For brick and mortar businesses, obviously a large percentage of their conversions take place offline, despite an amplified online presence and rigorous online marketing tactics. As local search continues to sprout new innovations, one can only assume that the web will continue to drive offline purchases better and better. With some consumers going to their smartphones more than their PCs for online shopping research, businesses are seeing more mobile customers who may be more apt to swing by a physical location while they’re on the go.

KeyRelevance President Christine Churchill once wrote, “Measuring offline conversions and proving on paper that the online marketing triggered the offline conversion is difficult, because you can’t often directly measure the process from start to conversion.” Therein lies the problem. Out in San Diego at the Online Marketing Summit this week, WebProNews spoke with Salesforce’s Global Head of Search, Lauren Vaccarello about this subject.

Google and comScore once conducted a study, which showed that 63% of consumers who conduct product searches online buy the same items offline. It’s been a while, and that number may have changed by now, but what hasn’t changed is the fact that people are still finding products online and buying them offline.

At an SMX Advanced conference, she recommended in-store surveys to find out the ways people are arriving at their purchases. In addition, online coupons and offer codes can be tracked offline. At that same conference, Ryan Gibson of the Rimm-Kaufman Group suggested introducing “actions of value” on a site, such as allowing people to order a catalog or sign up for emails.  Specifically, ad-spend, return on ad spend return on investment, and cost per order/acquisition) are all things to consider tracking. Rich Devine, ZAAZ’s director of search also recommended assigning dollar values to things other than the main conversion.

When it comes down to it, without a way to track an offline sale, it’s going to be difficult to tell how effective your online marketing efforts are.

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There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains. They can also be great for data collection – it’s fine to ask the entrants for their email address and whether they’d be happy for you to send them emails again in the future.

Furthermore, there’s a potential for increasing brand awareness amongst people who’ve not heard of you before.

Running a Giveaway

In the simplest competition users visit the website to fill out their details, possibly answer a simple question, and then a winner is picked out of the hat.

Competition Prizes

If you have high margin products, these can make attractive prizes without harming your bottom line too much (e.g.: giving away tickets for your theatre doesn’t cost anything if the show isn’t sold out.) You should also consider ‘money can’t buy’ prizes: a trip to watch a rugby match is cool, but spending the day working for a national team and getting a signed jersey is priceless.

Look out for partnerships: when Distilled recently ran a whisky giveaway (to create buzz around the brand prior to the launch of our US office) we were sent messages by Jura whisky and Master of Malt (neither of whom we knew beforehand) offering some quite exceptional additional prizes.

There’s potential to improve any competition by approaching suitable partners first, to offer some co-publicity and links. (I once emailed some contacts to ask for contributions to a competition, and ended up with £300 worth of books, £120 of CDs and DVDs, £50 of gift vouchers, two magazine subscriptions, a £120 digital camera, a wild animal adoption, a bottle of port and a towel that folded up into a beachbag.)

Of course, the flip side of this is that you could simply look out for people in industries related to you that are running competitions, and offer an additional prize for their promotion, in return for links, etc. You can use Google to find such opportunities: search for terms like ‘win’ and ‘competition’ alongside phrases used in relevant niches (eg: ‘win album’ for music prizes) and then filter down to results from the last week / month. For example: this Google search.

Get Listed

The ‘comping‘ community is a great place to seed your competitions to begin. Certainly in the UK, a listing on a few active sites will often send the first 2 – 5,000 entrants – and I’m sure it’s not just us limeys that love a freebie. Search around for sites to submit your competition to, but regional sites you could consider include:

• Loquax.co.uk (UK)
• ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
• Compaholics (UK)
• CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)

Each site may have specific restrictions, and can have a delay between a few days and few weeks before submissions are published, so submit your competition as early as possible.

Seeding

Send competition details directly to twitter users & bloggers who you either know well, or think would be interested in covering it. Remember that people can be less inclined to share a competition if it’s good enough (to give themselves better chances of winning.) There are various creative solutions to this issue, but you can just keep it simple and appeal to the blogger’s love of sharing cool stuff with their readers.

