Archive for December, 2010
Posted on December 23, 2010 by Brian Honigman
This year 700 billion YouTube videos were watched, a record 700,000 new members joined Facebook every day and Twitter grew by 100 million new accounts. Social media has changed the way the world shares information in the last few years, but never as drastically as it has in 2010. It’s transformed from its humble beginnings to an up-to-the-minute exchange of information that alerts us about everything from a user’s exact location to the the type of shoes they “Like.” Let’s take a look back at the biggest developments and innovations of 2010.
1. Social Plugins: Social plugins have been picked up by hundreds of thousands of websites as a means of sharing their content on various social networks, whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or elsewhere. These buttons are beneficial to users because they can see what their friends, followers and connections are liking, reading, buying, listening to and doing at all times. Websites benefit by spreading their brand name, articles, products and more to large networks of people. These social plugins have brought about a never before seen connection between the social media realm and the rest of the web.
2. Location-Based Service: Location, location, location is what Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Facebook Places do best. A long time in the making, location-based social media has been making its way through the masses for the last few years via the mobile revolution. Ever since the creation of Facebook Places this past August, the competition has really heated up.
Having users just check in at various specific geographical locations isn’t enough anymore and each service has moved on to getting users to complete different goals once they’ve checked in. Gowalla offers rewards for visiting specific places, Foursquare awards points and badges, and Facebook has recently begun to offer deals for the completion of certain tasks at a location. When users check in and complete secondary goals via their mobile devices, the process connects the online space with the stores, restaurants, attractions and various locations users are visiting.
3. Daily Deals and Coupons: Services like Groupon and Living Social took the idea of clipping deals from local coupon books onto the web, but this time, aimed at international audiences. People like using coupons to save money and doing activities with other people, something both companies have profited from greatly. Google even tried to acquire Groupon in a 5.3 billion dollar bid, but Groupon decided to turn down the deal. How ironic is that? Now accessible even through mobile devices, this local coupon industry can’t be stopped. Who knew that a seemingly old idea could be recycled and be instantly successful? Social media truly works wonders.
4. Social Games and Activities: FarmVille was one of the most popular games played on Facebook, the iPad and the iPhone with over 80 million users as of February 2010. FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Café World, CityVille and other social games allow users to interact with friends in their network, keep the game play simple and are easy for the user to put aside. This low level of commitment is entertaining for most, especially during work, after school or anytime in between. The ability of users to connect with others of similar gaming interests and partake in simple social game play is what helped change the way people play games online, making it an important social media development of 2010.
5. Mobile Innovation: One common factor between 3 of the 4 categories above is mobile. Without the explosion of the mobile industry, the success of many aspects of social media would not be as far reaching, especially in location-based developments. Mobile is slowly evolving into the latest marketing channel of the 21st century. Facebook developed a mobile version of its website in 2007, which highlighted to many how important incorporating a user-friendly online interface is for your store, brand, publication or whatever you’re trying to make accessible to users.
Websites like Fandango, MTV, American Express and others have transformed their online presence into a mobile-friendly version accessible by all the latest devices. Advertisers have never been able to connect to audiences through so many channels before, which has made keeping up with the latest developments difficult. Through mobile channels many companies have been able to combine social plugins, location-based services, daily deals and social games reaching audiences never before reachable without the assistance of social media.
By nature, humans are social creatures. When companies utilize social media and act more like humans and less like a brand, the results are astonishing. Looking ahead, what does 2011 hold for the future development of social media? Share your insights on what you think the next big thing in social media might be.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on December 17, 2010 by Jonathan Weber
We wrote recently about a visitor who asked about enforcing capitalization consistency in URLs in Google Analytics. This is a pretty common thing.
In fact, there are a variety of ways your URLs can show up in inconsistent ways in Google Analytics. What you should recognize is, whatever the URL of the page is in your browser is what Google Analytics records. Now, often your webserver treats slightly different URLs as exactly the same page (differences in capitalization, leaving off a trailing slash, and so on). So if multiple versions of a URL are, in actuality, the same page, we want to clean up those URLs in Google Analytics.
