Razvan Antonescu

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Google Books updates

Beside the Google Books Settlement, Google Books is one of those Google projects that doesn’t receive too much attention despite of its usefulness. But, apparently things are about to change. This year, Google Books received a new, and more useful, interface, ability to create different shelves to categorize your books and I’m getting more and more results on regular searches. Another enhancement, is posting items from user created shelves to the user’s Google Profile.

Most likely, this will be a project that will receive more and more prominence in 2010.

Facebook Fan Pages Tips & Tricks

Just read a great summary of the tricks that you can do on your Facebook fan page in order to increase both user interaction and satisfaction. The “12 steps to creating a compelling Facebook Page” article is aimed to both starters and to those that have some experience with Facebook fan pages.

The tips I liked the most and were totally new to me were these:

7. Create a custom navigation sidebar – A few months ago, I showed you how to add an interactive sidebar to your Facebook Page. This is a creative way to help visitors find exactly what they are looking for on your Facebook Page.

and

10. Import your YouTube videos – Check out the application called YouTube Video Box. It includes an integrated search to find videos on YouTube and a Tab where you can display videos from YouTube. You can also import videos from an existing YouTube.com account.

Getting more targeted followers on Twitter

If you have followed the tutorial that I posted here, by now you should have a pretty decent list of followers and most likely you have more than 2000 followers, moving over past the first Twitter limit. But also you might have come to some limits in finding new, targeted followers. Here are 3 tips that will help you move on:

  • Do not focus only on the followers of the your vertical leaders. More important than those, are the people that they follow. This are pretty hard to get persons, but also more valuable so the effort is worth it
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that use your niche keywords on their bio.
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that interact with your vertical leaders. For this, use the people search option and look for @username (where obviously username=the profile of your niche leaders). Those are very important profiles because they have 3 important traits: they are interested in your niche, they are active users and they interact with others from your niche

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) errors

As I previously mentioned, a few days ago I was testing some new features on Google CSE. Unfortunately nothing worked as expected. I tried using the forums and directly contacting one of the CSE team members with no results. Today, using a new account, I started fresh and everything worked as advertised.

Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch

YouTube Related Videos Trick

Each youtube video gets on the right side 2 sets of recommandations:

  1. More from: [AccountName]: Videos from the same account
  2. Related videos: Videos with similar characteristics (name tags and so on)

Unless you are a YT partner, the “More from” is going to be collapsed. This means that there is a high probability that any user viewing your video will leave to see an item from “Related videos” element

If you want to keep the user within your account, tag all your videos with a unique tag sequence. For example you can have the same repeating sequence of tags (3-4) and after that add the unique tags for the videos. Doing this will cause the “Related Videos” to show videos also from your account.

  • Upside: once a user gets to one of your videos, the chances that he will see other videos from you are higher
  • Downside: you are giving up on traffic generated by videos from other accounts