Posts on State of Search about ‘Social Media’

Google Experiment Lets You Share Results Directly on Google+

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A new experiment from Google lets you share pages on Google+ directly from the search results. I personally haven’t seen this option yet but Berian Reed, head of search marketing AutoTrader UK spotted the ‘Share on Google +‘  after performing a search.

As you can see in the screenshot below the option is placed to the right after the URL of the search result  where currently the +1 button is placed. After clicking the button you can add your own comment and choose circles before sharing on Google+.

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Social Targeting – Know WHO You Are Looking For!

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This past week I have had the displeasure of hearing a wide variety of social media talk that has me perplexed. Is it not so much that people targeting social media are doing it wrong, or even that they have the wrong intentions. The problem merely is that they don’t understand what social media is, how to interact with it, and how they benefit from it.

I recently walked past a meeting room where a start-up was deciding which route to go with social media. A very boisterious message was delivered fromt he guy who is presumably in charge – “What social media platform are our customers reaching out to us the most?” The answer came, and his closing was “great let’s target that.” (more…)

Tools to Increase Social Engagement and Drive Conversions

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Something that I’ve been working on with several clients lately is utilizing their social channels to connect and engage with their target audience.  I’ve been quite clear that the goal of this should tie back to the business goals and they shouldn’t be doing it “because social media is cool and everyone is doing it”.  For me, if you are going to dedicate time and resource into social, it needs to drive conversions for the company.  Obviously these conversions vary from company to company, but for most it will mean driving sales.  If you can keep this in the back of your mind when defining your social strategy, it will keep you much more focused on what you need to do.

With that in mind, below is a list of tools which can help you engage with your users on different social channels.  Not all of these tools will be applicable to everyone and I’d recommend you choose the ones which will help you connect with where your audience hang out.  If you’re not sure of this yet, you can do some more research and even test tools with a small campaign to test the water a little bit. (more…)

Google+ Making Major Changes to Design

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Google just announced a major redesign for Google+. The Google+ pages now look a lot more like for example Facebook.

There is a major focus on the new navigation which is much more focussed on ease for the user. Google says:

One of the first things you’ll notice is a new way to get around the stream. Instead of static icons at the top, there’s a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left. This approach comes with lots of perks, but some of our favorites include:

- You can drag apps up or down to create the order you want
- You can hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions
- You can show or hide apps by moving them in and out of “More” (more…)

10 Ways (+ 5) to Increase your Twitter Followers & Essential Tools to do it

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This post was originally published on March 31 2010, but still has the value and has therefore been moved up. At the end of the post you will find more updated content as an extra on this post.

Admit it, size matters. Your Twitter followers have become as big a question as “What’s your number?” People look at your followers and make judgements, it’s only natural. So what can you do to increase your volume of Twitter followers?

There are many ideas out there, and I am sure you have seen your fair share of ‘Top Twitter Tools’ posts, but I have realised there is a need to bring these together and really explore how these tools can help. So, let’s focus on 10 ideas to increase your Twitter followers and the tools that can help you.
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Pinterest: The Numbers Game

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Pinterest is probably the newest ‘hot’ item on the social web. Whether or not it will stick around time will tell, but the immense amount of new followers I am getting in the past few weeks as well as the traffic it gets us shows for me that there might be potential in the tool.

There have been a few posts, including on our own blog, about what the tool actually does. But marketers also like to look at numbers. How is the usage, what is the traffic and who is using it? These questions are answered in this infographic. (more…)

Google SERP Twitter Talk – Boring the Pants off the Normal Man

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This is a guest post by Peter Handley, SEO Director of theMediaFlow. Like this post? Let us know!

Sometimes it’s easy for us search marketers to get lost in our acronyms – and let’s face it, there are a hell of a lot of them in this industry.

SEO, SEM, PPC, CTR, CPC, SMO, PR– there is absolutely loads of jargon flying around in our industry, and we are constantly coming up with new ways to shorten terms – who can forget one of the latest ones with GSPYW?

