I didn’t expect this! Twitter is the fastest-growing search mechanism on the web. I hesitate to call twitter a “search engine” (contrary to my headline) because it does so much more and wasn’t originated to be used as a search mechanism first and all other things a distant second (like most traditional search engines, like google, yahoo, and bing).

Not only is twitter the fastest-growing, it is now 2nd only to the almighty google in terms of number of searches performed in a month. Get this:

This is up 33% from April, where at Twitter’s Chirp conference Stone said Twitter was serving 600 million search queries per day. This roughly equates to 24 billion searches per month which is more than Bing (4.1) and Yahoo (9.4) combined.

Twitter is a formidable player now not only in social media but in news and search. How about that?

Socialnomics – Social Media Blog

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Facebook is the single most popular website in the world. Not just as a social media platform, but as a site. Period. As a business owner, you may feel like you’re limited in what you can do with Facebook Fan pages (and you’d be right) but there is a special programming/markup language you can use to do lots of cool stuff on your own Facebook page(s).

The application that allows this is called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Here, John Haydon shows how to add a clickable image on a Facebook page tab and how to embed a YouTube video.

Very cool stuff!

How to Customize Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Using Static FBML

Ah, the dreaded question – what is my return on investment with social media?

John Haydon is one of the foremost authorities on using social media and he’s one of my go-to experts on the topic. Here’s an interesting quote from John that illustrates his point quite well.

The return you get from using social media has more to do with how you use it rather than the medium itself. Trying to justify using it is no different from trying to justify using a telephone to create better relationships with your donors.

The Limits Of Calculating Social Media ROI

Here's an interesting article about the effects of social media on the brain. This could explain the seeming addiction of some to Facebook and/or Twitter!

Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love

As Zak and others deepen their study of oxytocin, we may better understand why people with friends live longer and get sick less, and why we are compelled to be social animals online and off. If these changes apply in the world of social media, the implications for business — for every brand, company, and marketer trying to understand the now intimately networked world — could be significant.

More at Doctor Love | Fast Company
 

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I saw the video below and just had to share it. The guys who put these videos together are comedic geniuses. They're also expert marketers. Watch and learn.