Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Snapchat Makes Adding People Easier With Profile URLs: Users can copy their “unique URL or instantly share it [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you have a great idea for a business? Is there a new product you want to create? To discover how to improve your chances for success, I interview Pat Flynn. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers [...]
This post Building Business Ideas That Succeed: How to Preflight Your Ideas first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you have a local business page on Facebook? Want to reach more local customers? Facebook recently launched Professional Services, a directory that helps consumers find the best local businesses and services to fit their needs. In this article I’ll share how to use the Facebook Professional Services feature to boost visibility with local customers. [...]
This post Facebook Professional Services: How Your Local Business Can Rank first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
We received over 300 nominations for our seventh-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs)! As in the past, the list of 20 finalists has some returning reader favorites and some new titles for our judges to consider. The Judges Our judges include Ann Handley (chief content officer for MarketingProfs, author of [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you want more from Pinterest? Have you considered using Pinterest analytics to inform your marketing decisions? When you know where to look in Pinterest analytics, you’ll find actionable information you can use to improve your Pinterest strategy. In this article you’ll discover five ways to use Pinterest analytics and improve your Pinterest marketing. #1: [...]
This post How to Use Pinterest Analytics to Improve Your Marketing first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Are you starting from scratch with social media? Got a new product or a new business? Having a social media launch plan is essential. In this article you’ll discover a step-by-step plan for launching your new social media presence. #1: 12 Weeks Before Launch: Choose Your Social Platforms A few weeks before launch, choose which [...]
This post Launching on Social Media: A Timeline for Business Owners first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Are you struggling to connect with your customers on social networks? Do you know where they hang out online? To optimize your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to know who your customers are and which social networks they spend their time on. In this article you’ll discover how to connect with your target audience [...]
This post How to Research and Locate Your Audience Using Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Is your blog taking full advantage of social media plugins? Looking for tools to help grow your following and encourage sharing? The right WordPress plugins make it easy to grow your social media following and increase social shares. In this article you’ll discover six WordPress plugins that’ll make your blog more social. #1: Showcase Your Instagram [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you have a Facebook page? Do you want more organic engagement for your posts? Facebook recently added a feature to let you specify the audiences most likely to engage with each Facebook page post, based on interests. In this post I’ll show you how to use the new Facebook Audience Optimization feature to increase [...]
This post Facebook Audience Optimization: What Marketers Need to Know first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Facebook Rolls Out Audience Optimization for Publishers: Facebook’s new Audience Optimization is “an organic targeting tool to help [...]
This post Facebook Audience Optimization for Publishers: This Week in Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you use tracking codes on your website? Have you heard of Google Tag Manager? To discover what Google Tag Manager is and how to use it, I interview Christopher Penn. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy [...]
This post Google Tag Manager: What Marketers Need to Know first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
While enterprises are racing to deploy new tech that will drive revenue through uses of data, they must consider these latest technologies within the context of the EU’s new data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Here are four key factors that businesses need to know about privacy in 2016:
Posted by randfish
From search ads and SEO to display ads, content, and your social efforts, there's a lot to consider when creating the correct marketing concoction. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over advice on how and why you should be auditing your funnel to ensure you have a balanced, effective marketing mix.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to balance your marketing mix. Specifically, I want to talk a little bit more about search ads and SEO versus kind of content and social, those traffic channels that you invest in, either paid or organic, that can drive traffic kind of more at the top of the funnel or more in the conversion process.
But this is actually a complex equation, and the marketing mix overall is something that a lot of folks struggle with and that I find a ton of misplaced energy and misplaced dollars happening. So the way to solve for this, in my opinion, is we can start with a pretty simple auditing process. We can ask ourselves kind of strategically, "Where are we facing funnel challenges?"
I see lots of businesses — from tiny, small startups and small businesses on the web to giant companies — having this issue where they say, "We have a problem with the consideration and comparison phase. We feel really good that people are aware of our brand, and they come for that first visit. They come back for the return visit. But then they get to the consideration phase and we feel like we're losing out against our competitors right there before conversion happens."
Well, guess what? If you're spending all your marketing dollars on display or on offline forms of display marketing, which go to awareness, and very little in the consideration and comparison set, where things like search can be great, especially your brand versus competitors, or your competitor versus your own brand, or features, or what to buy, or recommendations, or reviews, all those kinds of things, ranking for that stuff, buying those key terms, having content that serves them and maybe doing some display advertising to people who've already been to your website through a retargeting that's trying to convince them, well, all of those forms of marketing can reach that set. But the problem is you're spending all your time and energy, and people, and dollars up in awareness.
I see this across the board. I've seen people spend a ton on first visit and return visit, and nothing on recidivism and retention. I've seen them spend a ton at the point of conversion, but nothing up here to drive awareness. So they have a great-looking funnel for a very small number of people.
