#INFOGRAPHIC: The Landscape of Social Login

By Kimberlee Morrison at Social Times:


Facebook is indeed a powerful force on the Internet. Not only have recent reports indicated that the social networking behemoth refers more traffic than any other social site, according to Q2 data from social identity management software provider Gigya, Facebook is regaining its lead — and taking market share from other networks, too.

Gigya director of marketing Victor White attributes this trend to the fact that Facebook makes it easy to auto-populate data across a wide range of services. This is done to create personalized experiences.

There’s also a trust factor at play. During the F8 developer conference, Facebook announced that it was giving users granular social login control, effectively enabling them to control what information they share with business. Of course, we’ll have to wait for the Q3 data to find out if the controversy over recent experiments have had any impact on user trust.

White also notes that the social component is not to be underestimated.

“When users log into a site, they intuitively want to share their experiences with networks of real friends,” he says. “Users know that when they log into sites with their social network credentials, they will be able to share seamlessly with their friends.”

On the other side of the spectrum is Yahoo, which has seen its share of social logins decline steadily over the last few quarters. In March, Yahoo disabled Facebook and Google+ identity management on its online properties — a move that hasn’t had any impact on the free fall in consumers using Yahoo to manage their social identity. White says that Yahoo’s only chance is to provide real value to both businesses and consumers.

“They’ll need to consider how identity can be used to power on-site personalization, social graph integration and potentially even payments,” he says. “Until the company can offer substantial benefits for consumers as an identity provider, Yahoo will continue to lag far behind companies like Google and Facebook.”

Check out the infographic below for Q2 social login data from Gigya:

Google Analytics Finally Gets an iPhone App

By Josh Wolford at WebProNews:  


In pretty big good lord, finally news, Google has released a native Google Analytics apps for iOS. Available in 39 languages, Google Analytics for iPhone promised to let you “access all of your Google Analytics web and app data from your mobile device, monitor recent changes with Real Time reports, and easily get your Analytics data anytime, anywhere.”

Considering Android has had a version of a Google Analytics apps for years, it’s high time that iOS was invited to the party.

The app is plain but functional, with an overview tab that shows real time visitors to pages, total audience visits and a location breakdown, traffic sources, and a pageview grid.

#INFOGRAPHIC: Tracking Social Media Data

By Christie Barakat at Social Times:


Many businesses make an effort to be active and involved on social media. But information-sharing and interactivity with users does not go far enough.  Tracking data and its effectiveness across channels is crucial to examining and altering activity levels and success strategies.

Traffic, the relevance and quality of content, voice, community size, engagement and sentiment can be tracked with measurable data and channel specific tools. Dashboards let you measure data from multiple sites at once. Aggregators are great for discovering Internet trends.

In addition to measuring the success of your social media profiles, other tools let you measure data such as click-through rates, when most of your followers are online and more. Infographicworld.com created the following infographic to break down what you should be measuring, the most useful tools and the capabilities of each.

Courtesy of: Infographic World

Understanding Klout as a Brokerage Business

By Lucy Leiderman at TNW: 


Klout, the San Francisco based start up that measures your social influence, was acquired last week by Lithium Technologies in a deal that is supposedly meant to redefine both companies. Since its launch in 2008, Klout has apparently scored 500 million profiles and handles 50 billion API calls monthly, yet its day-to-day relevance remains a mystery for many.

On the surface, users link available social profiles to Klout in order to be scored. While a possible humble brag, a Klout score doesn’t necessarily translate into something useful. In 2012, Wired suggested candidates in social trades were being disqualified from jobs if their Klout score, depicting online influence, was too low.

As employers turn more to the Web to see if candidates practice what they preach, this may be even more prevalent today. There was also an implication that with a high Klout score, users are less likely to be ignored by customer service when they complain on social platforms, and in contrast, receive perks as perceived social influencers.


Perk-based model

That brings us to Klout’s business platform, which allows companies to offer perks to specific kinds of influencers. Perks are delivered straight into your account (and your email, depending on your communications settings), as an incentive to come back to Klout and redeem your perk.

Klout even lets users scroll through trending perks they didn’t get, in order to see how much social influence resulted from a company’s initiative. The perceived benefits to brands signing on are that when social influencers redeem the perk, the company has a good chance of getting earned media.

While calling a paid campaign’s results ‘earned media’ is contentious, nothing beats honest engagement.


Why Klout is a brokerage business

Klout, however, remains a brokerage with limited use to brands because one very important feature is missing – a feature that could potentially make or break the service. While Klout collects data and statistics on all of its users, there is no option to search for influencers by interest or location.

It’s clear to guess why, though. If Klout allowed agencies or brands to search directly for highly influential people in specific locations with relevant interests, this would cut out Klout completely and connect brands to real people, offering them products or services on other social networks.

