Google has declared its Google+ social platform an unprecedented success, having attracted 40 million users since it was launched to the public 100 days ago.

Print might be in retreat around the world, but that hasn’t stopped one publisher today launching four monthly magazines with one each devoted to Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The idea is that the four magazines will serve as manuals for those who understand the importance of social media, but need practical help in developing social media strategies for their businesses.  And look London made the front cover of issue one of the Twitter magazine. Read More »

One third of Facebook and Twitter users in the UK are followers of brands, more than twice the percentage of other markets across the continent, according to a pan-European survey, which highlights the divide between countries and the usage of social media.

The UK has the highest number of social media users signed up to the brands ‘fan’ pages in Europe, where other countries, including France and Germany, less than 16% of users are ‘fans’ of brands. Read More »

Reports this weekend suggest Google could be lining up to buy its one time rival Yahoo!. Google is said to have spoken to at least two private equity firms about a deal to buy Yahoo!, which has been in a state of turmoil since chief executive Carol Bartz was sacked in early September.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and its partners have held initial discussions, but have yet to come up with a concrete proposal to buy the firm. Read More »

As ITV’s X Factor entered the first week with the public vote determining the fate of the contestants, The Groups lost its second act, Nu Vibe.  What impact did the social media numbers across contestants, judges and The X Factor have?

In terms of number of fans on Facebook, although they grew over the week by a significant number across the acts (Janet’s by over 100,000) the top four didn’t change place: Janet, Frankie, Misha B and The Risk.  If you were to make an early prediction based on last week and looking solely at the figures below, Janet looks like a possible winner.  Her social media channels have grown exponentially last week, particularly on Facebook which jumped up by 153,000 Likes.  Janet was always an early leader, before the live shows even started and unfortunately last week we learnt that her grandfather had passed away, which undoubtedly had an impact on her social media profile. Read More »

Goviral’s top 10 global videos of the month for September 2011 has some crackers including the very funny Carlsberg biker ad as well as George Clooney in the DnB Norwegian bank ad, apparel company, Vooray, Red Bull and F1 going to America and the full length spot for the hotly anticipated Battlefield ad to the tune of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems. Enjoy. Read More »

High-quality content is a “competitive must” for businesses looking to up their customer acquisition figures via SEO, especially in Google’s post-Panda realm, according to the marketers at Brafton.

The following infographic shows a case study of a sales management business that increased its organic search traffic, amid Google’s Panda update, by use of frequently updated blog posts and Tweets, while also boosting its number of referring keywords by 150%.

Read More »

While it was reported earlier this week that News International had ditched the idea of a paywall for The Sun other parts of the News Corporation empire are pressing ahead with plans.

The Australian will put its paywall live on Monday, according to News Limited boss John Hartigan, beginning with a three month free trial. Read More »

Interesting move by Bitly which has announced the beta launch of its search platform and reputation monitoring service.

There is massive potential here considering that Bitly shortens around 80 million URLs every day. It will now crawl and classify every URL it shortens to create an index of the most “viral” content on the web, which is to say content that is broadly distributed, frequently-clicked, and strongly trending. Read More »

A wealthy Saudi investor, with stakes in Citigroup and News Corporation, is in talks with Twitter about making an investment that could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sky News’ Mark Kleinman says that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who chairs Kingdom Holding, is said to have spoken to one of Twitter’s co-founders, who include Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Read More »