Why are consumers following brands on Twitter and Facebook? Searchers Using Longer Queries in 2009 by Small Business Search Marketing. in 2009, while 4-word searches increased from 13.3% Twitter Demographics by Social Media Today. 20% of online adults age 25-34 have used twitter or something like it, compared to 10% of online adults age 35-44 and 5% of those aged 45-54. Predicting the Present with Google Trends by Google Research Blog. The median Twitter user is 31, compared to 26 for Facebook and 40 for LinkedIn. Google alone has a 63.7 MORE >>

This is particularly so for those on Twitter, which is infested with scammers and spammers: “Buy my miracle internet marketing kit and get thousands of clicks overnight!&# SEOmoz’s Biennial Ranking Factors 2009 Released by SEOmoz. Top Ten Ways To Get Banned From Google by High Position. Google Caffeine Update: “Real-Time” Indexing Favors Fresh Content by All Virtual Marketing. Why Your Company Needs a Google Profile by Search Marketing Sage. Google Base Opens Up New Doors for Internet Marketers by Best Rank Search Engine Marketing. MORE >>

If 2009 was the year many marketers puzzled over, poked at and pondered incorporating social media into their marketing mix, 2010 was the year of diving in. According to a HubSpot study, 71% of marketers viewed Twitter as a useful marketing tool last year, up from just 39% in 2009. Facebook added more than 200 million users last year, and Twitter more than doubled in size, adding 115 million. Which Profile Aspects Should Be Emphasized on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? 11 Practical Business Uses for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter by GigaOM. MORE >>

Having long ago passed MySpace as the most popular social network, Facebook recently replaced Google as the most-visited website in the U.S. It started 2010 with roughly 350 million users and is now on its way to 600  million. explains, “This isn’t about optimizing your ‘fan’ page to appear in Google search results, but instead is about optimizing your own site and pages to appear in Facebook search results.&#. 35 (of the) Best Guides to Facebook Marketing, Advertising, Search and More of 2010 (So Far). Best Facebook Marketing Tips and Guides of 2009. MORE >>

Nine months after the creation of the service in March 2006, Twitter only had a few thousand users. How did Twitter get those vital initial users? To answer that question I created a visual history of Twitter's growth, feeding data from Dharmesh Shah ( developer of TwitterGrader.com ) into OpenHeatMap to produce an animated visualization of the service's growth, along with information on the earliest users for each region. How did Twitter grow in the early days? How did the very first users discover Twitter? Do you know when you joined twitter? MORE >>