Default pages
Here’s one scenario: you look in your Top Content report and you see your home page in a couple of places, like this:
Or something like that. (Remember the URLs we see here are only the part after the .com or .org or whatever. So one of these represents http://www.example.com/ and one represents http://www.example.com/index.php.) We know these are both really the home page, but seeing them as two separate URLs in this report isn’t very helpful. We have to add up the pageviews for both to see what the total number is.
Google Analytics gives us a simple way to fix this. It’s in your Profile Settings and it’s this one right here:
Here, we can just put in “index.php” as the default page. Now Google Analytics will just add “index.php” to any URL that ends in a slash. Tada!
Multiple default pages
That doesn’t work for every scenario, however. Consider this:
- /
- /home.php
- /careers/
- /careers/index.php
Well, we can’t go and use the “Default page” setting from above, because now there are multiple possibilities, depending on where we are in the site.
Or, for that matter, what if we like the nice, clean, trailing slash URLs and want to get rid of all the index.php?
Well, this you can do with a Search and Replace filter. The setup looks like this:
Notice that I’m searching for anything ending in “/index.php” (the dollar sign means “end with” in Regular Expressions). I’m replacing that with just the slash. In the example above with both “index.php” and “home.php”, I could just create two filters, one for each one. Once I’m done, for my data going forward, I just get the trailing-slash versions of the URLs.
Trailing Slashes
Here’s one more thing that can be a problem, and this one is really challenging:
- /careers
- /careers/
- /careers/index.php
We’ve already solved the “index.php” problem. But notice we also have a problem with slashes. A lot of webservers automatically correct for this kind of thing with redirects. (Here’s some information on how to do it with Apache.) But if yours doesn’t, you can fix the data in Google Analytics (again, with filters).
This one is a little hard, because the patterns we want to match are kind of ambiguous. Here’s what I came up with, but chime in on the comments if you have a cleaner solution.
So, here’s the regular expression I used to match these URLs:
^(/[a-z0-9/_\-]*[^/])$
OK, so it starts with a slash (duh), then it contains 0 or more characters that are alphabetic (a-z), numeric (0-9), or an underscore or hyphen. (You may have to adjust a little if you have other characters in your URLs). Then it ends with a character that is NOT A SLASH. (That’s the important part.)
Why such a specific Regular Expression? Why not just:
[^/]$
That says “ends with any character that is not a slash”. Well, unfortunately that’s probably not specific enough. Because we might have pages like the following:
- /careers/jobs.php
- /careers/?search=web%20analyst
Notice that neither of those end in a slash, but they’re not the kind of URLs we want to end in a slash, either. So we need a regular expression that doesn’t match a few key characters (like the dot and question mark) that clue us in we don’t have just a directory name, but a full page in the URL.
So then the Advanced Filter just grabs the original part of the URL and appends a slash to it.
So that’s a variety of instances in which you have opportunities to clean up URLs and improve the data you have in Google Analytics.
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Filters, Google Analytics
Posted on December 13, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Developing keyword rich content of excellent quality is a big part of any awesome SEO campaign. (At least here at LunaMetrics.) In a perfect world, the subject matter of these articles would be closely aligned with my personal interests and hobbies.
I’d be able to expound for pages and pages using only my innate knowledge of the topic, never have to do a lick of research, and generally enjoying the hell out of myself.
Unfortunately, we don’t currently provide services to any SEO firms, Prada boot resellers, or cello makers (luthiers), or knife enthusiasts in our current client list. Damn. That pretty much exhausts the topics upon which I can expound without research. As a result, I find myself spending quite a lot of time researching a diverse set of topics across many industries and trying to find topics of interest in these industries that are worth writing about.
The (in)Famous SEO Article
One of my favorite types of informative articles are ones which answer a question or solve a problem. I find that these tend to get tons of attention and inbound links. (Traffic AND links, how awsome is that?) But coming up with answers to questions I don’t even know are out there is… well… hard. And I’m lazy. So I spend a bunch of time coming up with ways to save time, (oh irony!) and here’s one of them.