It’s easy to get trapped in your own bubbles and circles on platforms like Twitter and forget that we communicate with wider groups of people. My own Twitter account, whilst predominantly search marketing focussed also attracts followers based on music and food/cooking that I share. (more…)

What Is Pinterest And Why Should Marketers Care?

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Pinterest. If you have been on the internet for more than 10 minutes in the past 6 months you can’t have failed to notice the hype surrounding it. I’ve been a member since July 2011 and, following an agonizing 4 hour wait for my request to join to be approved, I’ve been using it consistently since that date. I’m a very visual person so I find it very satisfying to use – not only from an aesthetic point of view but also as a search engine for images and, increasingly, for products themselves.

What is Pinterest exactly? It’s essentially an invite-only social network for sharing images that are found online (including uploaded images from the users themselves). The images are known as ‘pins’ and users can organise them in themed boards i.e. silver jewellery, green hats, cats with Hitler mustaches etc.  So far, so dull – so why should we care? Well, according to the latest figures, Pinterest has become so popular that it is now driving more traffic to retailers’ sites than Google + and is attracting traffic at an incredible rate. There are two ways that marketers can take advantage of Pinterest – they can sign up and start curating contact, and they can also start optimising their client’s visual content to encourage others to re-pin and distribute.  Images can be linked directly back to a site, or even better, a particular landing page so everyone who sees the pin will have the opportunity to visit the original site – that’s where ‘Pinterest as Search Engine’ comes into it’s own. You can also add the price of a product to something you pin and it will appear with the content – a nice touch. (more…)

Having “Fans” Does Not Mean Engagement: Only 1% of Fans Engage

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Social Media is a weird science, if you can call it a science at all. In essence it is very close to what we as human beings have always been doing: recommending things to others and communicating about what we see happening around us. Still marketers seem to have difficulties grabbing and understanding this and making the best use of this.

This probably comes from decades of ‘old school marketing’ we have been doing. Trying to reach as many people at once, hoping that some of them will respond to it. This type of old marketing leads to a ‘wrong’ approach of Social Media. We try to reach as many people as possible hoping they will interact with us.

Recent research shows that the way marketers and users look at Social Media differs quite a bit. Where marketers still believe ‘presence’ counts and people will engage if you just share things with them, users actually don’t care that much. It turns out that only one percent of Facebook users for example tend to ‘engage’ with brands. (more…)

How to Get More Twitter Followers From Your Existing Channels

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As a brand you finally decided to start with Twitter, you formulated a good strategy but now you have to wait to get your target audience to start following you. On State of Search we already reported on 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers. But one point I’d like to explain a little deeper. How to get more Twitter followers from your existing marketing channels.

Research shows the most important reasons to start following a brand are an invitation or ad from the brand itself or an invitation or mention from a friend. So why not start with reaching out to the people who already know your brand. Those are the people you can reach directly and those are the people who can reach the other members of your target audience. (more…)

Google+ Now Available For Teenagers

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Bradley Horowitz, Vice President Product Management Google+, has announced that teenagers are now allowed to sign up for the network. This means that Google+ is now open to a whole new group of potential users because before this announcement you’ve had to be at least 18 in order to join.

In most countries you now have to be at least 13 to use the service. In some countries the minimum age is higher, in the Netherlands for example it’s 16 and in Spain and South Korea 14. These are now the same requirements Facebook has when it comes to age regulations. (more…)

How Building your Social Connections is like Link Building

"Building a foundation"

When you’re active on social media you need to have a network of people that are following you. A large, qualitative network that represents your target audience can be worth a lot for your online business. These social connections aren’t magically there when you start, you have to build these connections.

When we look at building social connections it shows a lot of similarities with link building as we know it. In this post I will make a comparison between link building and building your social connections, in this case on Twitter, but it can be as easily translated to Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. (more…)

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