SEOptimise » social media

11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:31:29 +0000

As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I’ve been able to come up with over the past few months.

Understanding the account structure

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Step 2: create your ads

Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.

Step 3: designate the landing page

If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:

1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.

2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.

Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.

Step 4: create your ad copy

The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.

Step 5: define your customer

This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.

Step 6: select your campaign

If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.

Step 7: set your bid and place your order

Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.

Step 8: repeat above steps

Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.

Getting the account structure right

Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.

Example 1: messy structure

Baseball campaign:

baseball bat ad
baseball ad
baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2
baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign:

basketball ad
basketball ad 2
basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign:

football boots ad
football boots ad 2
football ad

The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.

Example 2 : better structure

Baseball bat campaign -

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign -

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign -

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign -

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign -

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign -

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign -

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign -

football boots ad
football boots ad

You could go even more granular:

Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 18-24)

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 25-35)

- baseball ad
- baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 18-24)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 25-35)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign (age 18-24)

football ad
football ad 2

Football campaign (age 25-35)

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 18-24)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 25-35)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.

A/B Testing

I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.

What’s in a name?

The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -

[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]

e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males

Conclusion

The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Postscript

I received some constructive feedback after having published the above post and was notified by Leyla Arsan (@leyla_a) via twitter that I didn’t address a very important part of the whole campaign set-up process, namely URL tagging for conversion tracking. I also didn’t mention targeting ads to your existing Facebook fans and their friends, which I thought I should include too. So here are my #12 and #13 tips for a better Facebook campaign:

Tip #12: Conversion tracking
As with any PPC campaign, it is imperative that you set up conversion tracking in order to better gauge the success or failure of the campaigns you run. Like many PPC advertisers, I use Google Analytics in order to gain greater insight about the traffic I send via Facebook ads. The only problem is that Google Analytics can’t differentiate between referral and paid traffic sent via Facebook unless you tag your URLs with tracking codes. Google have very generously provided a URL builder that help you generate the tracking code to your landing page URLs. The only limitation with this tool is that it would be extremely time consuming if you have a large number of ads and landing page URLs. For this reason, I use our very own Daniel Bianchini’s Google docs spread sheet which lets you scale what the Google’s URL builder offer. This spread sheet has saved me loads of precious time, so I do urge you to use it. Here’s where you could find the spread sheet: http://goo.gl/jI1Wd
If you want more guidance on using the spread sheet click here to get to the original post.

Tip#13: Don’t forget your existing fans
With Facebook’s ‘premium ads and featured stories’ you can feature page posts on your brand pages as ads. This means that you can promote and advertise your content you post on your brand pages. This is quite a powerful channel to reach out and engage with your fans and their friends. The significance of this method of advertising is that you would be able to provide your target audience with an ad that is more engaging and less sale-sy. Also, you get to use not only text, but rich media such as images and videos. However, the key points to remember when setting campaigns that target your fans are:

1. The objective of the ‘premium ads’ campaign is to create brand awareness and increase the number of fans – or your fan rate. So you should avoid a sales approach in your core messaging.
2. If you are posting an image, make sure your page posts are up to 90 characters or less so they could be featured in its entirety on your ad. If it’s a page post with no rich media, then you can post up to 150 characters.
3. Since your target audience are fans and their friends, you might limit your reach (especially if you target sub-groups). However, it is still important to have a targeted audience with a decent enough number as Facebook wouldn’t display your ads if the target audience is too small.
4. Use your ‘page insights’ data to find what best geo locations to target your ads, and also to find which demographic segment are most receptive to your posts. This data should guide you when writing content for page posts.
5. Anecdotal evidence has shown that questions do tend to gain a fair amount of engagement: this also tends to work well when targeting those who are not already your fans.

Image credit: marcopako

Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business

Pak Hou Cheung — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:32:39 +0000

My Foursquare Experience so far…

Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below. I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”. Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now). In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

Despite my negativity and social neglect of Foursquare as of this month, I do believe it will be a bigger issue this year amongst companies (especially SMEs and franchises) to start rolling out and using this social media platform. Using Foursquare has really helped me in understanding why businesses should start using this social media platform and how to use it most effectively.

Does your Business Foursquare?

If you were to ask most businesses about what social media platforms they use to market their company, I suppose you could name a few, popular ones being Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and if you are really savvy (but not really), Google+.

But how many of us have thought about using Foursquare as a marketing platform for their business? I am going to go out on a limb and say probably less than 5% use Foursquare and to its full potential; an infographic that I saw last year outlined the number of small businesses using social media, with Foursquare not even being mentioned in the Top 7. Even today, the fact remains that Foursquare is still not being recognised, which was exemplified when I took part in a business social media survey last night, shown below:

Shown from the screenshot, not only has Foursquare not been recognised, but what is interesting is that Google+ and Pinterest have not been included. Also, their list showed that wikis were a more of a popular option.

Should my business start using Foursquare?

As I envisage Foursquare to get bigger and better, businesses will find it particularly useful for:

Maximising their social media efforts.
Looking to improve their multi-channel marketing efforts.
Digital-only brands to build upon their online reputation.
Great way of testing new products to market.
Source of market research to help understand their consumers better.

6 Immense Tips for Your Business to Capitalise on Foursquare

There are many ways for your business to make the best use of Foursquare and making the“Foursquare Special” better. Here are my Top 6 Tips.

1) Make your check-ins more useful

As exciting as check-ins are, after a while users are bound to get bored of them, so capitalise on using them better; for example, it was reported by Tnooz that the Radisson Edwardian chain of hotels were offering guests the chance to keep their rooms for longer, if they checked in via Foursquare. The hotel chain gave guests an extra two hours in their room.

2) Review and monitor your tips section

Be sure to monitor your tips section and understand what people are saying about your brand via Foursquare. Not only is this a great way for “free market research”, it is like having the service of a mystery shopper without the costs.

3) Create location-based experiences

If your business has one or more location, don’t just have a standard special across all the branches. Include specific ones, for example if your business is near a seaside resort or within the city. Have a special offer that is unique to that place to ensure they that your branch capitalises on that specific location’s resources.

4) Capitalising on low-cost impulse items

This idea works particularly well for businesses that sell cheap items, that people buy on impulse. Reach out to people in the surrounding area to let them know of a “free cup of coffee with a cake” or “buy one doughnut, get one free.”

5) Marketing new/seasonal products

Broadcasting new/seasonal items is a great way of using the “Foursquare Special” to letting your consumers know of any new products or services available, and that they should try them out as soon as possible!

6) Understand and review your specials

When you set up “Foursquare Special”, don’t just have one special set up and done; alternate them and see what works best for you. For example, if you own a restaurant, don’t just have “free glass of wine for the mayor”, but alternate them – “5% off Winter menu for check-ins”, “20% off food bill for the mayor” or even “15% off total food bill on the 10^th visit.” Play around with them to give new incentives and better engagement for the users.

2012 The Year of Foursquare (and the dragon)

With huge savings and partnerships already established in 2011 within the U.S, for example H&M, Sports Authority and Dunkin’ Donuts on board, I envisage that Foursquare will only get bigger and better for us in 2012, and be adopted as another popular social media platform to help businesses improve their sales.

What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

Gillian Cook — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:25:03 +0000

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh. A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

30 SEO Resolutions for 2012

Tad Chef — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:05:14 +0000

Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Content Creation

I will create less shallow content and more quality “one of a kind” pieces of content.
I will create more content using multiple rich media such as images, audio, videos and the like.
I will write shorter, more readable postings instead of long, hard to read ones that nobody can follow.
I will create more content on site and waste less time on third party sites that require me to give away “User Generated Content”.
I will provide less average sales copy and create more outstanding content for inbound marketing purposes.

Link Building

I will perform fewer tedious tasks such as contacting unwitting webmaster about link exchanges and provide more appealing incentives for people to link to me voluntarily.
I will go after more citations and fewer links to get traction on local search and Google Places instead of just the organic index that gets less exposure.
I will make sure my old inbound links are still there and also fix 404 errors on my own site.
I will link out more, not only to get noticed and more links back, but to reach out honestly to like-minded industry professionals – after all, we don’t compete most of time.
I won’t sneak in “free links” anymore on unsuspecting sites that would not voluntarily link to me.

Social Media

I will market less and contribute more in order to become a valuable contributor to social media.
I will get organised while social networking and not just waste time drifting from update to update on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
I will follow fewer hypes and not just jump in on every social site that web celebrities want me to. I will go where the real value is.
I won’t just share links all the time on social sites but instead use them in a balanced way, adding networking and conversation to my daily habits.
I will schedule times for my social media activity instead of just dropping in and getting distracted all the time during work hours.

Blogging

I will blog more regularly instead of just updating my social media profiles on third party sites.
I will guest blog on other blogs, both the already important ones and the not yet very well known.
I will focus my blog writing on the desired outcome – not just blog for the page views and social shares.
I will socialise with other bloggers both online and in real life to establish lasting relationships.
I won’t check web analytics daily or more often and obsess about metrics that only make sense to check in the long term or every other week.

Tools

I will use fewer tools and more techniques. SEO and SMO are still about how you use them, not how many tools you use.
I will use the tools I prefer more in-depth instead of just scratching the surface of the features.
I will take more time for social media analytics and monitoring and find out what real humans say about me, my contributions and why.
I will not trust tools with everything and make sure to cross check data and compare with other outcomes.
I will recommend only the tools I truly use, not the ones I’m an affiliate of.

SEO

I will perform more SEO tests and publish the results to the benefit of the SEO community, no matter how vague the outcomes are.
I will provide more advice to educate the clients and their teams and make them more self-sufficient.
I will share my techniques, tools and case studies, not just to show off but to get recognition from the SEO community.
I will rant and complain less about Google, other SEOs and bloggers and instead keep on improving my own arsenal.
I will build a recognisable brand instead of just relying on generic rankings on Google.

These resolutions are written in the first person to make it easier for you to identify with them and to apply them yourself. They are not necessarily my personal resolutions.

On a side note: this is my last post on SEOptimise after more than four years. I hope you liked my posts. If you did, you can keep on reading my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

The SEOptimise team will take care of this blog completely from now on, so there won’t be any shortage of posts.

* Creative Common image by Aftab Uzzaman.

What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?

Gillian Cook — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:21:03 +0000

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms. In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday’s big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

“Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

In December’s post, Google mentioned:

“Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.”

