All posts in social media

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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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!

joe's receipt

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).

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:

  1. Tweet interesting thoughts
  2. Post ground breaking news articles
  3. Be informative to your target market
  4. Interact with people
  5. 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).

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.

Agent 007

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.

Typing cat*
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.

  1. 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.

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