The promotion runs from June 11 to September 21, 2012, which means, in order to qualify, you must actually make your Mac purchase between those dates. The Back to School gift Card may be used on books, apps, music and videos.

To qualify for the Back to School Gift Card offer, you must be a college student, a student who has been accepted into a university, a parent buying for a college student, or a faculty member from any grade level. Students and teachers will also qualify for Apple Education Pricing, which could save them a little money on hardware.

Buy a qualifying Mac from the Apple Online Store for Education, the Apple Retail store, or an Apple Authorized Campus Store to receive the free gift card, which can be used in iTunes or the iOS and Mac App Stores as well as iBookstore.

Apple also went to the trouble of creating a special section in the Back to School website that highlights Mac and iPad Apps that will useful to students.

Getting a $100 gift card isn’t much when you are paying 1 and a half or 2 thousand dollars for a new laptop, but for those dedicated to purchasing one, the promotion will be an added bonus. Apple isn’t known to drop prices, so anything they do to sweeten the deal is always welcome.

[Apple Insider]

During the promotion, a business can get one pack of 50 cards for free, with additional packs being $15 a pop, which includes shipping. Brands can align specific products and images to different packs, and sort of mix and match what they’re specifically trying to promote.

Richard Moross, CEO and Founder of Moo, states, “As global businesses and brands, large and small, and their agencies seek new ways to catch attention and take advantage of new marketing channels, we believe this free offer will be a much-sought after additional tool to add to their marketing suite.”

During Moo’s aforementioned promotion earlier in the year, free cards were shipped to over 150 countries, including Greenland and Maldives. Paul Lewis, Head of Marketing for Moo, states, “The response from our first Moo offer was very positive and generated great momentum for our business. We quickly realized that we were filling a very timely niche in the marketplace for users who wanted a more dynamic, buzzworthy and fun social-networking experience. Our new offer is designed to fulfill a further need on the business side and meet the expectations of our loyal customers for other, more versatile ways to use Moo.com cards – and we’re delivering.”

One can begin building their free cards by visiting the Moo site.

To see if you can really drive up an organic search engine ranking using some social media sites you may have heard of, TastyPlacement created about as controlled of an experiment as you could do within the vast petri dish that is the internet. As it turns out, collecting Google+ followers seems to be the best way to push a site’s ranking up by as much as 14.63%. Facebook and Twitter showed signs of improving organic search results but not nearly to the degree of promoting via Google+ followers (canvasing for +1s on Google+ resulted in a slightly lesser push in search ranking, but still wasn’t too bad). The only promotional strategy that didn’t seem to improve a site’s ranking was by recruiting Twitter followers.

Have a look at the full infographic detailing the experiment and its results done by TastyPlacement, and feel free to comment with any of your experience or thoughts below.

[Via AllTwitter.]

If you haven’t used Quara before here’s a discretion of what they do from the Quara blog site:

“Unlike traditional social networks, Quora gives you access to people who haven’t explicitly opted in to follow or friend you. This makes the product powerful, but it means that one person’s actions can affect many other people. Credits mediate the flow of information so that people aren’t overwhelmed by the increasingly vast number of other people who have access to them. This allows us to continue to build features that let you access large audiences and diverse groups of experts, and furthers our goal of connecting you with everything you want to know about.”

The whole system of currency is based on your reputation. If you answer questions with clear articulate and knowledgable answers you earn credit. If simply mock people and provide no insight or clarification, your reputation will suffer and you will earn very little. I guess it’s social capital at its very finest. Anyhow, it costs capital to post questions and now, to promote questions to larger audiences. But, if it’s a subject or question that you really need addressed, it must be worth it.

Here are some responses from users on the blog site about the addition of ‘pay for promotion’ at Quora:

“One tiny thing you might wanna consider: if you’re requiring an expenditure of 50 credits to ask a question, perhaps make the slider cap out so the user is left with 50 credits.”

Awesome. Thanks, Adam, for the announcement and a big thanks to the Team’s tireless efforts to make Quora a better place.

