Google Makes URL Shortener Available at Goo.gl

Google URL Shortener Provides Analytics

oogle has had its own URL shortener for some time. It just didn't make it available for general use. It was always attached to various Google products. That changes now, as Google has given it is own site at goo.gl. It's called simply, Google URL Shortener. 

"We don’t intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web," says Google software engineer Muthu Muthusrinivasan. 

"There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products."

 


Google says that since the service was first launched, they have invested in stability, security, and speed. 

As pictured above, the service keeps track of the URLs you shorten, providing both versions of the URL, when it was created, the number of clicks its gotten, and other analytics.


About the author:
 Chris Crum -  WebProNews

Facebook Reveals Interesting Info About People Who "Like" Content

Facebook posted a note sharing some insights into who are the biggest "likers" of content on Facebook, and how engaged they are compared to other Facebook users. 

"People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user," Facebook says. "The average 'liker' has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook -- they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user."

"As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, 'always on' audience, we’ve found that the average 'liker' on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the Newspaper Association of America," says Facebook.

Facebook's advice for reaching these people is to implement its various social plugins and publish interesting content to Facebook yourself. Meanwhile the company continues to partner with sites for deeper integration and instant personalization. They recently launched integrations with Rotten Tomatoes and Scribd. A partnership with Skype is expected.

The company announced this week that 2 million sites have added social plugins since they were launched five months ago. Of course, these days, it's hard for publishers to justify not having Facebook like or share buttons of some kind, particularly now that they're being directly integrated with Facebook search. 

Advertisers are really going to benefit from all of this liking too, as the more information Facebook users get in their profiles, the better ads can be targeted toward them. 

COO Sheryl Sandberg says they're not working on an ad network "right now", but you could imagine what it would be like if they did. They probably will eventually. It's just speculation, but why wouldn't they?

About the author:
BY Chris Crum -  WebProNews

Twitter Followers & Facebook Fans: Which Ones Are More Profitable?

If you wandered over to eMarketer last week, you probably noticed their post entitled “Are Twitter Followers Better Than Facebook Fans?” Fascinating stuff! Just by reading that post, you can find out which Social Network you should focus on, right? Wrong.

Fans VS Followers

In the article, eMarketer noted that Twitter followers were 37% more likely to make a purchase, compared to 27% of email subscribers and 17% of Facebook fans. It also included some helpful stats, which indicated Twitter followers were 33% more likely to recommend a brand they follow on Twitter while emails subscribers were only 24% likely to do so and 21% of Facebook fans were willing to recommend the companies they follow.

This may lead you to believe that, if you want sales and recommendations, you should focus on Twitter. I’d caution you to slow down and look at things objectively.

Analyzing the Numbers

We all know that different segments do things differently. With this study, we’re not 100% sure what industries were covered. We also need to keep in mind that Twitter and Facebook only cover a small segment of Internet users.

Twitter, for instance, has more than 105 million users, not all of these are human, used regularly, or are unique (many users have multiple accounts). Facebook has over 500 million users. Again, not all of them are used, human, or unique. The Internet has an estimated 1,966,514,816 users, which is only approximately 28.7% of the world’s population.

With statistics like these, it’s easy to put this information into perspective. Does it mean these two social platforms should be ignored? Absolutely not. It’s simply means you need to be cautious about your approach.

The Ultimate Solution

If you really want to find out what target audiences are more likely to do, ask them! Don’t just limit yourself to Facebook and Twitter either. There are thousands of social media sites out there. Remember, it isn’t just the number of users, but the quality of the connections and conversions that will make your business profitable.

Google Launches Analytics Dashboard

Google has launched the Google Analytics Status Dashboard, which lets users check on the current status of components in Google Analytics, such as Data Collection, Web Report, and the GData API.

This means you can check on whether data from sites are being collected by Google Analytics servers correctly, whether users can view the reports correctly when they sign in to their accounts, and whether the APIs are working properly. 

The dashboard is not unlike the Google Apps Dashboard.

"The Google Analytics Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will benefit all Google Analytics users, from Fortune 500 companies to personal websites," says Yi Wang of the Google Analytics product team. "The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for service availability of Google Analytics anywhere in the world."

Users can get updates via RSS if they choose.

By Chris Crum          -   WebProNews

Twitter To Release Free Analytics Tool This Year

People who use Twitter for business purposes should soon get access to a valuable flow of information.  A Twitter employee indicated this week that Twitter is going to release a real-time analytics dashboard sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

An important - and surprising - point: the product will be free.  Which is great news for business owners and marketers, if a little odd since this would be an easy way for Twitter to earn money.

