More and more businesses have been discovering Google+ as a social networking platform where they can share content and engage with followers in a highly effective way.

Recent figures report: “Google+ has 100 million users, and has grown in popularity recently, with growth spurts of daily users hovering around 625,000 per day.”

With businesses finding the need to be in multiple places online, the question eventually boils down to the basics, e.g. why this platform? How will the experience be different? Do we really need another social media page?

With more and more brands creating presences on Google+, we were curious about what makes pages stand out in a crowded marketplace.

For this post, we took a look at ten brands with extraordinary numbers on Google+ (via stats available on Zoomsphere) and paid attention to how they represent themselves with an about statement, the photos/artwork for their profile and the types of “shares” (posts) they make to help them stand out and drive user engagement.

Social media marketing continued to make significant headway in 2011 and is expected to move full steam ahead in 2012. More specifically, what trends can we expect to see in the coming year? We checked in with five marketing pros who shared their insights with us. Joining us are Sergio Balegno, Shama Kabani, Cindy King, Joe Pulizzi, Mike Volpe and our very own Julie Diaz-Asper

If your business caters predominately to local customers then you know how important it is to gain the attention of people in your immediate vicinity. In this post, we’ll explore ways to be leverage engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Google Places.

It’s official. We’re now in the summer of 2011, past the 4th of July, always a good marker of summer. While you may be settling into a more laid back mode for the next couple of months, the world of social media doesn’t seem to slow down or necessarily recognize the concept of vacation. We’re also at the half-way mark of 2011, which is a good place too to take stock and see how far we’ve come and where we’re going for the second half of the year.