Imagine if companies were able to use Klout scores to connect with influencers in any given city and engage them to cover activations? Or if brands launched last-minute stunts and flash mobs by connecting with exactly the right people, who care about the right things, at the right time?

The possibility of measuring social influence, and communicating directly based on that, offers an agile world of marketing capability – greater response rates through more efficient, directed communications.

However, the Klout business model is currently not built to facilitate such campaigns. Companies that strive to adopt a human persona and engage the people who may turn their social tide must go through the middleman if they want access to Klout’s inventory of the movers and shakers of social.

Would adopting such a model demystify Klout’s purpose and existence? We’ll just have to wait and see what Lithium Technologies decide to do with the service.

#INFOGRAPHIC: How Are Small Businesses Using Social Media?

By Shea Bennett at Media Bistro: 

Two thirds of small businesses are using Twitter, and around a quarter devote six to 10 hours each week to social networking, reveals a new study.

Vertical Response polled more than 400 of their customers to enquire how they’re using social media in their everyday activities, and found that 67 percent use Twitter, which finished second overall in the survey behind Facebook (88 percent).

Six in 10 respondents spend less than 6 hours each week on their social media platforms, with more than half using a third party tool to manage updates. One quarter have raised their social media budgets, with 55 percent maintaining or decreasing their expenditure.

Check the visual below for more findings from the study.

Courtesy of: VerticalResponse

#INFOGRAPHIC: Age of User: What's The Difference in Media Use?

Anyone who has tried to teach their grandparent how to use a computer, or had a younger relative school you in tech-talk, knows that there are differences between age demographics and their media use. Some people prefer television and newspapers to social networks and RSS feeds. Some people are on the cutting edge of new technology in an effort to escape other generations (enter SnapChat, etc.). The differences in its use and the causes are as various as media itself.

As marketers, we need to know how our specific target market uses media to communicate with each other, with brands, and with the rest of the world. Learning and understanding how our consumers use media is the first step in providing a mediated experience that will be pleasant and user friendly for them. After all, it’s far less likely that someone in their 70′s will be using a mobile app vs. someone in their teens.

This infographic is meant to shed some light on some generational differences in media use and some commonalities. The information provided is intended to be a starting point in understanding some fundamental variances in media use, but there is a plethora of information available on the subject.


Published by Ciceron.

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

US Market: Apple 41.6%, Samsung 26.7%, Android Down

Apple’s dominance as the top smartphone OEM in the US has started off strong in the first month of this year: 41.6 percent share. Samsung is once again gaining share faster than its main competitor, however, hitting a new high at 26.7 percent. Rounding out the top five were LG, Motorola, and HTC.

In the platform wars, Google was still first with Android, and Apple took second with iOS. Yet Google’s mobile platform slipped at the start of the year, while Apple’s continued to plow forward. Rounding out the top five were Microsoft (which managed to sneak into third place), BlackBerry, and Symbian.

The latest data comes from comScore, which regularly surveys over 30,000 mobile subscribers in the US. The market research firm says 159.8 million Americans owned smartphones (66.8 percent mobile market penetration) in January, up 7 percent since October.

During the quarter, here is how the top five smartphones OEMs fared:

On the software side, Google is still dominating, even with Apple’s steady gains. Android lost share most months in 2013, and 2014 isn’t off to a good start:

Read the full story >>

#INFOGRAPHIC: Why Women Are The Real Power Behind Social Media

The stats are in and women dominate social media. Where are all the guys at? In some cases women just leave men in the dust. As you might have guessed women crush men on social network Pinterest. Only 8% there guys, come on you’re missing opportunity.

Published by Finances Online.

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

Facebook Knows When You're About to Update Your Relationship Status

Facebook released new findings on Friday — Valentine's Day — that hints when two people are about to change their status to "in a relationship."

In the three months (or about 100 days) before a couple updates their status to make their relationship Facebook official, the social network sees a steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the two. In fact, posting to each other's pages will peak (1.67 posts) at 12 days before the relationships begin and when the update is officially made ("day 0") posts typically start to decline.

Facebook only looked at couples who declared an anniversary date — and not just changed their relationship status — between 04/11/2010 and 10/21/2013 and remained "single" 100 days before and "in a relationship" 100 days after that date. The findings are a part of a larger six-part series that looks at love.




Read the full story >>

SEO Checklist: 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

By Jon Rognerud at Entrepreneur.com: 

The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.

Below is a broad four-step process for a strategy for search engine optimization. Use this as your top-level checklist.


Step 1: Target Market Business Analysis

Website analysis. Analysis of meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to deter­mine how well you're positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?

Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process. Expand as necessary. Use tools such as Semrush.com and Keywordspy.com.

Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Then, ask your customers!


Step 2: Keyword Research and Development

Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.

Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin. As you get more comfortable, check every 30 to 45 days. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Some optimizers will say that rankings are dead. Yes, traffic and conversions are more important, but we use rankings as an indicator.

Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days. Or you may want to improve your current conversion rate of one percent to two in a specified period. You may begin with top-level, aggregate numbers, but you must drill down into specific pages that can improve products, services, and business sales.


Step 3: Content Optimization and Submission

Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.

Create meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-throughs but aren't directly used for rankings. (Google doesn't use the keywords tag any­more.)

Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclu­sion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A natural approach to this works best. In the past, 100 to 300 words on a page was recommended. Many tests show that pages with 800 to 2,000 words can outperform shorter ones. In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers.

Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.

Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense (google.com/adsense) scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.


Step 4: Continuous Testing and Measuring

Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with.

Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business. A blog can provide you the necessary structure and ease of content addition that you need. Your hosting company can typically help you with the setup/installation of a blog.


Via Entrepreneur.com.

6 SEO Predictions for 2014

By Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch: 

For those that thought that the digital marketing landscape would see dramatic change in 2013, the year didn't disappoint. Last year I made 6 predictions, and it is time for me to give it another shot. But first, let's see how I did last year!

Scoring My 2013 Predictions:

1- We'll get confirmation that steering anchor text in links you get is bad. Score a full point for this one. Google now discusses this in their Webmaster Guidelines

2- The relevance of a linking page will carry increasing weight. Well, no proof of this one. I maintain it is true, and that belief certainly is impacting the content marketing work we do with our clients. I will take a half point here.

3- People will finally accept that +1's aren't treated by Google like a link. I think the proof of this one is available, but there are still more people who believe that +1's are a ranking factor than not. With some reluctance, I will take a half point for this one, too.

4- Rel=author will become a ranking signal. Another area that people debate heartily. Many will say that I should take a full point here. However, I will take a zero instead, because I don't think it has become a ranking signal. For people who think I gave myself too much credit on #2 or #3, we can call it even, OK?

5- Google+ will begin to show some of its true influence in search results. Definitely happening. I take a full point here.

6- The industry will start to talk about the role of landing page optimization in SEO. People have been talking about bounce rate for some time, but that isn't what I mean here. I was talking about real management of the customer experience. Well that has in fact begun to happen. The driving factors for this one will be Semantic Search and Hummingbird. However, not as broadly as I had thought it would, so half a point.

2013 Score:: 4 out of 6

2014 Predictions


Now it's time for six predictions again this year, and the first one sets the stage for the remaining five! Once you're done checking these out, let me know your predictions in the comments, or argue with mine if you like!

1. Hummingbird Rising

Just ahead of their 15th birthday, Google let the world know that it had released a new platform called Hummingbird. In fact, it had been live for three months or so at that point and few people had noticed. This all changes in 2014.

Hummingbird was in fact a rewrite of Google's search engine. Note that this doesn't mean a rewrite of all of Google's code, just the function that executes searches.

As a platform change, the near term impact was in fact quite small. The specific algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin, and basic ranking algos weren't changed. Google restructured things so they can better bolt on new algorithms to the platform.

What does this mean? It could mean new algorithms for processing links. It could mean social signals starting to carry weight. It could mean lots of things.

The bottom line? In 2014 we start to see the impact of Hummingbird. It is quite possible that all of the predictions that follow are all only possible because of Hummingbird.


2. Author Rank / Publisher Rank (again)

Once bitten, twice shy! Or, older and a little wiser might be more appropriate. My 2013 prediction for Author Rank failed because I fell into that trap that is so easy for us all to do. Just because we can conceive of Google using a ranking factor doesn't mean they will, or that it's easy to implement:

Implementing new algorithms is hard. Google needs to do an enormous amount of testing of any changes they make, and more often than not those simple changes break something else. In 2013, Google launched in-depth articles, a feature that seemed to be more driven by Publisher Rank than Author Rank:

My 2014 prediction for this will be more cautious than I was in 2013. We will see one or more new changes to the search results related to AuthorRank and PublisherRank. We may also see the in-depth articles feature rise to more prominence.

What we won't see however is some huge shift in the search results based on Author Rank. The use of this signal will likely come out as part of some specific features or scenarios. An example scenario might be an Author Rank specific ranking change in personalized results that shows up as some type of new presentation of authors you follow.


3. Natural Language Search

You might call this one a layup, and that would not be entirely unfair. Prior to Hummingbird, natural language search queries were specific to the Knowledge Graph. After Hummingbird you could start to see natural language queries visibly impacting other types of search results.

