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Yea, I am not seeing a way to do this for my clients so I guess it is not available here. Thanks for the link though

Thanks for the responses, much appreicated.

I am seeing your social media buttons throughout your blog archive and single blog posts pages. They all seem to have different numbers associated with them also. It seems to be working for me, did you figure this out?

It is my understanding that in testing done by many to track click-thru rates on SERPs that listings with a picture that results from the rich snippet does get more clicks than a listing without. Rand referred to testing that SEOMoz had done on this today in his Whiteboard Friday blog post. I think there is a residual benefit to SEO as a result of that. SERPs with higher click-thrus and lower bounce rates can benefit and get a higher ranking over time as a result. I believe AJ Kohn also referred to testing he had done on click-thru rate for his SERP results in his presentation at MozCon 2012. He even split test his Google+ profile picture, I believe, and found that one did better than another. I don't think the benefit is limited to Google+ snippets either. For example, if you've used Structured Data to mark up your site to let Googlebot more easily discover your customer review ratings, these too might show in your SERP listings as star ratings that could greatly impact click-thru rates (and by association, SEO).

Hi, I am not hearing any bad things about this company, and i did not found any reviews about this company.

Hi! I would definitely link to Google+ from your website. It just has so many benefits for SEO, that having that connection won't hurt. It doesn't need to be super prominent if the majority of your community is on FB and Twitter. But I don't think it will hurt anything by having it there. Plus, you may find that you actually do have a community on G+. I also agree with bjgomer13 that everyone you ask will probably say something different.

Thanks for your response and I will take a look at the url suggested!

Thanks for the advice Mat  - certainly useful to know it isn't worth investing a lot of time into for SEO purposes.

I think this is exactly the point - no matter now boring you perceive it, now matter how niche the problem your business solves, then there is someone out there who needs that information. Now, whether they will share it or not is another matter but if you answer those questions, they will certainly find you and then you can look at other ways of converting a percentage of those visitors in leads or prospects down the road.

There is no value if you artificially inflate your like count through competitions or purchased likes in any other form. Your social engagement across FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest etc should come naturally. You should start engaging with your customers/users via the social channels. Social media provides a good extension to deliver content really fast to your audience. It helps to have a social marketing strategy - the simplest form is to measure engagement via retweeting/sharing or commenting. More complex is to measure conversions originating from social media. Ideal scenario would be that you post something on social media which does not advertise something on your main site, and traffic results in conversion because of the engagement.

Google will not really care about FB likes. Not even FB cares too much about artificially inflating likes. Almost all FB competitions attracting likes are short lived and hardly ever engage your brand with the user and there will be zero stickiness. Consider the FB likes a vanity number and nothing else. If a company has no social engagement on the FB wall (i.e. no shares or comments), then it's not worth it to run a campaign. I would rather look at an all-inclusive social campaign where you stretch across Twitter, FB, G+ and Pinterest. We had good engagement from users with our photo- or Pinterest competitions and actually saw backlinks and referrals growing from this. Also look at engaging new / existing users on your site and/or blog - this will have more value than just artificially growing some meaningless number.

We don't know about the direct effects of social media participation on rankings. However, we do know about the indirect effects. White-hat link building is relationship building. Build relationships with influencers in your niche, get them to notice your stuff, and they might share your stuff to their followers or link to it on their websites. Their followers might also link to it on their websites. I know that I often blog about something I found on Twitter or Facebook. Plus, so many searches are personalized now, showcasing results from the searcher's network. If you're in their network, your content is more likely to show up. Social media can also be a simple form of reputation management. If you have active accounts on the major social networks, it's likely that they will appear on page 1 when someone searches your brand, possibly pushing down anything negative.

Accounting, at least, doesn't have to be boring. They could use social media to share their own content about small business tips, home budgeting tips, tax tips, etc. or to share and comment on news stories about the industry. Will you have a giant following? Probably not. But it's still worth a few minutes a day. As for the other companies, those are very niche and not sexy. In that case, social media might be primarily about branding and relationship-building -- positioning yourself as a friendly, fun, family company by sharing stories about the workplace, the owner, etc. Then again, there might be a B2B network in those niches. You just have to expand a little. Who buys forklifts? Who hires surveyors? What would they find interesting?

You're welcome. **I figured as much but was hoping there might be a few onsite things I could do. ** I think that is a common pattern.  On site is easier, so we all tend to look for it.  Even when we really know that the answer is "lots of hard link building to do now" we tend to look for other answers.  You don't have to be a noob to fall in to that trap!

Oh my it's no bother. I am glad you found the solution. Cheers!

Hi Guys, I just wanted to add to what I have previously said as when I have dug a bit deeper into this, I have found some info that could go against what I have previously said. You can use the rel=publisher tag alongside the rel=author tag on a webpage. With this in mind it would be a good idea to have the rel=publisher present on every page in your website to enable you to be eligible for Google's Direct Connect feature. I found this out when looking through a Google forum and one of the Google Trend Analysts confirmed this by saying: Hi guys _just a few short comments: it's fine to have both a link rel=publisher and author-markup on the same page. The rel=publisher confirms that your website is the publisher of that Google+ Page; the authorship markup confirms that you (your personal profile) is the author of the content on that page. This markup can be used independently, since  the meanings are slightly different. The issue with the Rich Snippets testing tool flagging this as an error is a bug on our side and should be resolved soon (sorry about the confusion caused by that!). _Cheers__John Just thought I would share this with you all as it might help. Matt.

Tiffany, The sharing and retweeting of your images will definitely help you gain edge rank, the specific applications, but if you're looking to optimize your site using both Facebook and Twitter you have to remember that Facebook is mostly closed off to Google. Twitter has started closing off other companies as well, but it still does get crawled a bit from Google.  What I would suggest is Tweet a picture then also attach your brand's name to the Website.  Maybe like this, "Like this? :insert image:   It's available now at Tiffany.com"  It won't give you a lot of link juice but it will give you some especially if it's shared a lot.