A month earlier, Google announced its freshness update to search, which prioritises recent, relevant and timely results. Joe Crowther, of Metro news site explains, “The quicker you get the image up the better. Google tends to assume that the first to break a story or image is the source. As the story develops, it will re-adjust, dependent of other signals”. As image search succumbs to the freshness update, we can deduce that Google is continuing to include image search within all its major algorithm updates.

Last week, Google announced 30 subtle algorithm changes. This ‘monthly series’ instalment was different to any previous one due to Google publishing the codenames attached to each change. In its newfound approach to communication, Google mentioned three updates specific to image search.

“Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.”

This update is rather reflective of the Panda update, which favours high site quality.

“Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.”

SEOptimise’s Matt Taylor explains the possible implications of this for an SEO campaign: “When Google rolls out something from the main search to image search that wasn’t there previously, it may be possible to spot patterns on what Google deems as spammy by noting which sites disappear from the search results. If you notice images from your site disappear from the image search, this gives you an indication that Google thinks you are spammy”.

“Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.”

The improvements to image size present opportunities for ecommerce sites. Bigger images will rank better, and if these sites have good size images of their products, they may be able to pull traffic from image search for products that may be difficult to rank for normally.

These changes not only signal that image size is now important, but also that the quality of a landing page (or the page on which the image sits) determines how an image is ranked. Along with added spam detection, all these updates point to a “cleaning up of image search”.

Yesterday Google announced its “+1 Your World” project, which confirms and further enhances Google personalised search for users based on their social circles. Search queries will now deliver results from the anonymous web and results from the user’s own personal networks (providing that the information has been shared with that user). Image search will be no different. However, the personal image results will only be truly useful depending on the information that is attached to the images. Images posted with the original JPEG filename will not rank well in personal search, just as you would expect in a public search.

This update strengthens Google’s previous attempts to clean up web images by rewarding well classified image information. It is apparent that Google Image Search is being targeted with algorithms that reflect the ideas behind the major Google algorithm update, which would suggest that this area of Google’s business is becoming more important.

36 Social Media Sharing Resources for Business People

Tad Chef — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:18:25 +0000

Sharing is the key activity when it comes to proper social media participation and beyond. When you don’t share anything on the web today, you can’t compete with those who do. They get all the attention, links and ultimately sales or whatever they are after.

So where are we sharing online?
How do you actually share?
What tools help you with sharing?

I compiled a list of 36 Social Media sharing resources that cover a variety of content types, such as how to articles, statistics, tools for business people.

How to share

Most people, it seems, have lost the ability to share. Instead, business social media users in particular tend promote themselves. They have to learn that on social media you don’t promote yourself directly but you share instead. You share content provided by others.

Statistics

Some statistics show that most sharing online still gets done via e-mail, as in the early days of the web before social media. Facebook comes first or second, depending on the source. Google+ or automated sites such as StumbleUpon, which claim to bring more social media traffic, are far less important than you might think judging from the press they get. Some social media statistics show much more detailed insights into how sharing is going on.

Infographics

Most statistics and other social media related data tends to be a bit overwhelming. Some social media infographic do a great job at visualising what’s going on and putting things into perspective.

Tools

Beyond the usual suspects everybody uses, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, there are lots of tools out there that can simplify, streamline and analyse your social media activity. I won’t add the numerous social media analytics tools, but only those focusing on sharing.

Facebook

Facebook is still the number one when it comes to social media or rather social networking. It has added numerous features and manifold changes recently. Using Facebook to share is already a science of its own. Especially dealing with the Facebook algorithm that decides who sees your shares is intriguing and complex to say the least.

Google+

Google+ has received lots of attention, especially compared with its real size. Google is too omnipresent to let Plus fail. Thus I’d like to show you how Google adds features strategically to get the social ranking signals it needs, because clearly Google+ is not just a Facebook competitor but part of a bigger plan to get people to stay and share in Google’s own eco system.

All these resources will help you to plan and practice sharing on the social Web, the most basic part of your social media presence. Without sharing you don’t have such a real presence - you may practice customer service on social sites but as long as you don’t share anything beyond your own content you’re just doing promotion without truly participating.

* CC image by ryancr

Small Business Owners! 6 Quick Ways to Help Your Customers Help You

Shaad Hamid — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:15:31 +0000

Sometime last month, my friends and I did what most people do on a Friday night. Yes, we went out to blow off some steam and in the process, popped in to Pizza Hut to grab something to eat. The problem was, we probably dropped by at a bad time. The waitress seemed like she’d be anywhere in the world except serving at our table. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I weren’t expecting 5-star treatment, but is a little courtesy or even a smile too much to ask for? Like most people who simply wouldn’t bother to complain about how rude the waitress was, we just grit our teeth and left as soon as we could. Fast forward to the next morning and one of my friends suggested that we go to a local restaurant named Joe’s, located in Oxford’s Summertown (isn’t that the best ever name for a town?) so we paid them a visit.

From the moment we entered the restaurant, we were made to feel welcome. The food was absolutely divine, their attention to detail was impeccable and their service was amazing. In fact, their receipt had a handwritten ‘thank you’ along with a smiley face on it!

Apologies for the low quality mobile phone image.

It’s amazing how little effort can make a customer happy. Having enjoyed the food and the service, I felt I must run to the top of a hill and announce to everyone that these guys are amazing and that all my friends should check them out too; or at least the modern method of doing so, which is to tweet about them or to mention them on Facebook. Unfortunately I couldn’t tag them in my tweets or Facebook status as they didn’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook. So here I was, a satisfied customer, looking to give this restaurant a big ‘thumbs up’ and a recommendation to my friends about how awesome they are, but with no natural channel to do so. So I thought I should compile a list of quick and easy ways small businesses can help customers become their advocates. (Please note that Joe’s, to their credit, have now set up a Facebook page).

#1 Out of sight, out of mind

At the very least, make sure you have some sort of social media presence so that, like me, your customers can recommend your business to their friends. This shouldn’t take you long, as setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile literally takes a few minutes. Make sure you include details such as the address, a phone number and a link to your website. If you are unsure or are not confident in doing this yourself, get someone who is tech savvy (like your niece or nephew) to do this for you. If you have the time, here are a couple of great posts on how you could set up a Facebook page and a Twitter page.

#2 A picture is worth a thousand words

Images can convey quite a lot about your business, and this is especially important if you are a restaurant or a retail outlet. This also helps to give your business or your brand some sort of personality. So when you include images of your premises on Facebook, make sure you either invest in a really good camera or you obtain the services of a professional photographer. Although this may sound silly, the images on the web do in fact influence what people think about your business, as it’s the only tangible way they could associate quality with.

If you want to take this to the next level, you could propose to your guests that you can take good quality images and with their consent, upload it to your Facebook page and invite them to tag themselves and their friends on your fan page. This will ensure people will visit, engage and share your page with others.

#3 Consistency is the name of the game

Now that you have set up a Facebook page and/or a Twitter page with about 10-20 fans or followers, it is important to consolidate your existing fans and to grow this number. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, it is extremely important to be part of your followers’ social network experience (which means being visible on their Twitter feeds and Facebook newsfeeds). Having said that, it is also important to not overdo this; there’s nothing more offensive on the social sphere than spam. On average, I’d say 1-2 posts a day is more than sufficient. The secret to maintaining great posts is to make sure your updates add value to your fans and followers. If you are a restaurant owner, sharing little cooking tips to your followers could be quite beneficial to them. For example, you could have a ‘recipe of the week’ post and share a tip to your followers.

#4 Offer incentives

Everyone likes to feel special and it’s the same on social media. Offering your fans and followers a special discount to try out a new item on the menu would help bolster loyalty toward your Facebook fan page.

#5 Save time with tools

I’m sure most small business owners wouldn’t really have the time to constantly be on social media platforms updating statuses and tweets. If you can’t hire someone to do this for you I suggest you use tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck in order to schedule your tweets for the coming week and to monitor what people are saying about your brand or business on Twitter. Make a schedule at the beginning of the week as to what type of tweets and updates you want to share with your followers and also schedule at least half an hour a day to monitor and respond to any user engagements.

#6 “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”
Use Facebook insights to measure and monitor the virality of your posts. Facebook provides a wealth of statistics, from how many people who are talking about your page right now to which demographic and geographic (including which cities) are most receptive to your posts. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. Marketers at one time used to spend quite a lot of money to obtain this market intelligence data which Facebook now provide you on a platter, and all this free of charge. So take advantage of the plethora of data and constantly tweak and improve your campaigns.

Conclusion

I’d like to share with you what an ultra-local business owner mentioned to me recently. His father set up a grocery store on a very competitive and busy high street in Colombo. I remember as a child frequenting his store on a daily basis with my grandfather who bought his loaf of bread, newspaper and his bottle of milk from this store like a prayer. How this business owner distinguished himself against his many competitors was his ability to form relationships with his customers. He knew my grandfather and me by name. He always made us laugh and we always left his store with a smile. So although two generations have passed, and his tiny grocery store is today a chain of supermarkets, he hasn’t forgotten what made his business succeed in the first place. When his son took over, he made sure he continued this formula on a whole new platform; he says that social media is simply a tool to form and develop these very same relationships at scale. None of the original classical methods of marketing have changed. The only thing that has, is where these relationships and conversations take place. Sadly most businesses don’t seem to grasp this concept well. Herein lies an opportunity for small business owners to be a serious threat to large multinationals. For me personally, Joe’s Bar and Grill has won a customer for life, without having to dish out heavy advertising spend.

*Image credit: ActiveSteve on Flickr.

How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother!

Pak Hou Cheung — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:23:35 +0000

Let’s get one thing straight first: you will NOT be required to do the following in order to get free followers on Twitter using this method:

Tweet interesting thoughts
Post ground breaking news articles
Be informative to your target market
Interact with people
Be selling a good/service to people in order to be followed

Over the past few years, as social media marketing has increased and become ever more popular, ludicrous businesses have popped up “selling” Twitter followers, with many brands also reporting the success of their social media campaigns simply from the number of increased followers.

Today’s post will not only show you how to get free followers, but also help you understand that having 100 followers as opposed to 100,000 makes no difference; it’s about quality not quantity (funnily enough, similar to SEO).

I will not be discussing the reasons as to why you would want more Twitter followers etc; a quick Google search will bring up a plethora of articles discussing it.

Learning Objectives

Before we begin I will outline a little structure to what this post will cover:

Show you how to get free Twitter followers
Prove to you that it is possible
Help you understand why even if you/your brand gets, say 100,000 followers from doing this, it would be useless – especially from a business perspective.