This screenshot is part of a sequence of searches that started with the [give me pictures of Tom Brady], and ended with [when did he start playing football].

However, the types of queries that work at this point in time are pretty limited. During the course of 2014 I believe we will see significant additions in natural language search capability. One reason for this is that Google sees mobile as a dominant trend, and believes that this will increase the demand for voice searching capabilities.


4. Impact of Google+ Grows, But Not in the Way People Expect

Google+ continues to grow as a social platform, but its adoption to date has been uneven. There are many categories where the discussions are rich and vibrant, such as science, food, photography, health and fitness, and many others. But, there are also other categories where the community is not yet as vibrant. Still, haters aside, Google+ is succeeding, and that sets the stage for this prediction.

The impact of Google+ on the SERPs will increase. Once again, we should expect moderation. This won't be some type of sweeping change. I wrote about the impact so far in this article.

The main impact we already see from Google+ on the SERPs are:

1- Personalized results. This is a big one. If you publish lots of content, people who follow you will see it often when they perform related searches in Google.
2- Google+ posts in the SERPs. This is the one that is less recognized, but also important. If you are influential on Google Plus, and you share a post that ends up being very well received on the platform, that post itself can show up in the search results, even for people that don't follow you.

What will Google do to increase the influence of G+? I'd expect to see more G+ posts in the SERPs (even for people not following you) at a minimum. We may even see some new search features tested. For example, if there is a breaking news item, and there is an active G+ community discussion about it, maybe we will see that discussion featured in some way in the SERPs.

What we won't see if Google Plus taking over the SERPs or remapping them in some big way. Google can't punish people for not being on G+, because that would break search itself. But, they can do more with it, and they will.


5. Guest Posting Takes a Visible Hit

I wrote the first draft of this post back on January 12th, and low and behold 12 days later Matt Cutts writes an article about guest posting to say Stick a Form In It. Fortunately, this position softened somewhat, and the upshot of it is that guest posting that is primarily for SEO purposes is in Google's crosshairs in a big way. And so it should be.

So I could take a full point already for this, but since I did not get this post up prior to Matt's article, I will not take the easy way out. Instead, I will offer up some thoughts on what parts of guest posting will take hits in 2014:

1- More action against rich anchor text, even if it's in the attribution only.
2- Devaluing sites for publishers that focus on many domains vs. authoritative relationships.
3- Discounting (or punishing) low relevance posts, where relevance is defined as the relevance of the page giving the link to the page receiving the link.

Based on Cutts' post we already know is that Google will look dimly on guest posting for SEO practices in their manual reviews of link profiles, so the above expectations relate to potential algorithmic action by Google.


6. More Weight Placed on Having a Mobile Site Experience

We live in a world where mobile (tablets plus smartphones) is going to be more important than the desktop. This has already happened in online retail. We also know that Google cares deeply about the user experience – they don't want to send users to sites that offer a crappy experience because it's bad for their search engine to do so.

So yes, sites with no mobile implementation might take some rankings hits in 2014, at least when the user is coming from a mobile device. If mobile devices represent 20 percent or more of your traffic (and I think is pretty much every website these days!) then you need to pay attention to this. Cutts already discussed this in his keynote at Pubcon Las Vegas.


In 2014, it begins to have serious implications.


Wrap Up

So there you have it. Another year's predictions on the books. How do you think I'll do? What are your predictions? Tell me in the comments below.



Via Search Engine Watch.

#INFOGRAPHIC: Measure Your Content Marketing

By Pam Dyer at Pamorama:

Content marketing is one of the most reliable and effective tactics available to digital marketers.

how to measure content marketing Measuring Your Content Marketing Success [Infographic]

Brands are increasingly employing content marketing strategies to generate product awareness and drive demand. Keyword-optimized blog posts, white papers, press releases, articles, and social media content create brand awareness, inspire audience engagement, and move customers through the sales funnel from initial consideration to purchase. But how do you measure the success of each of your targeted activities?

The team at Brandpoint, a leading provider of content-based marketing solutions, helps their clients get their brand message out, establish their thought leadership and credibility within their industries. Here’s how they suggest that you track your content marketing success.


How do you measure content marketing?

1. Awareness: Exposing new people to your brand, product, or service

Why is awareness important?
- Quality content can increase the number of keywords for which a site can rank.
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 75% of searchers don’t move past the first page of search results.
- Social media is an excellent content distributor — more than 15 million online consumers say that they research products via social media before making purchases.

Measuring awareness success: What to look for
1- Higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs)
2- Steady increase in your website’s first-time visitors
3- Improved social metrics — increased likes, follows, +1s, upvotes, etc.


