Here are 10 important links that every Google user should know about. They are tucked away, somewhere deep inside your Google dashboard.

1. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account username but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your username.

https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, your Google+ account and other signals. They try to guess your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

3. Google lets you export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

https://www.google.com/takeout

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website that is using one or more Google products – say Blogger, AdSense, Google+ or YouTube – you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get that content removed. This wizard can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

https://support.google.com/legal

5. Your Android device may be reporting your recent location data and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. Head over to the Google Maps website to see your entire location history and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory

6. Google records every search term that you’ve ever typed into their search boxes. They even keep a log of every ad that you have clicked on various Google websites.

https://history.google.com

7. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies.

This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted content for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts. Not available for Google Apps.

https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

8. Worried that someone else is using your Google account. Go to the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently been used to log into your Google account. You also get to know the I.P. Address and their approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity

9. This is a complete list of web apps, browser extensions, Google Scripts and mobile apps that have any read or write access to your Google data. If the permission level says “access to basic account info”, it basically means that you have used your Google account to sign-in to that app.

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

10. This is important URL for Google Apps users. If your Google Account ever gets hacked, use this secret link to reset your admin password. You’ll be asked to verify your domain name by creating a CNAME record in your DNS.

https://admin.google.com/domain.com/VerifyAdminAccountPasswordReset

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The new profile features a larger user photo and customizable header image. Twitter highlights your tweets that have the most engagement by displaying them slightly larger than the rest. You can also pin one of your tweets to the top of the page.

Furthermore, you can now choose which timeline to view when checking out a profile page. You can see all tweets, tweets with photos and videos only, or just tweets and replies.

As for the similarities of Twitter’s new user profiles to Facebook’s profile page, well, they’re inescapable. There’s a square profile photo in the top left, and a large “cover” photo on top dominates both pages, for example. Below the profile photo you’ll find the basic info about the user, and under that is photos and friends. The only real difference there is that on Twitter’s user profiles, photos are placed below your followers, and Facebook has it the other way around. It’ll be interesting to see what the users think of the new look — especially those that are not overly fond of Facebook.

The new profile design is already live for a handful of celebrities, including Zac Efron, Channing Tatum, Floyd Mayweather and John Legend, and it will also show up for new users. The rest of us will have to wait as the new look rolls out over the “coming weeks.”

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As the company wrote in its advertising blog: “Now advertisers can easily reach Twitter users exposed to integrations, sponsorships, and other innovative TV tie-ins for an additional touch point or message expansion.”

TV conversation targeting is launching in the United States and the UK and is coming soon to Brazil, Canada, France and Spain. The offering is distinct from TV ad targeting, a feature Twitter launched in July that lets advertisers augment their TV buys with Twitter campaigns.

Image: Getty/Scott Eells

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Previously, articles pinned on Pinterest only contained photos from the article with a link at the bottom. (Users who wanted to include the article title or description had to add it manually.)

“We’re always looking for ways to make pins more useful so that when you discover and pin something great, it’s easy to act on it, whether that’s cooking a dish, watching a movie, buying a new gadget or reading an article,” Jon Parise, a software engineer at Pinterest, wrote on the company’s blog.

Pinterest is hoping that the change will encourage more users to pin and share articles they find interesting. The new updates could also encourage more media outlets to utilize Pinterest as a tool to promote content with
readers like they do with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Pinterest says that users are pinning five million articles to the site per day and many use reading boards to save articles to consume at a later time. As of Tuesday, the new feature will only work with articles from a small number of publications, including Mashable, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Pinterest plans to expand the feature to all article pins “shortly after that,” according to a company spokesperson.

The new update will also roll out on mobile “soon,” per Pinterest’s blog post.

What do you use Pinterest for most? Tell us in the comments below.

Images: mkhmarketing; Pinterest

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YouTube launched an audio library on Wednesday, featuring more than 150 royalty-free instrumental tracks to choose from. The video manager feature allows you to peruse options based on mood, genre (from rock to classical), instrument and duration. Users can download the tracks as 320 kbps MP3 files and add them to videos.

“We searched far and wide for musicians to create tracks for us and ended up finding co-conspirators in multiple places: an acquaintance down in L.A., music houses across the country and a well-known music producer in Brooklyn,” YouTube wrote on its official blog. “And it turns out the latter produced albums for Phish and Sean Lennon.”

For a full look at the audio library, click here.

What tools do you use when making YouTube videos? Let us know in the comments.

Image: Flickr, jm3

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The new managers will build out the local Pinterest communities overseas and connect with brands and partners. Pinterest is also looking to hire marketing managers in London and Paris, and may open international offices after building a larger workforce outside the United States.

“The Pinterest communities in France and the United Kingdom have been growing as people find inspiration for the things they love — such as food, fashion, cars, and art — and go do those things in the real world,” said Matt Crystal, Pinterest’s head of international, in a statement to Mashable.