How to get free followers?

In order to start acquiring more Twitter followers you will need to log onto the following site: www.twiends.com and register yourself.

What is Twiends? Good question. Twiends helps people to develop their social network profile on Twitter. The whole concept works on creating seeds in order to incentivise people to “follow you”. So when you follow someone they give you a seed and vice versa; more information can be found about this here.

The whole concept is pretty straightforward – piggy-backing from one of the old tactics in Twitter that people used to use and still do, quoting “Team Follow Back/Follow Me, I Follow You.” Using the Twiends method is far quicker and more effective.

The Proof

This morning, to accompany the blog post, I thought I would actually show you guys that this is possible and to test how many I could acquire in under 25 minutes. Shown below is my dummy account “Pre Twiends” – please take note of the followers, following, time and date in the corner (I have no idea why this Twitter UI has not been updated yet either).

Within 10 minutes of setting up my account and gathering and distributing the seeds, I had already acquired 36+ followers. Note that my following figure has gone up dramatically, but that’s because of the way Twiends works, as shown below:

You will find that the featured users distribute the most seeds and the interesting Tweeps distribute fewer seeds, but sometimes you do get some who offer 8/9 seeds, so be on the lookout for those, as they do go quick!

Here is a top tip for you: when you first log into Twiends, I would recommend that you go to your settings straight away and turn your seed distribution to “OFF”, so you will not be giving your initial free seeds away, and use a few minutes to better acquaint yourself with the layout and how the programme works.

I used some of the time in between to follow some more people and to unfollow some people, and before I knew it, as you can see, I had 100+ followers in under 25 minutes and 79 new followers!

Why doing this is useless for you or your brand

Even though it’s great to show that with this it is possible to get 100,000+ followers on Twitter, it is useless for two reasons – for a person and business.

Firstly it would be useless for you on Twitter to voice your opinions to a load of people that are just there for the vanity metric.

Secondly, for a business, if those numbers do not convert to sales/leads, that is useless too.

To put this into perspective, ask yourself a question: as a person or brand on Twitter, would you rather have a 100,000 followers and 0.1% of those are genuine sales/replies, or would you rather have 10,000 followers and 70% of those followers lead to sales/replies?

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother!

Can Meeting Your Followers Face-to-Face Increase Loyalty?

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:35:32 +0000

A few days ago I was looking through my mentions on Twitter and I noticed a rough correlation between the strength of relationship I have with a person and the frequency/consistency of their interaction with me. I also noticed that strength of relationship was in rough correlation to the medium(s) that I’ve communicated with them on. In other words, the followers who I’d only spoke to over e-mail or Twitter weren’t interacting with me as often as those who I’d met in real life.

It got me thinking: if the depth of a relationship impacts frequency of interaction online, and the medium in which I communicate with people on impacts the depth of relationship, is it possible to increase the loyalty of your followers by meeting them face-to-face?

How real are you to your Twitter followers? Image Credit: Aristocrats-hat

Meeting Face-to-Face Increases the Likelihood of Social Interaction, IF You Have Shared Interests.

When you meet someone face-to-face, you become more likely to then interact with them online, providing that you have shared interests and consider them to add value to your newsfeed. Having met someone in real life is a ‘filter’ that some people (subconsciously) use to prioritise who they interact with socially.

I decided to ask my followers what they thought about whether meeting someone in real life improves the likelihood of engaging with them on Twitter afterwards. The general consensus was that most people found meeting someone face-to-face does have a positive impact on interaction on Twitter.

Can Skype Increase the Loyalty of Your Audience?

Nowadays, the process of meeting someone has become more of a spectrum than a binary choice, as you can virtually meet people through video calls, instant messaging and audio technology.

Research has proven that the use of voice and video communications helps when building relationships. What this means is that hypothetically if you were to Skype someone, they’d be more likely to interact with you in the future than if you were to have solely had correspondence over e-mail or Twitter.

I personally love Skype and use it regularly as a way of getting to know new people whose blogs I find interesting or tweets I enjoy. I find that it adds so much more context to the relationship I end up building with that person, as quite often I will end up finding something I have in common with that person or learning about the interesting things that they’re up to.

Skyping with one person a week will increase your followers’ loyalty
I strongly recommend Skype as a means of getting to know your followers. Deepening your relationships with your followers will not only allow you to get to know your audience, but it will also increase the interaction you have with your followers and they have with you. I recommend trying to put aside a little bit of time each week to having a Skype call with your followers, even if it’s just one call a week.

Final Thoughts – How Many of Your Most Loyal Followers Have You Met?

I ran some data on my Twitter followers and found out that I’ve met 80% of my ten most loyal Twitter followers (those who retweet me the most) in real life. I asked around the office and on Twitter and the general consensus was that most people had met between 60 – 90% of their most loyal Twitter followers (the average being 76%). Although based on a small sample size, I think it’s fair to assume that for most of us, the people who interact with us the most are those who we meet in person. Which, if you turn it around, makes a lot of sense – those who we share the most interests with (and thus interact with online) are the people we’re most likely to meet and develop relationships with in person.

A big thanks to Stuart Duff, Richard Fergie, Jenny Foden, James Carson, Eloi Casali, Gavin Llewelyn, Bas Van Den Beld, Ruben Martinez, and the SEOptimise team for inputting into this post!

Agent Rank: Google’s Internal Klout Score

Tad Chef — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:18:13 +0000

Recently I’ve written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly “hate Klout”. Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.

Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it’s quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

That’s why some people hate Klout: they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.

What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people’s influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn’t a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.

Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it’s also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.

The Agent Rank patent does not describe in detail how such Agent Rank might rank people, but the other papers mentioned above suggest a few ways to determine trust on a collaborative social site. At Wikipedia for example:

“Users gain reputation when they make edits that are preserved by subsequent authors, and lose reputation when their work is partially or wholly undone.”

What does this mean? Opportunism and mainstream opinions pay off.

This is similar to early Web 2.0 sites such as Digg or Hacker News, where a few dominant users gained reputation by submitting content from sites everybody likes and agrees on. Back then it was TechCrunch, for example. I have seen this phenomenon on my first generation social sites.

The more “one size fits all” and “smallest common denominator” a page was, the more likely it succeed.

With it the submitter succeeded as well. Thus people were always in a race to submit TechCrunch articles. The ones who submitted the most TechCrunch articles were the most reputable.

I’ve seen a similar phenomenon on the newer social sites you couldn’t game as easily, people submitting all stories by the

NYT
Mashable
Search Engine Land
SEOmoz

or whatever the main authority in your field is. Most automated accounts do it. They gain authority by simply feeding RSS feeds of popular sites to Twitter, even though nobody clicks the links.

I can see because I see the stats from my blogs that get retweeted by these bots, the bit.ly stats for the URLs and the reputation metrics of these bot accounts. Many of them were able to game Topsy algorithm. Topsy is not as exact as Klout: they just have three different kinds of user not influential ones, influential ones and highly influential ones.

Google will measure trust with more complexity than Klout

I guess but elements from all the measurement system above will be among the likely factors. We’re still in a very early phase of this, but it’s already clear that Google does not want to trust websites anymore but authors instead.

The insistence on real names and the many incentives to verify your identity on Google services all point in the same direction: Google will focus more on people than on websites in the future. Thus an author publishing a completely new website will be able to push it quickly to the top or at least the article they transfer their reputation to.

Also, the more reputable documents and pieces of content you support, the more reputable you get. As on Klout, it will be most likely the sheer activity that will make you more trustworthy. Google’s Agent Rank won’t be able to compute your reputation just based on one or two articles and a few votes.

The more you participate and the more content you create, the more you will become an authority. In the long run, Google will have to focus more and more on real authority that is not the sheer number of votes. In the beginning the search giant has no choice. It has to reward sheer activity as it doesn’t have enough users, votes and other social signals yet.

You may have noticed that I use terms such as

reputation
trust
authority
influence

quite interchangeably in this article. As of yet, there is no clear standard on the web for measuring the worth or value of one’s contributions. We already know that neither model is perfect yet but that the importance of measuring people and not websites is growing.

You don’t have to be a prophet to extrapolate the most likely ranking signals for people Google will have to use. Consider these:

Activity – as noted above, you can’t measure something where there is nothing – without activity there is not enough to measure. On the other hand there will be some limits to that. We know that having a million followers on Twitter does not necessarily mean that you are more important. Also, sending 50 automated messages a day may be too much.

Altruism – nobody, either on social media or in real life, likes constant self-promotion. Many marketers still get that wrong. You get what you give. Science has proven that only through altruism can the whole species survive. Algorithms can’t rely on egoists to offer the best advice, as there would be no popularity at all: everybody would just promote their own works. So it has to count the other people who share content, with whom they have no direct connection.

Authority – one of the reasons why Google succeeded in becoming the biggest search engine in the world is its reliance on authority. The more experts consider something to be a good resource, the better. It worked for a while with websites, as the original PageRank formula reflected the reputation model of the traditional scientific community. The more a document got cited, the better. We know that it’s no longer enough, ever since Google has been the leading search engine. PageRank could be gamed quite easily with paid links. You can’t bribe thousands of people as easily as you can pay for a few links though.

Expertise – authority can’t be measured without measuring expertise as well. You can get very popular despite being dead wrong. So an Agent Rank will have to measure whether a given author gets supported by thousands or even millions of people who have no clue or whether they get supported by a few experts who are really knowledgeable in a given area of expertise.

Impartiality – just consider a Google +1 user who constantly votes up Fox News. Can Google count on this person to be an expert on news? Well, most probably the algorithm will consider such a user just an expert on US conservative views. In contrast, consider a user who gives +1 to all kinds of resources, including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera etc. Will this user be more of an impartial expert?

Popularity – you may be right, but as long as you don’t tell the world or convince more than a bunch of bookworms who do nothing else than deal with the issue all day, it won’t be sign of influence. You have to be able to appeal to the masses. Google already favours Wikipedia in its results not because it’s always the best results, but because most people can get that. Whether you search for SEO, film or God, Wikipedia will show up on top. You will surely agree that there are bigger authorities or better results for all three examples.

Quality – the aforementioned factor; mass appeal can be easily gamed though. We have seen content farms embrace the shallow but popular approach over the years until Google has to curb it. Quality will have to be measured as well. How can quality be determined? This is very difficult, I could write a huge post about this. The on-going Google high quality update, aka Panda, has been about it in 2011. The quality of published and voted for texts by authors will have to be determined by a complex mix of signals itself.

