Marketing

Sarah Worsham / Mar 24, 2010

Small Businesses Using Social Media for Real Results

Many small businesses want to use social media, but they may be unsure of how to best use it. Most examples of businesses successfully using social media tend to be large companies with entire departments dedicated to campaigns. Seeing some examples of small businesses using social media may be helpful:

The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement. Less obvious but just as important: Your business will gain exposure not through your own advertisements, but through folks who’ve already been patrons. We’re more likely to trust a Facebook update or Yelp review from a friend than from the business itself. – How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results (Mashable)

Sarah Worsham / Mar 23, 2010

More Twitter Followers Isn’t Necessarily Better

We’ve all seen those Twitter accounts – they’re following 24,506 people and have 24,302 followers. They’re in a mad rush to get as many followers as possible by following so many people every day and removing those that don’t follow them back. Having more followers isn’t necessarily a good thing, and the results of a new research project has the data to show it:

To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways. – The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter (ReadWriteWeb)

Sarah Worsham / Mar 23, 2010

Google has a Self-Centered Need for Speed

Google has been pushing everything on the web to be faster, faster. Is this all for the greater good? Or does Google have a more self-serving intention?

Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter. – Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More (TechCrunch)

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