There’s a theory that labeling Google+ a social network is missing the point because it’s actually a tool to integrate social into search. If that’s the case, we can expect to see more “your friends have shared this link” tags in our Google search results in the near future. A recent discovery by Stateofsearch shows that Google is not only highlighting the stuff your friends share, but are now giving you a way to thank them for sharing it.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Popular sharing platform AddThis just celebrated their fifth birthday and to mark the occasion they’ve released an infographic that takes a look at social sharing trends based on their five years of experience.
With this new deep integration on Facebook, people will not only get updates on what their friends are liking or sharing, but also see comprehensive wall posts about the foods their friends are craving, making and recommending.
Currently, LinkedIn has a small foothold in the country and is one of the few foreign social networking groups allowed access to Chinese Internet users. Facebook and Twitter are both blocked in China. Earlier this year in February, LinkedIn was temporally blocked by China; but is faring well now.
In the days following a huge concert, a wedding, or a birthday party, you might try messaging and emailing your friends to get copies of the photos so you can store them or share them with others. Telling someone to put up photos on Facebook of Flickr is easy – but creating an album, uploading all the pictures, sorting, tagging… this can be a daunting and time-consuming process for even the most social media savvy. And this is where Yogile hopes to make its mark: by creating a stripped-down, ultra-simple method for creating group photo albums online.
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Looming menacingly on Apture’s About page is a frightening stat for many web publishers: 30% of most publishers’ outbound traffic is lost to search, according to comScore Media Metrix data. That’s 1/3 of all outbound traffic moving away from your site to search for something else. Apture hopes that its innovative context-oriented web service will help publishers retain some of that previously lost traffic and replace outside searches with internal context.
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Twitter is the most popular social sharing option on the 100 top blogs in the blogosphere. So says a recent report from Royal Pingdom that studied how common dedicated buttons, for different means of sharing web content, were on top blogs. The study found that dedicated Twitter buttons existed on 66 of the top 100 blogs (as per Technorati’s Top 100 list). Facebook buttons were only on 58 blogs, and Digg only on 43. Poor old Google Buzz is at the bottom of sharing choices.
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If you spend time reading websites and blogs online, take note of ShareThis’ new Stream service, which aggregates not only what content friends are sharing on hundreds of thousands of sites, but also any conversations about the content.
You might already be familiar with ShareThis’ discreet little green button on multiple sites, which upon clicking displays a list of social sharing (bookmarking, voting, etc.) sites where you can post a link to the page you’re browsing. ShareThis claims over 400 million users across 130,000 websites using this social sharing wdiget. Now, they’re leveraging this base to show the top shared content plus “social comments from friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social services.”
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