Reputation – someone can have mass appeal, be considered an expert by other experts, even be considered an authority. The reputation of this person can still be a nightmare. Just think about people like Jason Calacanis, Derek Powazek or Steve Rubel who declared SEO dead or rubbish. They are not even famous – they are infamous. People know them because they shout louder than others. So their reputation is awful no matter how much they can game other simpler social media metrics.

Topicality – as you see above these “experts” who indeed have enormous mass appeal, gained great success from their anti-SEO rants when measured by sheer reach and attention. Most of their other contributions haven’t been about SEO at all. So an Agent Rank will have to measure whether you are an expert on SEO, gardening or homeopathy. For example, Klout assumes I’m an expert on homeopathy because I’ve been involved in many online arguments with people who never tried it but attempt to convince me that it cannot work.

Trust – trust is not influence and not reputation either. Trust is about telling the truth, being reliable and not tricking people in order to gain something. How on earth do you measure that? You can be trustworthy without being influential or without having a reputation. You don’t need to be an expert or have mass appeal to be trustworthy either. It’s a very important but easy to grasp concept. Nonetheless you need it to survive, and Google will have to measure it as well. Can a person be trusted not to favour their own clients, colleagues or advertisers? Most people will have a bias. The less bias the better to determine a good resource or author. So Google will have to measure the trust other people ascribe to you.

Velocity – news that spreads fast is in many cases more important than news that spreads slowly. Of course this signal is not enough in most cases. Is the royal wedding or Osama Bin Laden’s death really the most important news? It depends on many other factors. The speed with which articles by a particular author or social media user spread is one metric that has to included among the above as well. Some ideas need a decade or a century to spread; they aren’t less important, they just need more time, but in many cases there’s a reason viral ideas spread like wildfire. Google will have to measure velocity, as it already does with breaking news.

It’s a huge task to measure these abstract concepts, but at the end of the day they determine how important a person, a source or a document is.

Some old school SEOs who are envious of the social media influence of more active users frantically try to outpace the competition by making their employees vote them up on social sites or by bragging that they work for big brands and only accept the highest quality.

Telling people is not enough these days; you have to show or rather offer this quality while sharing your know-how free of charge, otherwise others will do it. Most people will look at the measurable social proof and not the clandestine contracts you have with a large corporation. Google will likewise care more for what other people say about you than what you say yourself or make your employees tell the world.

Already there are tendencies such as selling employee attention to the highest bidder as Walmart does with its more than one million underpaid workers. Google will have to determine quickly whether there are voting patterns between a particular group of people.

Still I’m quite optimistic, overall; authors will be judged by what they give to the world, not what they sell to a chosen few. That’s a great way to find out what’s important. I believe that 99% of the people know better than just the top 1%.

Let’s just hope that Google doesn’t mistake mob mentality for democracy.

SEOptimise’s 58 most awesome blog posts of 2011

Matthew Taylor — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:32:20 +0000

*
2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People – with businesses seemingly falling over themselves to become more social, it’s good to know what you can use it for, and this post rounds it up.
30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate – a one-stop guide to some of the more misunderstood Google ranking factors: link decay anyone?
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours? – this post got a fair few mentions at conferences, on other blog posts and even in the mainstream media. While the answer may seem obvious, you never know until you try, and Marcus did.
30 (New) SEO Terms You Have to Know in 2011 – this was the most shared post on our blog in 2011 and, amongst other things, told everyone what a content farm is shortly before Google tried to destroy them all. Still, there are always the 29 other terms.
High Risk SEO: 33 Ways to Get Penalised by Google – a post that summarises ways to get penalised by Google. Best used as a “how not to guide”, but I’m fairly sure people will still try a few and cross their fingers.
36 Must-Read Local SEO/Google Places Resources from 2010/2011 – with Local and Places results becoming ever more prominent in the SERPs, it’s best to know how to master them. This post did the hard work and aggregated lots of the best sources for you.
30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change – despite only being published in late November this still made the top 10 list. Judging by the accuracy of the one Tad did for 2011, it’s probably worth a read.
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets? – there was a lot of talk earlier in 2011 about the potential use of social signals in Google’s algorithm, so Marcus tried to find out if there was anything to back up the chat by experimenting.
30 Link Building/Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – With the Panda update (potentially) devaluing a lot of low quality links, Tad refreshed our memory about some of the great link building tactics that are still available.

The 20 posts that got you sharing

The later half of the year has all been about one thing – social media, largely fuelled by Google’s latest attempt at social media, Google+. Bearing this in mind, we had to check what got our readers sharing during 2011.

30 New SEO Terms You Have To Know in 2011 – shared 1,510 times
30 Ways To Use Social Media for Business People – shared 1,284 times
30 Web Trends For 2012: How SEO Search Social Media Blogging Web Design Analytics Will Change – shared 890 times
30 New Google Ranking Factors You May Over or Underestimate – shared 678 times
How To Write a Social Media Audit – shared 599 times
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes Tweets – shared 597 times
High Risk SEO 33 – Ways To Get Penalised by Google – shared 582 times
30 Link Building & Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – shared 406 times
What Makes a Real SEO Expert – shared 404 times
30 Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners – shared 397 times
30 Efficient Web Tools That Save Time and Make Money For Power Users – shared 369 times
30 Google SERP Changes that Impact Your SEO Strategy – shared 357 times
157 Awesome PubCon 2011 Takeaways – shared 346 times
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours – shared 322 times
30 Web Trends You Have To Know About in 2011 – shared 285 times
Google Dropping Analytics Keyword Data: What Does This Mean – shared 273 times
30 SEO Myths That Are True or False Depending on Who You Ask – shared 247 times
30 Ways To Optimise Your Site for Speed – shared 235 times
Experiment Do Google+1S Impact Your Rankings – shared 229 times
Social Media Why an SEO Background is Better Than PR – shared 229 times

The three best experiments of the year

Due to the secrecy behind Google’s algorithm, a lot of popular SEO theory is based on anecdotal evidence and guess work. But, every so often Marcus, our resident SEO mad scientist, likes to don his lab coat shark outfit, lock himself away and get experimenting. Below are three of his best experiments from 2011 (no animals were harmed during the making of these posts – but a few sites were).

The 10 greatest SEO tool posts

The one thing common to all SEOs is that we like our tools, whether it’s to crawl a site or just optimise it. In the SEOptimise office we like to try everything out, and the good news for you is that we love to write about them too. So here are the 10 greatest posts about SEO tools we wrote this year.

10 awesome SEO conference posts

As an agency we get like to go to and talk at as many conferences as we can (especially if they are in Vegas). But we also know that not everyone can go to them all, and even if you do there is a lot to remember, so we always try our best to post a round-up of the stuff we hear. So below I have summarised our 10 most viewed conference related posts.

Five wicked polls

We love a good bit of crowdsourcing in the SEOptimise office, and we are very lucky that we have followers who like to get involved and share their opinions. Here are five of the best and most interesting polls we ran this year.

So these are our greatest hits of the year, hope you all found some cool stuff. Next year there will be more of the same, plus hopefully a few more video blogs as well. If there are any blogs that we haven’t included but you think deserve a mention, let me know in the comments section.

Finally, we are always happy to take requests, so if you want us to blog about something in particular you can add those to the comments too.

*Image credit: negatendo on Flickr (I had to use a cat picture once this year).

The Ultimate Guide to Securing a Job in Social Media, SEO & PPC

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:01:19 +0000

There are many misconceptions about the kind of skills and traits you need in order to find a job within the Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Industry (hereinafter referred to as ‘SE & SMM Industry’). In order to dispel most of these misconceptions and to provide a guide-like resource to anyone looking to make their first step into the world of search and social, I have listed eight tips that would keep you in good stead in your job search including how to answer the dreaded “what prior experience do you have in Search and Social Media Marketing?” question.

Tip # 1 – Turn the darn news off!

How many of us have heard of how bleak the current climate is in terms of employment for new graduates? Almost every day I see depressing stats thrown about on news sites. So please do yourself a favour and turn a Nelsonian eye on all the negativity regarding current unemployment levels. Why is this important? It’s important because you reflect the state you’re in to potential employers. You want to portray the best version of ‘you’ to them. Negative stories on the media only reinforce the belief that you will not secure a job (which obviously isn’t true).

Tip #2 – Learn industry jargon

The first thing that intimidates most people from absolutely anything is the unfamiliarity of a situation, a place or a group. This is true for the SE & SMM industry as well. We tend to use a lot of industry jargon to sound cleverer than we actually are. So for anyone not familiar with commonly used phrases and terms, this industry may seem quite intimidating.

For example read the following terms:

rel=”canonical”
Sitemaps
301 redirect
Panda update
GWT
Robots.txt

If you don’t have a clue about what these words mean don’t think, “Oh man! This industry isn’t for me!” rather, make a note of these terms and find out their meanings. In times like these, the mantra I take solace in is “every expert was once a beginner”. So even today, there are times when I end up at meetings where I don’t understand what some people say. The key is to not be intimidated but to learn these terms and learn them quick. The beauty of this industry is that everyone’s constantly learning, including the ‘experts’. This is important to know especially when you start off because you will hear lots of new terms and words that are unfamiliar to you. So be comfortable in being in the realm of the unknown and enjoy the exciting but steep learning curve ahead of you.

Tip #3 – Start networking early!

Our Director of search, Kevin Gibbons, mentioned that he met final year university students at Pubcon (a search conference held in Vegas) recently, who were walking around meeting industry leaders and handing out business cards. They were networking even before finding a job, so make sure you attend industry events or even local networking events and build relationships with people within the industry. Once you’ve met with them make sure you continue fostering the relationship via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tip #4 – Ask and you shall receive:

This links with the previous tip; once you’ve networked and met someone influential within the industry don’t go “could you give me/find me a job please?”, rather ask the right questions. Ask questions about current roles that are in demand, or what skills are valued the most and what’s hot within the industry right now? These questions will give you greater insights into the skills that are in demand and will help you focus on a particular role to go after.

Tip #5 – Find your niche that match your strengths

If you ask me what the best thing about working in the SE & SMM industry is, I’d say it’s the diversity of the individuals who make up this industry. Surprisingly not all of us are geeks, technical, or even tech savvy but we’re good at what we specialise in. no one can be amazing at everything, so there are niches within this big umbrella called Digital Marketing or eMarketing. If you take the SEOptimise team as an example, you will find some with degrees in computer science, business development, classical archaeology & ancient history, physics & philosophy, mathematics, mechanical engineering, business management and the list goes on. So if your degree has absolutely nothing to do with computers, it is perfectly fine! I believe this industry is big enough to accommodate your skills and talents.

