According to a recent survey on Hubspot, LinkedIn provides a much higher ratio of leads generated to total page visits than either Facebook or Twitter, with performance well above the average for social media sources. In fact, they quote an average conversion rate of 2.7% for website visitors arriving through LinkedIn, compared to 0.69% for Twitter and 0.77% for Facebook.

The data come from 5000 companies- not a huge sample but enough to make the data interesting. It also fits pretty well with our experience.

The high conversion rate is, perhaps, not surprising when you consider what LinkedIn is and who the viewers are likely to be. Facebook viewers may be wandering idly but LinkedIn users are likely to be looking for something very specific, usually a service or a contact with a very specific area of expertise.

LinkedIn is also refreshingly hard to ‘game’. Any recommendations given can be traced back to a known quantity, and the question/answer structure that pervades LinkedIn’s archives makes it very easy to pick out helpful, knowledgeable users.

Getting involved with LinkedIn is well worth it, particularly for those who are looking to sell to other businesses. If you want to invest a little extra time in social media here are half a dozen things you can do on LinkedIn right now:

1. Find new contacts. When was the last time you updated?

2. Edit your profile. Add a picture and make sure the info reads well and is error-free.

3. Join industry groups. They are a good source of news and interesting research in your area, and a great way to connect with your peers. Comment, post questions, and get involved.

4. Invite contacts you can’t find to join LinkedIn.

5. Ask existing and past contacts for recommendations. Even a one-liner helps.

6. Share you LinkedIn profile on your website or through other social channels.

This guest post comes courtesy of Garry Pickles at Online Media Direct, internet marketing exper

Researchers have predicted recently that British companies are set to continue strong patterns of investment in online marketing strategies and the technology that goes with it throughout 2012.

In contrast to the shaky UK economy as a whole, the digital economy is riding high, Econsultancy’s third annual Marketing Budgets Report said.  It noted that some 69 per cent of companies in the UK have declared that they will be increasing their budgets  for online marketing this year, compared to just 45 per cent who are increasing their overall marketing budgets and a mere 16 per cent who will be increasing their non-digital marketing funds.

Researchers have uncovered four key details which look set to make online marketing a very exciting sector to be in this year:

• Some 79 per cent of all companies planning to boost their internet marketing budgets are doing so by 10 per cent or more.
• Companies are devoting 37 per cent of their overall marketing budget on digital campaigns this year, compared to 36 per cent in 2011
• An impressive 74 per cent of companies will be boosting their funds for online marketing technology in 2012, compared to just 67 the previous year.
• Well over half of all UK companies – 56 per cent – will be stepping up recruitment for their online marketing sections this year. This is a 4 per cent increase on the 52 per cent of firms that did the same last year.

The report was compiled in association with Experian Marketing Services, whose UK & Ireland managing director Mark Zablan pointed out that marketers are “investing in the tools, technology and people to allow them to deliver greater returns on their campaigns and present insight and results back to the business in a meaningful and incisive way.”

Other key findings of the survey were:

• Companies are feeling the lack of sufficient online marketing staff. Such shortages were given as the joint second most common barrier to investing in the field, along with company culture.
• Marketers find it easier to measure the results from online marketing drives, compared to more old-fashioned methods. Some 55 per cent of respondents said they had a “good” or “very good” grasp of the ROI gained through digital marketing, as opposed to just 44 per cent for traditional marketing.
• Most investment in online marketing this year is likely to be in social media – one of the big growth areas of 2011. Some 69 per cent of companies surveyed said that their budgets would be increased for “off-site” social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
• The other major area for online marketing investment is in mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. A hefty 57 per cent of respondents said that they would be putting money into mobile apps in 2012.

Their research (and that of a good many others) shows that Googblebot is no longer a simple text reader. Its ability to interact intelligently with Java has been well established for a while now, and official sources announced new capabilities for dealing with AJAX POST requests last month. There is no doubt that search crawlers can capture more than ever before.

So, what does a smarter Googlebot (and smarter crawlers more generally) mean for SEO? Search professionals are going to be a little more careful about the way they do some things, but the main take-home message is this: usability and design considerations aren’t just about user experience any more. They’re going to have an impact on organic search too.

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Much of the manual content was pretty much as the SEO community had long suspected but there were a few interesting points. Probably the most interesting is about the way Google assumes intent on the part of a searcher. It’s not just a question of guessing that you’d be more likely to be after local shops and services but a deeper assumption that in order to be relevant to a keyword, you should be relevant to their idea of a dominant interpretation of that keyword, if there is one.

The other biggie is that duplicate content doesn’t necessarily bring up a red flag. There is a more subtle discrination going on. This tallies well with a few things I’ve seen over the last few months and there are probably other analysts who feel the same.

