1. Engage users on your own web site. Nearly every audience we’ve studied says it trusts a marketer’s own site more than any other marketing channel — including offline advertising and social media. Use this trust to build a site that shows users what your brand stands for. And rather than just deliver content here, pull social experiences (like blogs, communities, or Facebook Connect) into your site to make it more interesting and useful to your audience. This will be the place where your brand makes its biggest impact.

2. Distribute your content and engagement into social and mobile media. Just because Facebook and other social platforms aren’t at the very heart of your ecosystem doesn’t mean they’re not a crucial part of how you communicate with your audience. Choose pieces of the content and interaction from your site and push them out into the social (and, if appropriate, the mobile) channels your customers prefer. Your brand probably won’t make quite as big an impact through social tools as it does on your own site — but social platforms will make your brand accessible to users who don’t find their way to your site.

3. Reach a broad audience with paid media. The challenge of owned media (like your web site and your social platforms) is that it rarely generates significant scale. If you want to get your message out to millions of people rather than thousands, you’ll need to buy both online and offline paid media. This is where your brand will make its smallest impact on any given person, so focus on using the scale of paid media to talk about the brand story you’ll telling on your web site and to drive users back to that site by promoting the URL.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Last week Apple announced that its 200 million iOS users have downloaded 15 billion applications.

How much money money is Apple making from those 15 billion downloads? Apple wasn’t so forthcoming about that, so we’ll have to rely on this estimate from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Munster says the average selling price of an app in the App Store is $1.44. Of that Apple nets $0.18 after you account for credit card fees and storage/delivery costs.

Since the App Store launched, Apple has earned a net profit of $538 million on paid app sales, estimates Munster. It has spent an additional $246 million on storing and delivering free apps, says Munster, suggesting Apple’s true profit is just $292 million.

Of course, that’s the narrow way of looking how much Apple is making from the App Store. Apple’s vibrant app ecosystem has helped it sell millions of iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, helping it earn billions in profits.

From Search Engine Watch:

A study from BrightEdge examining the prevalence of social plugins on the home pages of major sites shows that Facebook is still the most dominant social button on the web. Google +1, however, is growing quickly, having seen a 28 percent increase in adoption over the last month.

The Dominance of Facebook
BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, examined the 10,000 top ranked sites on the web to see what social elements were present on the home page. The study looked for standard links to Twitter, Facebook, and other social profiles, as well as buttons or plugins provided by the social sites. The data was pulled using the “inaugural version of our SocialShare Site Analysis,” as specified by BrightEdge’s CEO Jim Yu on the post announcing the findings.

For both plugins and standard links, Facebook is the leader. 10.8 percent of the top websites posted a Facebook “Like” button on their home page, compared to 4.5 percent for Google +1 and 2.1 percent for Twitter share buttons. Three additional Facebook buttons also placed high on the list, with the Facebook “Like box” present on 6.1 percent of top sites, the Facebook Connect plugin present on 1.9 percent, and Facebook recommendations present on 1.2 percent. Twitter’s “instant share” also made it to the list, with 1.3 percent of top sites adopting the plugin.

When it comes to standard links, Facebook is seen on the home page of nearly half of the top sites, with 47.4 percent linking to a Facebook page. Twitter fared better here, with 41.8 percent of major sites linking to a Twitter profile. YouTube was also a popular site to link to, with 16.75 percent of major sites adopting it.

The Rapid Rise of +1
Whilst Google +1 button adoption is on a smaller-scale in comparison to the Facebook Like button, the Google plugin has seen rapid growth over the last few weeks. Since figures were tallied in June, Google +1 has risen from 3.5 percent adoption to 4.5 percent, a 28 percent increase. In terms of button presence on the home page of the top 10k sites measured, Google +1 has already surpassed the Twitter tweet button plugin in web popularity (but a Twitter social profile is more commonly displayed on every page).

Commenting on the findings, BrightEdge’s CEO Jim Yu said to SEW, “What is surprising is the magnitude of the spike in publisher adoption that we are seeing following the launch of Google +1. However, the broader story here is the missed opportunity among large websites to fully leverage the top social networks, as over half are still missing basic social optimizations on their homepage.”