Tip #6 – Leverage your existing skills

If you’ve got any of the following skills, make sure you highlight them in your CV:

You have web development and design skills – this is the most natural transition into the world of Search and Social Media. Simply because you know what it takes to build a site, so it’s only logical that you learn how to promote your site to your target audience. Most often these people you target are either searching for something on Google/Bing/Yahoo/Baidu or passing their time on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. So the very basic objective of Search and Social Media Marketing is to make sure your website is in the faces of these people.

You are analytical – you love statistics, you love mathematics, you love excel then you might enjoy PPC or Paid Search. This is where you pay search engines and social media platforms to display your adverts and promote your brand, service or any offering.

Writing is your passion – the SEO industry is waking up to the fact that quality content is integral to all marketing activities. Big brands are taking web content really seriously! So if you love writing really engaging, thought provoking, high quality content then you can enter this industry as a copywriter. Tom Critchlow went to the extent of suggesting that every company should appoint a ‘chief content officer’ to manage and maintain quality web content.

You are creative and think out of the box – this trait can be useful in a number of ways. You could be creative in coming up with really interesting blog posts, you could come up with really creative ways of doing link building that others haven’t thought of. If you love expressing your creativity through art or graphics, you could be really good at creating and designing infographics. More importantly you could come up with loads of creative ideas for SEO, PPC or Social Media campaigns (as you would in an advertising agency).

You are a software engineer and programming is your thing – the SEO industry is always looking for new and innovative software and tools to be built in order to make their day to day work easier. So when you network with people within the SE & SMM industry be sure to ask “what kind of tools would you like built to make you work more efficiently?” find out what these are and build them. If you can go to an interview and say you built a tool that your friend (or an agency) uses to manage their Facebook ad campaigns or it helped them manage SEO projects efficiently, I can assure you the agency will be quite interested in you. Having someone in-house to develop tools that improve efficiency and productivity is a competitive advantage for any agency.

If you are a people person – you love a good social gathering and love meeting new people, or you are really good at picking up the phone and striking conversations with strangers, then you could get into link building and do some serious ‘blogger outreach’ activities. Link building is probably the most difficult and time consuming activity in SEO. Therefore, it helps if you are a natural hustler. And trust me; your skills will be worth its weight in gold!

At the top of my head, these were the skills that came to mind, if I have missed anything please do pop down to the comments and share with us what other skills that you think can fit into this massive puzzle called the SE & SMM industry.

Tip #7 – Find out what employers are looking for

Some very famous people within the industry have listed what they look for in a candidate in the post titled How To Recruit An SEO – The SEO Industry Leaders Reveal Their Secrets which I urge you to read. Bear in mind this particular post is aimed at people with a little more experience within the industry, having said that, it’s still a good idea to learn about the thought process of those who actually hire you.

Tip #8 – Answering the dreaded “so what experience do you have in SE & SMM?” question

OK so you must be thinking this is all well and fine. But every time I apply for a job they ask me what experience I have. How do I gain experience if I don’t get an opportunity to build experience? This is actually a great question and I completely share your frustration. But the beauty of the SE & SMM industry is that you don’t need to hold a job or a position in order to demonstrate your skills in SEO, PPC or social media. Yes, you read that right!

Here are some ways you can demonstrate hands on experience:

Be an active member in clubs and societies at university

While at university join a club or a society and put yourself up to be part of these committees. Or if you don’t find any club interesting, you could go ahead and start your own club. Setup a Facebook page and a twitter page and start managing it. This experience will give you loads of insight into how difficult it is to actually manage and promote a Facebook page. Get familiar with tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, learn how to schedule tweets, test out what works on social media and what doesn’t. If you could go into an interview and say I set up a Facebook page for my club and increased its fans from virtually none to 856 within 6 months and list out the activities you undertook in order to increase these numbers, I can assure you they’d be well impressed.

Don’t forget volunteer work, internships and work experience roles

I know there is debate about interns not getting paid and whether it’s ethical or even legal to not get paid for work experience. I shall not comment on the politics or the legality of this practice in this post, but in my case I worked two internships before landing my proper role within the SE & SMM industry. My first internship role was unpaid and the second paid me a very small wage! So at one point I worked two jobs at the same time and worked about 70 hours a week! One job gave me the necessary skills for my career and the second paid my bills. In no way am I encouraging you to follow in my footsteps (seriously, I was out of my mind!) but the fact that I took on internship roles that were directly related to the career I wanted to pursue, helped me look attractive to potential employers. So don’t ever write off doing volunteer and internship roles. Any experience that is relevant is good experience!

Go around asking SMEs if they need a hand with SE & SMM

Recently a couple of friends asked me what they could do to demonstrate their skills in social media. I advised that they go out and find ultra-local businesses such as restaurants, pubs and cafes and suggest setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles for these businesses and offer to manage these. Local business owners don’t have the time to invest in social media and probably even don’t see the point in it. If you can convince them that it’s a great way to retain customers and win new ones, chances are they will let you be their social media guy. Also speak to local charities and offer to do some volunteer work and devise plans on how you could help their fundraising activities through social media. Also make sure to organise events at university and use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote them. All this is work experience and makes your CV look good to potential employers.

Make sure you blog (especially if you want a role as a copywriter)

If you want to get into SE&SMM as a copy writer, make sure you blog regularly and build a decent following. Write about subjects that excite you or are passionate about, such as reviewing movies, albums, books, restaurants and events. Show you can blog about different subject areas and build relationships with other bloggers. One industry where SEO, PPC and Social Media are integral to the success of their business is the travel industry. So make sure you write about traveling, hotels, countries and cities in an exciting and engaging way. Also it would be advantageous if you could demonstrate your ability to write copy in a completely different style to that of your own. This is because most often you will be writing on topics that may be alien to you.

You have your own website

If you know how to develop and design websites, then a really good way to demonstrate first-hand SEO skills is to set up your own website and implement SEO techniques. Test different title tags, landing pages and link building efforts and see how they affect search engines rankings, traffic etc. also include social elements such as the many Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sharing features. Set up Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools to your site and familiarise yourself with these interfaces and their features. Again, these are all demonstrable skills that are extremely valued by employers. The idea is to show you’re keen, enthusiastic and hungry to learn and improve your skills.

Some words of wisdom from people within the industry:

I asked around from active members of the SE & SMM industry what advice they’d give to someone embarking on a career in this industry. Here’s what they said:

“The biggest piece of advice I can give is two-fold. Always be learning and get involved in the community. There’s so much to learn about search every day and the community is invaluable, people are so helpful and generous and very interesting because so many people came into SEO from so many different backgrounds. It’s a ton of fun to meet and learn from so many diverse people. Don’t ever let your skills get dusty, always test, always challenge what you’ve learned and always be open to learning from other people.” – Michael King (aka iPullRank).

“From my experience, graduates who are looking for jobs in this sector must be able to display some key attributes. Presence on the web – a Facebook profile alone isn’t enough. You have to be active on Twitter, LinkedIn etc. also it’s essential to have some other sort of project. It could be a Youtube channel, a blog or a website. Something you can show that you have an explicit interest in. Once you’ve got your first job you’re going to learn so much. Until then, its enthusiasm that’s going to get you the job you want.” – Gillian Cook

“I would suggest setting up a site of your own and doing SEO for it. It will mean you can demonstrate understanding and you get to have a play. Also, use one of the free AdWords vouchers to learn PPC. I would also consider doing the Analytics and AdWords exams as they aren’t greatly expensive and will give you a really good technical start.” – Matthew Taylor

“Employers can be a lot more selective in their recruitment process nowadays, and as a result, are always on the lookout for the candidates who have something extra to offer. Look for work experience whilst studying; put it on your CV. Look for ways to practice things in your own time; put it on your CV. Just get something that makes you look better on paper than the people around you.” - Daniel Braddock

Here are some additional resources:

beginners guide to SEO: a must read if you are new to SEO.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting a Job & Getting Promoted by Marcus Taylor.

How To Interview for an SEO Job by Chelsea Blacker.

How to impress at an SEO interview by Kevin Gibbons

SEO and Social Media leaders to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+….

As with any industry, the SE & SMM industry have within its niche its own experts who have reached celebrity-like status. I have listed some of the biggest names within the industry here as you’re sure to hear their names regularly in conversation with SEOs and Social Media Marketers.

Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
Matt Cutts (Google)
Vanessa Fox (Nine By Blue)
Aaron Wall (SEOBook)
Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz)
Danny Dover (author of SEO secrets)
Richard Baxter (SEOgadget)
Michael King (aka iPullRank)
Will Critchlow (Distilled)
Brian Solis (Altimeter)
Chris Brogan
Jay Baer
Scott Monty (Ford)
David Armano (Edleman)

Conclusion

I’ve tried to make this post as comprehensive and as useful to you as possible. However, if I have missed something, please do feel free to pop down to the comments section and add anything you think is relevant to the topic.

Finally, I wish you all the very best in your job search in the SE & SMM industry. I leave you with one last quote from Richard Baxter who was asked by Matthew Ogston what he bases his decision on when hiring someone new; his head or his heart?

“Most definitely my heart. It’s probably not ideal but genuinely, I look out for people I think will blend in well with the team (a cultural fit) – this can’t be measured with facts and figures, at least not in my experience. Obviously there’s a requirement to demonstrate previous achievements, but I also look for raw intelligence and problem solving over experience. SEO I can teach, attitude and aptitude I cannot.” (emphasis mine)

*Image credit: Tulane Public Relations on Flickr.

30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Tad Chef — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:50:40 +0000

It’s this time of year again! In the previous years my web trends lists were very successful, both as predictions and by traffic or number of shares.

People working in the web industries want to know what’s ahead.

So for 2012 I want to tell you again what’s coming up. Basically I’m not predicting anything here; instead I just list trends you can already see and measure, but which will be obvious next year.

SEO

Good bye PageRank and links – links and PageRank matter less and less. In 2012 more ranking factors will probably be about other signals than conventional a href links. Google will use all kinds of other data including feedback human quality raters to overcome the big decade long link buying spree.