2. Consideration: Inspiring potential customers to engage, read, download, comment, and share

Why is consideration important?
Search engines rank content based on relevance:
- Time spent onsite per user
- Amount and age of pertinent original content
- Social chatter about your site
- Sites with 300+ indexed pages increase traffic by 236%
- Sites with 400-1000 indexed pages receive 600% more leads
61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content
65% of social media users learn about products and services via social media

Measuring consideration success: What to look for
- Increased total page views
- Longer visit duration
- Lower bounce rate
- Improved social metrics — video views, content shares, positive comments, interaction, etc.


 3. Conversion: When a customer makes a purchase or fills out a contact form

Why does content marketing drive conversions?
It supports searches for specific products and services — more than 39% of all customers come from search.
Unlike PPC (pay per click), social media amplifies traditional word of mouth and grows organically with time.
- 77% of B2C companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.
- 41% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.

Measuring conversion success: What to look for
- Increased conversion rates as measured by sales or leads
- Tracking which content sources contribute to the sales funnel
- Social media metrics — referrals from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks
- Subscriber vs. non-subscriber behavior

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

5 Tools Everyone in Social Media Should Be Using

By Ben Harper at Social Media Today:

Social media is becoming more and more of a data game in 2014.  Those in the know can optimize and dominate those who aren't running their campaigns in a data-led way.  Combine this with the ever increasing usage of social, the fragmentation of audience by platform, and the trend towards paid reach on some platforms and many social media managers will be at a loss as to how to manage their social presence in a sensible way.  Fear not though, we've put together a handy guide on 5 of the tools that everyone in social media should be using to help you survive and thrive in an ever-expanding marketplace!


Socialbakers (www.socialbakers.com)

Socialbakers are a company providing a whole suite of tools, including listening, posting and ad analytics.  However, their key tool is Socialbakers Analytics.  This tool allows you to compare your social profiles to your key competitors, seeing all publicly available social metrics alongside each other.  This allows you to benchmark your performance versus the competition & in the market, and see which parts of your content strategy are performing best, allowing you to optimise your content accordingly.

The ability to fully use data to optimise your content is really helpful, and allows you to consistently deliver better results from each Tweet & Facebook post based on your learnings.


Kuhcoon Ads (www.kuhcoon.com)

This tool is a relatively new one that we've started using here at Datify.  Kuhcoon is a tool that allows you to create, manage and monitor your ads, but the key point here is that you can do all of this from your iOS device.  About 70% of social media usage from the social media manager perspective is on mobile, however the one element we have struggled to control when on the go is advertising management.  Kuhcoon Ads solves this problem with a handy app that allows you to monitor campaigns on the go in terms of their performance, and pause and restart adverts and campaigns from your smartphone.

This means no more having to drag the laptop out at home to double-check how things are going and is a real time saver.

TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com)

TweetDeck has been around for a number of years now, but is still one of the top 5 tools that I believe everyone should be using for their Twitter management.  TweetDeck allows you to pull in all of your accounts, organise columns to track various keyword terms that are appearing in other Tweets and track competitors feeds.

Another advantage of TweetDeck is that you can schedule content for different dates and times for your profiles, to allow you to build out your content calendar quickly and easily.

For interacting with customers and people who may potentially be interested in your services, TweetDeck is an amazing free options that allows you multiple options.


Optimal Social (www.optimalsocial.com)

Optimal Social is a really interesting tool that I'd definitely recommend everyone checking out.  Optimal run an advertising optimisation platform, but the most interesting part of their tool is the Analytics section.  This area allows you to start in depth audience analysis by searching for people who like and dislike certain topics, by location and by platform.  Searching for those who like 'football' for instance shows you the total potential reach, the gender split, and what else those people are interested in.

Graphics like the above show the kind of insight it can pull out in terms of income of people who like different brands, and there is a real wealth of data in the platform to explore.  Some elements are paid, but there is plenty of data in the tool that can be found for free that will come in handy for your planning and strategy.


Topsy (www.topsy.com)

Topsy is a massively useful tool for social listening purposes.  Topsy is a relatively cheap tool to use the full social analytics section.  This allows you to search for multiple keywords over specified date ranges.  From this you can graph the Twitter mention data, and see sentiment scores.

Topsy is also great for link tracking when you have a blog post or other content that is being shared widely - the free version of Topsy allows you keep a track of this very easily so that you respond on Twitter as required.

There are literally thousands of social media tools that are worth investigating these days; however, the above five are all essentials that you must have in your locker ready to use when you need them.  They make our job a lot easier here, and I'm sure they will for you too.

Google Plus Marketing Strategy: Interview with Jesse Wojdylo

Is  ”Market your company on Google Plus” on your company’s New Year’s Resolutions list?  If not, it should be!

