no time rolling out similar promotions for other advertisers. Less than a month after the launch of the Chase banner campaign, Facebook partnered with Microsoft to run banner ads through the adCenter display network.

Since the early days of Facebook advertising, there have been countless advertising options launched within Facebook. Some have been beneficial to advertisers; othersdownright embarrassing to Facebook due to privacy concerns. There have been several common themes, however, as advertising has evolved on Facebook. Ads on Facebook have become more interactive and dependent on the audience’s (and brand’s) connections. In sticking with the trends, these connections make up the backbone of Graph Search.

Nuts and Bolts of Graph Search

Graph Search takes an object-oriented approach to search as opposed to keyword oriented as is the case with its current search engine, which is known as PPS. The Facebook graph is the collection of entities and their relationships on Facebook. The entities are referred to as nodes, and the relationships are known as edges. Nodes include entities such as pages, places, events and applications, while edges are the methods of interacting with those nodes, such as liking, commenting, tagging and checking-in. Graph Search aims to identify nodes relevant to a user’s search based on connections they have to the nodes and any constraints they put on the edges (i.e., nodes liked by friends).

Leveraging Graph Search

Because Graph Search currently only returns nodes in its search results it’s important for brands to have assets in as many relevant nodes as possible. Since page nodes are relevant to virtually any business, this is the most basic node in which to have an asset. Depending on the type of business, other nodes may also be relevant. For example, if a brand has physical locations, each location should have a place node. Graph search returns results from a variety of nodes for the same search, so the more nodes a brand has, the more real estate they can potentially own within the search results.

Promotion of a brand’s Facebook assets is also more important than ever. Graph Search places priority on nodes that are in some way connected to the searcher, whether it be directly (the searcher likes the node) or indirectly (the searcher has friends that like the node). The more users that engage with a brand’s assets, the larger the audience will be that can potentially see the brand returned in Graph Search results.

Actionable Insights

Here are three things marketers can do right now to tap into the benefits of Graph Search:

• Optimize the brand’s presence in Yelp, Foursquare and Trip Advisor while encouraging customers to share their positive experiences through reviews. Facebook will often display a star rating for local businesses (up to five stars), aggregated from business review data of those sites in Graph Search results. Having a positive star rating can be very compelling for attracting clicks on the business’s Graph Search listing.
• Incentivize customers to interact with the brand on Facebook. The more connections a brand has the more likely they are to show up in Graph Search results. Give customers an offer, such as a discount on a product or service, in exchange for liking the brand’s Facebook page. Other incentives can come through contests, such as offering a prize for people who post pictures to the brand’s page or other interactions with the brand (i.e., checking in, tagging, etc.)
• Promote Facebook assets. Build the brand’s following by placing a Facebook badge linking to the brand’s Facebook page in a prominent location on its website. Advertise the Facebook page in other marketing channels, both on- and offline, including email, direct mail, newsletters, etc.

What’s Next

Although Graph Search is only available to a small percentage of Facebook users, there are already plans to enhance the capabilities. Logic will be more deeply incorporated within Graph Search, specifically the “and” operator. This will allow users to place multiple constraints on the nodes that will be returned for a search. For example, users will be able to search for an entity that is liked by their friends and within a certain geographic area. This will help users drill down to exactly they are looking for.

Since Graph Search currently only returns nodes (i.e., people, places, photos, etc.) as search results, marketers need to develop multiple nodes for their brands on Facebook. As Graph Search evolves, however, there will be more to the results than just nodes. Things like posts and open graph actions will also be included in Graph Search results. Brands need to begin adjusting their online and search marketing strategies now to prepare for the coming benefits of Facebook Graph Search opportunities.