Furthermore, look for opportunities to find partners who have email lists. Let’s take two companies with email marketing lists: BigHotel (a large, fictional hotel chain) whoc is running a competition, and GreenTour (a successful, fictional eco-tourism site) which is launching a new feature. They have similar audiences, but there’s no overlap between their products; BigHotel can mention the feature launch in their next newsletter and EcoTour can promote the competition to their subscribers. This just required finding a partner and making a gentleman’s agreement; as Bonytoad is fond of saying: “Win-Win, For Teh Win.”

Use Your Affiliates

Make sure that your affiliates can add their tracking codes to the entry URL, and they’ll help to spread awareness of the competition pretty quickly and to places you might not be able to reach to otherwise.

Create a video primer

The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.

Videos are particularly shareable: embed codes can be copied from the Youtube page, and lots of social sites (including Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit) allow for easy importing of videos. Given that people might be watching the video anywhere, make sure to prominently display the URL for the entry page in the video, either on-screen or using video annotations.

Get Press

Lots of magazines and newspapers are happy to mention competitions and link to them from their websites. Find publications that target the geographic area or niche targetted by the competition. Pick up the phone and give them a call – ask to speak to someone who deals with promotions, or in the editorial department. A few minutes later you might have a decent link and some coverage that will be read by a very targeted group of people.

Maintain Momentum

When people have entered, it’s a waste to just show them a ‘thanks for entering’ message. Use this opportunity to give a call to action – typically to share the competition with other people. Consider having a secondary prize that encourages people to share the competition. For example:

Upsell the Competition

Have a successful competition, and want to take advantage of this get more entries? Take the email addresses of everyone who entered so far, and send them a message during the week before the competition finishes.

I’ve not done this, but I think it could work really well to add an extra 10% to your number of entries. To be honest, I’m considering not mentioning it here, and saving it for myself for a while, but I want to see what CTR & results anyone who tries it gets. Let me know if you have a chance.

Other Competition Structures

Outside of the basic ‘name-out-of-a-hat’ competitions, there’s potential for all sorts of interesting competition structures.

Competitions to Encourage Engagement

Ooh.com run a competition with two $100 prizes each week. The winners are picked from the new ‘OOHs’ which have been uploaded, and encourages people to not only add their content, but to make sure it is as ‘rich’ as possible.

Sites with user generated content (such as a forum, social networking or social media site) could use similar techniques to reward particular contributions.

Twitter Competitions

A competition where the only entry requirement is to tweet a message including a link to a site / account / hashtag has very low barriers to entry for Twitter users. Once up and running, such competitions excel at keeping momentum – the more people hear about the competition, the more people enter – and help to improve brand awareness for companies and products.

The tactic’s been used by a variety of organisations; the most famous execution was probably the competitions run by Moonfruit. This did well, but the concept already feels a little bit passé – plus you have to have an awesome product and spring for $10,000 of prizes to have the same impact that Moonfruit enjoyed.

Consider modifying this viral ’self-fullfilling prophecy’ competition for other formats or networks; Umbro had people upload photos on Facebook – the Facebook ‘News Feed’ then showed entrants’ friends that they’d submitted an entry. If you’re looking to find similar success for your sites, Google Buzz is still new & cool… I’m just saying…

Procedural Points

A couple of miscellaneous points about operating a competition:

Conversion Rate Optimisation

If you’ve attracted people to the competition entry page, you should hope to see a very good conversion rate to completed entries. Try using some CRO techniques on the entry page, to maximise the number of entries received and the amount of useful data collected.

Avoid Cheats

Log the IP address along with each entry – you can then investigate any IP addresses which submit a lot of entries to identify people who are trying to cheat the system.

OK; I hope that this has been useful, or at least inspired you to go through the back of the cupboards, and see if you have anything interesting to give away. Using tactics like this can be an iterative process – it doesn’t need to go exactly right first time, and people will never get bored if you run a few competitions to improve your process. Good luck!

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Do you still need a website to be successful online? Share your thoughts.

First off, let me be perfectly clear in that I’m not advising anybody not to have a website. That said, there are a lot of ways to have a web presence without actually having a site, and let’s face it – maintaining a site (let alone a successful one) takes time, money, and resources.

According to data from Compete, Facebook has become a bigger traffic source than Google for some sites, and for many others, it is right up there with Google as a major traffic source. If it can drive the traffic, then that means the people are already at Facebook. You can be on Facebook without having your own website. Businesses can build a Facebook Page, complete with analytics provided by Facebook itself, and they can spend time making that page a good one. Here are some tips on how to do that. Facebook pages are perfectly capable of being found in search engines. In fact, they are often right on the first results page.