Here’s how to use Google site search to find article topics :
Example #1 Finding Article Topics for the Food Industry
The goal: Come up with 100 article ideas for a foodie website.
The method: Search for site:http://allrecipes.com “why does”
The Result:
The Takeaway: Article 1: Why does my cake always crack after baking? Article 2: Why does my potato salad get watery? Article 3: Why does half and half clump up when making Italian Soda? Article 4: Why are steak sandwiches always referred to as “Philly Steak” sandwiches?
Those 4 ideas from a search that took about 30 seconds. A lot of similar tips recommend using the allintitle advanced search operator when doing this type of research, but a lot of these questions were actually found in the COMMENTS section of the site in question.
Example#2: Finding Article Topics for Bathroom Renovation
The Goal: Come up with ideas for Bathroom Remodeling Articles
The Method: I already know that there is a great forum called gardenweb. So I do a site search within their Bath sub directory to find only bathroom related questions: site:ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/bath/ “why does”
The Result:
The Takeaway: Article 1: Why New Grout Gets Discolored Article 2: A review of CBU Brands — Hardibacker, Wonderboard, Durarock, Kerdi. Article 3: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Trench Drains
And now for the bonus: LINKS
The added bonus to this method is that once you have the articles written, you already have a list of URLs of relevant comments, forum articles and blog posts to go post links on. It’s quite brilliant.
Don’t worry, I won’t break my arm patting my own back. I’ve had practice.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on December 6, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Today, while reading our KissInsights, I saw this question:
“[I came to your site to] learn how to aggregate all pages that are the same to be the same page when using Google Analytics. Currently, we have a number of instances where the same page shows up multiple times because the page is capitalized in one case and not in the other.
I know we’ve come really far in GA since we were force to use lots of filters and profiles, but this truly is a case for filters. In fact, there is a special lowercase filter for this (and one to use if you want to make everything uppercase, too.) Go create a new profile (never experiment on your production data, someone once told me) and then create a new filter, like the one I have below:
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Filters
Posted on December 3, 2010 by Brian Honigman
Recently, Facebook made it possible for a brand to merge their Facebook Page and Facebook Place to one concise page. This new feature became available the same time as Facebook rolled out the Deals option for Facebook Places, which allowed for various local deals for users checking into a physical location from their mobile phone. It makes sense these features debuted around the same time because both additions can certainly be utilized in conjunction with one another. However, like any newly added feature there are good and bad aspects. What will you decide to do with your brand on Facebook, merge or remain the same?
The Pros of Merging Your Facebook Page and Place
1. Consistency: The main upside to merging your online presence on Facebook is that it creates a single hub for your customers to interact with your brand and to find information. Having your contact info, location, deals, updates, photos, events and more all on one page offers a helpful streamline for any current or future customer with regard to the goings-on at your company.
2. Convenience: Going hand in hand with consistency, the fact your entire brand is in one spot on Facebook allows for easy updates and maintenance as the owner of your brand. After a merge you only need to update your customer base from one channel within Facebook, which allows for an easy connection to your business’s online presence and physical location. Also, whenever your brand needs to update your profile there’s no need to worry about consistency between a Page and Place, making changing info quick and streamlined.
3. Appearance for Small Business: Another plus to the merge is that it merges the look of a Fan Page and a Places Page, which is specifically beneficial to companies with one physical location. For instance, a small map of your business’s physical location appears at the top of your newly merged page offering quick and easy understanding to consumers as to how to get to where you’re located. Not to mention, your address, phone number, website and hours are now also at the top of the page. This is perfect for a small business like a coffee shop or a shoe store that aims to bring the customer to a physical location.