Most people won’t be making major adjustments to their SEO strategy after reading the 125 document (or any of the commentary that’s popping up all over the search community). It might, however, be really useful to anyone who has suffered a big drop in organic traffic and can’t figure out exactly what went wrong.

Why did they do this? Well, the official statement cited privacy concerns but people some have other ideas. In fact, quite a lot of people have other ideas and most of them don’t like new scheme one little bit.

Of course, this isn’t the only change they’ve made lately. The new toys provided in Google Analytics/Webmaster tools are intended to help with SEO, but at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much data in there that couldn’t be obtained elsewhere in a neater, rather more informative package. It seems they’ve taken away more than they’ve given.

The change to search keyword reporting is more likely to irritate the analytics community than it is to cause huge uncertaintly for individual websites, but as always, being aware of changes to algorithms and reporting platforms is the best way to make sure that a new pattern isn’t mistakenly attributed. If you see (not provided) popping up, it’s nothing to do with a change in your traffic, just a change in what Google is willing to tell you about it.

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Most people treat the figures that come from Google Analytics or another reporting suite as gospel, so it often comes as a shock when two sets of figures are compared. If the visitor numbers that come out of Google Analytics are plotted against the visitor numbers obtained by statistical analysis of the server logs, the GA figures will almost always be significantly lower.

It’s actually pretty hard to count visitors. First of all, you have to decide who should be counted- there is a world of difference between a real person looking at your site and an automated search crawler indexing the pages. Server logs count both search bots and human browsers, and while tools like AWStats and Webalizer do try and filter out the crawlers it can be quite hard to catch them all, so real visitor numbers might be a little inflated.

Google Analytics uses another approach. Users loading a page trigger a piece of Javascript. This code snippet is not tripped by robot crawlers, so the only people who register as visitors are real people. The downside is that a significant percentage of users browse the internet with Java disabled so they aren’t counted either. Therefore Google Analytics tends to underestimate visitor numbers.

There is also the issue of what counts as a session. If a user closes their browser window and then immediately reopens it on one of your pages, does that count as a separate visit? If they are inactive for an hour, then resume browsing, should that count as the same session? Different analytics packages have different ways of counting sessions and this will also affect total visit counts.

Then there are sampling issues. If your site sees millions of visits, some software packages will sample the dataset rather than examine each individual element. This can provide a good statistical picture of what’s going on, but it inevitably introduces some degree of error.

So, with all those accuracy problems, how can web analysts hope to generate useful insights? Consistency is the key. If Google Analytics always underestimates visitor numbers by 12% because 12% of the target market disables Java, the exact figures may be off but the trends are still sound. A 30% rise in visitor numbers is still a 30% rise in visitor numbers, even if the exact numbers aren’t known precisely.

Usually, problems only arise when measurement methods change. If you’re moving from one analytics package to another, it’s good practice to run the two side by side for at least a month. That way you’ll be able to see how the two sets of figures relate to one another. Don’t worry if they don’t match up exactly, because they almost certainly won’t!

In terms of the raw number of searches performed each month, Twitter sees more than Bing and Yahoo together. The figure is a little misleading (the percentage of automated searches is much higher on Twitter) but it does demonstrate the massive power and influence of social media. Twitter is now being used as a source of news as well as entertainment.

Social searching is also growing fast. 20 years ago, you might have picked up the telephone directory when to find a local plumber. 10 years ago, searching through Google would have been just as likely. Now, rather than relying on a search engine’s rankings to find the best plumber in your area, you may well put out a call on Facebook or Tweet something like ‘Anyone know a good plumber in Philadelphia?’

People who use Twitter in this way are looking for trusted recommendations from real people, but smart businesses who monitor Twitter for terms like “plumber” + “Philadelphia” can also reply, and if they appear helpful they’ve got a good chance of picking up a new client.

Twitter monitoring isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to take up time. Tools like Monitter (monitter.com) trawl through Twitter traffic in real time, collecting relevant posts within a set geographical area. Others, like Tweetbeep  can send email updates whenever your chosen set of search terms comes up. If you use Google Alerts to monitor new websites, Tweetbeep can extend your watch to include Twitter traffic. Twazzup  searches through recent news items and Tweets for the terms of your choice. There are also numerous mobile apps for sending, reading, and monitorring tweets.

If you’re serious about Twitter monitoring Monitter can be left running in the background as you work. Once set up, Tweetbeep won’t bother you unless something relevant comes up, and whenever you happen to have a spare five minutes, you can check Twazzup or a mobile app like Echofon. Twitter monitoring doesn’t have to take long and it doesn’t have to be complex. Anyone can do it, and enjoy the benefits.

Happily, there is a handy record of algorithm updates over at SEOMoz. It only covers the bigger changes but it’s very useful nonetheless.