You know what else is often right on the first page? A set of local search results from Google Maps, courtesy of Google’s Universal Search integration. Within those results (which are very often right at the top of the SERP) are links to individual businesses’ “Place Pages”. From here, users can find coupons, reviews, store hours, etc. There is a very good chance users will find this before they find your site anyway.

Google is actually going to great lengths to get people using these Place Pages. They are even sending out stickers with barcodes for stores to hang on their windows. When a user scans this barcode with their mobile phone, they will be taken to the business’ Place Page. Social media profiles can also appear on these pages (although so can website links of course).

I probably don’t have to tell you that the web is rapidly becoming more mobile. Smartphone usage and mobile broadband subscriptions continue to accelerate, and people are using a variety of devices, operating systems, browsers, and apps. Making sure you have a site that looks right across all of these is no easy task. This is not so much of a worry when it comes to Facebook pages, Google Place Pages, and other third-party entities.

In many cases, it seems that small business sites are becoming harder to find through organic search. If you look you can find them, but users want convenience, and they are probably not going to look too hard if they can find what they are looking for on the first search results page (or right within Facebook where they’re already spending their time).

Social profiles show in up in search, and often early. The very nature of social media is viral. If one Facebook user becomes a fan of your Facebook page, that user’s friends are going to see it. Then, maybe a couple of them also become fans. Then maybe a couple of their friends become fans, and that trend can continue on and on. The more people who become fans, and the more exposure that page gets, the more chance that page has of acquiring links, which of course can lead to better search engine rankings, not to mention a larger presence on Facebook itself, where a large percentage of Internet users are already spending a great deal of their time. Your reputation and following within the social networks themselves may do your profile well in the eyes of Google too.

If you sell things online, there are obviously many different options out there without having to sell from your own site. In fact, even Facebook and e-commerce are on the road to becoming more and more closely attached. People can buy/sell physical goods through Facebook.

A great deal of focus has been placed on Facebook in this article for the simple fact that it is the world’s most popular social network. That could all change in time. But that doesn’t mean the points would not sill apply to other services. Google is going to be placing a lot of emphasis on Google Buzz this year, and it’s going to become integrated with more and more Google products. Currently, Google profiles are kind of the central place for a Buzz presence. Users can include any links they wish right into that profile (Facebook page, Twitter account, blog, eBay/Amazon listings, etc.)There’s no telling how big Buzz can be, and there’s always the possibility that something else will come along and take the world by storm. And that is one of the reasons…

Why it Still Pays to Have a Site

Can you be successful without a site? I think so. However, having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control. You don’t have to adhere to the policy guidelines of any third-party platform. If Facebook decides to shut its Pages down (as Yahoo did with GeoCities, for example), you still have your own site that they can’t touch. For that matter, having your own site certainly lends credibility to your brand.

Still, social networks continue to work on making data more freely able to flow among one another via a number of open standards like Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger. “The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle,” says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. “The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.”

Google itself, even has its own site dedicated to making user data for its various products exportable. That’s just Google, but the web in general appears to be moving more in this direction.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion. For now, I’m going to say having your own site is still in your best interest, but has a more social Internet with more portable data made a standalone site less critical? Is having a website going to be less important in the future? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. Comment here.

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According to comScore, Yahoo’s Winter Games coverage attracted 9.3 million unique visitors, more than NBC’s Olympics site (7.6 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors). Yahoo Sports attracted over 17.5 million unique visitors over the week, more than double the visitors to its nearest competitors.

Meanwhile, NCBOlympics.com on MSN has generated more than 177.4 million page views, 414 percent more than the nearest competitor, according to comScore. NBC says visitors to its Olympic site spent more time and viewed more pages than visitors to Yahoo’s Olympic site.

On average, visitors to NBCOlympics.com spent 8.2 minutes per visit, 64 percent more than the five minute average for Yahoo users; and visitors to NBCOlympics.com on MSN averaged 27.5 pages per visit, more than seven times the 3.8 average pages per visitor for Yahoo.

While NBCOlympics.com leads in pages views and time spent, and Yahoo Sports leads in unique visitors, there is little doubt that the Winter Olympics have been good for both properties.

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What kind of traffic do you get from MapQuest? Comment here.

