Archive for Social Media

Free Twitter Analytics Tool Announced Today

September 13, 2011 Amy Leefe Social Media, Uncategorized

Today, Twitter made many marketers happy when it announced its free Web Analytics tool. The tool, Twitter Web Analytics, is free to use and will help Web site owners understand, in general, if their activity on Twitter is driving traffic to their site. Specifically, the Twitter Web Analytics tool will help internet marketers and Web site owners determine:

  • The amount of content from your Web site that is being shared on Twitter
  • The amount of Web traffic Twitter drives to  your site
  • The effectiveness of your Twitter button on your site

Without a concrete Twitter analytics tool, it’s been tough for Twitter users and internet marketers to accurately understand the effect of their work with Twitter on their site.

We anticipated this was coming after Twitter’s acquisition of BackType, a social analytics platform, in July.

For us, internet marketers, we couldn’t be more pleased with today’s announcement as we are always looking for analytics tools…especially free ones…to help us understand what is working and what is not. This tool will also help us to better inform our clients the success of our work with the social media tool and more easily justify the impact Twitter is having on their marketing.

The Twitter Web Analytics tool will be rolled to a small pilot group of partners this week, and will be available to Web site owners in the next few weeks.

 

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Google Reinforces the Importance of Social Media with Realtime Search

August 26, 2010 Amy Leefe Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Social Media

As you would assume from the name, Google Realtime Search provides search results in real-time with a dynamic stream of content from across the Web, live and automatically updating instantaneously.

What Realtime Search does is,

  • gather news stories,
  • blog posts,
  • updates from social networks
  • and it presents them in a constantly refreshing stream

How it Helps You:

  • Cut through the noise
  • Beat journalist to the breaking news before it hits major headlines with Google Alerts
  • See the entire conversation from initial comment to up-to-the second replies
  • Look back in time to see what people were saying about a specific topic
  • Refine a search to see what people in a specific area (town, state or country) are saying about a product, service, brand

 

Advantage for Businesses

If you are a business participating in social media, smile away, as Google is providing you another advantage over companies that are not. With the launch of real-time search, businesses that are active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will have an advantage in getting found online because they will show up in real-time search.

Advantage for Marketers

Lucky us, we can now monitor online conversations about our clients FOR FREE! We can see how the press release we just distributed for our client was viewed by consumers and take a peak into the discussion surrounding our clients newest special offer.

Are you still questioning the value of social media for businesses? I hope not. To test out Google Realtime, visit Google.com/realtime.

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Location-based Social Networks: Trend or Social Networking Trait

August 19, 2010 Amy Leefe Local Search, Social Media, Uncategorized

According to Mashable and HubSpot, location-based social networks are becoming a mainstream feature of social networking. Well yes, I would say so…now that the most popular social network in the world has a location-based social network.

Facebook Places for Socialites

Individuals can sign into Facebook Places and allow Facebook to know their location. They can then add places, check-in to places and tag friends who are with them.

Facebook Places for Businesses

With Facebook Places, businesses can claim their location by simply adding the location of their business to the system. Then, similar to foursquare, official representatives of a business can claim the location as the page for their business. Advice for businesses: as soon as Facebook Places is available, claim your location!

So is Facebook Places in competition with location-based service providers such as Foursquare and Yelp? Thats to be determined. In my opinion, sure is. Unlike Yelp and Foursquare, Facebook has the added benefit that its services, such as its many applications and features and ads and business solutions, go through one central service, but thats just the opinion of one, intrigued SEOer.

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Interactivity with Compelling Entertainment = Campaign Success

August 18, 2010 Amy Leefe Online Marketing, Social Media

Nowadays, your goal in a marketing campaign must be to engage consumers. How do companies that have successful social media campaigns do this? A stud on a motorcycle, perhaps.

Old Spice Man Social Media Campaign

Successful social media campaigns are fun. They get the viewers to immediately want their best friend to see what they just saw and laugh as hard as they just laughed. When developing a campaign and once you have an idea you think is good, you MUST first ask yourself the following questions before proceeding with campaign development. If the answer is yes to the below questions, you may proceed.