Web: www.sunmoonsolutions.in | Email: sunmoonsolutions@gmail.com | Skype: sunmoonsolutions 

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18 Killer Ways to Make Your e-Commerce Website SEO Friendly

It’s time to adopt something exceptional and dynamic for e-Commerce owners, especially if they are looking to make their e-Commerce business on the top of the search engine. Running a successful e-Commerce business in this competitive market is not as easy as it sounds; owners need to spend their precious time on researching perfect solutions that make their e-Commerce site successful. With such high completion in the market, it becomes pivotal for business owners to make their e-Commerce websites SEO friendly so that they always stay ahead on the web.

However, owners would find a spectrum of solutions to adopt, but it is essential for them to adopt such solutions that work well for their e-Commerce site. When it comes to make your e-Commerce website highly interactive and flexible, you should look for some SEO friendly features to make your e-store successful. No matter whether you are running a small online store or a complete shopping mall, you need to consider the SEO friendly features that I have listed below.

Choose Brand Domain Name:

When it’s time to choose a domain name for your site, you should choose a brand domain name so that your customers can easily find you on the web. Many owners select keyword based domains, which are not as effective as you think. They need to select a brand domain name, because their decision affects their search engine ranking. It used to be that keyword based domain names quickly got ranking in the popular search engines, but after Google’s EMD updates, it’s simply not viable anymore.

In the above picture, you can see the brand domain name: caredom.in. This is more effective than BuyPetsProducts.com (see in the below image).

Domain Hosting:

Domain hosting is also an essential point when it comes to develop an SEO friendly e-commerce site, as you need to make sure that your domain does not expire in small time period. Such types of domains are not considered as very trustworthy. Opt for long-term based domain hosting. Getting a targeted domain extension is a great idea. For example, if you want to target your website in UK, then you should use the co.uk extension.

SEO-friendly URLs:

It is important for e-Commerce owners to have an e-Commerce site that supports stagnant and keyword-rich URLs, as it affects their website’s search engine results. Those URLs can be modified for better SEO and brand identification.

In the picture above, you can see that ebay has SEO-friendly URLs, whereas in the below picture, Amazon does not. These types of URLs are not permanent URLs. They’re also hardly crowded by search engines.

301 Redirects:

It is highly important for you to make your e-Commerce site 301 redirects; however, there are many e-Commerce websites that are changing and deleting their pages. 301 redirects allow you to redirect your customers to new page. In short, we can say that 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to the other. This will ensure that you will not lose link juice and visitors from deleted pages.

Canonicalization:

Canonicalization refers to those web pages that can be easily loaded from multiple URLs without creating a duplicate content error. It is a common problem, especially when multiple pages have the same content, but different URLs. This is what Google considers as duplicate content.

Canonicalization accurately indexes and rank content which can be easily viewed with the help of different URLs.

Here are some examples:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/

http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.html

http:/yourwebsite.com/

http://yourwebsite.com/index.html

With the help of <link rel=”canonical” href=”" />, you can easily tell Google which URL is your chief URL. Through this concept, you can easily shun duplicate content issues and get link juice to your main URL. It is important that your e-Commerce site makes use of canonicalization, especially if any of your pages have same content.

SiteMap.xml

SiteMap.xml plays a very significant role in making your website crawlable. It is the complete list of pages on your site. It is one of the easiest ways to give search engines information about pages of your site. Mainly, there are two types of sitemaps, such as sitemap.xml and sitemap.html.

Sitemap.xml is for search engines, while sitemap.html is for users to get information about your site’s pages. Through sitemap.xml, you can help Google and other search engines to read, crawl and index your website easily without any obstacles. It is also helpful for you to crawl your new pages instantly.

Robots.txt

Through robots.txt, you can easily specify the URLs and directories of your website that you do not want that robots to crawl. Use this tag to keep some important and sensitive information private.

Here’s an example:

Make sure you use this tag to keep your customers’ personal information private.

W3c Validation

W3c validator is one such validator that checks the markup validity of website pages and shows you all the errors your website has. By clearing the mistakes and errors, it will be easy for search engines to crawl you site.

Google Webmaster Tools authentication:

By using Google Webmaster tools, you will get a code to confirm your website with Google. These tools help you to find errors and malware in your site and help you solve these errors. Google lets us use this service for free.

