I was pleased to read today about Facebook’s rapid enlightenment on the need for easy to use privacy settings. That it comes as a reaction to Google+’s Circles feature (which has been widely praised for it’s usability), is enormously satisfying. Not only do we now have some real competition among social networks. that competition is starting to make them better. Excellent!

As part of it’s enhanced privacy launch, Facebook is providing more control over how images are tagged with your name, and where they appear. Privacy settings are now available on every post and image, and Facebook users can now edit posts after they go live – features that Google+ got right first time.  As always these changes are rolling out over days – so you might not have them yet.

One other bit of Facebook news that’s worth noting: it would seem they’ve lost the battle for check-ins with Foursquare. They have abandoned the check-in feature in Facebook Places. David 1: Goliath 0.

Several months ago I ran some tests on the impact of Facebook Likes on Google Rankings. After receiving several e-mails and tweets asking whether Google +1s have any impact on rankings, I decided to run some similar experiments in order to give a more conclusive answer.

I began my Google +1 experiment by taking 35 URLs across six unique domains with various traits: a mixture of indexed/unindexed, had links/no links, home pages/deep pages, had social signals/no social signals etc. All of these domains had experienced no significant changes in rankings for a while, i.e. the main keywords that I was tracking had not moved for a fair amount of time and there was very little other activity being done on them.

I then requested some +1s from a variety of different groups of people and monitored the log files, rankings, Google Analytics, and Webmaster Tools’ Google +1 section to spot any interesting trends.

Results:

Analysis:
Although it has only been one week since starting the test, and the sample size (35 URLs across six domains) is not at all statistically significant enough to make any rash conclusions, my general observation is that +1s from genuine Google+ users do improve rankings. However, in the case of URL 1, which was the only URL that was not indexed, the +1s had no impact on getting it indexed.
The scale of some of the ranking increases was also very varied: one of the URLs increased the ranking for a targeted keyword from 75 up to 27 in Google UK. Another Keyword increased from 42 to 18, and another increased from 8 to 6.

Google+1s Impact on Traffic:
Here is a Google Analytics screenshot for URL 6 (the domain where +1s were spread across 30 URLs). As you can see, after relatively stable traffic there does appear to be a slight overall increase in traffic – although it’s hard to say whether this is was caused by the +1s or if it is just correlation. Either way, it hasn’t smashed the site’s traffic, but it is a noticeable increase (from ~185 visits a day to ~225).

To learn more about his experiment and how to harness the power of social seo, join his session at Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 London on September 19th.

A survey from Gartner has revealed that, while social media usage continues to grow, early adopters are showing signs of fatigue. According to the survey, which gathered the views of 6,000 people, “24 percent of respondents indicated that they were using their main social site “a little less” or “a lot less” than when they first started using it”.

Now this is very much in line with my own experience and anecdotal findings through friends and clients – and it’s close to my heart. For those people who joined Facebook early on, the buzz of having connected with friends, poked them, seen their holiday snaps, and chatted a few times has started to fade. Is this down to feed burn-out (i.e. too many irrelevant updates), or a lack of new and interesting features? Perhaps it’s just our usual habit of becoming bored with things after a while – or maybe we’ve run out of things to say?

It’s probably a mix of these things. early adopters are, by definition, keen and savvy, so in my view, if we’re getting bored with Facebook (and possibly also Twitter), it’s because those sites haven’t developed with us. Instead they’ve done what big business always does: look for the easy customer – in this case in new territories – and, just keep cranking the same old lever. After all, if it ain’t broke…

The problem is: for many of us it is broke.

Look how Google+ has taken the best interactive elements of Facebook, added better privacy controls and a smarter UI and sparked our interest again. Look how better Twitter apps are than Twitter itself: the mute feature on Echofon that allows you to switch off overly chatty friends (or hashtags), or the multiple time-lines you can set up on TweetBot (both iPhone apps). Think how much better the usability is when you monitor your network updates and post-to-all through social media dashboards like Hootsuite or MarketMeSuite.

The large social networks have been failing their early adopters for a couple of years now. As a result, we ‘re leaving in droves. Chris Brogan is one of the highest profile figures to commit facebook suicide and shift to Google+, but there are millions of less prominent users who feel the same.  I’ve been pretty disillusioned with Twitters treatment of it’s 3rd party app developers, so I was pleased to see the launch of Heello. Admittedly, it’s a Twitter clone at the moment, but this is a market that desperately needs competition to regain it’s mojo.

Is competition the answer? Are privacy concerns an issue? Have we started to lose faith in our online friends and their recommendations? I’d be interested to hear some thoughts on this.