  1. Would I bring this campaign up at a dry dinner to get the table laughing?
  2. Would I mention this campaign at a networking happy hour as a conversation starter to sound intelligent and funny?
  3. Would I look cool passing this story along to my buddies?

The key point is this a remembered, talked about and tweeted social media campaign will be one that combines creativity, a clear message and one that makes a splash.

Looking for examples of successful campaigns? According to Forbes, the best-ever social media campaigns are the Old Spice Guy and the Burger King Subservient Chicken.

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Twitter Provides a Two for One w/ Tweet Button

August 12, 2010 Amy Leefe SEO, Social Media, Uncategorized

1) Share Content

2) Promote

Say farewell to Tweetmeme and hello to Tweet Button. They could have come up with a more inventive name, but hey the tool’s pretty cool.

Not only can you now share content quickly via Twitter, such as a scandalous article about how MTV is giving Kanye West a second chance, you can promote strategic Twitter accounts at the same time while driving traffic to your website. Hello PR and SEO!

To put it into simple terms, you can simply choose your Button size from a choice of three, add the code to your site, and boom your enabling others to promote your company/Twitter account (PR) and potentially driving traffic to your site (SEO).

Twitter Tweet Button

Choose from Three Twitter Tweet Buttons

Plus, with Twitter’s new Tweet Button you can build a custom tweet button for your Web site.

For additional information on Twitter’s new Tweet Button, refer to Goodbye TweetMeme: Twitter Launches Its Own Retweet Button.

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Do Videos Help With SEO?

August 12, 2010 Amy Leefe Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Uncategorized

You bet they do — Video can increase your search engine optimization and increase traffic to your site — if orchestrated correctly

Small and mid-sized businesses often struggle standing up to the bigger guys — earning visibility when the larger organizations consume it all. Video SEO is a powerful method of drawing visitors to your Web site.

Gain Visibility in Search Engines with Videos

 

Video Search Engine Marketing

Video SEO

 

Surprisingly, videos can increase your search engine visibility significantly if hosted on entities other than your Web site, such as YouTube or TubeMogul. Businesses have experienced huge advantages, generated leads in hosting a video on a video hosting site rather than their own Web site, due to the following:

  • A search engine spider cannot crawl your video behind the firewall on your Web site. This is a huge problem regarding video SEO because viewings lead to higher search engine rankings, search engine prominence. On a video hosting site, however your video can earn great search engine prominence the more it is viewed.

Don’t just Upload It Spiderfect it!

Video’s can be made spider friendly in more ways than one and here’s how:

1) Text is Queen The Video is, of course, King

Incorporate keywords into the text that accompanies the video, including the title of the video, category, tags. If possible, provide a transcript of what is said in the video to boost video SEO.

2) Inform They Shall Come

Drive traffic to the video on the hosted site so the video hosting provider can track viewings. Post the URL to the video on your Facebook page, LinkedIn Group, blog and even your Web site.

3) Quality, Quality, Quality

We, or Google, can’t say it enough. Sure, an inexpensive digital camera can be utilized to film the video, that is not what we are referring to in terms of quality here. Certainly try and make the video as aesthetically appealing as possible, but what we are referring to is the way you get people to view your video. Ensure you are using relevant, quality terms to get people to watch your clip. According to industry experts, sneaky people have been including links to their video using popular terms such as BP, Justin Beiber or Jet Blue Guy in order to get views to their video not so quality.

For additional information on Video SEO, refer to Inc. Technology piece, Can Video Help Searchers Find You? TwentySix2 currently hosts a YouTube Channel for our client, executive suite and virtual office provider, Servcorp.

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Another Tool for Getting in the Conversation

July 29, 2010 Amy Leefe B2B Websites, Google, Social Media, Uncategorized

Yesterday, Facebook rolled out a new product, Questions. Similar to LinkedIn Answers, users can ask a question and instantly get answers from the Facebook community, a 500 million+userbase, that is.

A beta product right now, Facebook Questions is only being tested by limited number of people to get the kinks out and perfect it for the FB community.