Here’s an example:

This tool allows you to get a complete idea about the errors, indexed status, and search queries you have.

Site Speed

Site speed means how much time your website is taking to open. It is highly important for you that your website has very high speed. as it is a must that your site can be quickly and easily accessed by your customers. Websites that are taking too much time to open will affect your visitors’ experience.

Site speed affects everything like visitors, visitors’ experience, duration of time spent on your site, ranking, and etc. You can easily increase speed of your site by avoiding lots of images, JavaScript, frame, flash file, irrelevant links, and etc.

Meta Tags (Title and Description) attractive and example from image…

Meta Tags are an important part of your website that provides information to the search engines about your site. Through these Tags, e-Commerce owners can easily provide complete information to their clients about their products. E-Commerce owners can add Meta Tags to the <head> section of their HTML page and make it easy for search engines to understand their site. It’s important to make attractive meta tags and titles that grab the attention of their users.

In this above picture, you can see that I have searched for “buy clothes” and Myntra.com has an attractive Meta tag. ‘Buy clothes’ is in the title and can easily grab the attention of potential customers.

Heading Tag (H1, H2, H3 etc)

Headings tags are highly important for your website as these H tags are used to give the page structure of what the page is about. Through heading tags in your website, it becomes easy for search engine, as well as for your visitors, to know that what the page is about.

By using such headings on your page, your visitors and search engine will understand the pages of your site in a better manner. This will help to boost your ranking in the SERPs.

Image Alt Tag

We all are using different images in our website, so it is pivotal for us to include an ALT tag within the IMG tag so that the image provides a clear text alternative of the picture for screen reader users. It is also important to show search engine that what this image is about. If you do not use Image Alt Tag, it will be difficult for search engines to understand your images.

Product Page & Content Optimization:

Content plays a very significant role. Search engines are considering your site’s relevancy and importance based on both Meta tags as well as content. There are various points that you need to consider in order to optimize your content and pages efficiently:

• Price: To greatly optimize the page of your e-Commerce site, make sure to mention price on the product page so that your customers can easily get price information.
• Content: To optimize the product page as well as content of your site, provide accurate and perfect content on your site and product page. (Like details, product reviews and overview about the product.)
• Related Products: Providing related products on the product page is a great idea for you as your customers can look at your other products. Who knows, they may like them and decide purchase.
• Bold Keywords: Bolding keywords is extremely important as it shows search engines that particular keywords are more important for you.
• LSI: LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and it determines the words, sentences and phrases that are related in the content of a document. Search engines are using LSI as search analysis. Here’s an example: if you are searching for the term badminton, search engines must decide which websites and documents are more relevant to your term and display them in the search results.

Search engine Friendly Navigation Structure:

To make your e-Commerce website SEO friendly, it is important that your site has a search-engine friendly navigation structure so that your customers will find it easy to navigate to different pages of your site. Navigation structure is highly important part of the search engine optimization process. If you have an easy navigation structure, search engines find it simple to index all your web pages. e-Commerce merchants should give importance to the logo, sitemap, avoid image links, exceptional site navigation and more.

Schema.org Markup:

Schema.org offers a complete set of schemas such as HTML tags and more that webmasters can easily use to markup their pages in ways that are recognized by major and popular search providers. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and more are relying on this mark up in order to enhance the display of search results. However, Schema.org makes it easy for search engines to recognize two different pages with same meaning.

As an example:

Through schema.org, websites can provide their customers huge information like rates, price information, product overview, author mark detail and more. Here in this above given image, you can see that ratings, price details and product information are given. This helps customers find the details of the products and other stuff before visiting that page.

Social Sharing Buttons:

For e-Commerce merchants, it is highly important to have social sharing buttons on their website so that their customers can share your product and services with their friends.

Make sure to have those social sharing buttons in a perfect place on your site so that your visitors and potential customers find it easy to share information with their friends and other people. Twitter’s Tweet buttons and Facebook’s like button have gained huge popularity in the market. Make use of social sharing buttons on your website to boost brand awareness.