Otherwise, Justin Kistner reported after speaking to business development specialist Ross Hoffman at the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit, "Like their releases of ads and the new UI, this will likely start as a beta release and have a phased roll out.  Because the conference was a sports marketing conference, Ross said it would be available to that audience, but presumably it will be available to all users."

Also, "The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more.  The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics."

This development could cause professionals to start spending a lot more time on Twitter, and maybe help the site gain additional fans.

Let's just hope Twitter is able to remain in working order if a lot more information starts flying around, considering that there have been 12 posts on the Twitter Status blog in the last month alone.

By Doug Caverly              , WebProNews.

Google Launches 2-Step Verification for Google Apps

Google has introduced a more secure sign-in capability for Google Apps accounts with two-step verification. The company says this "significantly increases the security of the cloud."
"Two-step verification is easy to set up, manage and use," says Google Apps Director of Security Eran Feigenbaum. "When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, something you know: a password, and something you have: a mobile phone. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. This makes it much more likely that you’re the only one accessing your data: even if someone has stolen your password, they'll need more than that to access your account. You can also indicate when you're using a computer you trust and don't want to be asked for a verification code from that machine in the future."

Admins for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can activate two-step verification from the English version of the Admin Control Panel now. Standard Edition users will get it in the coming months. Google says it will offer it to individual Google users in the coming months.

 

Google is also open sourcing its mobile authentication app, so companies can customize it.

 

 By Chris Crum

 

Twitter Intros Redesign, Expands Beyond 140 Characters

Twitter has introduced a new redesign of Twitter.com with a two-pane format aimed at providing a richer user experience, and you can easily tell by looking at it that it does just that. 

 

"Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little," writes CEO Evan Williams. "The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what's happening. Yet, we've learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn't always fit into 140 characters or less."

 

Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site. 

 

The first pane is essentially the single pane from today's Twitter - the timeline. In the second pane, referred to as the "details pane", users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page. 

The changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks as a preview. During this period, users will be able to switch back and forth between the new design and the old one, though frankly I can't see any advantage to using the old one. 

 

Redesigns typically get some amount of user backlash, and this will be probably fall in line with that tradition, but this particular redesign has some advantages. For one, many Twitter users are already using apps rather than Twitter.com anyway. Secondly, Twitter has left a lot of people wondering what the point of the service is. This has been a problem since it launched. This will help people understand its value more. 

 

Facebook And Twitter Driving Referral Traffic

Online video viewing grew across all media categories in the second quarter with unique viewers increasing on average 2.8 percent per month, and consumers watched 11 percent more videos-month-over-month compared to the first quarter, according to a new report from Brightcove and TubeMogul.

Video consumption on newspaper sites grew the most over this period, surging to 65 percent more views than the previous quarter due to the coverage focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Referral traffic for online video from Facebook and Twitter is growing faster than from traditional search engines. At current growth rates, Facebook will surpass Yahoo within the year to be the second only to Google for video referral traffic.

 While Facebook and Twitter are attracting more viewers, they are also leading to the highest levels of engagement for video on television network and music entertainment websites.

Consumers watched more minutes per view on official media websites versus online destinations with syndicated video content.

Other highlights from the report include:

*Nearly 60 percent of brand managers plan to invest more in online video in the next 12 months.

*More than 65 percent of brand managers indicate that the primary focus of their online video initiatives is awareness, followed by lead generation (21 percent) and e-commerce (12 percent).

*70 percent of respondents said they plan to add mobile video to their marketing mix in the next 12 months.

*Consumers who find marketing and e-commerce video via Facebook and Twitter have the longest viewing times (1:24 minutes and 1:18 minutes respectively), while traffic originating from Yahoo! search (0:52 minutes) and display ads (0:52 minutes) tied for shortest.
 
By Mike Sachoff

Measuring Social Media Effectiveness May Have Just Gotten Easier

Everyone knows that social media provides some great opportunities for marketing, but measurement issues continue to plague businesses. You know content is being shared, but you don't know how people who its being shared with are responding to it.

One of the metrics is its Audience Index, which lets publishers understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites (and soon against categories), find out what types of influencers your site attracts, and find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners, and engaged customers.

The other metric might be even more useful. That would be "Social Reach".

"We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics," ShareThis explains on the company blog. "Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook."

While Facebook may get more shares from ShareThis, email appears to be more effective, as people are more likely to click on an emailed link (31 percent out of the 34 percent, compared with 36 percent out of FB's 44 percent).

Either way, the metrics could prove to be very useful for publishers looking at optimizing their social media marketing strategies.