“I think this is awesome. Promoting an answer has already got me two upvotes out of the blue. My only concern is that even at 100 credits, that would mean I need 10 upvotes to recuperate my costs and that’s a high number of upvotes for the average answer.”

“It’s gambling. Spend some to promote a question with the hope or either getting more answers or upvotes. For those that want to play and really enjoy tracking the credits it’s a great feature. It’s going to change the nature of Quora more.”

“I’m just a little worried that good questions from new (ie not power or “celebrity”) users will get buried by the whole commodity market of credits, and people with influence (ie people with lots and lots of credits) will be able to pack user feeds with posts and questions which are more relevant to them than to everyone else.”

“Wow, 50 Credit cost to ask a question is HUGE! My gut reaction is that it will do a LOT to improve question quality on the site, as well as help reinforce the idea of questions being reusable.”

So it sounds like people are generally excited about the addition of the new feature, but there is some concern too. I haven’t used Quora so I wonder if this new ‘pay for promotion’ could drown out some highly relevant or interesting topics or questions. If the whole point is gaining exposure to get feedback or answers, how does a new user gain enough clout, or credit to even make using Quora worth while? I would really be interested to know. I guess I should use Quora to find out.

First and foremost, it should be understood that not all video content is viral-worthy. There are millions of great videos on YouTube that haven’t reached atmospheric-levels of popularity, thanks to constant sharing among friends. For further clarification, here are some tips Terpin discussed some general ideas concerning online videos:

- Educational videos don’t need virality to be effective

- Video increases engagement on Facebook updates, tweets, Google+ and other social network engagement

- Universal search means that video will show up higher

- Videos continue to grow as a percentage of content in the “how to” space

- video nearly always improves clickthrough for a search result

As you can see, social platform success doesn’t necessarily mean viral-levels of popularity, but when people do share your video content, it almost forces people to interact with it. How to videos are great for attracting visitors, as well as increasing your perceived level of authority. Of course, there are many different ways to engage the social media side of web users with video, and Terpin discusses a few of them:

- Webisodes

- Video catalog with ecommerce links

- Repurpose live footage

- Instructional / customer service (keep it short, entertaining)

- Viral event marketing, tied in with Facebook, email

- Viral video (or at least videos hoping to become viral)

The downside to attempts at going viral is you have little-to-no control once the video goes live. You can’t control how people are going to react to your work. What you may perceive as being funny may be viewed as being lame. It’s important to know what your audience is looking for and create accordingly.

As for people marketing directly to the consumer, with ideas of using YouTube as a platform for your videos, here are some things to consider. First, the good aspects of using YouTube:

- Free, easy to upload

- Can be repurposed into many forms of social media and social networks

- Universal search brings video results gives video a boost in search results

- Mass virality is possible with the right ingredients and promotion into the blogosphere

Now, for some things to watch out for:

- High quality production can be expensive

- Sound quality and lighting makes or breaks a video

- Most videos are doomed to have very few views

- The new ability of filimmakers to monetize both videos and viral videos makes it even tougher to break through the noise

Granted, some of this isn’t as much on YouTube as it is on the video creator, especially the production aspects. Sound quality, as well as lighting, can be controlled by the producer. Because of YouTube’s viral nature, the benefits clearly outweigh the potential potholes. For those of you wondering whether or not video content is the right avenue of marketing for you to travel down, here are some other ideas to consider:

- Are you looking for fifteen minutes of fame, a lasting brand, or to drive a specific action (cause/purchase)?

- Does the video hit the mark? will the viewers get what you’re tring to do?

- Do you have an obsession for crispness and quality?

If so, it’s something to consider, plus, the viral nature of videos makes it almost too tempting to pass up. Just remember, go for quality. When shooting for the viral approach with videos, the risk and reward needs to be considered because of all social media efforts, viral video is the hardest to pull off. That being said, if done well, videos can be the most effective viral content on the web.

Terpin also provided a checklist for viral success, one that contains some good direction:

- Short, fast-paced: two minutes is the gold standard

- Videos should be disruptive: funny, shocking, surprising, adorable

- Celebrities help, including web celebs

- Editing must be crisp; many good tools abound (including new cloud-based service, WeVideo)

- Sound quality is paramount. Nothing should distract from the message

- Key question: would you pass this to a friend?