Gryffin Media hosted a Google Hangout with social media marketing expert Jesse Wojdylo, one of the individuals with the largest followings on Google Plus.  It’s not easy to have 1000 followers on Plus, let alone Jesse’s 500K + followers.  In this Hangout on Air, Jesse shared invaluable information and advice on how to create and implement a Google Plus Marketing strategy.

Few people have the experience and insights that Jesse does, so please don’t miss out on learning the elements for a successful Google Plus strategy for growth.

 The post A Google Plus Marketing Strategy for Success: Interview with Jesse Wojdylo appeared first on Gryffin Media.



Via

Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working on Social Media

By Nathan Mendenhall at Social Media Today:

2013 was the year of changes for digital marketing.
We saw major shifts in the algorithms for Facebook and Google as well as developments in almost all other social media networks. Fundamentally, we are now forced to change from “hunting” down potential customers to “farming” and cultivating them until they are ready to convert. Since we are using the farming analogy, you might be wondering what we must use to cultivate the consumer-crop.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to push the old “create quality content” mantra at you. That should be a given.

What we DO need is quality content marketing strategies!
These days having keyword rich content on your blog or website simply isn’t enough, you have to have a strategy to make it more find-able. You might be thinking that you can simply post your blogs to Facebook. WRONG! Social media users are used to be bombarded with blogs, so you have to be intelligent about your approach from start to finish. Even if you are thoughtful with your content and your distribution, there are still reasons why your strategy might not work. Let’s take a look at 4 commonly encountered pitfalls.


1- You Aren’t Solving Any Problems

One of the main reasons people search for and share blogs is because they are looking for advice. Think about the last time you had a question. Where did you go? I would wager that you turned to Google or one of the major social networks and received a plethora of blog articles filled with lists. If your content isn’t getting any love, it is very possible that it doesn’t solve a problem. Every piece of content you produce should be useful in some way. While narratives have their place, problem solving content truly generates social engagement and website clicks. You might have noticed the trend that blog titles have become more teasing and in the vein of storytelling. This type of content DOES pick up some traction on social sites; however I would suggest that it is more beneficial for a brand to provide problem solving content with staying power. People love to establish themselves as knowledgeable on social media sites and your content should help them.


2- You Aren’t Using Images

Based on a recent study, Buzzfeed was named as the top publisher on Facebook. What two main themes do we see in the content that Buzzfeed publishes? Lists and pictures! Buzzfeed is successful because they have mastered the art of communication through images. Some of their articles barely have any text. The point here is that people love images, especially if they help move the communication along. Try to infuse your content with fun images that support the message of the content. Nobody likes boring visuals. Another item of note here is that Facebook recently overhauled their link previews to pull in larger, more obvious images into the news feed. Equip your blog with images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels and use proper Open Graph tags. You can find a decent guide here or install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin as it has that feature. At the end of the day, your content strategy needs images AND text that tell the story or solve the problem.


3- Your Community Doesn’t Care   

One of the biggest problems I have encountered with brands trying to figure out why their content isn’t working on social media is that they are producing content that isn’t FOR their community. They are producing content that they THINK the community wants. This might work in some instances, however to truly produce content that resonates with your social community you have to know who they are and what interests them. Try to find out as much information as you can about your community and tailor content specifically for them. All social channels have some sort of analytics available, so use that information to create a profile of your community. Keep in mind, your demographics might shift between the different social channels. Overall, here is what I recommend looking at:

Age – Define the major age range of your community.
Gender – This is pretty self-explanatory.
Location – Geographic location can influence what content will and won’t work.
Language – Does your community speak multiple languages? Should you post in multiple languages?
Interests – If you are using Facebook Ads this should be pretty easy, otherwise you will need to do some testing. What is your target demographic talking about online?

Once you have these demographic pillars, you can calibrate your content creation and distribution strategy to fit your target. There will always be a need for adjustment, however I recommend this approach because it saves you from your gut instinct (which can be wrong) and forces you to use actual data.


4- Your Don’t Have a Content Distribution Strategy

In the previous point, I mentioned calibrating a content distribution strategy. A content distribution strategy is very important because you need to know where your target demographic spends time online, how you need to speak to them, how often and the structure of the post. Are you going to post everything you have to all social channels every day? Are you going to publish a ton of content on your site but only share certain posts to certain channels? All of these questions need to be answered. In an ideal world, your content would be relevant to everyone everywhere at all times. However, experience shows us that we need to tailor the content to fit the distribution channel. Certain titles work great on Facebook, but are too long for Twitter. Hashtags work wonders on Googe+, Twitter and Instagram but have been pretty underwhelming on Facebook. Perhaps Pinterest is the best place for your content to live if it is very image rich. At the end of the day, creating content that is in-line with your desired demographic is only half of the battle. You need a plan on how to get the content in front of them.