Google Analytics to Track:

For monitoring and tracking your website’s effectiveness, Google Analytics can be a helpful tool that works exceptionally well. It doesn’t matter whether you have a big or a small business, Google Analytics is extremely useful, as it provides statistics on the number of visitors to your site. You can also get complete information about the number of visitors, information related to page views and more. The best thing about this tool is that it’s completely free of charge and works extremely well for small and big companies.

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Four Schools of SEO Success Thought

Having worked in the SEO industry for quite a few years now, I’ve heard myself uttering the same words over and over again: “SEO is a team game.” Clients of mine understand that SEO is truly something that requires effort on both sides, and potential clients hear it all the time.

Unlike many other industries, there are many different ways to define “success” in Search Engine Optimization. Below I’ve detailed four schools of SEO success thought. For fellow SEOs, it’s important to know which school of thought you belong to. For business owners, it’s important to understand how your SEO of choice defines success, and based on which school of thought you want them to fit into this should provide some guidance on how to find the right SEO agency.

Improved rankings

How it’s measured: Google is doing all that it can to prevent SEO agencies and website owners from tracking changes in their website rankings, in many cases even threatening to shut off their API to reporting packages who offer rank tracking tools. With that said, there remains several providers who continue to track rankings and changes in rankings (including SEMrush, Moz, and a whole host of desktop applications and browser add-ons). Quite simply, this metric tracks where your website is ranked for given search terms, and tracks the changes over time.

Why it’s great: Almost every client I’ve ever done SEO work for has been obsessed with Googling themselves to see where they show up. Improved rankings are great because they often lead to increased search traffic, and certainly lead to increased credibility and increased visibility in the search rankings.

Where it’s lacking: Do rankings really matter!? Judging “success” by an improvement in rankings seems strange to most SEOs because it’s easy to get things to rank when that’s all you focus on. To see why this approach is lacking, think about this: why do you care about improved rankings? Because you want more web traffic! Fifty #10 rankings can be more valuable to your bottom line than two #1 rankings depending on the keywords, consumer preference, conversion rates, and search volume. On top of that, hardly any keyword rank trackings are accurate as Google personalizes searches based on browsing history, location, and a wide range of other factors.

Questions to ask: If your SEO is bragging about your improved rankings, as the following questions:

1. How much is traffic changing for these keywords that had improved rankings?
2. Are we focused on broad or long-tail traffic?
3. What’s our next milestone? How much do you expect traffic to increase?

Increased organic search traffic

How it’s measured: For most SEOs, the ultimate goal is to see an increase in organic search traffic. This is measured directly by the number of visits obtained from organic search engine searches. It’s a simple metric to track through Google Analytics, and can easily be compared month over month.

Why it’s great: When a business hires an SEO, it’s because they want more people to their website! Success in this arena proves that that’s exactly what’s happening: more eyeballs on your website! It’s as simple as that. With increased traffic to your website, that gives you more chances to convert and sell to more customers.

Where it’s lacking: If an SEO points to an increase in organic search traffic as success, they may not be aligned with your true ultimate goal: more money. Oftentimes this is a watered down version of focusing on actual conversions (read: sales), so I’m always skeptical when an SEO considers their campaign successful simply because of increased traffic. On the other hand, there can be no increase in sales without an increase in traffic, so this is a great first step in the process, and is a great “initial win.”

Questions to ask: If your SEO is telling you about some wins in this area, try the following questions:

1. How are we working to convert these new visitors into conversions?
2. How do we know this increase in traffic is good, targeted traffic?
3. Where on the site are these new visitors going? What are they doing? How engaged are they?

Increased overall site traffic

How it’s measured: Site-wide traffic is the easiest metric to track and measure over time.Google Analytics provides top-notch tracking in this case, and is the single most important metric regarding whether or not the number of visitors to your website is increasing or decreasing. Shockingly, most people outside of the SEO world don’t know their sitewide traffic numbers, so if you’re unsure head over to your Google Analytics dashboard today!