MapQuest recently launched a new geosearch engine to power location search, and plans to do more with business listings before the year is over. Businesses should pay attention, as this is another place where users look for information about businesses related to specific places.

“Many of our users search for specific businesses or business categories in order to obtain maps and directions,” a spokesperson for MapQuest tells WebProNews. “In addition, many of our users search for types of businesses nearby another location. For example, if a user obtains a map of the hotel where they are staying for a meeting, the user may then search for restaurants nearby. MapQuest’s extensive database of business listings provides consumers with relevant business listings based upon the user’s search query.”

“MapQuest also provides consumers with the business name, address, phone, website as well as additional details such as hours of operation, user ratings and reviews, photos and more,” she continues. “As a result, businesses benefit from leads several different ways, including people driving to and visiting the physical location, making a phone call or visiting the website.”

MapQuest might not be the first thing businesses think of in terms of driving traffic, but it is an option that should perhaps not be ignored. According to the latest data from Compete, MapQuest.com gets nearly 40 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. By comparison, Bing only gets over 50 million according to the same data set.

Benefits of the new MapQuest search engine include more accurate, relevant results based upon the user’s query, according to the company. A feedback link is also provided, where users may submit comments and feedback related to their search experience.

“We also have nearly 1 million City Search listings that provide a wealth of information and has the ability to drive traffic to the business web site,” the spokesperon says. “Businesses can offer very helpful information including menus, coupons, and more on their CitySearch listing.  Businesses should contact CitySearch to become part of the information feed.”

MapQuest obtains business listing information from multiple data sources. Businesses may report business listing changes such as additions, edits and deletions. They can change phone and FAX, business name, location address, city, state, and ZIP code, contact information, primary line of business and web site information.

MapQuest has 16+ million “Points of Interest”, with the majority being businesses through its InfoUSA database.”At MapQuest, we’re consistently looking at ways to enhance our data for users,” she says. “We will be offering ways to work directly with us for a business listing later this year.”

The company would not get specific about what its plans are, but regardless of the rise in popularity of Maps from places like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, MapQuest is still worth recognizing, and may provide additional traffic.

Do you consider MapQuest an important part of your strategy? Let us know.

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1. You have an enjoyable, albeit unique, writing style. Lots of people write about things worth reading but much of what they write, or how the present it at least, makes it pretty forgettable. How much has your style helped you in acquiring and keeping visitors to your site, landing clients?

With the blog I just try to be myself and talk about what I think is interesting – and let’s face it local search, while often interesting, is not always interesting – so if I need to talk about doing keyword research for personal hygiene products to get my point across, so be it. It’s no different in how i interact with my clients. I think half the reason my business works is because maybe I know what I am doing and the other half is because I am totally myself with my clients/readers.

While I am serious about helping my clients succeed, I try not to be too serious about much else. I have a friend who ran a pretty cool web start-up. His wife was a phd focused on the palestinian situation in gaza. I remember her asking him when he was going to stop wasting his life and do something serious. That stuck with me. I used to think building companies was a meaningful way to spend your life, and I still do, but compared to trying to solve Middle East peace problems, SEO is not exactly ghandi-type work. So you better enjoy it.

2. In reading your Local Search Predictions for 2010, I found the point about Google not allowing “agency accounts” with respect to their Local Business Center pretty interesting. I imagine it would make it harder on small businesses, who likely don’t have time to manage their entire marketing campaign, to do the proper things within the LBC to make it work for them, thus make them less loyal to Google.

Do you think they will eventually implement that? They do that on the Adwords side and you can give agencies access to Analytics so what is with their reluctance with LBC? Do they want to engage the business directly and cut out the middle-person?

I really think they need to do this. First off, let’s face it, a huge number of businesses would rather have an agency deal with their LBC account. But agencies have to trick Google into getting control of their clients’ LBC accounts. It’s really just ridiculous.

Even worse is that there are so many businesses that have problems accessing their LBC accounts when they part ways with an agency. That’s a big problem. So it would make a lot of people’s lives much easier to have a system that solves these problems.

That said, Google’s POV on this is quite interesting. Googlers that work on LBC will tell you that the reason why many businesses would prefer an agency to manage their LBC account is not because these businesses have better things to do than figure out how to use the LBC, but rather because the LBC software design is not optimal. So if they come up with a better software design, then more businesses will use the service and there won’t be a need for agencies. I like the apollo-13/mcgyver-like thinking here, but i think that flies in the face of everything I’ve ever experienced with how SMB’s operate.