Freshness – the latest Google update is perhaps more important than the high quality update dubbed Panda. Nobody cries about it because it wasn’t about penalties for sites but about improvements for searchers this time. This is good news for big news sites and bad news for brands with questionable business practices. The bad news will show up on top.

Quality – the Panda update wasn’t really about pandas, as I hope you know: it was about ”high quality” sites. Thus focusing on quality metrics that entail usability, readability and overall usefulness is key in 2012. Underpaid quality raters are out there to get you, sometimes even without a look on your actual site.

SEO is just a part – SEO isn’t dead in 2012, but it’s more and more part of bigger ideas and concepts. This year it seems it’s not SEO 2.0 or findability anymore. The new en vogue terms are content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing or Internet/online marketing (again). SEO practitioners do just stuff meta tags, but their tasks now encompass much more.

SEO marries CRO – The two disciplines, SEO and CRO or conversion optimisation are just two sides of one coin. While SEO focused on getting traffic, CRO concentrates on making this traffic work for you. I’ve watched these two disciplines converge more and more. In 2012 you will rarely have one without the other. I know I predicted this for 2011, but many people still tried to divide the two sides of the same coin.

Search

Google does it again – Google has quickly reacted to competition from small contenders like Blekko, Ixquick and DuckDuckGo. It has appropriated all improvements and features by these faster competitors – be it the removal of content farms by Blekko or the introduction of SSL search by Ixquick or referral blocking by DuckDuckGo, Google offers it all now as well.

Even more confusion – last year I predicted more clutter in Google results and was nevertheless unprepared for the wide range of changes leading to portal-like search results. In particular, many changes on local searches lead to even more information stuffed in the SERPs. Furthermore, the manifold social enhancements such as who +1′ed, shared or authored a post make the SERPs look like a collection of gif clip art. I’m afraid this won’t be the end of this trend of more confusion.

Search without clicking – in 2011 several small moves by Google showed a tendency to show search results as content directly on Google, thus making a click to the actual page not necessary anymore. We will see more of it until people start suing Google for stealing their content.

Google does it already on Google News, Google Places and Google Images. It also owns YouTube, where most video searches end up. They want the same thing for text search as well. They don’t want people to leave Google properties at all. Google+ brand pages just add to it.

Google reads your mind – we already got used to the sometimes annoying instant search results that appear even before you type something meaningful. Google works on more ways to find out what you need and give it to you even before you ask. Just consider the multiple data sources Google now has about you: Google toolbar, Chrome, Profiles, Plus, search history…

Speech recognition – Siri, the speech recognition ”assistant” on the latest iPhone, makes people talk with their phones and it’s extremely popular already. In 2012 we will see Apple’s competitors come up with similar tools so that we don’t need to talk to people or type in search queries anymore. Is this the end of SEO as some journalists assume (just like some suggest after every other major change in the search industry)?

No, it just means different kinds of queries, maybe more colloquial or clumsy ones. Maybe more dialogue with your search engine, for example ”I want something to eat”. I can’t imagine people just saying one, two or three word queries in public without looking silly. So they will talk as they do with other people.

Mobile grows – no surprise here. Mobile search will grow in 2012 again. How big it will become? Some pundits suggest that more than 1/5 of all searches will be conducted via mobile devices.

Social media

Google+ stays tiny – Google+ is being heralded and pushed by Google in search results because it’s still tiny – it hasn’t even reached a social networking market share of 0.5%, while Facebook owns approximately 65% of it.

Facebook losing ground – despite its almost monopolistic position, Facebook is already losing ground. In 2011 Facebook lost 6 million users in the US. The various privacy scandals and annoyances, along with alternatives like Diaspora, Google+ or Tumblr, will accelerate this process in 2012.

Oversaturation – it has been evident for a while already, but in 2011 most people noticed it: people can’t join more social media sites and spend even more time there without spending 24h on social networking and creating user generated content. We witnessed this when Quora appeared and demanded constant attention and production of high quality content.

Also, the emergence of Google+ has shown that most average people already have enough to do with Facebook and the likes. In 2012 it will finally become obvious that the social networking and UGC market is saturated and that creating another site that demands time and effort is not a valid business model anymore.

Social bookmarking vs social saving – last time I predicted the death of social bookmarking. In a way I was right, though luckily Delicious, the original social bookmarking site, has survived. Nonetheless it moved on to a different model of sharing links. Other social bookmarking sites or their competitors have created something that has no name but that I’d like to call social saving.

People are saving snippets or whole webpages using tools like Diigo, Evernote or bo.lt to collect, edit and share them. The future is bright for these type of tools in 2012 as webpages, articles or blog posts you want to bookmark vanish faster than you can look.

Curation – Curation is the collection of resources by an editor or a user who acts as an ad-hoc editor. Search engines like Blekko or Rollyo use curation but also third party services that create “Twitter newspapers”. With the relaunch of Delicious as a curation site for compiling small lists (aka stacks of links), the idea has been given another push. Adding +1 votes to search results is another kind of curation.

Social CRM goes prime time – customer relationship management (CRM) and social media converged for a few years now but there was no perfect solution to merge those two. In 2011 Nimble CRM appeared. This tool is so simple to use and flawlessly combines CRM, email and social media sites Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place, so that you can save lots of time and effort when trying to generate leads right on there on social media sites.

Blogging

Quantity vs quality – in 2011 people blogged less often, but when they blogged they wrote long articles. With the new freshness algorithm Google just introduced, the process might get reversed, as now the latest articles are more likely to show up on top in the top 10.

Tumblr – miniblogging is still growing, at least the market leader Tumblr. Why is Tumblr such a success? It’s a bit like Facebook, a bit like blogging and a bit like Twitter, but it combines the best of all of them. You can like or “heart” postings, you can reblog them and you can use a pseudonym like on Twitter. In 2011 many high level bloggers even moved their blogs from WordPress to Tumblr for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. Also, never underestimate the huge Tumblr audience.

Corporate blogging fails – businesses dump blogging in order to invest in Facebook marketing some statistics suggest. This is like giving up your office and doing business from Starbucks. Despite logic, this seems to be an appealing business model both in real life and online. Why host your own website and practice SEO, networking and advertising to get people to visit it when you can rent a “table” at Facebook. This is quite a short-sighted and risky move but business people tend to follow this trend.

Line breaks – for the sake of readability bloggers use more text-decoration, lists and breaks. Some overdo it though it seems. Not every line needs a break after it, not every post has to be a list and every second word has to be bold.

Web development

No more Flash – there will be no Flash on Android and RIM tablets and smartphones anymore. Thus the original Flash will die finally. Adobe is already working on a HTML5 implementation instead. So Flash will be probably resurrected based on Web Standards.

UX surpasses usability – if you believe Google Insights for search is a reliable statistic, you can see that in 2011 the interest in UX or user experience design has outgrown the dwindling popularity of the keyword usability. Fewer and fewer people are satisfied with usability because it’s too limited. The overall user experience, which includes emotional states of the user in its ideas, is the more important discipline of both.

@font-face usage - I remember it as if it was yesterday, when I first heard about the @font-face CSS method to embedding web-safe fonts to websites around 2004; I couldn’t wait until web browsers started supporting them. It took almost a decade and half a dozen font replacement techniques to make this CSS3 method work in most modern browsers. Now most browsers support it and we already see an abundance of websites using beautiful and readable typography. In 2012 we will probably see this going mainstream.

HTML5 innovation – when HTML5 came up, the hype was huge but I rarely ever noticed some HTML5 that wowed me. Most websites still seemed to look boring. Yes they were readable, usable, maybe even findable but what about the 21st century design I’d expect in 2011? Well, now the sites that really use HTML5 to create a design beyond a few boxes start appearing in larger numbers.

Analytics

Referral keywords - Google proprietary SSL search kills the Google keyword referrer. You can’t even see it on an SSL site, as Google removes the keyword using a script. Thus people will finally look at conversions not keywords.

Klout – no other metric has been so obsessed about both in a positive and a negative way recently. People love and hate Klout as if it was a nation or a religion. Whether you like Klout or not, it’s the elephant in the room. The social media influence measurement may be flawed at the moment, but it’s still the best there is. Also, Google has similar metrics for authors or might acquire Klout in the near future, maybe even in 2012. What’s safe to say is that in 2012 you won’t just measure websites but also people.

Rankings, traffic – simple SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic die a slow death. The search referrer blocking by Google may be only the last nail in the coffin of simplistic SEO metrics. When you can’t even see what keywords people use and thus can’t segment your search traffic properly, this metrics becomes useless.

Real time analytics – Google finally caught up with the competition this year, adding real time features to Google Analytics. At least a dozen of other vendors have been offering real time data for a while, and even better than Google Analytics if you ask me.

ROI – business people finally seem to overcome the ROI frenzy. ROI is important for both SEO and social media campaigns, but you can’t quantify everything by chasing after Return On Investment. It seems that in 2011 this simple truth has dawned on marketers and analysts all over the place so that we can sit back and watch other metrics in the coming year.

Feel free to add more trends you want to get noticed in the comment section or on social media.

* Creative Commons image by Express Monorail.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Behold Facebook’s New ‘Page Insights’ Dashboard

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:02:51 +0000

In what seems to me to be a bid to prove to marketers that advertising with Facebook can produce great results, Facebook have rolled out a new ‘Page Insights’ dashboard which provide metrics on user engagement. They intend to delete all data from your old insights page on the 15^th of February 2012 and will stop collecting data on the 15^th of December 2011.

The new dashboard looks like this:

In addition to ‘total likes’, you can now view the number of friends that your fans have, thereby giving you an estimate of your total reach.

You probably would have seen the stats for the number of people ‘talking about this’ on Facebook pages for a while; this is now provided on the dashboard as well. This is quite an important statistic to gauge your engagement with your community, as shares, comments, likes, posts etc. are all taken into account.

Your weekly total reach gives you the number of people who have seen any content associated with your page, including ‘ads’ and ‘sponsored stories’ that send traffic to your page. This metric is quite unique as it is different to ‘impressions’, where you’re provided with the number of unique people who have seen the ad. This metric in my opinion would be quite useful, especially when running a branding campaign.

Below the graph, you are provided with stats for all your page posts:

- Your ‘Reach’ (number of unique people who’ve seen your post),

- Your ‘Engaged Users’ (the number of unique people who have clicked on your post).

- Those who are ‘Talking about this’ (the number of unique people who have liked, commented or shared your post; or responds to your event; or answers a question you posted) and

- ‘Virality’ (‘people talking about this’ divided by ‘reach’ and multiplied by 100) – this is basically your viral thermometer.