Because virality success is based almost solely on the sharing aspect the web now rotates around, if you wouldn’t share it with your friend, it’s doubtful the video has the legs to crossover into the land of viral success. Keep in mind, however, not all videos have to be viral to be considered quality content.

While there are many other smart posts about creating compelling infographics to attract attention, links and traffic, the information on promoting that type of content seems a bit light. If you’ve invested in creating great infographic content and need advice on how to promote, here are a few ideas:

1. Involve credible sources in the data collection and then encourage those sources to help you promote the resulting graphic.

2. Create a blog post for the infographic and support promotion through the blog’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, social news & bookmarking sites)

3. Segment the infographic into screen shots which can be used in blog posts and shared on image hosting sites like Flickr with links back to the main page hosting the full infographic. A week or two after publishing and promoting the infographic, upload the full image and unique description to Flickr with a link back to the original web page.

4. Schedule tweets of specific data points mentioned in the infographic over time with a link back to the full infographic. 10 data points/statistics = 10 tweets. A similar, but more conservative approach can work with Facebook as well.

5. Submit the infographic to aggregators and directories. Here is a short list:

• http://dailyinfographic.com/
• http://www.coolinfographics.com/
• http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/
• http://submitinfographics.com/
• http://www.infographicsarchive.com/
• http://www.visual.ly/ (not live yet)

6. Promote the infographic with an article/news release that includes a link to the full infographic and distribute through a news distribution service like our client PRWeb.

7. Highlight the infographic in an email promotion to your in-house prospect and/or customer list. Include a segment of the graphic and a link for readers to see the full image on your website or blog.

8. Pitch relevant industry bloggers and media on the story behind the data included in the infographic. Focus on relevant, personalized emails and offer previews or pre-release opportunities for more influential sources.

9. Share the infographic with influential users of social news & bookmarking sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, or Digg. Or enlist a connected social media marketing service to do it for you.

10. Create a screencast video version of the infographic and promote through YouTube and other video hosting services.

11. Deconstruct the infographic into a PowerPoint and PDF document and share on Slideshare, Scribd, Docstoc and other document hosting services.

Additional tips that can help promotion include: Make sure the file name includes relevant keywords as well as the text on the web page used to describe the infographic. Social sharing buttons on the page that hosts the infographic should be easy to see and use. Include a text area form element with code that users can copy to embed the infographic (with link back to your site) on their own website or blog.

Obviously there are many other ways to promote and re-purpose great content. I have to say, at TopRank Marketing, we’ve had many opportunities to develop our content marketing and promotion skills as well as content re-purposing. It’s an essential part of an efficient marketing program.

If you’ve been successful at marketing content through infographics, what promotion tactics worked best? What additional ways do you think infographics could be useful on their own or as part of a coordinated content marketing effort?

Profile of a twitter user Infographic courtesy by GDS Infographics, on Flickr

Originally published at TopRank Online Marketing Blog

However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitika’s publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. Visitors that went to a site four or more times in one week were considered loyal users.

By a wide margin, Facebook led the pack in providing loyal traffic. 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the site four or more times per week. Digg was second with slightly over 16%. Digg was followed by search engines: Yahoo, Google, then Bing with 15.89%, 11.84%, and 11.74% respectively. Finally, Twitter came in at 11.08%.

"While Google naturally wins in sheer numbers, if a website owner can drive a thousand people to their site via Google, or they can drive the same number via Facebook, Facebook seems to be the way to go for creating a loyal reader," says Chitika.

The sheer popularity of Facebook and the time spent on the site must play crucial roles in driving repeat traffic. When a user frequently checks for status updates, they are likely to see new posts made from Facebook Pages they are subscribed to. This shows that creating a Facebook page can have a great effect on content publishers.

Twitter has historically been harder for users to manage and keep up with. That may change, however, once the Lists feature reaches the masses.

Is your content easily tweetable? Talk about your strategy with WebProNews readers.

