Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Look Out for New Twitter!

Thursday, September 16th, 2010
The New Look Twitter has been rolled out in the US and will be here in the UK very shortly. The new design will @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above your timeline – creating a single, streamlined view on the left of the screen. When you click a Tweet, the details panel shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: @replies, other Tweets by that same user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from. What we’re really excited about is the ability to view photos, videos and other media directly on Twitter. The micro blogging platform have created partnerships with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube.

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Posted in Social Media |

Social Media Mistakes

Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Social Media and Social Networking can be great marketing tools for your business, but are you going about it in the right way? Here are just a few pointers. What’s Your Master plan? It is essential to have a plan before you start otherwise you will become rudderless and end of wasting a lot of time. Sit down and think through what you want to achieve with your social media message. Is it to raise your brand and business profile? Launch a new product or service? Establish yourself as an expert? Me Me Me! Your social media content is all based on YOU and YOUR BUSINESS and nothing else. Your followers might get irritated after a while and start to see your business in a negative way, especially if you’re just trying to sell. Be Social Interacting, sharing and connecting with others online is what social media is all about rather than being a broadcast system! Auto Messaging People follow you because you have something of interest to say. An automatic message saying ‘ thanks for following’ holds no real value and is just another tweet to delete. Because it is auto-generated it doesn’t appear to be genuine. Overposting Sometimes you see people have tweeted a message 8 times in a row and it doesn’t look good at all. Try to spread out your messages evenly. You bang out the same tweet/message again and again or just post one after the other. This just looks like you’re contaminating the feed.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media |

The Changing Face of Online Search and SEO

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The world of Internet search is changing fast, especially the world of Google search. You may have noticed when doing searches that there are a lot real-time results such as Twitter, Facebook and other social network content, although Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are “for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.” Bing have a deal in place with Facebook that goes further, indexing individuals’ status updates which have been set to public and Yahoo! have also started to integrate Tweet content.

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Another big change on Google is the personalised search. This had an effect if you were logged into your gmail or any other Google account, but now you don’t have to be logged in. This means individuals will see an increasingly different result to another individual. This isn’t great news for those concerned with SEO as you no longer know where your website will rank. When a result has been clicked a number of times, then that site will start to appear higher up in the search rankings for that visitor. Personalised search is nothing new. It all started in 2004  with a beta release through Google labs allowed users to refine search results based on their interests. Then, in mid-April, 2005, Google rolled out its search history feature called “My Search History.” This kept track of all the users’ searches and every page that they viewed from the search results. This time Google required users to have an active Google account. The process has been refined along the way climaxing with the recent change. Personalised search involves many, many factors.  Among them are:
  • Geo-graphic factors (local top-level domain, IP address and query analysis)
  • Technical factors such as browser, OS capabilities, cookies and toolbars)
  • Time of day, time of year and other historical data
  • Behavioural query history, interaction with search engine result pages and interactions with advertising and surfing habits).
So what actions can be taken in regards to personalised search? Well best SEO practices still stand and these factors have become more important: Factors such as demogaphics, keyword/phrase targeting strategies, quality content, search result conversion, freshness, site useability, social bookmarks, and analytics will all have an impact on your SERPS. Practically this means:
  • Get to know and research your audience and give them the (great) content they want
  • Titles and Snippets that are compelling will attract a better click through rate which will in turn help these sites/pages rank better
  • Make social bookmarking available and easy to do on your website
  • Google Analytics will help in measuring both paid and organic traffic flows
  • A logical navigation and architecture for a quality end user experience
Google Caffeine Google also recently introduced Google Caffeine which ranks pages faster, giving you quicker results. And your page load times will now be a factor in ranking on Google. Simply put, the slower a page loads, the lower it will be ranked. Google describes Caffeine as: “a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Of course this all has implications for your search engine optimisation and your online business strategy and something to be well aware of! :-)

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media |