Why it’s great: This is what marketing is all about! You hire an SEO so that you increase the number of eyeballs on your website, and this is the way to tell if that is working. Without visitors to your website you’ll never get conversions from your website, and no one will ever be learning more about your business, products, or services. Who doesn’t love website traffic?

Where it’s lacking: Unlike simply looking at an increase in organic search traffic, an overall increase in site traffic can show you that your traffic sources are diverse and flourishing. Even if your organic search traffic is lacking, by having strong direct traffic and referral traffic numbers you know you won’t be hit hard if your rankings ever drop. With that said, overall site traffic only indicates so much. More often than not quite a few of those direct visits are website owners themselves, and in many cases referral traffic from sources such as Facebook can be friends or family members who are just keeping in touch with what website owners are up to. So where it’s really lacking is that it doesn’t give a glimpse into the targeting and effectiveness of the traffic. Is it converting? That’s the really important thing!

Questions to ask: Try these on for size:

1. Where is the traffic coming from? Organic, paid advertising, direct, referring? What’s the strongest driver in the increase and why?
2. How engaged is the audience? How do the engagement numbers differ across traffic sources? How do organic visitors compare to the rest of the visitors?
3. Are there any plans to A/B test the pages since we’re seeing overall site traffic increases? What are we doing to increase conversions? How are we even tracking conversions? Where are the clicks going once the visitors land?

Increased conversions

How it’s measured: Hooray! We finally got to the final school of SEO success thought, and almost everyone will agree that this is the most important school of thought: and increase in conversions! All of the above metrics are great, but if a website’s traffic isn’t converting into more customers, sales, engaged readers, or whatever your goal is, then none of the above metrics matter. Conversions can be measured in a few ways:

1. People who submit a contact form
2. Orders and/or purchases
3. Email signups
4. Visitors who reach a certain page
5. Visitors who reach a certain level of engagement (five or more pageviews, five minutes or more on the site, etc.)
6. People who call

Why it’s great: We all have websites because we all have goals and/or business objectives. The ultimate goal with any investment in marketing is for increased conversions. This method of measuring success is great because it means more customers/clients and more money!

Where it’s lacking: The funny thing about pipelines is that seeing clients get to the end (the close!) is the best thing ever… until we begin to worry about how we’re going to continue to have potential customers fill in the beginning of the pipeline. While an increase in conversions is great, it’s imperative to think about who’s still funneling in and that a consistent stream of traffic is coming in. More importantly, it’s important to know that a strategy is in place to keep it coming!

Questions to ask: You’ll surely be happy with your results, and this is when asking questions are easiest:

1. What’s next?
2. What do we have to do to keep this going?
3. What new things are we trying?

There’s no one way to measure SEO success

Yes, all signs pointed to the fourth and final school of SEO success thought being the winner. In most cases, it is. But even then, an increase in conversions has several weaknesses and important questions to ask, so it’s imperative that website owners and business owners investing in SEO – or any form of marketing for that matter! – understand how their account manager is measuring success and ROI. On top of that, at all stages of the process it’s important to ask the right questions to make sure that you’re accomplishing your goals and building a sustainable strategy for the long-run.

Which school of SEO success thought have you found yourself stuck in? Where do you find most SEOs stuck? Comment below!

Web: www.sunmoonsolutions.in | Email: sunmoonsolutions@gmail.com | Skype: sunmoonsolutions 

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Top Alternatives to Google Reader Plus Other Discontinued Google Products

On July 1, Google Reader will join a long list of discontinued Google products and services, a list that includes social media services like Google Buzz and Google Wave, search tools like Sidewiki and Aardvark, and various other random ventures, like photo editor Picnik and Knol, a Wikipedia-style knowledge base.

Google Reader may not have experienced much growth over the years, but it was a popular product with a loyal fan base. Many of my colleagues in search marketing used the RSS reader to follow their favorite blogs and sites.

