Maintaining a Facebook Page is now a fundamental part of most news organizations’ social media presence. News sites utilize Facebook Pages to increase brand visibility, promote content, interact with users and drive traffic back to their main sites. But how much are these pages really worth to them, and which news sites are getting the [...]

So Lebron and Kobe may (or may not) be heading towards a much-hyped NBA Finals matchup, but the real question on fans’ minds is: Which NBA playoff teams have the most user engagement on their Facebook Pages? Ok fans could care less about that, but for myself and some sports and social media marketers out [...]

There has been a lot of news and reaction around Facebook’s new additions to the Facebook Platform: Social Plugins, the Open Graph protocol and the Graph API. News and content sites are a natural fit for participation and Facebook is encouraging news site adoption by showcasing sites that are already experimenting with it. So I [...]

UPDATE: For more current figures plus links to all the MLB team Twitter profiles and Facebook Pages, see MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook: Two-Year Growth Rates. A new baseball season is underway and we are in that wonderfully brief period when fans all over the country still believe this could actually be the year [...]

It has been a couple months since Google Social Search was made available in beta to all users on Google.com so I thought I would revisit it from a marketing perspective. As I covered when Social Search initially launched in Google Labs, for companies the main objective in social search optimization is to get included [...]

For my presentation on Twitter Marketing Tactics at SMX West this week I wanted to get a sense of just how much traffic Twitter is driving to major news sites. So I conducted an informal poll of 10 US newspaper and magazine sites that Define works with or I am friendly with. The surveyed group [...]

In working on my presentation for the Twitter Marketing Tactics session at SMX West next week I’ve been looking at the various types of share and retweet buttons used on news sites. I’m partial to the Tweetmeme button although displaying the number of tweets is a double-edged sword. It looks great when there are a [...]

Google Buzz has certainly gotten a lot of attention in the past week for privacy concerns, suggestions for improvements and its “Code Red” push to get things right. At this early stage how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites? Sharing and discussing content is a key component of Google Buzz so it’s a [...]

Now that Foursquare is all the rage (or the bane of existence if you don’t like all those check-in and badge tweets invading your Twitter stream) news sites are looking at how best to leverage location-based social networks. The recent partnership between Foursquare and Canada’s Metro is a good early example of the potential that [...]

A major newspaper is about to undergo another dreaded round of layoffs. After the first wave of buyouts, a tough choice has to be made been two journalists of equal talent and seniority. One journalist has a large following and active presence on several social media sites. The other does not. Who offers more value [...]