Google+ Custom URLs: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What's New This Week?

Google+ Rolls Out Custom URLs for Profiles and Pages: Google+ is “introducing custom URLs to a limited number of verified profiles and pages.” Custom URLs will be made available to others in the future, but Google has not said when.

Klout Gets a Major Update: Klout has made changes to the way they calculate Klout scores to increase accuracy, give more transparency and improve website design. There's also a new feature called Moments, which displays the content and ideas that have been most influential across all of your networks. With these recent changes, Klout helps “everyone to gain a clearer, more accurate understanding of how they influence other people through the ideas they share.”

Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

• What do you think of expressing your political beliefs in social media?
• What's a good landing page app for your business blog?
• How do you put your blog on your Facebook page?

Pinterest Introduces Android, iPad and iPhone Apps: Pinterest makes it “easier to take your inspirations with you by providing new apps for Android, iPad and iPhone. The apps are now available for download at Apps.Pinterest.com.”

LinkedIn Joins the New Office App Store: LinkedIn is a featured partner in Microsoft’s new app store with a new LinkedIn for Outlook app. The new LinkedIn for Outlook app offers a few new features that allow professionals to immediately see rich insights right where they need them most—in email and calendar.

Facebook Sponsored Stories Get Performance Metrics: Inside Facebook reports that “Facebook is now offering advertisers new metrics about how their Sponsored Stories perform in the news feed, including the average position within the feed where the story was inserted.”

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Facebook Streamlines Ad Creation Process: The new Facebook Ad creation process strives to help businesses create ads and Sponsored Stories in alignment with their goals. Find out more here.

Facebook Gives Developers the Ability to Publish More Prominent Stories: Facebook made a few improvements to Open Graph and introduces “explicitly shared actions” to let apps notify them when a user wants to prominently share something like they would through posting it directly on Facebook.

Google Maps Now Has More Than One Million Public Transit Schedules: Today, Google Maps has public transportation schedules for more than one million transit stops worldwide in nearly 500 cities including New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney. There's also a useful update to the Google Maps for Android app.

Google Updates Search Algorithm to Punish Copyright Violators:  Popular business blogs often find their content republished on other websites without their consent. Google is now taking into account a new signal in their rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices they receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in Google search results.

Here's a useful social media tool worth noting:

Bitrix24: a social intranet tool, free for small businesses.

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