If you haven’t yet exported your Google Reader data using Google Takeout and found a replacement, now is the time! You won’t be able to access your feeds after this weekend, so stop what you’re doing and export your Reader data now.

As for alternative RSS readers, here are your best options once Google Reader shuts down for good.

Free Alternatives to Google Reader

Feedly – Feedly is probably the most popular alternative to Google Reader. They make it extremely easy to migrate your feeds over, with a one-click import, and the design is actually cleaner and more attractive than Google Reader.

Curata Reader – The cleanest reader, specifically designed for business users. Exceptional article searching and filtering capabilities.

AOL Reader – I personally wouldn’t be caught dead using an AOL product but for those of you who aren’t picky, I’ve heard their reader (still in beta) is simple and fast.

The Old Reader – The Old Reader was built to replicate, well, the old Reader, back when Google Reader had social sharing functions. If those features (like sharing and commenting) were important to you, you might like this replacement, though you’d have to convince all your old friends to use it too to get the same value.

Digg Reader – Digg has been developing an RSS reader that is so far invite-only, but should be more widely available soon. An Android app is on the way. You can read about the features here.

Paid Alternatives to Google Reader

Newsblur – At $24 a year, you may feel more comfortable paying for a reader that is less likely to shut down unexpectedly. It’s been around since 2009.

Feedbin – Feedbin also costs $2 a month. I haven’t heard from anyone who thinks it’s worth the cost, frankly.

Feed Wrangler – Another basic RSS reader, for $19 a year.

If you’re serious about RSS it’s worth trying out multiple products to see which is the best fit. All of these options offer similar functionality, so it’s mostly a matter of finding the reader whose aesthetic you like best.

Web: www.sunmoonsolutions.in | Email: sunmoonsolutions@gmail.com | Skype: sunmoonsolutions 

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The Perfect Social Media Marketing Suite

Harvard Business Review recently published an article on why Social Media Won’t Consolidate. Word around town is that the “participation web” (social media, blogging, and other markets in the Web 2.0 world) has peaked and that its best years are behind it. Take a look around the social web – Facebook is seemingly stalled, the blogosphere looks like its losing its luster, and new social networks are struggling to find traction.

Despite the growing consensus is that the future only holds industry maturity and decline, I think something different is taking place – a scenario is unfolding that is extremely frustrating yet holds enormous potential. In the midst of a decade of development involving hundreds of companies (some of them now among the most valuable in the world) and billions of dollars of investment, is one painful fact – the science of social engagement, which lies at the heart of this world, still hasn’t been solved.

I’m convinced that what appears to simply be a market that peaked is, in fact, more complicated. The participation web has not yet reached its climax. The good news is that it is only stalled as developers search for a better solution for developing, nurturing, and maintaining virtual relationships. The bad news is that a almost decade has passed with no sign that the players are any closer to a developing a solution.

Let’s take a closer look at sharing and publishing technologies. For years companies have inundated users with endless options to deepen their engagement while simultaneously sharing content. Yet this industry has yet to settle on a winner. Major players like Hootsuite and TweetDeck are plagued by a lack of customer loyalty as users continue to switch back and forth – the classic signal of a customer universe deeply disappointed with what it can buy. This also means that this corner of Web 2.0 has barely even gotten started. Sharing and publishing companies won’t really see this industry take off until they find that perfect balance and functionality in their offerings that finally capture and retain excited customers.

Consider now-famous companies like StumbleUpon and Reddit who try to foster engagement across social channels. These companies have targeted content suggestions but there are other, less celebrated companies doing the same type of work in publishing syndication, scheduling and measurement, and other applications. These companies raced across the social networking landscape in an effort to capture and convert as many users as possible to their services. And they have been hugely successful as many now have millions of regular users. One major reason for their success is that they really do deliver positive results, not just hype, to their advertisers.