“We’re continually refining our recommendations to deliver the most relevant and high-quality experience for pinners in these locations, and look forward to making Pinterest more personalized and relevant for people wherever they are.”

The international hires come just months after Pinterest launched a French version of the site in June. Pinterest says its engagement in the UK is also increasing, with more than one million pins per day.

The company’s San Francisco-based headquarters is approaching 150 employees.

Image: mkhmarketing

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Each video will play silently and can be viewed with sound upon clicking.

The new capability will only be rolled out a small group of random users, and videos will only play automatically if they are uploaded directly to Facebook — not embedded from other sites like YouTube. Still, Facebook hopes the added functionality will let users get more out of the video content on their feed, particularly since Facebook lets users preview the video without interrupting the scroll.

This new autoplay feature only applies to videos uploaded by individuals, bands and musicians. In other words, brand pages won’t be able to use autoplay for promotional videos, and Facebook doesn’t offer video advertisements at this time.

No details were released regarding a timeline for rolling out the feature to all users, or whether it will be available for Facebook’s desktop platform.

Image: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

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There’s still plenty of debate about whether advertising on Facebook (or social media in general) is worth it, and whether it’s more useful as a lead generation tactic than a direct driver of sales. But as anyone on Facebook can see from the sheer number of promoted posts and sponsored stories, that businesses large and small are opening their wallets.

We wanted to learn what’s actually working on Facebook for startups, so we asked a panel of successful entrepreneurs which Facebook advertising strategies they find most useful — and what kind of ROI they’re seeing so far. Here’s what they had to say:

• Using Facebook Paid Ads With a Darwinian Approach

  

We primarily use Facebook paid ads for ultra-targeted user acquisition for our freemium product. We are Darwinian in our approach in that we experiment with hundreds (if not thousands) of different images and copy combinations that go to a plethora of landing pages. We double down on the ones that convert at a high rate (assuming the costs are reasonable), and we quickly kill those that don’t.

• Using Facebook Ads to Grow Email Lists

  

We’ve used Facebook ads to grow our email lists at very affordable rates. The steps we’ve taken? 1) Define your target. 2) Find out what your target wants. 3) Advertise what your target wants to your target and offer it to them for free or at a discount in exchange for their email address. One example is we identified that an author’s audience was closely aligned with our business philosophies. We ran Facebook ads at the author’s audience and offered our target a free download of the author’s presentation slides in exchange for the target’s email address. By giving a little to get something in return, we spent about 10 cents for each email address, which is something we were happy with.

•  Working With a Growth Hacker

  

We have a great growth hacker working on our team. He uses Facebook in combination with PR to drive traffic to a specific target and has used this for events. Instead of trying to send Facebook traffic to a sales page, he might just send Facebook traffic directly to the article in the press publication. In the past, this resulted in a 7 percent conversion rate and a sold-out event he was promoting.

• Boosting Mobile App Installs

  

We have successfully used Facebook ads to drive installs of multiple iOS apps. One great thing about Facebook is the degree of targeting you can employ. By getting laser focused with our targeting and rigorously testing our ads, we were able to drive app installs for less than 49 cents.

• Retargeting on Facebook Exchange

  

Retargeting on Facebook works the same as other retargeting. It’s a cost-effective way to market to potential customers who have been to your site but did not make a purchase. You bring the visitor back to your website, and you get a second chance to prove how great your product or service is and keep your brand top of mind. With retargeting on Facebook exchange, we are seeing a 200 percent ROI.

• Hitting Specific Targets

  

 Our company has used Facebook marketing to directly target users we want. We found that the Facebook app Install Ads is showing amazing results in certain markets. It’s a newer feature that they have rolled out, which is how they are planning to monetize their mobile users. But while it’s new, it’s pretty affordable on the conversion rates and relatively easy to use. I can tell you without disclosing too much information that it is a very good medium for now, and the pricing will increase probably four times the amount over the next two years. If you are smart and know your user and your budget to pay for your user, it’s an amazing platform for app installs.

•  Buying Advertising to Find Discussion Group Members

  

Hands down, the most effective Facebook advertising money I have spent was on finding people to participate in our Facebook discussion group for college parents. We did a sponsored story to people who were not currently our fans. We spent $199 for nearly 200 members. Although this isn’t a ton of people, the real value for me is in having our team see firsthand exactly what issues parents are facing. It really opened our team’s eyes to the emotional difficulties and challenges that our company is focused on solving. This made it worth every penny! Because our company produces a website, we don’t often see the impact we have on families. This group has made our impact real for the team.

• Offering Contests

  

We have used Facebook to promote contests run on our site. Facebook ads got us a ton of entries at a cost below 49 cents per entry, and for each entry, the customer was required to submit his or her email address. This was a very affordable way to grow our list.

Image: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

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On Monday morning, Gap issued a call on Tumblr for creators to share, through an original piece of content, what “blue” means to them — blue being, of course, the color of Gap’s logo and of its signature product, the blue jean.

