The Places You’ll Go – Google Places Uses Momentum To Grow

Do you use Google Places? Chances are, if you have ever looked up a business listing through Google, you’ve landed on Google Places. Also known as the Google Local Business Center, Google Places gives local business owners the opportunity to list address, phone, hours of operation and brief snippets about their business, as well as link to Google Maps.

Businesses can also show photos, respond to reviews and offer coupons, all for free. All that is required to get started is setting up a free Google account. For a flat fee of $25 per month, businesses can also participate in an advertising program called Google Tags that provides a way to call attention to the listing.

Google Places has more than 4 million local business using its service; Google sees more than 100 million visitors each month to Google Maps.

Enter Facebook Places. Facebook Places is a location-based platform that lets Facebook members check in from a local business and then tag friends to let them know where they are. Both services seek to connect local businesses with consumers.

So far, Google is all about the business, with no social connection; and Facebook is all about the user connection. As more businesses start to register with Facebook Places, expect to see advertising come into play. Google has strong momentum on its side, and analysts expect to see the search giant add social content before long. Social tools should create an interesting competition between Google and Facebook for small business ad share and consumer mindshare.

How to…Vyoo.it – Real Estate Listings Go Mobile

We all know how the iPhone and other mobile computing devices have changed the way we use the Internet. Did you know that Web (HTML) traffic visible through a browser is now only a quarter of all Internet traffic? That’s half of what it was ten years ago. The app rules, and we have the latest cool find in real estate apps.

If you’ve tried to read real estate listings on the Web with your mobile device, you know how hard it is to view on a small screen. Enter Vyoo.it, a new mobile marketing app that is designed to give you online listings via the mobile Web.

Your buyers are mobile. You want them to be able to get all the information they could possibly need on your property on the spot. The Vyoo.it app optimizes listing information, Web sites and virtual tours for a four inch screen. It can optimize any exiting listing and give it mobile ready landing page.

Vyoo.it also provides a short link and a QR code (a two-dimensional bar code) that you can post on Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with just a couple of clicks.

And the best part – it’s free. Expect to pay for advanced features down the road, but the standard app is free for now. Upcoming features include customized URLs and traffic analytics –be prepared to pay for those upgrades.

Vyoo.it uses Facebook’s single sign-on to register and log in. From there, all you have to do is provide a valid property address, a link to the online listing and some basic property information. Vyoo.it does the rest. Vyoo.it works best for iPhone and Android devices and they are creating optimized versions for Blackberry, Nokia and other smartphones.

Social Networking – How Sociable Are You?

As you read this, more than 10,000 Tweets just went out. According to the Social Computing Journal, social media grew more in 2009 than all previous years combined. Social networking sites have rapidly evolved into much more than a way to connect with family and friends – social media has become the channel for interactive, digital marketing and communications that brings businesses, consumers and communities around the world together as collaborators.

A recent article on the web describes this amazing tool, HowSociable.com. This tool is fun, easy and informative. Just enter the brand name of any business you’d like to track (including your own) on the HowSociable? home page. The tool will query a number of the top social networking sites and then display the results for the number of times the brand or business name showed up on each site. To see more detail about the visibility on a specific site, like Facebook People, you can click on the results icon and get additional information, even specific posts or comments.

You can use the tools to measure where you are with your social media plan, or give you a beginning baseline for measurement if you are just getting started. It also provides an easy interface to see collective results. Give HowSociable? your email address and the brand you want to track, and they can email you the results on an ongoing basis.

You can also use the tool to study the success of highly rated brands and check in on how your competitors are faring in the social landscape. HowSociable? is fun, it’s free and it’s a way to measure your social success stories. Try it, we think you’ll like it.

Build Your Campaign with Traffic in Mind – Try Google Analytics URL Builder

We all want to drive traffic to our Web sites, and search engine ranking and indexing has become an important part of our marketing efforts. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are hot topics, with keywords, meta tags, description lines part of our daily marketing vocabulary. We also want to track traffic, and many of us are use site analytics tools to determine where the Internet traffic goes to and where it comes from.

In making your site friendlier to organic (not paid) search results, don’t forget to improve the structure of the site URLs. We think carefully about the primary site URL and pay to procure domain names for our sites. But the URLs within the site are important too – each page has a unique one, and Google offers opportunities for you to better organize your site and make it easier for Internet ‘robots’ and ‘spiders’ to crawl the pages. In particular, Google has a great tool to help you manage promotional campaigns through Google Analytics URL Builder. You have to be a current user of Google Analytics to use the tool.

The free URL builder uses a simple online form to help you create and track URLs for the landing pages of your latest marketing campaign. Just enter in the primary URL (domain name) of your site and follow the easy steps on the form. Be clear and specific on each descriptive title you add to the builder – Google uses these titles to help you identify the traffic once the campaign is launched.

When you’ve completed each field, just click on the “Generate URL” button and the tool will create a tracking URL that you will use as the page link for the banner ads specific to this campaign.

To measure the traffic results of your campaign, log into Google Analytics and click on “Traffic Sources,” followed by “Campaigns.” Google then displays your traffic by each marketing campaign.

As with most things Google, we love that it’s free, simple and highly effective!