What’s cool about these stats is if you click on the figures, you are provided with even more statistics, such as how many of these posts were ‘organic’, ‘paid’ or actually ‘viral’ etc.

On the tree menu on your left, you can navigate to see your statistics about your ‘likes’. This is quite similar to the old insights, but in addition to the gender, age and geographic locations of your community, you can also view ‘where your likes came from’. This is quite useful to know whether people liked your page from their newsfeed, on your website, or after visiting your page; all this provided for you on a timeline. This will be especially useful to gauge which mediums of promotions are performing best, such as ‘paid ads’, special offers for the Facebook community and website content updates (do people like your page once they arrive at a new product page or a post etc.).

Under reach, again you’re provided with demographic data, but what’s even more interesting is the stats about ‘how you reached people’ and also your top referrers.

As I mentioned before, the ‘Talking about this’ section is probably the most important in terms of gauging your social media health. These graphs provide you with data about the number of ‘unique people’ who created a story about your page and also the number of ‘unique people’ who saw a story about your page published by their friend.

All this data and information is wonderful for an eMarketer, but how can you utilise this data in order to improve business performance and activity? Each business is unique and has different goals, which means that your social media strategy would also differ. However, one thing I believe will remain a constant, which is even more emphasised by all these metrics, is the consistent supply of unique and useful content and engagement with your community. Using the plethora of data provided by Facebook, you can now gauge what type of content resonates with your community and what doesn’t. This is by far the most generous Facebook has ever been in terms of providing data to page owners. Hopefully this will provide eMarketers with greater direction on their social media campaigns.

Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?

Marcus Taylor — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:15:52 +0000

This post originally appeared on State of Search.

Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand’s marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of ‘who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?’ will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced.

It sounds obvious, but many businesses give a variety of social media responsibilities to the PR team, the tech team or external agencies, which is fine, but social media is not about using tools, it’s about extending your current business activities into the landscape of social media to identify opportunities. It should therefore ideally be the responsibility of the people within the business, assisted by those with experience in recommending tools and strategies to increase effectiveness and productivity.

The first step to creating an effective and sustainable social media strategy is creating an internal structure that makes the most of employee’s strengths and interests.

However, getting employees to engage on behalf of the brand is easier said than done, and there are many potential issues that need to be prepared for prior to jumping in. Remember that everything you publish on the social web represents your brand and adds to your brand’s online shadow, and this is why I believe businesses encouraging staff to engage should implement a social media council.

The power of having a Social Media Council

Given that the brand’s involvement in social media may benefit multiple departments within a company, it makes a lot of sense to have a social media council made up of a representative from each major department involved in the brand’s social media strategy.

The role of the social media council is to develop the guidelines, policy and direction to allow anyone within the business to represent the brand on the social web effectively and safely.

An example social media structure incorporating a social media council:

The collective wisdom of the social media council will be incredibly powerful, but without someone who can objectively absorb the social media council’s goals and provide a strategy that utilises the tools, networks and techniques available to achieve those goals, the council’s wisdom and power will not be used to its full potential. This is where I personally believe an outside expert or social media agency is best situated in a social media strategy (in most cases).

When the social media council and head of strategy have produced a carefully planned strategy and set of guidelines, it should then be safe and effective for employees to interact on the social web on behalf of the brand.

When you know who is going to represent the brand, the next step is how.

How to represent your brand on social media

One of the most commonly debated questions when brands enter social media is ‘how should we represent ourselves?’ With so many options to choose from it’s important to remember what your brand stands for and how you want to be perceived on the social web, because there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to setting up your profiles.

Do you want to ‘humanise’ the brand by getting employees to tweet from personal accounts, giving insight into their lives? Or does your brand need to retain its mystery and glamour by not presenting itself as overly ‘humanised’? Here are some guidelines, which are by no means factual but simply my perception of what different account structures suggest about a brand.

Account structure	Impression that this gives the brand
Company account with anonymous person tweeting	Impersonal, mysterious, corporate. Does not ‘humanise’ the brand. This approach works well for ‘mysterious’ brands that are not expected to be personal or accessible.
Company account with employees tweeting from company account	Personal and gives the brand a ‘humanised’ element, but lacks insight into the lives of the people behind the company. Often results in an inconsistent mixture of corporate & personal tone / message.
Company account with fictional character tweeting	Personal, fun and interactive. Lacks the human element, but if a brand is well associated with a mascot, this can be effective. Wonga, SEOmozand Compare the Market are great examples of brands using this approach.
Employees tweeting from personal accounts	Highly personal and human, gives insight into the lives of the people behind the company, reducing the friction between the brand and customers.
Company account with employees tweeting + employees tweeting from personal accounts.	Good balance of being personal, human, allowing people to develop relationships with the people behind the brand if they want to, but company account also maintains corporate feel.

The decision of which approach to take should be decided between the social media council, who will be able to make an informed decision on how the brand needs to be represented to achieve the goals outlined in the brand’s social media strategy. Here are several examples of different approaches that brands have taken, to give you inspiration on which may work best for you.

Example of a brand account with fictional characters tweeting on behalf of the brand:

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting (see left hand ‘tweet fleet’):

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting as well as from personal accounts:

Final thoughts

I asked some industry experts what their thoughts were on who should represent a brand on social media and how. A big thanks to Rand Fishkin and Luke Brynley-Jones who kindly shared their thoughts.

“I believe strongly in enabling authentic social media use by employees and encouraging those who want to participate more with the brand and community to do so. However, I’m not a fan of forced social contributions – for some folks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ aren’t great public outlets.”

For that reason (and many others), I much prefer each brand to have its own, corporate voice that’s not uniquely tied to an individual. At SEOmoz, that brand voice is represented by Roger Mozbot, our mascot, and while many folks use the SEOmoz Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. accounts to publicly speak “as the brand”, they don’t identify themselves as such. It’s like getting into the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World. As far as park attendees are concerned, you’re Mickey. Nothing more. And when you take off the suit, you should be who you really are.”

- Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz

“Staff should be encouraged to participate in social media, but within a clearly defined framework set out by the company. The framework can be open (e.g. Zappos) or closely managed within a CRM process (e.g. Dell), but the bottom line is: it needs to be clear and understood from the outset. The question is: how can you leverage the personal knowledge and networks of your staff without either (a) courting PR disaster or (b) crushing them under brand guidelines and CRM Service Level Agreements? The answer is: carefully.”

- Luke Brynley-Jones, founder & CEO of Our Social Times

Who do you think should manage and represent a brand’s social media presence? I’d be interested in hearing people’s experiences with different strategies, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (my handle is @MarcusATaylor)

Where is Google Going with Google+ Pages?

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:51:00 +0000

Launching a social network is to some extent a bit of a chicken and egg scenario these days, as you need people to encourage the businesses to get involved, but businesses can also attract more people.

This morning Google launched the metaphorical egg in their social network chicken and egg scenario – they launched ‘Google+ Pages’ as a means for businesses to join Google+. The question now is: if businesses join Google+, will it encourage more people to join and utilise the network?

Does Google Have the Power to Make Google+ Successful? Of Course!

If Google ranks Google+ pages highly for branded searches, people will be directed to Google+ from Google’s search engines. If Google integrates Google Places/Local Deals into Google+, then Google may prioritise Google+ Pages for local searches.

Google receive over 400 million search queries a day – that’s a big opportunity that Google are only just beginning to tap into as a means for driving traffic to Google+.

For Google+ to take off, people need to rely on or even need a Google+ account to get the most out of the web. As Google already own a large proportion of the web’s staple services, it makes a lot of sense for Google to integrate those services into Google+ and make them better for people using the network, as an incentive to join Google+. They also need a significant amount of regular traffic, which again is unlikely to be a major problem for Google.

Why Google+ Pages may become beneficial for brands

Currently, Google+ Pages are incredibly similar to Facebook Pages, with very few improvements other than the ability to easily segment who sees your updates (which I think is a pretty cool feature). However, the bigger picture is that beyond all the little features, Google has the ability to make businesses need a page.

If Google integrated other Google Services into Google+ then…
• Google+ could be a localised social network with the integration of Google Places and Local Deals.
• Google+ could integrate Google Analytics into Pages, which is infinitely more powerful and insightful than Facebook Insights.
• Your Google+ page will rank higher than your Facebook Page in Google for your brand name.

So where is Google+ and will it be the next Facebook / Twitter?
There’s no doubting that Google+ have messed up on a lot of the details (no setting for multiple administrators? No branded URLs?), but the bigger picture is that if Google really want to make this work, they can.

Google+ has not taken off yet because there is not enough stickiness. They need to integrate services that offer continued value for the user when they log in. When a social network gets its users to reach a ‘no return point’, the social network has won.

Ask yourself, could you delete your Twitter or Facebook profile today? For the majority of us probably not, because they provide value in one form or another. Google+ just needs to start serving up the value, which will inevitably be in the form of improving the web for people.

Everything I Know About Effective Blogger Outreach

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:39:19 +0000

Those of you who follow my tweets will probably know that I’ve recently launched a book called Get Noticed, which is a guide that explores the processes and techniques that successful networkers use to get noticed.

In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach. On Wednesday morning I sent out 100 e-mails to YouTube video bloggers and so far I’ve received 77 replies (not bad when most sources suggest anywhere from 3% to 25% is a good response rate for an outreach campaign).

In this post I want to share a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt about outreach from researching, writing and marketing Get Noticed to help you improve the success of your outreach campaigns.

Image Credit: ekai

I’m going to assume that you’ve already done some blogger outreach and know the basics like finding the right bloggers to target, personalising your e-mails, sending them at the right time and including obvious call-to-actions. This one’s for the pros

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

A 5 second meeting in person is worth 100s of e-mails

When contacting high-profile bloggers, a five second in-person introduction has an incredible impact on increasing the likelihood of that blogger helping you out. Busy people tend to use ‘filters’ to manage their time efficiently, and one of the major filters that busy people use is ‘have I met this person in real life?’

I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it is to attend blogger conferences as a means for improving your outreach campaigns. Second to this, a simple tweet telling the person that you dropped them an e-mail seems to significantly improve response rates as it suddenly presents you as a real person in their world. Being ‘real’ to someone outside of their inbox is effective for outreach.

Scalability is awesome IF combined with quality & selectiveness

It’s common sense that sending 100 e-mails is more effective than sending 10 e-mails, but there are two other parts to this equation: quality + selectiveness.