Do you have any other reasons why content marketing strategies fail? Tell us in the comment section!



Via

#INFOGRAPHIC: Are Social Networks Fighting For Your Attention?

Social interaction is a part of human nature, but with busy lives or distance sometimes separating friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues, social networks are filling a need globally. While there are some leaders in social media, there are dozens of networks filling various categories and needs, all fighting for attention.

Source: Masters-in-Marketing.org

10 Alternatives to Google Keyword Research Tool

By Pam Dyer on Pamorama:

Keyword research is a fundamental part of content marketing. 

It is an indispensable tool for developing a potent inbound marketing strategy and improving SEO. Search engines favor compelling content, but you won’t generate much traffic if you don’t include the words and phrases people are most interested in and actively searching for. Because many of the available keyword research tools are confusing and counterintuitive, the process can be challenging and time-consuming.

The valuable insights offered by keyword research will inform your strategic process by identifying exactly what your customers want, need, and are concerned about. The demise of Google’s Keyword Tool, the most popular of its kind, has left marketers scrambling for alternatives. Viewed as an essential mechanism for conducting research on keyword phrases, it offered lots of useful information about popularity, competition, and phrase variations. It has been rebranded as Google AdWords Planner, which offers much less functionality and requires users to have an AdWords account in order to use it.

What to do?

10 best alternatives to the Google Keyword Tool

Here are ten keyword research tools that I’ve found to be good replacements for Google’s Keyword Tool. Check them out and see if they’re a fit for your keyword research routine:


Free keyword research tools

- WordStream Keyword Tool has a huge database and enables you to customize searches by filtering adult keywords or “nichefying” results. It also offers options for identifying negative keywords, keyword grouping, and finding keyword niches. The full, paid version delivers thousands of results for some keywords, with the top 100 available for free.

- Wordtracker reveals high-performing keywords in minutes via its easy-to-use interface. It shows you what people are searching for, gives you a multitude of suggestions for keyword phrases, and computes how much competition you might face for the terms you select. A free account is required.

- SEO Book Keyword Tool offers search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo, and Bing and links them to related global search results; links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword Discovery keyword research results; links to vertical databases like Topix, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us; and much more.

- Ubersuggest makes good use of Google Suggest and other suggest services. You can instantly get thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries. It also offers vertical results for images, news, shopping, video, and recipes.

- Keyword Eye helps you simplify your keyword research. The visual tool displays keywords in increasing or decreasing sizes based on their search volume or AdWords competition. 10 free keyword searches per day are allowed, with 100 results delivered per report. You also receive great data about your competitors.



Paid keyword research tools

- MOZ retrieves the top 10 rankings for any keyword, then assigns that keyword a difficulty score based on the pages that currently rank for that word. View search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term. Competitive keyword analysis metrics show you where a competitor is ready to be bumped out.

- KeywordSpy tracks all search advertising activity in any given industry, which empowers you with marketing analytics, SEO intelligence, competitors’ keywords and their ad copies, and much more valuable information.

- SEMrush helps you discover your competitor’s organic and paid keywords in search. You can search by your competitor’s domain or search for competitors using specific keywords. You can see volumes, trends, and other data across ten different Google regional domains and Bing. You can also enter your site or that of a competitor to see the top 10 organic keywords for which it ranks.

- Keyword Discovery helps you identify the keywords that your customers are using, related keywords you need to look at, and common spelling mistakes, as well as how your industry’s keywords are impacted by seasonal search trends.

- Advanced Web Ranking offers a keyword research tool that brings data from Google AdWords, Google Webmaster API, Google Trends, Google Suggest, 7Search, SEMRush, Wordtracker, and Yahoo API Related Keyword Search together in one place, helping you to identify efficient keywords and find your competitors’ best keywords.




10 Great Alternatives to the Google Keyword Research Tool is a post by Pam Dyer on Pamorama | Social Media Marketing Blog.

Buffer For Business Gets Google Analytics Integration

Buffer today announced some new features to its Buffer for Business plans. The additions include Google Analytics integration, follower growth tracking, a date-range picker, individual day performance of analytics, and an export option.

Firstly, you can now set your own UTM tracking parameters to match your clients or your campaigns within Google Analytics. The option is available on the Link Shortening page for your social profiles, under the Settings menu:

Once you’ve turned it on, just set your campaign parameters (name, source, and medium) and you’ll be good to go. To change your campaign, just update the parameters.

Read the full story >>

Apple Buys Twitter Analytics Company Topsy

Apple has acquired the social media analytics startup Topsy.

