Maybe it’s Pinterest, or Facebook. Or both. The 2012 Social Media Report states that U.S. audiences are spending more time online each year, and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are big time consumers of their attention.

In the United States, over 170 million people use social media. It’s become something we all share. Savvy marketers are seeing the opportunity in this and incorporating social networking into their overall marketing strategies.

With so many networks to choose from, how do you figure out where your business needs to be? Below, are outlines of four of the biggest social networks with a brief summation of how these applications might be used for business.

Facebook – a storyteller
Businesses can leverage Facebook to tell their stories. This network is a great place to communicate personality, share behind-the-scenes details, as well as products and services. Through updates, photo albums and savvy use of Pages, businesses can build a stronger connection to their fanbase.

The image above shows an example of a business (Disney) using Facebook’s Milestone feature to highlight a key moment in its history. Milestones are large, highlighted updates that let businesses share significant moments like historical events and anniversaries with fans while adding visual diversity to the Page layout.

Features like these establish a very interactive and fun way for consumers to learn about businesses, often leading them to share with their friends.

Twitter – filtered tweets lend insight
Businesses eager to engage with their customers will find the realtime conversations on Twitter engaging and insightful. The ability to search through tweets based on specific keywords can offer lots of insights on your customers wants and needs.

Marketers curious to see what people are saying about a certain topic (including their company) can type a relevant term into the Twitter search bar and browse filtered results. Below is an example of a query for ‘print marketing’:

From this one search, you can learn what companies are using print marketing in creative ways, tips on how to use Google Analytics to enhance your print marketing, and an article explaining why major companies feel print marketing is important.

Filtered search makes it easier for businesses to find relevant information to share with their followers and more easily engage with them in topics that relate to their mission.

Pinterest – great tool for retail
The real benefit of Pinterest seems to be seen in the retail sector. The pinboard style of the website encourages its mostly-female demographic to create visual wishlists targeted towards items in the fashion, beauty and health industries. An added benefit to businesses is the built-in pricing capabilities.

According to a recent Pew study a smaller, older demographic of users – about 16% – are on Pinterest and over age 50.

Recent changes to the site include a sleeker, larger layout, the ability to drag images to boards, and suggestions for pins you might like.

Visual arts organizations and museums can also use the site’s visual focus to share artwork from exhibitions with followers.

Google+ – improving search 
According to the site, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“. Google+ supports this mission by giving Google users more diverse and authentic information in search.

Google+ integrates business page activity into search results, giving businesses more control over what populates in Google search and enabling customers to see and follow the latest news and information about their business.

Google+ pages add depth to search queries; not only do users find out critical info about a business like location and contact information, but a particular status update might further encourage them to engage and support a business.

For instance the search results for Coca Cola, above, also dislpay a status update on their page with information about an upcoming hangout, or video chat, with a super fan.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is different from networks like Pinterest because it’s not the venue to post products and pricing to make sales. 79% of LinkedIn users are age 35 or older and they comprise a network of learners converging to discuss topics related to their industry and profession.

Businesses can benefit by setting up pages and sharing resources but what’s really valuable are LinkedIn groups, which give employees a chance to promote their business through group interactions. By answering questions and creating thoughtful topics that relate to target consumers, businesses can promote themselves while also getting a heads up on potential leads.

Marketers would do well to thoughtfully consider each network (and there are more out there) that can be used as a tool to enhance a business. Once you decide which network works best for your business, the biggest factors are whether you have the time and the staff to curate content and consistently share information with followers. A great approach to getting social is to pick just one or two networks to engage with and make those efforts successful before branching out.

How have you determined which social networks to use for your business? Share in the comments below.

I recently stumbled across this article on Hubspot by Kieran Flanagan, and it got me thinking about Google’s Panda update. I wondered what exactly it was, what happened recently and why it was important to me as a marketer.

Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, Google performed its latest update to Panda, an algorithm initiated in early 2011, that changed the way Google populated search results on its famous search engine. It’s not clear to me now how many searches were affected by this recent update, but a look at the updates initiated since last year show that the percentage of searches affected are decreasing– only 1.2% were affected this past January.

The Head of Google Webspam, Matt Cutts reported that further updates would not be announced since they will occur automatically with other updates.

So what’s Panda about?

The initial Panda update in early 2011 affected nearly 12% of Google queries. The algorithm benefited Google’s users by pushing low quality content to the bottom of search results. This is how Google described it on their blog at the time:

“Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

These are the two most significant qualifiers for low quality content:

• pages that rip-off content from other sites
• pages without real value (full of purchased links and advertisements) with no real content

Why is this important to marketers?

Google’s Panda update affects marketers directly because it corresponds to how users find their business online. Marketing and PR professionals must encompass digital channels in their marketing plans to increase visibility and outreach to target markets.

By knowing what kind of content the internet’s most popular search engine (it recently took 67% of the market share) is looking to provide its users, marketers can strategize ways to gain the best visibility and grow their audience.

What to do now

The simplest and easiest solution is to provide rich, relevant information on your website. Here’s how:

• add valuable information like statistics, examples and case studies
• avoid duplicating information (in its entirety) from other websites
• use applicable keywords; don’t thoughtlessly litter your web pages without having relevant content to support them

What actions have you taken to enhance your customer’s experience as a result of the Panda updates? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Read more about Google Panda and other updates on the Google blog.