For social media marketers, it’s important to tune into the leaders in your field. Below is our list of the top 10 “influencers” on Goole+ in SEO and social media.

1. Matt Cutts – 166,544 have Matt in circles: Head of the webspam team at Google. “If you type your name into Google and get porn back, it’s his fault.”

2. Rand Fishkin – 33,701 have Rand in circles: CEO and founder of SEOmoz. He tweets primarily on inbound marketing, SEO, startups and entrepreneurship.

3. Danny Sullivan – 626,948 have Danny in circles: Editor of SearchEngineLand.com. He covers Google, SEO, PPC and all aspects of search engines and search marketing.

4. Lee Odden – 11,365 have Lee in circles: CEO of @TopRank Online Marketing. He focuses on search, social media and content marketing.

5. Mari Smith - 55,503 have Mari in circles: Passionate social media leader, Facebook marketing and relationship marketing speaker and author.

6. Michael Q Todd – 7,001 have Michael Q. in circles: CEO of NPO Index on Empire Ave. He is a Twitter strategist and author.

7. Stefan Keuchel – 19,566 have Stefan in circles: PR Manager Google Germany. He is a Twitter and online strategist.

8. David Jacobs – 4,377 have David in circles: Software Engineer. He is a programmer and social network specialist.

9. Jaana Nyström – 29,487 have Jaana in circles: Content curator, social media writer, consultant.

10. Natalie Villalobos – 125,562 have Natalie in circles: Community Manager for Google+. She started +Handmade, a community for makers, crafters, tinkerers, and foodies.

We hope you embrace this list and participate in online conversations with Google+. Let us know what other heavyweights we have left out of the social media influencer list!

So what does this have to do with social media marketing?Successful execution of a social media strategy requires an understanding of your target audience and creatively influencing their behavior. This has less to do with who they are than what they do and understanding their behavior online over time.

You must ask yourself two important questions.

What Are They Searching For?

Searcher behavior and keywords must act as a cheat sheet. There are many tools that businesses can use to uncover this information, such as:

• Google Analytics: To give you insights into what drives traffic to your website.
• Adwords: A deeper look into actual search terms.
• Google Trends: To give you insights into trending keyword themes.

Insights from these tools can help marketers develop more comprehensive keyword lists, better optimize paid search campaigns and achieve greater value from search engine optimization initiatives.

What Are They Saying?

Social media presents us with an always-accessible group of consumers who have experienced your brand or product and have something to say about it. It is absolutely crucial to monitor the conversation around your brand and to engage with your target.

Great tools that help you listen to your target audience include:

• Google Alerts: E-mail updates that are sent to you for whatever keyword or phrase you want.
• Twitter Search: Use this to track real time news and discover trends with hashtags.
• Hootsuite: The ultimate Twitter toolbox – save searches into tabs to monitor keywords and phrases.

Understanding what people are saying and how they perceive you is crucial to developing your online marketing strategy.

This may impact your overall goals and you may find out that you need to change perception or choose new keywords.

Finding out what your audience wants and needs is challenging, but when you take the time to understand your audience and use that knowledge to create relevant content that grabs people’s attention, you will inspire them to connect and engage with your brand.

Are you engaging and delighting your audience? Find out today by requesting more information on our Social Audit.

Social media presents people with an opportunity to broadcast thoughts, feelings, significant events and very personal information. We read the who, what, where and when of an individual’s life each day on social networks.

Lou Beach, the author of “420 Characters,” brilliantly blends his illustrations and poetic language to use his Facebook status updates for something more. He writes tiny tales that do not exceed Facebook’s previous maximum character count for statuses: 420 characters.

Beach redefines micro-blogging by embracing storytelling while obeying strict rules of social media sites. Shakespeare once said, “Brevity is the soul of whit,” and Beach’s book uses brevity to its advantage. In an NPR interview, Beach described that his stories came to him after waking up.

“They come out of a dream state.”

