According to data from Compete, Facebook has surpassed Google as the top source of traffic for major portals like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. In December, 15% of traffic to these sites came from Facebook and MySpace. 13% from just Facebook. They say it’s among the top traffic drivers for other types of sites as well.

In a recent WebProNews article, I asked if it is becoming increasingly less critical for businesses to have websites, when they can just have things like Facebook pages and Google Place pages. The discussion is more complex than just that (feel free top participate here), but the general point is that you can have a strong web presence without having an actual web site (although I still recommend having one in most cases).

By Facebook’s most recent stat counts, the site has over 400 million active users. Half of them log on each day. Over 35 million upate their status each day, with over 60 million status updates posted each day. Over 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week, over 3.5 million events are created each month, and there are over 3 million active Pages on Facebook.

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When you talk about mobile marketing, most business minded individuals would consider it as one of the most superior methods of modern advertising. With a mobile, the advertisement you have will immediately be viewed as compared to advertisement in billboards and on TV. It is highly different to other forms of advertisement because it is said to be personal in nature. This will then give and allow small and medium scaled businesses the opportunity to reach out to a bigger market. The personal touch also attracts various businessmen to use it as a method of introducing, promoting, improving and making it known to wherever it may reach. This extraordinary and effective platform continues to give chance to smaller business become bigger.

This fast changing world makes almost every one busy which results to the development and creation of personal services. People who are too busy and have the least time to accomplish even in this field usually opt for the service. It makes life easier for them, and it also saves them great value of time. Wedding planners find the service beneficial in their part so as professional organizers. But the most effective approach of advertising these days and is considered to be unbeaten by any other form of advertisement when it comes to faster audience viewing is the mobile marketing. As for businesses that are still starting or those that are struggling to get improved in time, they find this platform to be very effective in helping them reach to the audience they wish to target. This is done ideally by sending your ad via mobile SMS and by sending regular updates about the promos you offer like discounts. Whatever business you may be into, you will need this method to immediately increase your popularity rate and to make your business profitable. You will also have greater opportunity of advertising your product or service using this powerful medium. You can instantly contact potential buyers in your area or even in the neighboring towns.

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Do you want to improve your Twitter listening skills? Here’s a closer look at how to monitor your brand, yourself or your competitors using Twitter

1. Decide What You Want to Monitor. Decide which information you want to monitor.  Common types include your brand names, industry keywords, customers and competitors.

A daily listening routine gives you more value over time. Spend the time you need to find the right mix and create a routine that works for you.

2. Track Your URL Shorteners. Use URL shortening tools to monitor the links you share on Twitter and help you find out what’s popular with your audience.

As Jeff Bullas says, the popular URL shortener bit.ly “allows you to track how many people are clicking on the shortened link with a set of metrics that displays it in a visual format as well as textually.” This makes it easy to track your important links and monitor the interactions you have on social media.

3. Use Twitter Lists to Monitor People on Twitter. You might find it convenient to create your own Twitter lists and monitor people through these lists.  Remember, you can set up a private list to follow your competitors and you’ll be the only person to see this private list on your Twitter profile.

You can also set up an RSS feed to follow someone else’s Twitter list using Twitter Lists 2 RSS.

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We just installed the widget on the home page of fanminder.com that auto-imports the most recent blog posts to the home page. So this is a test I’m hoping it works!

We are pleased and excited to announce the newest release of Fanminder, Version 1.5.

We’ve been hard at work at this release for a few months now. While it’s mostly “infrastructure” and not features, it’s much-needed infrastructure we couldn’t be happier to share. The release contains:

• Co-Branded Solution Provider experience
• Reduced Setup
• Simplified Welcome Message
• Customer Billing
• Mobile Signature

Co-Branded Solution Provider experience – The co-branded experience enables our resellers’ (we call them Solution Providers) logo to appear on every screen of the application to the right of the Fanminder logo.

Reduced Setup – This feature shrinks the number of pages and information required to setup a new account from four pages to one. Information such as store hours and payment method are not requested any longer. The goal of this feature is to minimize effort to start using the application.

Simplified Welcome Message – We have eliminated the original default Welcome Menu that a fan would see upon joining the list from his/her phone (the original Welcome Menu allowed the fan to request business hours, phone, and address via text reply.) Now, every customer can customize his/her Welcome Message to suit their needs.

Customer Billing – This feature enables Fanminder to directly bill a customer’s credit card on a recurring schedule. ‘Nuff Said! Actually, a little more: Automatically billing our customers is a key requirement for us to grow quickly and we’re glad we have this ready because we’re growing quickly now.

Mobile Signature – One of the key requests we’ve heard from merchants is to ensure their name is included in the text so their customers know who the text is from. Currently, all text messages display on a phone as coming from Fanminder’s short code, 244326. Because of this, fans glancing quickly at an incoming text may not know who its from, and delete the text.

With Mobile Signature, a merchant can create any “from” copy they like and that copy will appear in the body of all outgoing messages. A merchant may also change the copy at any time for a single message or all messages

We’ve just put a big release behind us. My hat is off to our spectacular team who devoted themselves to launching this. Look for updates on our next release soon!