Research company Nielsen just released a new research they performed on the State of Social Media. Off course we like to cover anything with the sentence “State of” in it, but this truly is an interesting piece of research to absorb.
With Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter etcetera) reaching almost 80% of the active US Internet users, Nielsen found that Social Media keeps on growing in a rapid pace. And they are using it more and more from their mobile phones. (more…)
Google and Facebook have become huge competitors in the past few years. Where they started of as two completely different services on the web they now are connected like no other. The biggest battle is not between Google and Bing, but between Google and Facebook.
But a study performed by Pagelever shows something interesting: the two are also connected to each other in a way that they need each other. Social Media activities trigger search, but more importantly: search triggers Social Media. The study shows that 27% of Facebook’s referrals come from… Google. (more…)
A research performed by the Dutch Dialogue Marketing Association shows that things are looking good for search marketers, much more money will be spent on search in 2010. The research shows its all about the dialogue, search and mobile.
The research is a quarterly questionnaire amongst the members of the DDMA. The results give us a nice insights in which direction the marketers believe the industry is going. We can learn and benefit from that. (more…)
Only last Friday Google announced that the Panda Update was going World Wide and already things are changing. Google told us last Friday that they expected 6-9% of queries to be affected by the algorithm Update. We’ll have to wait and see what the real impact will be but Searchmetrics has already given us some insights into the German market.
Searchmetrics just moved into new Berlin offices and had a warm Google welcome with the announcement last Friday. They however immediately went to work and created a list of expected ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ from the update. The biggest losers are ciao.de, gutefrage.net and dooyoo.de. The biggest winners are golem.de, Facebook and focus.de. (more…)
Last week Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reported on a study done by Searchmetrics about which types of universal search – results from specific vertical searches such as videos and images, shown in addition to normal web page results – appear most often in Google’s American SERPs.
Now Searchmetrics has sent State of Search similar data for UK search results, and it appears the trends follows that of Google.com closely. First of all, what jumps out is that universal results are a part of the vast majority of SERPs. Less than 30% of Google’s results pages do not have a universal element to them. (more…)
Whenever a company publishes research that casts its own products in a positive light, my sceptic-alarm goes off. Often this type of ‘research’ is just poorly veiled PR spin disguised as a scientific study.
There are some exceptions fortunately, and Google is one of them. For all the criticism I often levy against the big G, I have to admit that their computer scientists regularly come up with some fascinating stuff. (more…)
Should we all be running out trying to get likes? Fake accounts? Bribe people to like our content? It could be one of the conclusions if you look at a research performed by Experian Hitwise. They noticed that one fan on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website in a year.
The research shows the importance of likes and fans, but even more shows the power of Facebook in the UK. We already knew that 1 in every 6 page views from UK Internet users goes to a Facebook page. The follow up on that now shows it could get you more visitors to your website. One fan can influence 20 of his friends to also visit your website. (more…)
Search and Social is all about personalization these days. Google has seen the light: if we can personalize the web for our searchers, we will be the ones they turn to for their most relevant information. No more clutter, no more irrelevant news, no more content you didn’t want to see in the first place.
In basis Google’s idea, and Facebook’s for that matter, is not that bad. Personalized means for example that we get advertising tailored to our needs. Like cars? You’re getting cars! Do you have small kids? You might like these diapers.
But it goes a lot further than just the advertising. Clicking on links means you are telling companies like Facebook and Google what you like, or maybe even don’t like, based on the amount of time spent somewhere or your reaction on for example Twitter, Facebook or Quora. You are ‘feeding’ the search engines, social networks and other online companies with your data so they can give you as personalized data as possible. Data like for example search results. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personalization can have its advantages but also its disadvantages. And how far is Google with this anyway? Are we all seeing totally different search result pages? Time to dive into this for a little bit. I’ll write about this in several posts over the next few weeks, trying to ‘unfold’ personalizations and the directions Google is heading in to. (more…)
UKOM/Nielsen reports that for the first time ever Facebook surpassed Microsoft to become the second-most popular website in the UK. They grew 7 percent compared to a year earlier to 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May.
With that Microsoft falls back to the number three spot. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing sites combined were still good for 26.2 million visits from Brits. Google is still leading the dance with 33.9 million. Nielsen came to these numbers by looking at their panel of 50.000 people. (more…)
Last week I spoke at an internal event of a big company and afterwards I was talking to somebody who said to me “That Bing thing, that is never gonna make it right?”. I then replied that I thought it was gonna make it, but that in The Netherlands it simply wasn’t there yet in its full potential, but in the US it had already grown to a 30% market share.
Now slowly Bing seems to be also taking a bit of a bigger piece of the pie in the UK. According to Hitwise they are now the fastest growing search engine in the UK. (more…)
SEOMoz looks at what rankingfactors are important for Search engines (read: Google) every so many months/ years. This year they again consulted many SEO experts to find out what they think are the important ranking factors to keep an eye on.
At SMX Munich SEOMoz’ Rand Fishkin presented some preliminary results of that data and the data of research they did on over 10,000 keywords in the SERPS. The data is as said not definite yet but it is always nice to look at the findings so far.
The preliminary research shows not surprisingly that social signals have become much more important than two years ago, but what it also interesting is that it seems that page level metrics have become a lot less important than before. Read some findings and look at Rand’s presentation below. (more…)
A Microsoft research paper did the rounds on Twitter yesterday: Augmenting Web Pages and Search Results to Support Credibility Assessment (pdf). Search engine patent-guru Bill Slawski has written an excellent analysis of it which I highly recommend you read – as well as the paper itself (it’s light on science-babble so anyone should be able to come to grips with it).
But it’s not so much the credibility-factors that the paper describes that really made my eyes light up. No, it was the other research that the paper referred to that really caught my attention, specifically the research about how users assess the credibility of a webpage. (more…)
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