As I mentioned yesterday, in 7 Social Media Monitoring Essentials, fortunately or unfortunately, keywords are a part of life on social media (and the Internet). Keywords are how search engines provide results and keywords are how we find what we’re looking for. On social networks like Twitter, where you’re limited by the length of the post, keywords are vital for targeting the right audience. So how do you go about finding the right keywords for your content (and to monitor)? Here are a few suggestions…
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Nov
03
2010
Review: Real-time Social Media Monitoring with Social Mention
Keeping up on what’s being said about a company or brand can be difficult with so many different channels. It’s even more challenging when people expect real-time responses via social media to problems and issues. A lack of response when there’s a problem can be more harmful than the problem. Social Mention makes it easy to monitor, not only what’s being said, but also who is saying and what the general sentiment is towards the company or brand.
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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)
Mar
22
2010
Facebook sends more Traffic to News Sites than Google News
All along newspapers have been struggling with Google and how it “uses” their content to fill search results, both on Google News and Google.com. Well, consumer usage of news has shifted:
Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook.com are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from News.Google.com. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook.com compared to 64% for Google News. - Facebook Visitors Come Back Again and Again (HitWise)
Mar
15
2010
Sency Adds 4 New Language Search Engines
Real time search engine, Sency, who we’ve reviewed previously, just launched 4 international search engines to help users browse real time content in other languages. The real time web is alive – there are over 50 million status updates posted to Twitter every day. With all of these updates, a slew of real time search engines have launched in an effort to help users see what is being said right now.
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Mar
11
2010
Vanity Searches Should Be an Important Part of Your Routine
Wondering what people are saying about you or your brand? One of the most powerful tools to keep up what people think is to do a vanity search from time to time. A vanity search is a search (usually on Google) for your name, company name or brand name (really should be doing all of them). Ideally you should own the first page of results – meaning you’ve written or posted everything there. But when a results from someone else shows up, it’s an opportunity for you to take action.
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Feb
05
2010
5 tips for success with Local Listings
This is a guest post by Emily Thompson, Online Marketing Coordinator for Kutenda.
Local search has quickly become one of the most cost-effective opportunities for businesses to connect with local prospects. Not only are you getting found by locals searching for YOUR products or services, but statistics show nearly 82 percent of local searches online result in further action: a phone call, site view, in store visit or immediate purchase.* (Source: TMP/comScore, October 2008)
Wondering how to tackle Local Search for your business?
Dec
02
2009
Review: Sency for Real-Time Search
As more and more consumers start using social media to talk about companies, it becomes even more important for those companies to try to keep track of what is being said. Social media has increased the use of the web in terms of having real-time conversations (which used to happen mostly via instant messaging). Now customers can start talking about something immediately and companies often need to respond quickly to preserve their brand. Sency provides a window into the real time web and what is being said.
Jul
13
2009
When They Can't Figure Out Your Site, People Turn to Search – Have One?
Usually when people come to a website, they’re looking for something. And they hope they can find it on the first page, but if not, most are willing to scan the page to see if there’s a link that may lead them there. This behavior really points out the importance both of properly organizing the information on your website, as well as having a navigation/menu system that people can quickly and easily understand.
Aug
04
2008
Yahoo delivering on user created potential in search
Back in April we covered the web 2.0 expo announcement of Yahoo’s Search Monkey, a search result modification API. Now Yahoo is making the bold step of bringing a small group of Search Monkey applications into the default search results space. My prediction: Yahoo is evolving into a specialty search company.
When announced, Search Monkey was Yahoo’s early days search tool that summed up the company’s commitment to an open application development platform. Programmers working in the Search Monkey space were able to create specialized results within the Yahoo search application. If, for example, you run a restaurant and you wanted your chef’s three best entries listed with your name in the results, it could be done in Search Monkey. The catch was, people using Yahoo needed to install your Search Monkey app into their Yahoo profile in order to see the special results. That was, at least, before now.
Yelp and LinkedIn are the first two companies outside of Yahoo to have their Search Monkey applications added to the default search engine for Yahoo. The specialized look that Yelp and LinkedIn developed for their searches will now be in every Yahoo search result by default, meaning every Yahoo search page with Yelp or LinkedIn results will be serving up rich, contextualized information. I have to believe that other companies are seeing this as their best chance to help push their unique content out to one of the big three search engines.
This move begins what I feel is an important journey for Yahoo to distinguish itself from Google and Microsoft. User generated search results like Search Monkey may give Yahoo a speciality search advantage. If you know that Yelp (a resturant recommendation site) has more informative results in Yahoo, you’re going to start using Yahoo for your resturant searches. While it remains to be seen how many Search Monkey apps Yahoo brings into the fold, this is likely only the beginning. Yahoo’s press release suggested that both the Yelp and LinkedIn app were seeing 15% click-thru rates when tested in an A-B group, which is a very high percentage in search. It seems logical to me that as long as your app has a high rate, and your content is well structured for semantic markup (a requirement for Search Monkey to work properly. See Microformats), you too may find your user-created search layout added into Yahoo’s main trunk some day. Now you just have to contextualize your site’s content and write your custom Search Monkey application. Need any help?
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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