The acquisition was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which says the deal was worth more than $200 million.

Topsy is one of the few services that has access to Twitter's data firehose. It offers users a way to analyze tweets, gather sentiment and measure the reach of a campaign, hashtag or message. In September, the company rolled out the ability to search Twitter's entire archive.


Read the full story >>

7 Facebook Statistics You Should Know For An Engaging Facebook Page

By Belle Beth Cooper at TNW:

One of the things we focus on most at Buffer is the best time to post to Twitter and Facebook. This is because we want to help you get more engagement with your audience, which is beneficial for everyone.

While the best time to post is definitely important, there are some other things to keep in mind. I had a look at what kind of updates work best for Facebook pages to increase interaction and found 7 interesting statistics that you’ll probably find useful if you’re trying to make your page more engaging.


1. Photo posts get 39 percent more interaction

Not only do photo posts get more engagement than links, videos or text-based updates, they actually account for 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook. According to Kissmetrics, photos get 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs on links than text-based posts. And as we’ve mentioned before, self-explanatory photos seem to perform best.

Wishpond’s data says that overall, photo posts get 120 percent more engagement than the average post, and photo albums actually get 180 percent more engagement. This was a surprising one for me, but it seems that if you have multiple images to share, you’d be better of putting them into a Facebook album than publishing separate photo posts.

Especially Buffer’s new image posting feature lets you right click any image on the web and then share it in full-size to your wall in seconds. No more downloading, uploading nightmare here.


2. Shorter posts get 23 percent more interaction

Writing shorter posts isn’t just handy on Twitter. Keeping your posts below 250 characters can get you 60 percent more engagement than you might otherwise see. You can even get up to 66 percent more engagement if you cut it down to less than 80 characters.

Either way, the result seems to be that getting to the point quickly and concisely works best. Perhaps that’s why Facebook fans like photo posts so much?

Especially looking at the overall Social Media statistics for other social networks, it’s really interesting how this stacks up to other platforms.


3. Using emoticons increases comments by 33 percent

If you thought emoticons were only for teens, you might want to rethink that idea. According to this AMEX OPEN Forum infographic, emoticons can make a big difference to your engagement rates. No only do posts with emoticons get 33 percent more comments, they also get shared 33 percent more often. Even better: they get liked 57 percent more often than posts without emoticons.

Emoticons tend to add a more human side to your communications, and it seems like this comes across fairly well with users.


4. Engagement rates on Thursday and Friday are 18 percent higher

Compared to other days in the week, Buddymedia’s study found that engagement rates for Facebook are 18 percent higher on Thursdays and Fridays. As they put it, “the less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook!”

The study also looked at different industries, including sports, retail, automotive and healthcare, to see which days worked best in each industry. Although they did vary, most of them sat around the end of the week, from Wednesday-Friday. Apparently no industry has users that are engaged on Mondays or Tuesdays!

To find out more about the best times to post to Facebook, we’ve also written an extensive guide that you might find useful.


5. Question posts get 100 percent more comments

If comments are the kind of interaction you’re after, questions might be the way to go. According to an infographic by Kissmetrics, they get 100 percent more comments than standard text-based posts. HubSpot shares a similar finding, although this data points out that question posts often get fewer likes and shares than other types of posts.

What I found really interesting about this stat is that HubSpot’s data also shows which question words attract more comments, with the most popular being ‘should,’ ‘would,’ ‘which,’ and ‘who.’ This makes me think that closed questions which have a very limited answer option are the highest attractors of comments. Open question words like ‘why’ and ‘how’ which make the user think more to articulate their answer sit at the bottom of this chart.

When we observe how most updates sent through Buffer perform, we found a similar pattern of greatly increased lift through questions being posted.


6. 35 percent of Facebook Fans like a page so they can participate in contests

If you’re chasing down new fans, a contest seems like a fairly good way to encourage likes. A report from earlier this year showed that 35 percent of Facebook fans liked Facebook pages specifically to compete in contests. Contests obviously solicit interaction by asking for people to enter. It turns out this can work, as ‘caption this photo’-style contests actually bring in 5.5 times more comments than regular posts.

In Buddymedia’s report, contest-related words like winner, win, entry, contest, enter and promotion were all more likely to engage users.

7. 42 percent of Fans like a page to get a coupon or discount

According to Socially Stacked, 42 percent of Facebook fans like a page in order to get a discount or coupon. A study by Wildfire Interactive showed that coupon-based campaigns received the highest engagement rates. Giveaways and sweepstakes came in just behind coupons as highly engaging post types.

What have you observed has changed the most on Facebook in the last few months? I hope these statistics might be helpful to get your Facebook page on the right track!




Via TNW.