So I am optimistic that we’ll get some kind of agency user thing happening this year. But then again I thought health care reform would get passed in ‘09 so what do I know?

3. Some marketers entering the “local” scene have preconceived notions about local SEO/PPC not being worth the effort because “most small businesses are cheap, they don’t want to listen, and there is no search volume anyway”. How real are the concerns and was/is that something you’ve experienced?

A. There’s a ton of local search volume and Google, for one, has made big efforts to drive more web search traffic to local businesses (e.g. the 10 pack).

B. A lot of small businesses are definitely gun-shy about spending $ on SEO and search in general, but they are not stupid. The past year was a real watershed moment in terms of the number of SMB’s jumping on the SEO bandwagon. The number of companies selling these services has gone through the roof and there are plenty of success stories out there. So the questions from a lot of these SMB’s has gone from “wtf is SEO?” to “I know i need to figure this out. How can you help me?” While it’s still a tough pitch to get a lot of these smaller co’s to make the investment, all I can say is that there are plenty who are willing to step up and these are the ones who get great results and then help bring their peers into the market.

4. You mentioned a lot of small business can be gun-shy from an investment standpoint. Is getting a commitment on the dollar amount you need to make the campaign work the biggest hurdle in dealing with local SEO clients? If not, what is?

In my experience it’s not very hard to get money out of the clients who understand the value of SEO, or at least those who understand that they need to understand the value. If they don’t get it, then they are probably not worth pursuing. In my experience, the biggest challenge with these guys, big or small, is getting them to work on their sites to make sure that they are set up to convert. I am constantly surprised at businesses that know how to put together a TV or print ad that is designed to drive people into the store but don’t bother to apply the same rigor to setting up their web pages. This is a big reason why so many of us in the SMB marketing world use pages other than the client’s website to drive leads.

5. There are lots of places to advertise a site outside of search from a local marketing standpoint. what is your opinion on twitter, Facebook, and/or MySpace for local companies? The buzz seems to be Facebook is great for local businesses and local events, Twitter can be hit or miss, and MySpace is ehhhh.

The consensus in my little corner of the search marketing world is that Facebook is the place to be these days. Lot’s of cheap, highly qualified, easy-to-target traffic. I have found Twitter to be an interesting source of traffic, but you have to be pretty creative about it. You need to be a lot more socially engaged in Twitter to get a lot out of it. I think Twitter and Facebook are going to get a lot more locally-oriented over the next year so it should be fun to watch. Nothing against MySpace, but it’s not really a factor in my work.

6. Have you experienced any discernible difference between using the free listings vs paid listings/premium services on some of the big IYP’s you mentioned in your Top IYP’s for SEO 2009 post like Citysearch, Yelp, etc?

one of the biggest opportunities for local businesses is to understand how to optimize not just for Google, yahoo & Bing, but also for the big IYP’s the traffic that comes from these sites is uber-qualified and most of the time businesses that are advertising on these sites usually just set it and forget it. if you learn how to optimize your ad on say yellowpages.com, you can probably get just as much if not more business than from a well placed Google maps listing. for some of these sites there’s no discernible benefit to having a paid v. free listing, but for a few of the biggies, the paid listings allow you to manipulate your listing so that you can better optimize for the site’s internal search as well as for Google

7. What is the best way you find for targeting local keywords, since keyword tools aren’t so good at it? Checking the popular variations of broader terms and tacking on local modifiers or just jumping right into Adwords upfront when you take on a client?

Adwords is really the best way to test if there is traffic for a locally modified keyword, but of course most SMB’s would rather not spend the $ to figure that out. Most RBB’s (Really Big Businesses) won’t spend the bucks to figure this out either so why should the little guys be any different? That said, I have done enough of these projects for both big and small local search clients that I have a pretty good handle on what the queries are like for the big categories. And once you have done one in a market, the variation from market to market is usually not too big so you can kind of cookie cutter it a bit for those clients in new markets that don’t want to invest the time/money to test. This will likely cover 90% of the good queries.

