We’ve covered Facebook’s Search Graph extensively, from early predictions to insights into what it means for marketers.
In this post, we asked paid search experts for a view on what they would like to see as a paid search tool on Facebook Open Graph (integrating Bing) and why.
UK internet users made 2.7bn visits to search engines in December 2012, an increase of 400m visits compared to December 2011.
This represents a 17% increase year-on-year, and confirms that it was a particularly strong Christmas period for search.
Interestingly, the data from Experian Hitwise also shows that Google’s market share dropped below 90% for the second month in a row to 88%; its lowest point for five years.
Good design is the cornerstone of web interaction and most of today’s designers also understand a great deal when it comes to digital marketing.
On the heels of Econsultancy and Creative Review’s recent training course announcement, we caught up with CR’s Editor Patrick Burgoyne on what makes a great designer.
Your personal and brand identity are both influencers on your visibility in search engines. How and to what extent does the power of your brand affect your rankings?
When discussing search engine ranking factors it can be easy to overlook the impact of identity and how it influences the results we see.
The idea of identity as a ranking factor is also linked to social metrics as the ‘strength’ of your identity on social networks can go a long way towards the display of trust and authority.
The overenthusiastic use of hashtags is one of the most annoying aspects of Twitter, particularly when the hashtag in question is overused or just doesn’t make any sense (e.g. #justsayin).
But they are also a vital part of the mechanics of Twitter, so marketers need to be able to come up with a good hashtag if they want their social campaigns to have any impact.
The use of hashtags is something we’ve previously looked at in posts rounding up 2012’s biggest social media fails and looking at Twitter’s relationship with TV. You can also find out more in our Twitter for Business Best Practice Guide.
And to help marketers avoid breaking some of the cardinal sins of hashtagging etiquette, RadiumOne’s European MD Rupert Staines has put together a handy list of dos and don’ts.
So here’s what you need to know…
Google’s continuing moves to penalise marketers ‘chasing the algorithm’, and to reward those who produce useful and valuable content, is one of the principal reasons why content marketing has emerged as a hot topic over the past 18 months.
The majority of marketers surveyed in our Content Marketing Survey Report (produced in associated with Outbrain) agreed with the statement that “Content marketing is becoming its own discipline, like SEO or email marketing”.
The question remains to be seen as to how content marketing and SEO will change, integrate and evolve over time, with some predicting the demise of SEO and others insisting that it will remain as its own discipline.
To find out more, and following last week’s post on the expert view on content marketing, we asked a selection of marketers how they “see the relationship between content marketing and SEO evolving over the next few months?” Their answers, some of which do conflict, are below…
As less forward-thinking retailers have gone under in the past couple of weeks, John Lewis has been a high street success story, thanks in no small part to its multichannel approach.
The retaier achieved a 44% increase in online sales over Christmas, so what lessons are there for other retailers?
I’ve been asking John Lewis’ Head of Online Delivery and Customer Experience Sean O’Connor abut the secrets behind its success…
Big Data may be tough on our technology stacks, but the real challenges lie elsewhere.
Promises. Promises. Big Data sure makes a lot of them.
Increase the effectiveness of your sales (or political) campaigns by using behavioural data to divide customers into micro-segments.
Improve brand perception by monitoring the complex web of conversations across Twitter, Facebook and other channels and then engaging carefully with key influencers.
Analyse internal processes to find opportunities to reduce costs and increase responsiveness.
Sounds great, but is it real? Are people actually doing such stuff, or is it all vendor hype?
The video game industry is worth more than $100bn worldwide, so it’s no surprise that businesses are using gamification to try to boost sales.
The idea is that by adding gaming elements to the sales process, such as small challenges and rewards, you can increase customer loyalty and advocacy.
As in every game or competition, the participants have to be motivated by a worthwhile reward. It’s also true that the greater the reward, the more you can ask people to do to earn the reward.
Last year Gamification CEO Gabe Zichermann said that the reward customers most valued was status above their peers. His justification was people are already used to being rewarded with additional titles and status while playing video games.
Obviously gamification isn’t necessarily suited to every company, as it could end up undermining the brand values.
But it can also reap huge rewards. So here are six examples of brands using gamification in ecommerce…
Ask folks about mobile operating systems and most will probably tell you that it’s a two-horse race: Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android.
The mobile OS landscape isn’t this way because other companies haven’t tried.
Microsoft has done some interesting things with Windows Phone, and Palm’s webOS looked pretty darn promising when it launched.
Once again here are six of the best infographics we’ve seen this week.
The topics include how Google spends its billions, the cost of poor web performance, Deloitte’s predictions for 2013, online tracking and details of the most followed sports clubs and athletes on social media.
Christmas might seem like a distant memory now, but as we’ve seen from the recent troubles at Comet, HMV and Blockbuster, having a good Christmas can be the difference between success and failure for a retailer.
But what’s coming to light from our search data is how Christmas Day itself is becoming critically important for online retailers.
We have seen a steady growth in e-retail on Christmas Day and Boxing Day over the last five years or so, and now with the proliferation of tablets and other smart devices we’re seeing the growth increase even further.