The Cons of Merging Your Facebook Page and Place
1. Appearance for Medium to Large Business: Although the appearance of this merged page is not unsightly in any way, it still has a disadvantage for most businesses. If you’re a large business owner, especially with more than one location, then it’s recommended that you do not merge your presence on Facebook. The look of the merged page is overtaken by the map at the top of the page, altering the look of a Fan page that users have come to learn and love. It doesn’t make sense for most businesses to merge because of their type of business. If you were a popular eCommerce site with no physical location, consumers would be confused as to why your contact info and address were front and center on your page. Not to mention, FBML customized tabs are shortened in width after a merge. This will alter any existing custom designed tabs you have within your page, squishing the images and distorting them.
2. Inability to Reverse a Merge: One of the main issues with the new merge feature is the fact there’s currently no option to reverse it once it’s implemented. This is hard to deal with because as a business, especially online, your market and product is always changing. Therefore, not having the ability to alter a facet of your brand may become frustrating and in the end troublesome for the transforming state of your business.
3. Confusion: Facebook appears to still be working on the Places feature and hasn’t fully completed work on the way that Pages and Places merge. My prediction is that they will attempt to fix the above problems in the near future. It’s not like the social media giant to release something that isn’t fully complete and user friendly, but then again like any business Facebook is ever changing. Until the confusion passes, what will you do? Will you merge or leave your Facebook presence as is?
View Comments (12 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
Posted on December 1, 2010 by Brian Honigman
Today, social media and search engine optimization affect one another reciprocally. The social web has evolved greatly in the last few years altering the way online marketers operate. If you’re optimizing a website in order to rank higher, you can’t ignore social media.
Anticipating Google’s Algorithms
If you’re optimizing your website to be Search Engine friendly you obviously want to try and stay as updated on the way Google ranks content, even though it is a coveted secret. Google’s algorithms, which determine what content comes up from which keywords a user searches for, are clearly not public knowledge, but are often scrutinized by many in hopes of predicting their next move. Currently, social media acts as a wonderful means of getting tons of links to your blog posts, videos, photos, overall website and more, which is vital to any SEO campaign. It’s widely anticipated that Google will further alter its algorithms to include social media updates, even more so than they have in the past.
How Sentiment Comes Into Play
Social media acts as a direct link between a business and the consumer. The consumer can quickly and easily leave direct feedback for all to see about their experience with the product or service within these channels, regardless of whether this feedback is good or bad. I believe that the sentiment of consumer feedback in social media, being either positive or negative, will begin to affect how certain websites rank in comparison to others.
For example, if two e-commerce sites who both sell shoes were ranking for similar keywords, it would be another piece to the puzzle if they were ranking for positive consumer feedback in social media. Google loves to gauge the credibility of a website and what better a gauge than insights from the very people using the goods and services the website offers. Measuring sentiment in social media could make what you’re searching for online more relevant and in the end, the products you’re purchasing better quality.
Google already has a world-class sentiment analysis system and plans to further alter these algorithms to come down on dishonest business practices. However, they still have a ways to go to completely implement this system, one of which is adding social media into the mix. Tweets have already begun to be included in news results, but when will the sentiment of these tweets bring good businesses higher and deceitful businesses lower? Having your brand active on multiple social media platforms often helps bring your company to the top of many brand specific searches, but when will the feedback by your customers affect these rankings? Time will certainly tell. By even announcing they have a sentiment analysis system, it brings more support for future inclusion of social media in search algorithms.
How To Adapt Your Social Media Strategy
Whether you’re selling fishing rods or magazines, focus your social media campaign on making your target audience happy and the lines of communication OPEN. Social media can help or hurt your business depending on how you use it, which is why it’s important to fully understand which channels you wish to focus your efforts on and what customers within those channels to speak to.
By being specific in your social media efforts, providing quality customer service and having a worthwhile product, the sentiment you’ll receive will be mostly positive. Hopefully these positive reviews from customers through social media will be taken into account in search algorithms and help make the consumer the judge of the products and services they purchase and the websites they visit. If nothing else, recent incidents highlighting the unfortunate power of negative buzz and backlinks will hopefully be reversed.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
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