His stories are simple and raw. Beach’s Facebook followers were reading a story a day before the release of the book. Shortly after the release of Beach’s book, Facebook increased the character limit for status updates to 5,000.

Micro-blog and status limits will never take from Beach his accomplishment: proof that brevity is the soul of storytelling.

We enjoyed Beach’s book so much that we pinned it to our Pinterest Board. What other books do you believe exemplify the power of social media? We want to know!

• Twitter users welcome 2012 with 16,000 tweets-per-second, more than doubling last year’s record. (Source: MediaBistro)
• President Obama joined the 15+ million users on Instagram. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• 3% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses from social media, while 38% claim to use Internet search engines. (Source: Pew Internet)
• 49,000,000 Americans visited the Google+ platform. (Source Hitwise)
• Coldplay became the top page on Google+ with 618,356 followers. (Source: SocialStatistics)
• 82% of the world’s online population are determined to be reached by social networking sites, representing 1.2 billion users around the world. (Source: comScore)
• For the first time in its 11-year life, Wikipedia’s English-language pages went offline to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• 19.7% of the total Facebook user base is proven to be located in the United States. (Source: AllFacebook)
• 4,306 +1′s are counted on the most-shared picture this month on Google+. (Source: SocialStatistics)
• The first ever Super Bowl Social Media Command Center launched in preparation for Super Bowl XLVI. (Source: YourSocialMove)
• McDonald’s used two hashtags, #MeetTheFarmers and #McDStores, in their Promoted Tweets which turned into a marketing disaster. (Source: MediaBistro)

What do you think these facts foreshadow for the rest of 2012? Did we miss any other imperative events and achievements from January? Let us know!

The Chairman of the Super Bowl Host Committee has stated,

“The big goal is to be the most connected Super Bowl ever, we think we’re going to be able to achieve that.”

The way to connect the 150,000+ expected visitors is through social media?

Drumroll please…

We believe that the Super Bowl will break records for social media statistics in unthinkable ways. Last year during the final minutes of the game, fans posted 4,064 Tweets per second. We have said it before: communication is always happening online. This brave initiative from the Super Bowl Committee will embrace the online chatter and will develop a new digital platform for football fans around the world.

The Command Center is proof that social media is now being taken seriously. It’s no longer an option. Social media is now being recognized as a legitimate news source and as a practical way of communicating with a large number of people — particularly people on the move.

If you’re a Twitter user, use the #SuperBowl, #social46 or #SuperBowl2012 hashtags. If you prefer Facebook, here is where you can find the Super Bowl Host Committee’s Facebook page. The free “SB XLVI Guide”App is also available for downloaded here.

What are your predictions for the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center? Will you be participating in the conversation online? We want to know, so leave your comments below!

For social media marketers, it’s important to tune into the leaders in your field. According to Klout, below are the top 10 “influencers” in social media, and their calculated followers.

These Top 10 social media influencers were calculated over the last 90 days, with Mashable holding the top spot.

1. Mashable – 2,691,685 followers: The largest independent news source covering web culture, social media and tech.

2. Chris Brogan – 199,275 followers: The President of Human Business Works.

3. Mari Smith – 134,008 followers: Social media speaker and author of The New Relationship Marketing and Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day.

4. Scott Monty – 66,726 followers: Head of social media at Ford Motor Company.

5. Jason Falls – 48,529 followers: Founder of Social Media Explorer and President of Social Media Club Louisville.

6. Gary Vaynerchuk – 913,730 followers: Businessman and author of The Thank You Economy.

7. Sarah Evans – 69,330 followers: Social media correspondent credited for beginning Twitter chats.

8. Reg Saddler – 157,928 followers: Social media correspondent with up-to-date current event news.

9. Scott Stratten – 113,558 followers: President of UnMarketing, author and social media speaker.

10. Social Media Today – 87,658 followers: Publisher of social media content, best practices, tools and social marketing.

Beepl is an ‘expertise platform’ that integrates content from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to generate responses to questions.