The four winning submissions, as determined by Gap, will be distributed through a mobile ad takeover on Tumblr on Aug. 29. On that day, Gap will purchase every single mobile ad Tumblr runs, the first brand to do so. Tumblr began running mobile ads in late April. The company says its mobile userbase is growing rapidly, and is expected to overtake desktop traffic by early 2014, founder and CEO David Karp has said previously.

By targeting Tumblr’s young, share-happy user base, Gap is betting that it can create a new “pop culture moment” on the Internet, Rachel Tipograph, global director of digital and social media at Gap, tells Mashable. “Pop culture doesn’t really start on TV

anymore,” she says. “Pop culture starts on the Internet. When you think about what community is creating pop culture on the Internet, it’s Tumblr. When you think about what community is creating pop culture on the Internet, it’s Tumblr.”

In a way, Gap is using Tumblr as its own creative agency. “We wanted to partner with the best content creators, give them a chance to make the Back to Blue brief, and then take the best pieces of content and turn them into mobile ads,” Tipograph explains. Winners will not be given cash compensation for their work; the compensation is in the exposure, Tipograph says. She declined to say how much Gap is paying for the mobile takeover.

In addition to the Tumblr push, Gap is making the usual buys in print, outdoor, direct and in-store marketing, plus a return to TV for the first time in four years. The apparel giant has also partnered with two dozen “influencers,” including MTV’s Tanisha Long, to create 250 pieces of content to distribute on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Vine and Tumblr over the next three months. A spokesperson for the company describes it as Gap’s “broadest-reaching campaign in the company’s modern history.”

Image: Gap

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That’s the challenge Meg Faure, founder of The Baby Sense Company, and Jeremy Pepper, a Los Angeles-based social media and public relations consultant on our Small Business Panel, are taking on this month. Faure is the international bestselling author of Baby Sense, which over the past decade she has expanded into a franchise that includes several more books, a seminar series and an ecommerce business that spans three continents.

Faure and her company are a natural fit for social media: In South Africa especially, she is a well-recognized expert on child care, and the company’s Facebook page and Twitter account are peppered with questions from concerned parents. With a modest marketing budget (less than $500 a month), Baby Sense has amassed more than 31,000 fans on Facebook and 2,400 followers on Twitter.

Faure, who handles both accounts herself, along with a Pinterest page and a UStream blogger profile, posts a variety of content whenever she has a spare moment. Opportunities for fans to ask questions tend to perform best: A recent question posted to Baby Sense’s Facebook page, “What are your pressing baby skincare questions?” elicited 53 comments in four hours. Faure tells Mashable that for one hour once a month, she holds a “Facebook party” where fans can ask her anything, and that she’ll generally receive upwards of 200 questions in that hour. Faure will also post child care tips, and promote new products and upcoming seminars.

Faure says she’s pleased with the engagement she receives on social media, particularly on Facebook. With around 8,000 subscribers to her email newsletter, she feels it’s the best way to get the word out about new products and events. Faure’s also finding ways to monetize her presence on those platforms by mixing sponsors, including Johnson & Johnson, into the feed.

But Faure would like to use Facebook to generate more sales. She said she’s had some success with Offers, but so far most of her Facebook marketing budget is spent on promoting posts and getting more Likes on Baby Sense’s page — which ultimately isn’t converting to many sales, she said. Faure is also looking for a tool to help her schedule, manage and respond to posts. In addition, she has started a Pinterest page but isn’t sure how to optimize her presence there, and wonders if she should even be on Pinterest in the first place.

The Master Plan

Pepper has devised a social media strategy to help Baby Sense achieve its aims — one that spans Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, UStream and email — and fits within Faure’s current advertising budget and limited spare time. The primarily goal is to grow Baby Sense’s online community, seeking out possible paid sponsorship opportunities. The focus will be on Facebook, where Baby Sense’s community is already strongest.

First off, Pepper suggests that Faure develop an editorial calendar and schedule for Facebook and Twitter. That way she can plan and promote events and products, and the community knows when to tune in. He suggests using an app like Buffer to schedule posts.

The editorial voice of Baby Sense’s online profiles also needs to change, Pepper says. Right now the voice is very corporate. Faure needs to be more “Mom to Mom” — more conversational, engaging. Posts on Facebook should be between 200-300 characters with a call to action (tell a story, share an experience, or do you agree/disagree). Faure should spend more time reading and responding to comments on both Facebook and Twitter. She should also be cross-posting and cross-promoting content from Facebook, Twitter and UStream, encouraging users of each platform to participate in live chats on the other platforms. Faure should also create a YouTube channel to index her UStream chats.

As for the newsletter, that too is an important platform for community-building. Subscribers should be alerted to all of the content that’s going out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and UStream, and be encouraged to participate on those networks.

Curious to know how it all goes? We’ll check back in with Faure and Pepper next month.

Image: Flickr, Eric Fleming

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