If you know where you have this problem, if you can identify where your issues lie, then you can invest in the right channels. You can change up your marketing mix and your people, your time, and your dollars accordingly.
Also, don't be too narrow. My view here is a little bit narrow. But you should consider whether channels like community building, email marketing, offline advertising, or in-product, in-app marketing can actually be part of this mix and how they should be part of this mix. I don't want you to limit it just to search, social, content, display. There's a lot of opportunity there.
You can invest a lot of time and energy, and dollars, and people into one of these channels to try and move the needle on something, and get what look like good results in the channel itself. Like, "Oh, search is driving lots of traffic." Or, "We have high rankings." Or, "We are spending a lot on this display channel, and we're seeing lots of people visit."
But then, when you actually dig in, you see that you're not moving the needle on what you need to. You're not improving the problem that you have in your funnel.
So you might ask: "I've got a retargeting ad or a whole set of retargeting ads. Are we effectively improving conversion rate, or are we just bringing people back to the site? Which was our goal? Were we doing retargeting to earn return visits? Or are we doing retargeting so that we can increase conversion or so we can improve consideration and comparison against the competition?"
"Is this piece of content, or our content strategy overall, or the tactic of producing a daily blog post or a monthly report, or a white paper every quarter, is that reaching a broad enough audience? Is it targeting enough of our visitors and their influencers? Is it driving return visits? Is it driving conversion? Is it getting us a lead that we can then follow up with? What's happening there?"
You can ask that question in SEO and in PPC as well. Does ranking for this keyword bring in the right qualified potential traffic? Does it bring us enough?
Are we ranking for a keyword where, you know what, it sounds like a great keyword and it would convert great. But we're not getting enough people because Google has a knowledge graph and an instant answer up top. So the keyword opportunity score is way down low in the toilet, and it's just not going to drive any traffic. So maybe we need to expand that keyword set. Maybe we're doing great with SEO, but we need to do more of it for different keywords.
If you are doing this auditing process and you identify whether the tactics are actually moving the needle in the places you think they are, you can now move on to, "We know our funnel problems, where they exist, where they don't. We know which tactics work and don't."
Now we can say, "You know what? Let me look at my marketing mix.
Let me look at my resource allocation and say, 'Oh, maybe I'm putting 20% of my budget to display and 18% to paid search. Maybe I'm putting 15% to offline, and I'm putting 12% to social and 8% to content." Whatever the numbers may be, "Is that the right mix? Does that effectively sound like it's doing the right things over here, or should I be changing this up?"
Should I say, "Huh. You know what? We saw that we have a bunch of opportunity in SEO, or we have a bunch of opportunity in content. We have a lot of time and energy and people being spent in display. Could we put that on autopilot for a little bit? Let our display run for a quarter. Maybe do a weekly or monthly check-in from one person. But ask those people to go concentrate on content, and then have our SEOs help them become sophisticated and savvy with how to promote that content."
Maybe. Maybe you can. The questions I like to ask in the resource allocation phase are: Are any of these already purely on autopilot? Are they just sort of running and they haven't been audited? Because that can speak to why the tactic isn't working, or why it's not targeting the right phase of the funnel.
How many people and hours, not just dollars are going to each? Because a lot of folks, when they look at their marketing budget from a CFO level or a chief marketing officer, they'll look purely at the numbers, not at the people. That can be very dangerous too, because if you say, "Hey, we've got a bunch of our budget is allocated to display. We have almost no budget to allocate it to SEO. But that's intentional because SEO is a free channel." Ahh. Pull out your hair. That's crazy.
Or the only dollars that we have assigned to it are our SEO consultants, rather than people and hours, and time, and energy, which is what you need to be successful with an inbound marketing flywheel, like the content, search, social, email, community system.
Are any of these maxing out? If you're seeing that you're putting more dollars, more time against them, but you're getting lower and lower ROI over time, that could be a sign that you're sort of maxed out in that channel, and you either need to get more creative on how you're reaching more people, or you might think about switching some of that expenditure of time and people and dollars.
Then, finally, do any of these have tracking or data issues? I find that in a huge number of organizations the reason they're not solving the funnel challenges that they want to, and pursuing poor tactics and not investing in channels like search and social and content, is because they have no good way to measure it. So the first step might be admitting, "You know what? We're bad at measuring the ROI of content. So that's the first thing we have to do."
We have to be able to say, "Did someone come to visit us for the first time from a piece of content? What happened in the 90-day window, or 120-day window, whatever the cookie lasts, however long we can make the cookie last? Did we see that person come back again and go to consideration and comparison phase, or go to conversion, or become more of a recidivist for our products or a highly-retentive customer who's subscribing to us?"
If the answer to those things is yes, then you know what? Data is the place to invest. When you do that, then you're able to effectively allocate your marketing channels.
