Following the trend of its social media counter-parts Facebook and Google+, Twitter has recently announced the launch of branded, business-specific pages on its site.

The new Twitter business pages are an effort to provide a more concrete and tangible fan-base in which brands can have more interaction with their consumers.

What's New About Twitter Pages for Brands?

The new Twitter pages for brands offer a rich and sophisticated user experience. The new pages offer more interaction for users and have become much more presentable from a marketing point of view. In essence, the new Twitter brand pages have become an ideal platform to lure customers.

We have found a number of benefits of the new Twitter pages. Some these include:

• Large, Customizable header images - probably the first thing you would notice about the new Twitter brand pages. This enables brands to a logo or image, as well as a tagline or any other visuals that format to the new 835 x 90 header space.

• You can move a Tweet to the very top of your profile page’s timeline to emphasize your most engaging and vital content.

• Also nice for business are the rich media (photos and videos) links embedded in Tweets. Instead of sending a visitor away upon clicking the tweeted link, a sub-window will expand to show that media within your page.

• The look and feel of the new Twitter brand pages has been optimized for mobile with a consistent across many popular smartphone platforms.
• Twitter brand pages are available to the global public and do not require visitors to log-in to a Twitter account to see your company's page.

Marketing Advantages of Twitter

From a marketing standpoint, this is a great leap by Twitter. Earlier, brands preferred Facebook over Twitter, as it allowed more customization and interaction. The move by Twitter now integrates such features into the new Twitter brand pages.

Brand pages for several large companies like American Express, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, Intel, and Nike have all been customized and offer a more unique, customized feel. These new branded pages provide an elegant platform for consumer interaction and promotional presentation. In short, Twitters new pages hint at the future of advertising and marketing from more social platforms.

In October of 2011, Google+, a 4 month old social networking platform from Google, had a reported 40 million users. Jump to January 2012 and Google+ now has over 90 million active users, with hopes to grow to 100 million by the end of February.

Although this is great news for Google, the question everyone is asking is how did the company more than double its number of users in so little time?

The only answer that analysts have for this immense growth in Google+ is of the heavy implementation of Google+ in all of Google’s activities. As Google has recently launched its "Search Plus Your World" feature, which adds personally-oriented search results based on your Google+ profile, its content, and your behaviors.

This has spawned a lot more traffic for Google+, as users (or members of one's circle) post anything from profile updates to photos and links (with the similar keyword references as your search query) will likely appear in the "personal" search engine results. This has led to a lot of mixed emotions amongst other popular social networking platforms and online business models.

More Promotional Push From Google

But the "Search Plus Your World" hasn’t been the only attempt from Google to rake in new users to its growing social networking site. Google has also made it mandatory for all new Google Gmail users to create a Google+ account to be able to complete the creation of a Gmail account. This has led to an immense amount of unhappy users who feel like they have been bullied by the search engine giant into creating a Google+ account.

In addition to online-based promotions and incentives, Google has also taken its marketing efforts to television audiences. During prime time TV, it is not uncommon to see television ads about Google that target both consumers and businesses. Such ads highlight the advantages of having "circles" in your social network, or for businesses, the opportunities to connect with consumers on a more social-friendly format.

With this much push from the search engine giant to get Google+ afloat, it makes sense how quickly Google+ gained over 90 million users. And at this rate it seems likely that Google+ will get the estimated 300-400 million users it yearns for by the end of the year.

But how many will truly be glued to Google+ like they are Facebook or Twitter? And although Google does say that 60% of Google+ users are engaged daily and 80% weekly. Google forgot to mention that it counts anyone who signs into their Google account which is tied to Gmail, Google+, YouTube and iGoogle (along with many others) as an active Google+ user.

It will be an interesting future for Google+, and here at Increase Your Rank, we'll keep you informed as Google continues on its path of extraordinary growth.

Business blogging is the modern way of building your brand by sharing knowledge, insights, and providing commentary about the things you specialize in.

Blogging has become an effective medium for businesses to attract customers and generate leads. Many organizations rope in their key executives and technical experts to write (or provide insights to writer) for their blog in an effort to generate a positive impression and instill confidence in customers.

Advantages of Blogging

Whether for a law firm or ecommerce store, the benefits of blogging offer a number of advantages and opportunities. Below are some of the key advantages of business blogging:

Increase Inbound Traffic

Blog topics can include a wide range of relevant topics, such as the latest updates on a product or service, news on recent occurrences, or commentary on emerging technologies by the subject matter experts.

To promote more inbound traffic to a blog, and thus to your site, blog posts can be linked through ads or social network tools like Twitter and Facebook. Most organizations should considering creating a Twitter page or a Facebook business page for two reasons: to build links to their blogs and to share their blog stories with a relevant following.

Market watchers, analysts and customers are solid sources of inbound traffic if the blogs are up-to-date and the content is compelling and contains useful information. For this reason, it is not only important to market your blog well, but also generate great copy that users can appreciate.

Promote Brands

Blogs can promote your brand with ease. They are the natural choice for advertising your brand by providing valuable knowledge on your products and services to your target audience. You can build the brand image by creating more buzz around the products, services, and offerings by creative ways including videos on product demos, commentary and white board sessions.

A solid blog with popular following is a brand by itself. In addition, blogging habits are niche by itself, because they underscore the building and promoting of the brands.

Creating a Fan Following

Blogs can generate a list of followers as users subscribe to feeds (such as RSS.) Blogs which are simple, intuitive and useful for the online community, generate positive word of mouth for an organization. Thanks to advent of social bookmarking tools, a business blogs can be easily shared and bookmarked with other users.

This creates lot of readers through positive recommendations and the blog by itself becomes a great resource among Internet users. In summary, business blogging offers differentiation and a niche for organizations to create a positive brand image and provide consumer enlightenment.