Reblogged from bridge nine interactive:

There are more than 178 million blogs on the Internet, with over 7,000 new blogs created each day. These numbers make it difficult for any blog to stand out from the crowd.

We asked Derek Halpern, author of Socialtriggers.com, to share his expert advice on how to design and organize your blog for maximum results. Here’s what he had to say.

1. Differentiate your blog from your competitors’.

Halpern suggests researching your competitors’ blogs and sites to see what they are doing in …

“Drop your categories, archives, and search box” to start with. Good idea.

Check it out, Go to Crash Courses.

1. LISTS

Being included on lists gives us two clues. 1. Being included on thousands or more signals that you are visible. 2. The categories people use to classify you tells you something about the topics you have influence in: This is known as “topical influence” and it’s really what counts in influence.  Have you built your own list, and are you on other users lists?

2. RETWEETS

These tell you something about how willing people are to amplify your messages and help them spread. A retweet essentially says “this is something I want my network to see”. It’s Twitter’s version of viral loops.  Oh, and make sure you thank people for Retweeting (RT) your information.

3. @REPLIES

These signal how much others want to talk to you or intentionally tag you, and also serves as an indicator for how willing you are to engage and tag others. Less replies signals less social interactions and more broadcast.

4. FOLLOWER RATIO

Generally, if a user on Twitter follows a disproportionate amount of users than follow them, it signals their desire to accumulate followers. Not always, but often. A 50/50 ratio translates to someone following back anyone who follows them, which includes spammers. Twitter users who follow significantly less than are followed indicate some selection process.  Most seasoned users of Twitter will not follow you back if you have a very high FOLLOWING to FOLLOWER ratio.  For example, you follow 800 users while only 200 follow you back.  If you are a brand and are seeking followers to engage with and eventually buy your products, this is not something you want to do.  Influencers on Twitter will not follow you back until you bring your ration down, no matter who you are.  Go here to check your Twitter Follow to Follower ratio, and the meaning behind it.

5. TWEET VOLUME

This simply indicates how prolific a user is. Those with high volumes who retain high levels of engagement, list counts, retweets, and a healthy ratio are likely providing some type of value. High volume Twitter accounts with suspect ratios, low engagement, etc may have a high noise to signal ratio (you are spewing out information that people may not be interested in).

6. FAVORITES

Getting favorited frequently does mean something, though because Twitter users leverage Favorites so differently, it’s nearly impossible to discern exactly what, other than you triggered a behavior (the action to Favorite) for some reason.

7. QUALITY OF CONNECTIONS

The most important indicator is the quality and RELEVANCE of who follows you on Twitter and who you follow back. Targeting the right audience and earning their attention (and Trust) is ultimately the best (and softest metric).  If someone where to go through your list to see who you follow back, are they going to see quality, a mix of spam bots, people who stopped using Twitter months ago, or people without a picture of themselves or description of what they do?  It is up to you to prune your Following list and tend to it and engage your quality Followers with meaningful dialogue and information.

Follower counts (and ratios) are great indicators, but only one of several and one of the easiest to game.

So while 100 million users is an impressive milestone, the company admits that its active users are below this number. How much below, however, is unclear. According to comScore, LinkedIn saw 71.5 million unique visitors worldwide in February.

LinkedIn’s next closest competitor, French company Viadeo, opened up a US office in San Francisco, less than 40 miles away from LinkedIn’s headquarters. Little known Viadeo has more than 35 million members and is the market leader in Italy, Spain and, France. Viadeo became profitable in 2009 and is attempting to differentiate itself from LinkedIn by targeting business development as opposed to the job market, an now seems to be going after the US sector.

http://blog.linkedin.com/100million/ Today, LinkedIn reached a major milestone: 100 million professionals worldwide. We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second. So, what does all this growth really mean? We’re making great progress toward our ultimate goal: to connect all of the world’s professionals to make them more productive a … Read More

via artvationmedia

Google announced today plans to integrate posts from the people you are most connected to into its standard search results. Launched in 2009, Google’s “Social Search” has been slow to fully form. But this recent update brings its functionality up to speed.

Google has included Twitter posts into its results for some time, With this update, however, results will include content from Flickr, YouTube and even the increasingly-popular social Q&A start-up Quora.

Yes everything from your friends’ Tweets to blog posts to YouTube videos will now be “mixed throughout your results based on their relevance.” In addition, Google will now display “notes” next to search results for links that your friends have already shared, thereby bringing attention to your public post(s).

Obviously, this could create some privacy concerns, since not everyone wants EVERYONE they know to see everything they’ve posted publicly. Google addresses this by increasing users’ control of their Google profile settings, allowing people to connect or disconnect the accounts that will show up in your friends’ results.

It seems the only significant social content that won’t be integrated into Social Search is of the Facebook variety, because Facebook status updates and other posts on the site aren’t public.

Related articles

• Google Search Becomes More Social, Integrates Flickr, Twitter & Quora (mashable.com)
• An update to Google Social Search (googleblog.blogspot.com)

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• Changes to Facebook Pages (talkaboutlocal.org.uk)

In the spirit of blogging in 2011, here’s the standard obligatory blog post with predictions for the year: Brian Solis has predicted a bit of doom and gloom in the social media space for 2011. Many marketing departments poured money into the medium in 2010 without any real planning and even worse, no tangible goals were set to increase sales using social media. After all, “Failing to plan is planning to fail,” says Brian Solis. But perhaps these … Read More

via Trufflepig Search

According to a new report, Facebook has  received a massive $450 million from Goldman Sachs and $50 million from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies in a new round of funding. In September2010, Facebook was worth between $23 billion and $33 billion and in November it was worth $41 billion. The New York Times says that the deal sets the popular social network’s valuation at a whopping $50 billion. Facebook has raised over $800 million … Read More

via Avinash Joshi's Blog

1. Social media is a conversation. This is almost laughable, but the "conversation" buzzword is still in rampant use.  Social media is not a conversation.  It is conversational and, on occasion, a conversation will happen.  But most of the time social media is listening in aggregate to your fans and foll … Read More

via HighTalk