Posts on State of Search about ‘Social search’

Turning Up Your Twitter Tactics #smxlondon

Twitter Evolution

Twitter has fast evolved to become a key element in anyone’s social media strategy. The landscape has changed though and the days of simply pushing out 140 character messages in the hope of generating new traffic to your site are long gone. Nowadays we as digital marketers, have to take various considerations into account i.e tweet time, frequency, re-tweets as well as the authority of those that are re-tweeting. Twitter has launched various new service enhancements such as its expanding Twitter promotion program and as Twitter cards. The session’s focus was on techniques and strategies to truly get the best out of Twitter.

(more…)

Social Signals, Schmochal Smignals?

Social Signals - do they effect rank?

Last week, I put together a workshop for Receptional Internet Marketing and sparked a very interesting debate: do Social Signals even affect page rank?  Or is it a big Google-myth?

On one side of the table there were the more technical SEO guys  who made some pretty compelling arguments favouring the opinion that Social Signals 100% do affect search rankings.  On the other side, was the side of the table that felt that while Social Signals are important to the online marketing mix, Google hasn t explicitly said that they do yet. (more…)

Activating the Social-Search Dynamic #SESLON

This session discussed:

  • How to develop an integrated social-search strategy.
  • Key points of crossover between search and social marketing.
  • Ideas for achieving synergy and efficiency between both channels with actionable strategic frameworks.
  • The importance of combined measurement and analytics strategy.
  • Client examples from some of the world’s most revered brands.

Bas van den Beld, Marketing/Search Strategist, Founder, Stateofsearch.com

Bas started with a story about his studies in history at university. His professor came on stage and said “don’t believe a single word you will hear over the next four years”. The study of history is more about what you’re thinking. We want to trust what we see and trust what we hear from the people around us. Only 5% of our decisions are made when we are aware of making a decision. We end up relying on the people around us to help guide us to make good decisions. This is especially true in choosing a restaurant. (more…)

Assessing the Non-Financial Benefits of Social Media Investment

internet-money

On Thursday I’m speaking at Digital Content Monetization Europe on a topic that regularly dumbfounds marketers: social media monetisation. My research for the presentation took me down three possible benefits of social media when it comes to Return on Investment:

  • Making Money – Conversions and advertising
  • Non-Financial Impacts – Traffic increases, acquiring more followers/Likes etc
  • Cost Saving –Savings on media spend, business process and customer service (more…)

The Problem with Social Buttons and 301 redirects

buttons-301

This is a guest post from Alex Moss. He is Co-Founder and Technical Director at 3 Door Digital, and develops WordPress plugins.

Last week I found myself launching a new company – 3 Door Digital. One of the tasks that I had to do was perform 301 redirects from the old pleer.co.uk domain to the new 3doordigital.com domain. That meant redirecting the content, but I wanted to keep the social ‘strength’ of the pages as well…

Amongst these pages were my WordPress plugins that have gained fantastic page authority and had thousands of social shares. Let’s take one of my plugin pages as an example – Facebook Comments. Here’s the statistics for the “top 3″ social buttons attached to the old pleer.co.uk URL (http://pleer.co.uk/wordpress/plugins/facebook-comments/): (more…)

An Integrated Approach to Content, Search and Social Media Optimisation

optimize

This Tuesday Lee Odden will join Bas and Roy in the weekly radioshow. Lee was speaking at IonSearch last week and will be speaking at the Fusion Marketing Experience conference in Antwerp. Lee also just published his new book “Optimize“. In this guest post J-P De Clerck takes a look at Lee’s vision integration of content, search and social media.

The integration of various online channels with the consumer and his preferences at the centre, is more than ever a trend this year. It’s also a necessary evolution and often linked to a content marketing strategy. This integration has come about as marketeers are aware of needing to work in a more customer-focused manner and of needing to approach the consumer in which we might call a “holistic” way. This is exactly the focus of the brand new book “Optimize” by Lee Odden.

Lee Odden is the founder of TopRank Marketing and the blog of the same name, which is one of the most visited digital marketing blogs in the world. His company supplies optimisation services to companies such as PRWeb, Marketo, StrongMail and various B2C businesses. (more…)

Why Content Strategy Is Crucial for Social Search

topman-case-study

This is a wrap up of the session “Why Content Strategy is Crucial for Social Search” from SES London 2012. The session had the speakers Chris Boggs (SES Advisory Board; Director, SEO, Rosetta), Rachel Hawkes (Account Director, Elemental) and Krista LaRiviere, (CoFounder & CEO, gShift Labs) speaking.

This session was concerned with how social media affects search results and activity within the search results. Concentrating on search results in .com given that we are not seeing everything on .co.uk (yet!), but definitely the shape of things to come.

(more…)

How To Switch Off Google’s Search Plus Your World Permanently

off-switch

Last week Google introduced “Search plus Your World” which integrates Google+ in to the search results. With the update Google also placed a new switch at the top right to turn off the personal results so you only see the non-personal results. These personal results are for example posts and pictures from Google+ but also all the recommendations from people within your own social circle and it even hides the +1 button. Unfortunately the big block “People and Pages on Google+” on the right is still shown, that should be hidden to I think.

You can use this switch but when you do a new search query then the personal results are just switched back on. But there is a simple cure for this if you don’t want these personal results or if you just think it clutters the search results to much. You can see the difference in the screenshot below after search for “YouTube”. (more…)

Google +1 Button Most Popular Button On Large E-Commerce Sites

Google+1-share

According to research by Darren Herman, chief digital officer at The Media Kitchen there are currently more e-commerce sites with the Google +1 button than similar share buttons from Facebook and Twitter.

Darren looked at 20 big (really big) e-commerce sites like Best Buy, Walmart, Disney, Amazon and Target. The Google +1 button was found on 45 percent of the sites, Facebook on 40 percent and the share buttons from Twitter were found on only 15 percent of the sites, something I think is quite surprising. (more…)

The Impact of Social on Search – Integration Series

JC-Penney

In the series about Integration today we look at how Social, Search and Branding influence one another. The post is written by one of the industries young talents Sam Noble, who specializes in exactly this combination.

Before the Internet really began to boom, when we wanted to make a purchase it would involve taking a trip down to our local shopping centre to look around the shops before deciding on what to buy. We relied heavily on the shop assistant to talk to us about the product we wanted to purchase and other than word of mouth recommendation from friends; the shop assistant was ultimately the one who would convince us to buy it.

This process was exactly the same when it came to deciding on signing up to a service, buying a new car, getting car insurance and even something as critical like buying a house!

Now the Internet is at an all-time high and with the introduction of social media over the past 10 years, it is becoming more apparent than ever that all businesses big and small need to be paying attention. (more…)

Social Extensions for Adwords: the new +1 Annotation Segment

Google +1 Annotation

Connect your +1′s with Social Extensions

Connecting Google +1Following on from the launch of Google+ Pages for business, Google also announced that it was going to be possible to connect +1′s so that all of your +1 data from pages, ads and search results are pulled together to form an overall +1 total.

Connection was launched late last week when Google rolled out Social Extensions for Adwords. As with organic search results and more recently display ads showing annotations, you will also start to see personal annotations alongside Adwords ads if any of your friends or connections have recomended an ad using the +1 button. (more…)

Page 1 of 3123