Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
When Facebook was launched I decided not to join up. It just seemed like another website to waste my time entering data into, uploading pictures and then never use. But suddenly I found that I was missing out on events, news and parties because everything was happening through Facebook and I wasn’t part of it. So I joined up, got sucked in for a while, checked it 20 times a day, changed my status, uploaded pictures etc. After a while the novelty wore off a little and now I just dip in from time to time, but it’s still a great way to stay in touch and connect with people without actually having to ‘get in touch’ with them.
Then there was Google Buzz and just as I decided to start using it, it seemed to vanish. People found Google Buzz difficult to get into because you couldn’t categorise the people you were following. It also had a big security flaw when it was launched that opened up Google Profiles to outside people so that they could look at who your contacts were and who you were chatting with most, so many people were sceptical about getting involved and it got off to a slow start. Also, with most people already using Facebook and Twitter, a lot of people thought ‘what’s the point?’ Google Buzz was around for a little over a year before Google announced that they were going to shut it down. I’m glad I didn’t waste my time.
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I’ve been getting more and more involved with social media lately, especially with Twitter, which in turn has led me to conduct a lot of research into free tools to help with my work. After some lengthy sessions of going through blog posts about Twitter tools lists and then using them, I initially realised that there are so many out there. However, despite the fact that there are many tools and blog posts about them, there are very few people who have looked into making a definitive list of completely useful tools (I stress the importance of useful). Therefore, for your reading and Twitter pleasure I have whittled them all down to my top 5 list of free Twitter tools for 2011.
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Originally produced and presented by Graeme Benstead-Hume and SiteVisibility for the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival event September 2011. Measuring social media with Google Analytics covers a number of ways to segment your Google Analytics data to better measure the success of your social media campaigns.
Handouts for this presentation are available below or as a download here: Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics Handout.
Creating Campaign Tracking Code
Visit http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 or alternatively search for ‘URL builder’ in Google.
Website URL – Enter the URL you will be linking to from your social media activity.
Campaign Source – Enter the name of the social channel / site you are linking from, e.g. twitter.com
Campaign Medium – Will group your campaign sources together in your reports so enter Social or Social Media.
Campaign Name – Choose a more specific identifier for your campaign, e.g. twitter outreach.
Click on Generate URL and copy and paste the resulting text instead of your usual URL.
You can find your campaign report in Google Analytics under ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘Campaigns’
This even works when the URL with tracking code is minified.
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Yesterday I published a well received article on econsultancy on why Google can be fairly confident that Google+ could already give them good social signals for rankings, even though they don’t have as many users as the other social media sharing sites.
I won’t rehash that article, but my gut feeling was, G could be fairly confident if something was popular Google+, it would likely to be popular on other social sites. But gut-feeling is rarely enough. So I carried out tiny scale correlation study looking at one site and whether there was any mathematical relationship between the number of shares on Google+ and the other social sites.
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As you’ve very likely heard, Google introduced Google+ last week, which many say is a response to Facebook. We’ve been using it here in the Think Tank to figure it out and get to know it a bit better. It’s still early days for this new tool, but here are some initial thoughts from a few members of the team. Feel free to share your views on Google+ in the comments.
Truus Heremans, Trainee Digital Marketing Consultant:
Initially I had my doubts about Google+, being such a closed social networking tool not worth using when already on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. However, once invited and logged onto the service I started discovering its interesting tools. As Google released more and more invites I started connecting to others. Your contacts can be assigned to “Circles”, by dragging them from the top of the screen to blue Circles, and you can name them basically anything you wish (and they can’t see which Circles they’re in, so there is much liberty there). Using the Circles model the user gains a greater amount of control over what is published, since you can select which Circles you would like to share your information/posts with. Google+ seems to be aimed at people who are interested in sharing things with people or groups with similar interests rather than trying to reach the highest number of virtual “friends” (as seems to be more the case on Facebook).
When uploading a video, I received an alert asking my visibility preferences. Again, Google+ is truly focused on “privacy” and “control”. You can choose whether or not you would like your friends to comment on your photos, video’s etc. Moreover, when connecting to others, there is no consent required of both sides. You can follow anyone, similar to how you follow on Twitter.
For the individual consumer, Google+ has built a platform where the right content can reach the right people. However, for now, Google+ is really “only” aimed at consumers. If you’ve created a Google+ account for your business you might need to wait a little longer until the right features are released.
Alan Cairns, Digital Marketing Manager:
So Google have unveiled their latest attempt to topple Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Since the far-from-impressive take-up of Google Buzz and Wave, I approached Google+ with scepticism. Buzz annoyed me – the way it stole my tweets and Facebook updates without my permission.
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As many of you will know, from March 1st 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have extended their digital remit to include all marketing messages and communications online. This covers their own websites and includes social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are the UK’s independent watchdog committed to maintaining high standards in advertising. They are self regulated and funded by the advertising industry who are required to contribute 0.1% of their media spend to regulating the advertising industry. The ASA’s authority is recognised by the Government, the courts, other regulators such as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Office of Communications (Ofcom) as the established means of consumer protection from misleading advertising. Read on
Session 3 Brighton SEO
With so many differing opinions about whether we have always ‘socially networked’ or whether or not the end of SEO is rapidly approaching, Paul Chaloner, Social Media Specialist at FreshEgg examines our treatment of social media compared to other aspects of digital marketing. Read on
Since communicating on social media went 140-character, there has been a proliferation of url shorteners to help squeeze web addresses into tight status updates and tweets. But can shortened urls break the link chain and ruin some hard-earned links?
If the URL shortening service goes bust, and some have, then the link is broken. When their server is down, those links are broken. Look for url shortening services which are reliable. The ideal choice would be Google’s url shortener, but Goo.gl is currently restricted for the use with Google products.
If a short URL is contained in a followed link, it will pass pagerank. But, if the shortening involves a 301 redirect, most search engines will reduce the authority of the link.
So is there any benefit to link building on Twitter when the links are no-followed? Well while you might have to wait days for a static link or a blog post about your content or activity, Twitter links can spring up immediately, and are increasingly visible in Google results pages:
Note that the BBC gain a link to their Twitter page, the individual Tweet and the shortened URL in the real-time search results
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Marketers absolutely luuuuuuuurrrrrrrve Twitter, but whats the real reasons why they are so infatuated with the service…
There’s been plenty of talk about how Twitter and how the proliferation of URL shorteners has broken the link graph. Everyday millions of links pass through URL shorteners, and although some do pass link equity, if one goes under (which plenty have), that leaves thousand of broken links. Not good news if you happen to be a search engine that relies on the link graph.
Image Credit
That seemed like the perfect reason for Google to launch their brand new Goo.gl url shortener service but I think there are alterior motives for them to launch the service.
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