Why Questions will be applauded
Who asks a question and does not want the best, most accurate answer possible?
With 500 million users, you have a fair chance of getting an educated, relevant and spot-on response to your question. And, if someone else more educated on the topic feels differently about a previous response, they can come back with a more accurate answer.

Why Questions will have an impact on Google
Google does not label itself as a Question search engine but in essence, many people’s queries are in fact questions. The best boutique hotel near Central Park, the best seafood restaurant in New Orleans, the best honeymoon beach location. While users queries may not be phrased as questions they often, in fact, are.

Instead of typing these questions/queries into Google, users may now rely on Facebook for answers. And, due to the rating system on Facebook Questions (answers are rated by whether they’re helpful or not, so ideally, the best content rises to the top and spam becomes inconsequential) they may in essence receive a response more appealing than a link they would see on Google.

Again, a product that shows the value of communication
Not that Facebook didn’t already prove that people are looking to mingle with their peers and brands online, but Facebook now hammers that point even more with Facebook Questions. And the real benefit in my opinion of Facebook Questions is the value this product can bring to companies. The way for companies to get in with consumers is to contribute value to the communities they are a part of. Lao Tzu said, If you want to lead the people you must learn how to follow them. Companies can and will get value from Facebook Questions if they utilize it correctly monitor what people are asking, gather insight and data into what the conversations/questions are about and keep track of how people are responding, and by darn get in the conversation and answer questions credibly.

Yes, Google will always be a source for answers, but it’s about time companies/brands start interacting with their potential customers and clients start providing fresh, on-demand responses to their questions and hopefully, they will come!

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State of the Blogosphere and Social Media

June 12, 2007 John Waddy Social Media

David Sifry is the CEO of Technorati, and he had written a great post on The State of the Blogosphere and Social Media. It provides great information on blogs and other social media trends. Great information!

Here is a quick summary:

  • 70 million weblogs
  • About 120,000 new weblogs each day
  • 1.5 million posts per day
  • Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
  • 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
  • Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
  • English second at 33%
  • Chinese third at 8%
  • Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
  • 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
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How to Leverage Social Networking Sites

June 4, 2007 John Waddy Social Media

There are a couple of ways to take advantage of social networking sites to grow your business:

  1. Blog: Blog about the blogs and the websites that you want to get noticed by. Most bloggers are obsessed with checking their stats and keeping track of who’s linking to them. If you link to a website in a blog post, you can bet they will find your post and read it.
  2. Comment: Read blogs about your industry and comment on them regularly with honest, quality responses. Other bloggers that read your comments are likely to click back and check out your website.
  3. Sign Up: Create profiles on business social networking sites like LinkedIn and FastPitch where you can interact with other people in your business or industry.

The golden rule of social networking is to be honest and genuine. Remember that at the end of the day, people like to meet other great people. Making connnections with others is the purpose of social networking sites and it’s also the best way to build a business – online or offline.

To show you that we practice what we preach, here are a couple of links to two client’s that have also become great friends. Lets see if they mention these links I added from our blog to their site / blog: Golf Franchise / Kids Furniture. Just passing the “link love” around.

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Social Media & Social Networking Sites

June 3, 2007 John Waddy Social Media

The very first social networking site was Classmates.com, formed all the way back in 1995.  Today, there are hundreds of social networking sites – each with their own target community and each with their own unique purpose.

One of the reasons for the growth of social media is the notion that we trust each other more than we trust businesses interested in their own self promotion.  Social networking sites enable us to find good, reliable information generated by others.

According to eMarketer, U.S. ad spending on social media will hit $900 million in 2007, up from $350 million last year.  By 2007, it’s expected to reach 2.7 billion.

Different Types of Social Networking Sites:
Sites like del.icio.us and Digg allow users to share information about the websites they like most, so if you want to find cool new websites that you may not know about, give these social networking sites a try.

Sites like MySpace are more for social purposes.  They connect like minded users with similar interests (mostly teenagers and young people that like music and chatting online). 

Sites like LinkedIn allow users to share their network of friends and business associates (mostly business people sharing business connections). 

To sign up for some of the most popular social networking sites, check out these links:

For a complete list of social networking sites, check out Wikipedia.

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