According to the website:

“Beepl lets you ask questions that other users answer so that it’s easy for anybody to crowdsource knowledge and opinion. Beepl also understands the topics that questions relate to and users’ interests, expertise and who they know so that questions automatically reach the best people to answer them.

Connect with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so that topics follow you”

Beepl finds experts on specific topics before the questions are posed and uses a semantic search engine to direct people to the experts regarding the questions they have. This means that the site’s users essentially answer questions for one another.

As chatrooms and ‘formal’ forum sites are used less frequently, sites like Quora have taken off. Beepl’s main objective is to be the forum, but in real time. Just add the #ask hashtag to your questions and they will find their way to the platform.

How do you think Beepl is different from other Q&A sites? We asked on Beepl and the Founder, Steve O’Hear, answered this question only a few minutes after it was posted.

What are your thoughts? Have you signed up for Beepl? Let us know below!

The list of sites alongside Wikipedia is alarming; for example, BoingBoing, Mozilla, WordPress, TwitPic, and Reddit are all participating in the “black out.”

What is SOPA and PIPA?

Rep. Lamar Smith announced the Stop Online Piracy Act in late October knowing it was going to be controversial. These US anti-piracy bills are intended to strengthen the position of content providers on the Internet, specifically those who argue their industries are being damaged by online pirates. Their argument is sound, but many Internet advocates believe the bills’ proposed tactics muffle free speech rights across the Web.

Protect IP targets only domain name system providers, financial companies, and ad networks.

Want more info? Here is a great summary provided by Holtz.

What is next?

The Senate Judiciary has approved PIPA and it’s waiting for a floor vote scheduled for January 24. SOPA is expected to be approved when Congress returns this month. Where it goes from there is a big question mark.

What does this mean to social media?

For the first time in its 11-year life, Wikipedia’s English-language pages are offline until midnight. Social media sites are willing to go to any length to unite others under their stance… because social media is the one thing we can’t live without.

What are your thoughts about SOPA and PIPA? What do you think this means to social media? We want to know! Share your thoughts below.

So what is Pinterest?

Think: digital scrapbooking.

The service, which is currently invite-only, lets users take content they care about from around the Web and organize them into “boards.” However, if brands are going to use Pinterest successfully, they are going to have to promote lifestyles or listen and use it is a business intelligence tool to see what is popular with their audience.

Here are the top 5 Pinterest tips for your brand:

1. Promote a lifestyle: Display your creativity. Create an experience to share with Pinterest followers. THE HEAVYWEIGHTS pins photos of their studio in Indianapolis because the office promotes their way of thinking.

2. Listen to feedback: Use your boards as a focus group.

3. Pin from various sources: Be sure to repin from within the site to engage with others.

4. Inspire your followers: What inspires you may inspire followers. For example, THE HEAVYWEIGHTS pins photos of the office’s CHALK TALK, a weekly inspirational quote that is drawn by a team member on Mondays.

5. Be Pinnable: Upload pins and create boards that others will want to repin. Make your boards visually appealing.

What is your best Pinterest advice? We want to know! Be sure to follow our agency on Pinterest.

So why did he join Instagram? And why should you? Instagram is changing the way people share content, and it is changing the way people access social media.

The basics:

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it through Instagram or a variety of other social networking services.  The application reached 5 million members in just 8 months, and more than 100 million photos have been shared.

• 1 million: The number of accounts on Jan 1, 2011
• 15+ million: The number of accounts on Jan 1, 2012
• 51,600+: The most likes on a single photo

The importance:

Instagram’s impressive growth gives us a glimpse at the future of social media. As addiction to mobile grows, more consumers will adapt to new technology and Internet devices. The web will become even easier to access on mobile devices than on computers. Ease and convenience in sharing content is becoming the focus of social media and social networking. The door to new marketing opportunities will soon be opened.

World leaders now utilize social media and applications, such as Instagram, create an even playing field for any registered user. Sharing and connecting with individuals across the world has never been easier.

Do you have an Instagram account? What do you think the growth of Instagram means to social media? Please share your thoughts!