E-mailing 100 bloggers is pointless if your product or offering isn’t good enough. The key to getting a good response rate in an outreach campaign is to give the blogger an irresistible offering. I personally like to sit down with a pen and paper before writing an e-mail campaign and list every possible benefit that I can offer to the blogger, so that my e-mail naturally becomes focused around them and not what I want.

Also, being selective can be very beneficial. Rather than e-mailing 100 Average Joe blogs, could you use the time spent contacting them to get featured on five or six major blogs that would then influence 500 bloggers to write about your product? If your product or offering is awesome, you should be able to get featured by high-profile bloggers.

Picking up the phone is the most effective way to get what you want

A pretty simple concept that I’ve talked about before; a phone call can sometimes take a little bit longer than an e-mail, but it gives you the ability to adapt to the blogger’s immediate response, which is not something you are able to do over e-mail.

If a blogger doesn’t have a phone number listed, I’d recommend dropping them a tweet asking if it’s okay to get in touch by phone with them.

Busy people are better at time management

I remember reading an interesting concept in the book Predictably Irrational, which suggests that busier people tend to be better at responding to e-mails. The theory behind this is that busy people tend to be better at time management and actioning opportunities.

When contacting people for pre-publication reviews of Get Noticed I was shocked to see the first replies come in from CEOs of major corporations and various New York Times Best-Selling Authors.

Don’t be afraid to contact the A-list bloggers just because they’re ‘out of reach’, you’d be surprised at how accessible they are.

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Be in the right place at the right time, all the time

One of my favourite chapters in Get Noticed is ‘How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All The Time’. Most of us assume that when we we’re supposedly in the right place at the right time, it was a stroke of luck. There is in fact more science and probability at work than we might immediately recognise. Lets break it down:

You were prepared either subconsciously or consciously with specific and clear objectives about the type of person you wanted to meet.
You were both in the same place (either geographically, or virtually)
You were perceptive enough to make the connection with them.

The first step to being in the right place at the right time, is knowing exactly what that place is. Who are the people you are trying to meet and where do they spend their time? If the answer is tech bloggers, then analyse where tech bloggers spend their time and be there. Attend technology conferences and meet-ups, write for the blogs they read, spend time in the cities notorious for tech blogging.

Being in that place ‘all the time’ requires you to analyse how your time is spent and replacing the ‘unsociable’ hours with sociable hours. I met a lot of great people by being ‘in the right place at the right time’ whilst writing Get Noticed by writing the book in cafés and restaurants (a sociable venue) rather than in a home study or office (an unsociable venue).

Broadly speaking, there are three main categories for how we spend our time: at work, at home, at hobbies. Working out how you distribute your time in each category and finding ways to make each aspect more ‘sociable’ can increase your odds of meeting more of the people who will help you.

Understand and be sensitive to a blogger’s accessibility

Just like celebrities, bloggers are both accessible and inaccessible in different places. Understand where it is that bloggers are most accessible and use that channel to cut through the competition and get their attention.

My experience has shown me that e-mail is relatively ineffective when contacting high-profile bloggers, when compared to Twitter and attending conferences, which are both channels where bloggers tend to be far more receptive.

Some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, some will consciously or subconsciously design their site in a way that pushes you towards their preferred channel of communication (i.e. if they have their Twitter link or phone number at the bottom of every post and only a fairly hidden link to their e-mail on one page, you’re probably best contacting them via Twitter or telephone!)

Utilise your existing network

When you do things for altruistic reasons it makes you feel genuinely good about yourself, especially if you’ve helped out a friend. Utilising your existing network is a powerful way to reach bloggers if your current network is likely to know the sort of people you need to meet. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I ask for a lot of virtual introductions to new people who are relevant to what I’m doing. This works amazingly well, as I always link to those who help me out as well as those who I virtually meet in the blog posts that I write.

If you need to meet sport bloggers, send a few e-mails to your friends or send out a tweet to see if anyone can help you out – don’t feel like you’re burdening your network, you’re not, in fact you’re helping them, too.

Be likeable, genuine, and understand a blogger’s motivations

I receive a fair number of outreach e-mails to my personal website e-mail accounts, and the #1 reason why I don’t reply to some of them is because they’ve forgotten to mention or outline what the benefit is to me.

Why should I waste half an hour helping someone I’ve never met increase their rankings and profile by blogging about them? There are plenty of reasons, such as: it gives me extra content, I could receive affiliate commissions, a free product to test, promotion from their company’s social media accounts or an invite to an exclusive webinar, but they rarely mention my motivations.

Also, remember that only 7% of communication between humans is ‘what you say’, 93% of what you say is non-verbal communication, which means that if you’re e-mailing someone, 93% of your communication is lost in translation as the recipient cannot see your body language, facial expression, and to some extent, tone.

This means that you need to make ‘what you say’ compensate for the lack of non-verbal communication by ensuring that your tone is likeable and that the core message to your e-mail is genuine and honest.

How to clean up your act and your timeline on Twitter

Rachel McCombie — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:58:39 +0000

In this day and age, it’s probably fair to say that we’re all aware of the value of Twitter – both on an interpersonal level and in a business context – so I’ll spare you the “why everyone should be on Twitter” blurb. Those ‘in the know’ will know that following the right people is important in terms of reaching out to an appropriate audience – those it will benefit you to interact with and who will share your tweets with their followers. As you build up your Twitter followers, you’ve probably done a fair bit of work to follow people who appear to share your interests. But in the process, you’ve probably ended up following a load of Twitter users who add little or no value to your Twitter experience, and I’ve discovered a great tool to help you weed them out.

Twit Cleaner assesses the list of people you follow and categorises the ones who aren’t adding much value according to a range of different annoying behaviour, including posting nothing but links, posting the same tweet several times, never interacting with anyone else and only tweeting about themselves.

Running the report on my ‘Following’ list on my personal Twitter account, @RachelsWritings, was quite an eye-opener. For any Twitter user, there are two main benefits to this exercise.

Most obviously, you streamline your timeline to ensure that you’re only receiving interesting tweets from people you wish to engage with.
You learn from other people’s mistakes by becoming more aware of the kind of Twitter behaviours that other people find annoying.

So what can we learn from a report run on the list of people I’m following on Twitter at the moment? The Twit Cleaner report gives you a neat list which looks like this:

As you can see in the screenshot, you can even unfollow the offending users directly from the report – convenience itself!

Key points to take away from a report like this in terms of how to run your own or business Twitter account in an appealing way – and how to avoid appearing on an Unfollow list yourself! – are as follows:

Post a range of content – not just links to other posts. If you only link to your own stuff it makes you look self-promotional, and if you only link to other people’s stuff it makes you look as though you can’t come up with anything original yourself (and this applies equally to people who only retweet other people’s tweets). That doesn’t mean you have to rule out links altogether – obviously not! – but make sure you throw in a reasonable number of ‘proper’ updates for your followers to engage with on Twitter itself, without being taken away from your actual tweets.

Don’t send out the same tweet twice – and if you’re accounting for audiences in different time zones, reword the tweet so that it’s unique. E.g. “in case you missed it earlier…”

Tweet regularly – don’t set up a Twitter account, get really into it for a week or two and then forget about it. I’ve seen plenty of surprisingly big businesses who’ve done this and it looks unprofessional and a bit lazy, quite frankly.

Interact – don’t just post your own stuff: reply to and retweet other people’s tweets. If you want to be a success on Twitter, you have to treat other people the way you’d like to be treated – or, as I would now like to paraphrase this old adage, “tweet other people the way you would like to be tweeted”!. If someone replies to one of your tweets, acknowledge them! There’s nothing worse than businesses who don’t respond to customers or people who can’t be bothered to take the time to reply to someone who’s taken the trouble to message them.

Avoid automated content – Twitter users want to engage with humans, whether you’re a business or not. With the amount of spam and general background noise on the internet these days, a real human voice stands out.

Don’t just talk about yourself – it’s boring! Take an interest in other people and they will take an interest in you.

Finally, and (hopefully) for a bit of an ego-boost, Twit Cleaner also tells you how you appear to the rest of Twitter. Luckily yours truly got a clean bill of health. ;-)

So if you’re in need of a wake-up call about your tweeting habits, this is where you get it!

What habits do you find annoying on Twitter? Are you guilty of any of them yourself? Let us know in the comments section below!

Poll: What Are the Most Important Factors That Make a Blog Post go Viral?

Marcus Taylor — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:01:31 +0000

Over the past few weeks I’ve been surprised to see some really great posts struggle to gain any momentum, as well as seeing some really crap posts do surprisingly well in terms of being shared by a large audience. My suspicion is that in both cases it had a lot to do with the design of the sites that the blog posts were hosted on (here’s a very good post on how design impacts shareability). I thought it would be interesting to put this question to the community to see what people thought were the most important factors in assisting a blog post to go viral and to see how important design really is. I’d love to hear as many people’s opinions as possible on the topic, especially around design impacting shareability. What do you think?

A Summary of Major F8 Facebook Updates

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:43:50 +0000

For those of you who missed the Livestream of yesterday’s F8 Facebook Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some major changes to the future of Facebook, which in a nutshell is to try and realise his vision of making the whole web social. Within Facebook, the focus is shifting from ‘what you say’ to ‘what you do’. Here are some of the major changes announced:

1. Facebook Profiles Are Replaced With ‘Timelines’
Facebook claimed that Facebook is no longer going to show ’15 minutes of your story’ but instead a timeline of your life. Here is a snapshot of the new Facebook Timeline design.

2. Facebook Announce Open Graph
Facebook have announced that they’re going to be closing down their ‘Connect’ product and replacing it with a new protocol and API called Open Graph. The purpose of Open Graph is to help external websites integrate with Facebook as easily as possible. Websites currently using the Open Graph include Microsoft’s Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp.

The Open Graph will also allow external websites to auto-login users who have never visited the website before, raising some serious privacy concerns.

3. Facebook Verbs
Facebook have announced a new set of verbs that can be used to interact with content. You no longer have to ‘like’ a post – instead, you can ‘watch’, ‘hike’, ‘cook’, ‘bike’, ‘listen’, or ‘read’ people’s updates.

Here is a good post outlining what Facebook Verbs mean for marketers.

Other Updates

There were also more updates announced around Facebook launching a new ‘Facebook Bar’, new like buttons, advanced location tracking, and more social plugins. Here is a more in-depth summary of some of these minor updates.