Foursquare is an application (app) for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm that takes social networking to the next level. Users can update their location and send reviews about their favorite hangouts. This app uses a list of restaurants, bars and nightclubs and it integrates with Yelp and Google Maps, making it ideal for quick reviews and directions.

Foursquare lets other users know where you are. You can even “check-in” someplace to let your friends or social contacts know you are there. You can also let them know any specials or other things to do nearby. There is a competitive element to Foursquare that creates engagement. For example, you can earn badges and points for each action you complete, including “checking in” or becoming the “mayor” of a location. As more of your friends use Foursquare, you will learn more and more about the places they frequent and you can discover new places.

Foursquare goes beyond the typical online reviews seen in directories. Got a favorite local hangout? Local businesses that use Foursquare begin to recognize patrons and reward them with special offers, deals and incentives. For example, a restaurant engaged in Foursquare may want to offer a devoted customer free coffee, appetizers, ice cream or otherwise. Businesses should take this and other opportunities like Foursquare and run with them. Reward customer loyalty. It is a great way to get repeat customers and gain their social contacts as customers through word of mouth recommendations.

Many of us have used LinkedIn as a way to maintain a professional profile within the social networks. LinkedIn is a great platform to communicate with business professionals and it can also be used to open communications with businesses. By direct communication or joining a group, it is easier than ever to reach important members of any business.

Can businesses use LinkedIn as a way to market to other businesses? LinkedIn DirectAds is an additional channel for business-to-business advertisers to capture qualified visitors. It offers advertisers many targeting options to help qualify the audience. With 7 top level categories, businesses can choose up to 3 of the categories to target, including industry, company size, job function, seniority, age, gender, and geography. LinkedIn is a good option for businesses, because they can target the exact industry, company size and even job function of their potential clients.

Most business to business companies know exactly who they want to target in a company. For example, advertisers may want to specifically reach a marketing manager in an enterprise level company. Creating very custom ad messaging to capture these people can turn them into customers.

LinkedIn DirectAds have no minimum spend requirements and can also be paid via a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) platform. Similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn DirectAds can also have images in the body, which helps to brand the message as well as help to gain user attention.

With LinkedIn DirectAds, businesses are able to target qualified decision makers in their industry.

People on the web publish content in many different ways that include using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social channels. But if you have ever searched on Google to find a blog your friend published, you most likely wouldn’t find it in the top search results. Google is changing all of that by introducing Google Social Search on Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to help you find more relevant public content from your social network in one place. In Social Search, Google will find personalized results from your friends or contacts and highlight them at the bottom of your search page.

No private information will be seen, as Google will only show information that is published publicly on the web. All the information in Social Search can be found elsewhere, however Google is putting all of the content together in a single place to make your results more relevant and personalized.

Google builds a social circle of your friends, connections and contacts using the links from your public Google profile, such as people you are following on Twitter or other social media channels. This new feature will also use your connections from Gmail; however you will need to be signed into your Google account because the results are specific to you. Your social search results will show up at the bottom of the page under “Results from people in your social circle.”

Social Search will make search results more relevant and personalized for you specifically. Next time you do a search on Google, be sure to see what your social network has published about the topic.

With the explosion of social media channels, it is easier than ever for consumers to share their experiences about companies or products. With Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn, people are talking.

This is where companies get scared. “What do I do when I get negative word of mouth via social channels”, they ask. Taking a more proactive approach, as opposed to a reactionary one could help confine negative comments. There is no way to stop people from sharing their thoughts but, as a company, you can take steps to minimize the negativity.

It’s best to have a plan in place for these situations before they even happen. Also, make sure you are on the social media channels where your audience may be having conversations related to your brand or products. Engage participants within these channels and build your following.

It is important to listen to what is being said. Don’t just spout your message with no regard to what your audience is saying. By listening carefully, you can then better respond in the most appropriate manner. It is vital to measure the success of your reputation management strategy in social channels. Is what you are doing to minimize bad publicity working or should you try a new approach?

Most important is to approach reputation management in social media channels with professionalism and courtesy.

Are you launching a new product or service? Are you looking to fill inventory at rock bottom rates? Using social media to drive hoards of traffic to your site could be the solution. Nothing brings in the people like the words “free”, “win” and “sweepstakes”.

Many businesses are using contests as a way to garner interest in a brand, product or service and get traffic to their site. Businesses can promote the contests on various social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter. Marriott, for example, recently launched a contest, “Tweet Yourself to Hawaii”. This sweepstakes allows you to enter for a chance to win a trip to Hawaii using your Twitter username and login. Also, you can enter for another chance on Facebook.