—

Thanks a bunch Andrew, great stuff as usual. To read more about Andrew and get more great local SEO tips and techniques please visit and subscribe to his blog over at LocalSeoGuide.Com

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“December proved to be a strong month for the retail category with Tuesday, Dec. 15 ranking as the heaviest online spending day of the year – and of all time – at $913 million,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.

“Holiday seasonality also fueled visitation to Shipping sites, which continually see their highest volume of traffic during the month of December.”

Not surprisingly, retails sites climbed in December as Americans search the Internet for holiday deals. The top gaining retail categories were jewelry/luxury goods/accessories, sports/outdoor, and flower/gifts /greeting sites, each growing more than 20 percent compared to November.

Jewelry/luxury goods/accessories sites attracted nearly 23 million visitors during the month, representing a 30 percent increase from November. eBags led the category with 2.9 million visitors (up 28 %), followed by Coach.com with 2.2 million visitors (up 26 percent), Zale Corporation with 2.1 million (up 48 %) and Kay Jewelers with 1.7 million (up 69 %).

Sports/outdoor sites grew to nearly 39 million visitors during the month, a 25 percent increase compared to November, led by eBay Sports with 5.1 million visitors (up 21%), trailed closely by Cabelas with 5 million visitors (up 26%). Dicks Sporting Goods followed with 4.6 million visitors (up 39%) and Sports Authority with 2.9 million visitors (up 29%).

Flowers/gifts/greetings sites saw a 23-percent gain, reaching nearly 39.8 million unique visitors in December. American Greetings led the category with 13.6 million visitors (up 18 %), followed by Gifts.com with 6.8 million (up 49 %), Hallmark with 5.6 million (up 46 %) and 1-800-Flowers.com with 2.9 million (up 48 %).

Traffic to shipping sites spiked in December as Americans rushed to ensure delivery of their gift purchases in time for the holidays. The category attracted 36.6 million visitors during the month, representing a 33-percent increase in traffic. UPS sites led the category with 19.7 million visitors (up 51 %), followed by USPS.com with 15.9 million (up 40 %) and FedEx with 12.6 million (up 36 %).

The e-card category grew 29 percent to 31.7 million visitors. The most visited site was Evite with nearly 8 million visitors (up 16%), followed by AG Interactive with 6.7 million (up 46%), MyFunCards with 5.7 million, and 123Greetings with 4.3 million (up 55%).

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The latest Twitter-like feature to come to Facebook is the “share” button, which is pretty much Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s “retweet.” The feature was rolled out over the weekend, and appears as a text link on posts in your news feed that stem from links (”share” is currently not an option for regular status updates, photo uploads, etc.).

Just click “share” and you are presented with a pop-up window that allows you to share the link, and says “Via username” (although you can remove this):

Just like that, you have passed the link on to your own friends, which may or may not include a variety of people who aren’t friends of the original poster. This in effect makes Facebook an even more valuable tool for content publishers. It will help content go viral, spreading through new audienceses.

For some pros and cons of retweets, read this article. You can now apply some of these to Facebook’s share feature, because it works about the same (without the 140-character limit).

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Mobile Commerce Daily is the entity that awarded eBay this title, and Giselle Tsirulnik, its senior editor, supplied quite a number of reasons for the judgment in an article today.  For starters, eBay’s sales were impressive, with about 1.5 million items changing hands thanks to mobile transactions during the holiday season.

Then there was a nifty promotion using a Mobile Boutique to consider, the success of the eBay iPhone application, and the introduction of the separate Deals application.  Plus, as Tsirulnik wrote, “EBay-owned online ticket marketplace StubHub went mobile in 2009,” and PayPal took a lot of steps forward, too.

All of which appears to put eBay in an admirable position moving forward, since the growing popularity of iPhones and Android devices is sure to have people buying more stuff online in the future.

Of course, there are other factors to consider when thinking about a company’s success or failure, and eBay critics will be pleased to hear that it’s not having a good day on the stock market.  Despite getting the Mobile Retailer of the Year award, eBay shares are down 2.43 percent right now.

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Do you see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign? Share your thoughts here.

Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for “Obama,” to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the “signal in the noise,” he says. Such a “signal” might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention “Cambridge police” or “Harry Reid” near mentions of “Obama.” By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on  real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.

Is ranking in Google’s real-time search important to your strategy? Discuss here.

Related posts:

1. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
2. How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter
3. Bill Gates Surpasses 100,000 Twitter Followers in 8 Hours