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We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
Not content with owning one of the biggest forces in social media marketing – YouTube – Google has ‘upped the ante’ with its bid for the video streaming site, Hulu, according to a report published by Tech Radar.
With Google rumored to be willing to offer much more than the other suitors in the market (speculated to be around the $2 billion mark), should Hulu’s current owners – including Fox and Disney – be willing to accept an offer, the site could be the company’s next big acquisition following purchase of Motorola for $15.5 billion.
In exchange for the greater offer, Google are thought to want access to a much greater amount of the content currently displayed on the video streaming site – as well as the rights to that content for a much lengthier amount of time.
Any possible acquisition could boost Google’s TV initiative, allowing it to benefit from the premium content currently offered by Hulu in the United States and Japan.
Amongst the other potential suitors for the site are Amazon and Yahoo!
While there is currently no date placed on when or even if Hulu will change hands, more information regarding the offers is expected to be known as soon as next week.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Twitter, if utilised correctly, is a fantastic tool in social media marketing. Although unimplemented, there is a set of unwritten rules for how to behave on the microblogging site – similar to netiquette – many of which people break on a regular basis.
Businesses, operating a Twitter presence with a lackadaisical approach, can impede their own brand image – ultimately doing more harm than good.
According to an article published by socialmediatoday.com, there are typically seven deadly Twitter sins that can be committed.
Here are just three of those, and more importantly, how they can be avoided:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
It’s a well-established fact that Twitter is one of the best social media marketing tools out there.
However, it’s not always that easy to measure the success of campaigns or marketing efforts on the micro-blogging site.
Having recently produced a list of strategies that can be employed to increase Twitter’s effectiveness in marketing, Heidi Cohen, writing for ClickZ, has suggested five ways in which the return on Twitter initiatives can be tracked:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Although many businesses are looking to improve their social media marketing strategies by increasing their spending, many are still making errors, according to an article published by the Sydney Morning Herald.
In particular, brands are failing to effectively analyse what people are saying about them on the Internet.
Recent results from research carried out by Alterian showed that 80 per cent of the companies they surveyed were ‘concerned their brand was at risk from not being engaged with customers online, or from failing to have a good grasp of how online conversations were impacting their brand.’
Carried out by tracking 350,000 mentions on various social media sites during a six-month period – in order to track and analyse performance – Alterian also found that a quarter of marketers were predicting their digital marketing budget would increase by around 25 per cent or more.
Despite this, it was also found that marketers weren’t capitlising on conversation; 29 per cent stopped analysis at a basic level, while 28 per cent stated that they had difficulty in linking analytics to the original campaign strategy.
Senior vice-president of Alterian’s Asia Pacific strand, Chris Tew commented on the results.
He said: “The survey shows the majority of brands lack direction on what exactly to measure and analyse, how to go about it, and how to utilise that information to continually improve on their marketing efforts.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Many recent studies have indicated that marketers would be open to increasing the amount spent on their various social media marketing efforts.
Twitter is one the most commonly used social media sites for marketing purposes, though there are many marketers out there not making the most of the micro-blogging site’s capabilities.
Social media expert, Heidi Cohen, writing for ClickZ, has produced a list of six marketing strategies that can be employed to boost the effectiveness of Twitter marketing campaigns.
Here are just three of those aforementioned strategies:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
This week, two stories are doing the rounds on the social media sites which highlight how companies can get it wrong with social media marketing.
The first tale is about Rentokil who, for those not in the UK, are a pest control company. It appears they have got their Twitter strategy a little skewiff. In fact, doesn’t it remind you of Habitat’s Twitter problems?
The other tale, which is actually a viral video that is just going viral as I write, is about Nestle and KitKat. By insisting the video (made by Greenpeace) is removed from Youtube, this has incensed those involved, who have sought other places to post it and begun a social media campaign to ensure that it is seen by as many people as possible. Right now, that approach seems to be working.
This last is, of course, a very old tactic which groups like the Sex Pistols and Frankie Goes to Hollywood showed the efficacy of by being banned from primetime radio stations.
There are several lessons to be learned here.
1) Social media is here. It will not go away. If you are doing *anything* as a corporate which may seem distasteful, dishonest, unethical, whether it is or not, it is likely to attract attention. Handle it carefully when the attention is turned to your company. Trying to hide it will bring ever more attention and your damage limitation may become crisis management.
2) Social media has rules. It is however social media and not rocket science. The rules are simple and easy to find out. If in doubt, lurk before leaping! And if you seem to be digging a deep hole, take a step back and consider your options, carefully.
3) If you want to go viral, get banned from a very big site and make sure everyone knows!!
For those using Twitter or looking to see what you can do with it, take a look at TwitterEye which is a directory of the ever-increasing number of apps available for Twitter users.
Very useful and shows just what happens when you make your source code / API available to developers to play around with.
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Once upon a time, and sadly still, in many SEO eyes, off page optimisation was one of the two keys to online success. Off-page optimisation includes link marketing campaigns, article marketing, posting to forums and blogs, video content, podcasts, joint ventures, syndicated content, and so on.
What we have seen is a dramatic change in the effect these strategies have in driving traffic to your site, building brand awareness, quick wins and so on, as the emphasis moves to social marketing, and the search engines fail to keep up with this stream of ever-changing data.
We have seen companies forbid even their marketing teams from using Facebook and Twitter and so on; yet by doing so, they are removing themselves from the social web, with its amazing capacity for fast-moving, viral campaigns, that can not only result in bottom line results eg a boost in sales, reduced marketing expenses and so on, but also in long-term brand building that can bring results for years to come.
A satisfied customer will use word of mouse to pass on to friends, family and followers the great deal, fab customer service, friendly staff, even the free cup of coffee your business has just supplied. A grumpy customer may well do untold damage to reputation just with one tweet that is RTd multiple times by other also dissatisfied customers.
Anyone who dismisses social tools, such as Twitter and the many newly born apps that have come from that and other social applications, is going to find themselves with a historically useful skillset, which no longer delivers results. Off page optimisation will not die, because it willalways be the foundation of the archive that creates the majority of search engine indexes. But even those are going to have to change to adapt to this fast-paced world of real time information we now live in.
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As some may have noticed, we have been experimenting with some of the Twitter tools available for clients and SEO agencies alikes.
For those with a blog, there are multiple options for ensuring that the information posted to your blog is automatically added to your twitter account, thereby saving a job. However, some tools only work with specific blogging software eg WordPress, whilst others offer a variety of useful functionality across multiple platforms.
This post is to check out what happens with Wordtwit (a WP add on) as against Twitterfeed, which works somewhat like Feedburner (now in the Google stable) and potentially is of more use to a wider audience.
Let’s hit send….!
Just before we do though, a salutory lesson to others. If you try to post in different places, eg blog, facebook, Twitter etc, and automate distribution of the content between those places, be very careful not to create an infinite loop!
For instance, if you set up Twitter to feed into your corporate Facebook page, and for your FB page to feed new content into Twitter each time a member of staff posts there, you will end up with a constant re-posting of the same content between the two places. Test and think out such processes before applying them live….
Update: you can use the Feedburner Awareness API to see your stats from Twitterfeed to Twitter and compare stats for clickthroughs between your traditional RSS feed distribution and your social media distribution.
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