It is important to make sure the prize is something people want. Free t-shirts are not as appealing as a free iPod or even a cash prize. Is the contest something that is easy to share with friends making it have a viral effect? Contests should be fun and engaging. This is not the time to tout a brand, focus on the contest and so will visitors.

When beginning a contest, it is important to let people know about it. Press releases, tweets, blogs, forums and even links to the contest on your site are all good ways to get exposure for your contest. Contests are a great way to increase traffic to your site and get people more engaged in your brand.

Facebook already offers behavioral targeting which allows advertisers to reach visitors based on interests. Advertisers can also target visitors by demographics. For example, marketers can target females between the ages of 25-34 with college degrees that are interested in travel.

Slowly, Facebook has been enhancing its targeting features. With the recent release of ad scheduling and ad editing, advertising on Facebook is becoming more appealing.  Last week, Facebook announced even more features to enhance targeting. First and perhaps most interesting is connection targeting. With connection targeting, advertisers have the ability to only reach fans of any of their pages, users of any of their applications, members of any of their groups, or attendees of any of their events, which can help solidify brand loyalty with the right messaging.

Another feature update is the ability to advertise in multiple countries. In the past, if you wanted to target different countries, you would need to create a new campaign. Now, advertisers have the options to add up to 25 different countries per campaign. Ad delivery is based on IP address.

Birthday targeting is another feature that was recently released. The ability to capture this specific audience sounds insignificant, but can be very powerful. Remember, by creating very specific ad copy messaging, you can reach an exact audience. Who wouldn’t click on an ad that says, “Happy Birthday to you. Click here and save 10% on your purchase for your birthday”?

With each rollout of enhancements from Facebook, advertisers have more opportunities to better target their audience. Combined with specific ad copy, advertisers can reach a highly qualified and engaged audience.

Many companies are afraid to delve into the brave new world of social media. A major reason for concern is that consumers can speak their minds and have their opinions heard by a larger audience than ever before. For most companies, this can be a great thing. Your consumers are actively engaged in your brand and are speaking out about it. However, the fear arises when the conversations are not positive. What do you do when your consumers are giving not so great feedback on your company? Do you just ignore it and hope it goes away?

The answer to that is a simple, no. Your audience is going to be on different social channels, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, blogs or forums, giving their opinions. For good or bad, it is necessary to have a presence on the social media channels.

We all know that every company will experience some negative word of mouth comments.  If a company discovers that a customer is unhappy, they should reach out to the person to rectify the situation, turning a negative experience into a positive one. Social media channels are the ideal place to do that. Once that person is satisfied or the audience knows you have reached out to do the right thing, you will not only recover from the negative publicity, you have also gained positive publicity. Leveraging social media can not only overcome bad publicity, it can also fortify strong relationships with your loyal consumers.

YouTube has undergone massive changes in the past few months. One major change is the move toward concentrating on advertisers and partners. YouTube has discovered how to better monetize their site by adding features to help brands, big and small, with their marketing initiatives. In an effort to reach that segment of its users, YouTube launched the YouTube Biz Blog.

YouTube Biz Blog is targeted specifically for partners and advertisers and provides tips, tricks and the latest feature updates. The forum was designed to introduce business opportunities to advertisers and partners.  By showing businesses how to leverage YouTube, the video giant hopes to help businesses engage their audiences more.

There have already been a few blog posts on topics such as the integration with YouTube Brand Channels and Google Analytics, YouTube Partner Program, and Mosaics. Partners also have the option to subscribe to the RSS feed so they are always kept up to date.

With businesses still trying to discover ways to use social media to build brand awareness and boost their bottom lines, the YouTube Biz Blog is another tool in getting helpful ideas designed solely for advertisers and YouTube partners.

It seems hard to imagine just six years ago, MySpace was created, revolutionizing the internet. It can be said that MySpace was the beginning of what we all now know as social media. Two short years later, Facebook came into the picture.

Facebook has steadily grown while MySpace has been declining. It was less than a year ago that MySpace had more visitors than Facebook. However, according to comScore, MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%. In contrast, Facebook garnered 276 million unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%.

According to the graph below from Compete, Facebook overtook MySpace in December 2008 and continues its growth, while MySpace experiences a sharp decline in visitors.

While the largest demographic on Facebook is ages 18-25, the fastest growing demographic is women aged 55 and over. This could be a major contributing reason for Facebook surpassing MySpace in the number of visitors.

By now, we know that internet users are very fickle and what is today’s social hot spot could be tomorrows passing fad. By this time next year, we could start to see other social networks, like Twitter or LinkedIn surpassing these social media giants, making both Facebook and MySpace yesterday’s new.