So hopefully, this will kick off an exercise in audit for many of you. I'd love to hear from you in the comments with your shares about places you have reallocated dollars, places you've seen present lots of opportunity or present poor opportunity. Then, I'd love to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
The strategy and operations arm of our Internet Statistics Compendium is one of the fastest growing documents within the ISC series.
Last month saw the addition of data published by ourselves in-house and a wealth of freely-available stats from a number of other research houses in the UK and beyond.
I thought I would use this post to share some of the most notable digital strategy trends according to business managers and employees as they reflect on 2015 and start planning for 2016.
The entertainment industry can teach marketers a lot about incorporating fandom into a company’s strategy.
From Beliebers to Kardashian followers, America is the land of the superfan. Diehard aficionados are the first ones to download a new album, tune in to the latest episode, or buy a concert ticket.
German ecommerce pure play Zalando is learning from the Chinese market, offering stylist consultations by IM or phone call, unique social interactions and three-hour local delivery.
It's part of rethinking the ecommerce model and blending online and offline to create a viable ecosystem, rather than simply an online shop.
Video is on the rise. In fact, it was one of the key trends highlighted in our 2016 content marketing predictions.
Frankly I’m all for it. The quality of video content has gone through the roof in the last couple of years, and one campaign that deserves a special mention came from St. John’s Ambulance (SJA) last year.
The campaign, complete with the necessarily bleak title of ‘The Chokeables’ – was so good that it one the video category of the 2015 Masters of Marketing awards.
Posted by ajfried
We all judge people on first impressions. When we see someone for the first time, we're quick to decide what type of person they are — based on the clothes they wear, how they style their hair, and anything else we notice that immediately puts them in a group.
It’s certainly not fair, but it’s human nature. And I'd like to keep my faith in humanity and argue that lots of us try NOT to prejudge others.
Believe it or not, Google is the same. It judges, too. Some might disagree with this theory, but our internal research supports it, as you'll see in the data below. Google pre-classifies every single search term into a group for later recall.
Is that fair?
Is Google fair about how it does this?
Imagine, for a moment, that you're about to walk onto the stage of MozCon. You've spent months preparing and you have new and thought-provoking research to share. You are legend and you're about to blow everyone’s mind. And as you make your way up... SPLAT! You fall right on your face. I mean, really wipe out.
You'll probably recover, because you're dynamic and you'll still nail your presentation. However, you'll also be forever stamped as the one that fell on your face during the conference.
Is it fair that people treat us this way? Or how about Google? Is it fair that Google judges us like this, that we're classified into select groups, or that Google may show years-old negative content about us or our clients?
I think most people would agree: it’s not. Something that's truly not relevant to an individual's or brand’s storyline shouldn't be appearing prominently in a query for their name. An event that's nothing more than a blip on the radar shouldn't become the most important thing you see about them.
Yet, often it is. More often than you think. Some of the biggest brands in the world are dealing with this problem — having unfavorable content appearing for their name — and desperately try to get rid of it.
On Google’s About page, Larry Page describes a perfect search engine as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."
As an example, it states: "This means making search smarter and faster, so it can understand that when you type in [jaguar] you’re looking for the car, not photos of the animal."
Well, first of all, they might want to find a different example, because queries without context can't hint at intent, as you'll see below.
It’s a basic issue of not knowing what the context is for the query. And, arguably, some of the most important searches don’t have context. A brand? An individual? There's nothing necessarily unique about these searches to give them context. For example, if I search for "Applebee's" from my phone, there's context behind it. I'm on my phone, I'm in the vicinity of a restaurant, I'm probably hungry. But a query for, say, a gentleman named "James Young" is useless, as it gives Google no context or basis for figuring out which results might be most relevant. Do I want to know where he lives? When he was born? What kind of work he's in?
| Arguably, these queries without context are the most important queries, and they're where audiences form opinions about brands. |  |
Sometimes, it can seem like it is when your search results don’t reflect who you are or the content you're putting out into the world. Truth is, though, Google's probably not out to get you — in reality, it's an emotionless machine.
As I've mentioned previously, I don't believe it's evil. I think it's a machine controlled by an algorithm, with imperfections and flaws. Choices must be made based on the information available. Sometimes there isn’t enough to work with, or the right information that it'd like to show is missing, so it makes the wrong choices.
So... How do we change what Google wants to show?
Google’s job is to show you what you're looking for. This can only be done by finding patterns and trends. Behind all the search results are templates that every query needs to fit in to.
When you perform a search in Google, you're effectively seeing whatever information it wants to show you on that day. It's a ton of information — but it’s not data. If you're able to collect all that information and trend it, an unbelievable amount can be learned.
For example, among the top 100 hedge funds:
Having this data, you start to uncover a deeper meaning behind the search results. You expose the template Google has created for this "type" of query. It should come as no surprise that these templates will change from industry to industry.