We’re still waiting on Twitter to incorporate the retweet feature onto Twitter.com. Once that happens, retweeting is almost certainly going to go up significantly. According to the rough sketch Twitter provided a while back, there will be a retweet option by the reply option on all individual tweets.

Retweeting is an incredibly useful tool for tweet promotion, which ultimately means for content promotion. If you are producing content, you want people to retweet it and spread it virally around the Twitterverse. This can lead to some big-time traffic. There are other business benefits to retweets as well.

Shéa Bennett, who writes the blog Twittercism, has come up with an obvious, but no so obvious equation for retweet optimization. The concept itself is obvious, the equation itself – not as much. The concept is this: consider Twitter’s 140-character limit, consider your user name, and consider how many characters you need to leave free.

"When sharing links and content, I always ensure I leave a minimum of 12 characters at the end of each and every tweet," says Bennett. "This is a great habit to adopt. Otherwise, those wanting to retweet you are forced to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because f this extra work, many times, they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all."

Originally, Bennett’s equation was:

Your Number = length of username + five characters

That was based on a retweet looking something like this:

RT_@Sheamus_The original tweet goes in here…

The five characters in the equation come from the "R," the "T," the "@," and the two spaces (represented above by underscores).

12 is Bennett’s number. At least it was. He had to change it to 15, because "RT" isn’t the only way people retweet. Sometimes they use "via" with parentheses around "via @username". Upon realization of this, Bennett added  3 to the equation.

Bennett’s equation is now:

Your Number = length of username + eight characters

It is an interesting system to go by, and perhaps a helpful equation, but the larger point of the equation is the real takeaway. If you want to increase your chances of getting retweets, you should be sure you’re leaving room for readers to do it easily. It’s a usability thing. It’s a simple concept that could end up greatly increasing your traffic. Don’t forget to consider any links as added characters.

What do you think is the appropriate amount of space to leave in a tweet? Share your thoughts.

Real-time search, while still in its infancy (if not in utero), is on the rise, and people are searching for up-to-the-minute, what’s happening right-now results for many of their every day queries. Real-time search isn’t a replacement for Google, its a compliment. That’s why Google knows it needs to gravitate in its direction and offer as fresh of results as possible, particularly when relevant.

Google already has a "sorted by date" feature (under "recent results") in its list of search options that users can use to customize their search experience. The jury is still out on how frequently these search options are and will be used, but that option’s there, and chances are that it will get better at indexing fresh content. Chances are also that more and more people will realize that option is available. It hasn’t been around that long yet.

People aren’t just searching on Google and the traditional search engines. They’re searching on social networks too. You know about Twitter’s real-time search, and Facebook recently rolled it out too. Facebook also acquired FriendFeed, which utilizes pretty much every other social network out there.

I’ve already written about why social media is only going to become more important to search, but it’s not just about search. It’s about the way people obtain, absorb, and relay information. They’re doing it on Twitter. They’re doing it on Facebook. They’re doing it on MySpace, and they’re doing it on plenty of other networks (and believe it or not, they’re still doing it through email too).

These are the reasons your content should be as shareable as possible. If you want more people to see it, word of mouth is just as important as search. Social media is the word of mouth of the web.

Include buttons and icons that make your content easy to share on social networks. "Post to Facebook," "Retweet," "Digg," etc. are all buttons that can put your content a click away from going viral. Obviously the content has to be up to par for this to work.

This can work in your favor on down the road as well as the present. Even if an article is a month or a year old, if it is still relevant, someone may happen across it and tweet it or share it some other way. This will not only place your content within the streams of that person’s followers/friends, but also on the radar of any related real-time searches taking place.

Real-time search isn’t just about what’s happening right now. It’s also about what people are talking about right now. It’s up to you to provide content that people will still be talking about later. Giving easy access to sharing features will only ease the way.

How important to you think real-time search is to the future of online marketing? Share your thoughts.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called " Project Retweet," which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

 But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the "like" feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook "like," a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your "likes" on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be "noise" on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old "content is king" cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole "Retweet vs. Like" concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

What are your thoughts on retweeting? Do you see value in it or is it just noise? Tell us what you think.