Social media use continues to grow year after year, making this space extremely fertile and ripe for new ideas and businesses. In fact, between 2010 and 2012 the number of users that followed brands on social media jumped 106 percent while average budget spent on blogs and social media almost. In an analysis of more than sixty Facebook marketing campaigns, 49 percent reported a return on investment of more than five times, while 70 percent had a return on investment greater than three times. These impressive numbers prove that marketing through social media is not a fluke or a phase as it continues to get better every year.

Looking at these numbers, it’s evident that there is a need to find the perfect tool to help manage social media marketing. This tool would need to excel at promoting engagement on social media as well as enhance and amplify it. As of today, one such tool has yet to make an appearance.

Our own experiences at Viralheat have only confirmed this alternate view on the state of Web 2.0. In October 2011, we introduced a free plug-in extension to Google Chrome designed to give any user the power to analyze the sentiment of tweets, Twitter streams, Facebook news feeds, timelines, fan pages, posts and comments — directly from the browser. Within days of our announcing the extension, thousands of users had already downloaded the product.

Despite its success, this is not an indicator of a mature market, nor of one that has found the ultimate solution to its customers’ needs. The perfect engagement tool is still out there, tantalizing customer and supplier alike.

When will we find that tool? That’s the million – even billion – dollar question for companies targeting this marketplace. I wish I had an answer I could stand behind with certainty. But for now, I think that all we can say is that there are three likely scenarios:

1. The users will find it – Today’s social network users may not know exactly what they want, but they are already coming up with ideas. For example, users are increasingly interested in multiple account types – everything from Facebook Pages and accounts, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to Instagram, Pinterest and more. Geo-targeting on social platforms grows by the week, as individuals and especially brands want precise control over message delivery. Conversation analysis is starting to become a popular social media tactic as brands want to know which of their conversations are making the most progress for their organization, how to prioritize the ongoing conversations, and what phrasing works best for analysis later on. Somewhere in this competitive chaos may lurk that perfect tool for social engagement.

2. We’ll never find it – The “perfect engagement tool” may, in fact, never exist. Large enterprises have drastically different needs than small business owners or individual users. Agencies (marketing, PR, advertising, etc.) have yet another set of needs that are often the trickiest due to differing relationships and needs of each client. Brands themselves don’t often know what solution works for them until they try everything that doesn’t work, leaving them with an idea of what they truly need. All of this suggests that this industry may be too complex for a simple solution. More frustratingly, even if that simple solution is out there, the world of social media changes so constantly that even if we found it, it might still take years to implement.

3. Industry will find it – The odds may be long, but the potential reward of owning the engine of the social networking and blogging universes is so immense that it’s worth the financial risk for suppliers to pursue that perfect tool. Many companies now are already on the right track. For example, a growing number of companies are beginning to offer lightweight, free features that integrate across social channels and browsers for individuals, making them at ease with an engagement tool and more open to a single dashboard concept. For agency clients, some of these firms are also offering a la carte options that are locked and loaded to help meet tight deadlines. These options include reporting, analytics, monitoring, custom dashboards, and team management features that can be scaled up or down with changing client needs. Other companies are maximizing their reporting options – so that they can be downloaded via .xls and csv, or exported in nice-looking graphic layouts to help customers make quick and effective use of analytics whether it’s for a metrics spreadsheet or a board meeting. These efforts may not get us any closer to that perfect solution – but they do guarantee that if and when that solution is found it will be quickly adopted and applied.

So as someone who watches and measures this industry, which of the three scenarios do I think will play out? I refuse to believe it is #2 because I believe in the infinite power of human ingenuity. I don’t think #3 will find the solution either. Instead, I’m betting on the combined intellectual capital of those two billion social networkers and blogging fans out there.

In the end, I’m convinced they’ll not only find the answer and that industry will be ready with a new infrastructure that can apply it. And when that happens, we’ll instantly stop worrying if social networking is past its prime and instead will be searching for ways to keep up with this revitalized industry as it continues to accelerate.

Web: www.sunmoonsolutions.in | Email: sunmoonsolutions@gmail.com | Skype: sunmoonsolutions 

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