Driving Traffic and Profit

Both Linkedin and Facebook are excellent social media platforms but both have their independent individual characteristics.

1. Linkedin is highly focused on professional networking. It is a heaven for recruiters as they can gauge the credentials of the potential employees and also contact prospective recruits with the help of their existing network.

Facebook is more casual and diverse in nature and truly encourages interaction amongst its members. As they opened their API for application developers, many interesting applications including games, polling apps, etc. intrigued and caputred the imagination (and time) of the community members of the platform.

2. Linked in has the subscription based revenue model and also has ad based revenue stream. Facebook on the other hand has ad based revenue model as of now. But they are also collaborating with mobile companies like Nokia for OEM deals and must be making big bucks.

3. In Facebook one can upload pictures/videos to share with friends…. Linked in has stayed away from rich media game play. Profile pictures are allowed but in all probability one would find people in their business suits at linkedin. In Facebook one can be more relaxed and opt for more casual profile pictures as they are out there to socialiaze with friends and have fun.

4. Linkedin has added the Q&A module for knowledge sharing. Facebook does not have have such a mandate.

5. Facebook allows building web pages to promote products or service or organization or event. Linked allows the users to add companies which can show in the search results.

In a nut shell, Linkedin is a more focused social media platform. Facebook is a larger giant allowing people to be more casual and encouraging them to indulge on the wall !

Google is synonymous with God in the internet world and its success has inspired tens of thousands of internet companies. Following are some of the factors which I feel contributed/contribute to the Google success story:

1. High Quality but for Free:  Google developed a quality search engine, had the brilliance of coming up with a very simple and user friendly front end design and then offered the search service for free to the masses ! What a disaster it would have been had they charged money for the service.

2. Develop an eco-system for others to make money: Google created an industry in itself for people to make money via Google Adsense. Small companies who could not afford and manage a sales force could now make money simply by integrating the google ad scripts and google search bar on their website. People worked hard to create content and make money out of it. Google gave them hope and created many internet moguls. But in the entire process what actually was also happening was that Google was getting more and more content inventory where they could serve ads; they were now having more locations from where people were searching using Google’s search engine. Yes, Google had gone viral !!

3. Smart Acquisitions: They realized the potential of video content and acquired YouTube. They saw the powerful rise of facebook, myspace and acquired Orkut to compete. The acquisition team of Google is always on the prowl sniffing innovation in the internet world!

4. Smart Hiring: People indeed make all the difference. Very rigorous hiring process ensured inflow of very very talented people in the organization, resulting in great products, smart marketing and aggressive sales. And as the saying goes Good talent attract more good talent.

Sundeep

There are so many different channels for marketing like TV, Newspapers, Magazines, Bill Boards amongst others. However, search engine marketing has an inherent advantage for advertisers. It empowers the advertisers to target and advertise to only those consumers who are actively seeking (read Googling) to know about some product or service.

Its a far cry from the broadcast form of advertisement say in a general tv news channel, where probably millions of viewers will see the ad but they are passive viewers of the ad since they are not seeking info about the product or service being advertised. Out of those millions only say thousands would be interested in the advertised offering and another few thousands “may” be interested in the offering in future and “may” recollect the ad. So in the broadcast form of advertisement there is lot of SPILLAGE !

Search Engine Marketing gives a powerful tool to advertisers  to reach to TARGETED customers only,  based on the keywords they are searching.

Phone help line enquiry services like Just Dial are also similar in nature and help advertisers reach very targeted customers and avoid spillage !