The graph below gives a breakdown of what shows up in search results for these industries. (Note: the percentages are the percentage of Google page 1 results.)
Some notable observations:
Armed with this information, you can now identify what kind of content Google wants to show for you or your brand.
While we've all heard a million times that "content is king" and we should create more content, the reality is that only the RIGHT content is what’s going to make the difference. Content is not churning out post after post after post of products and other junk. Rather, content is about creating an impression that enhances the brand in the viewer's mind.
Practically, this idea of templates becomes extremely important in planning the right content for your brand. If you can use these templates to identify certain trends appearing for brands similar to your own, you can create the content Google wants to show.
To help articulate this point, I want to share a few case studies.
Take, for example, a client we had in the not-for-profit industry. He was the president of an organization and notable enough to have a Wikipedia profile, as did all of his competitors. His corporate site and social profiles were ranking relatively consistently with everyone else, and he authored content regularly. However, he had a disproportionate amount of media coverage about him compared to his competitors, causing negative content to rank prominently.
What became clear was that all the authored content was on his corporate sites, as opposed to a leading industry publication. Content creation was happening, but it was being put in the wrong place. According to the data, someone like this individual should be generating content on reputable industry publications.
Result: We worked to migrate some of his content to relevant publications. With a few relevant links, it began ranking within a few weeks.
Another example was the CEO of an asset management company who had a disproportionate amount of news content appearing about them, some of which was negative. This caused frequent changes to the search results for the individual's name and a lack of branding around their name.
When you examine the results closer, you notice that on average, the CEO of a company like this would have two non-owned, executive-style profiles on sites like Forbes, Bloomberg, or Fortune.
Result: This individual was missing from notable lists, specifically the Forbes billionaire list. Working with the communications team, he was included in the list, displacing some of the negative content.
The final example I'll offer was of a client who had been trying to brand themselves through the use of content, blogging, press releases, and other similar information.
The biggest problem they had? They already had a nice amount of “ownership” within their search results. That means they had full and total control over half of the results appearing. Based on the peer analysis, it was going to be highly unlikely that they'd get more than that.
However, when we ran a frequency analysis, we noticed that every single one of their competitors has a GuideStar profile appearing.
The only differentiator between our client and their competitors was the level of their profile, which is earned by completing it. They were at silver, while everyone else had gold status (Note: there's some speculation about the level of status).
Once we helped them build up their profile to gold, we added a few easily-attainable and relevant links pointing to the profile. Easy ones, like from their corporate website. It doesn’t get more legit than that.
Result: Within a matter of weeks, we saw the profile ranking at the bottom of page 1, displacing negative content about the brand.
At the end of the day, Google is nothing more than an organized system. We sometimes give it too much credit because it happens to be REALLY good at understanding what we want and mean. But this is based on an organized understanding of how we (all humans that use Google) use the search engine.
Not all content can rank for all types of queries. Just because a certain result appears for one query doesn’t mean that another will; randomly creating a bunch of profiles is not going the solution. For example, if you happen to be one of the 200 richest Americans in the world, Pinterest is not likely to rank for you. (It appears for 3 of them on page 2: Randa Williams, Milane Frantz, and H. Ross Perot Sr).
Using historical and competitor analysis, understanding what type of content is frequently appearing will give you tremendous insight into the kind of content you should be building to fit into the template Google has built for your brand.
The only loose end in this process is the thought that you're now "stuck" in a template. Once Google perceives you a certain way, is that it? Are you stuck? Can the CEO who loves arts and crafts convince Google that Pinterest should rank prominently for queries with their name?
There is some subjectivity to this, to be sure, but the entire process above is by far the path of least resistance. This is the content Google wants to show for queries about you or your brand, based on trends of others in your industry.
If you create an experience on that network that's highly popular, engaging, and something in which you invest a lot of time and effort, I think it's fair to say that it could change how search engines classify you. But convincing someone to blog or use social media when it’s not something they'll do aggressively or passionately usually doesn’t end well. Most people have these profiles, but that doesn’t mean they actively use them.
These templates exist because of the type of information that typically shows for these queries. It’s low-hanging fruit. If you have info that doesn’t make sense for who you are, it likely won’t appear right away without really hard work.
Work with the algorithm and make sense of which content it's clear that the search engine wants to show. If you create that content, it will rank.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
A few months ago an Econsultancy contributor gave his views on the state of the digital industry in New Zealand.
The post focused on four main issues, which I didn't entirely agree with.
When PPC is as important as it is for Argos, understanding how external factors impact on conversion and spend is vital.
Argos' paid search agency Summit won a Masters of Marketing award in 2015 for doing just that, optimising bidding for the retailer in reaction to competitor TV ads, weather and seasonality.
Let's look at the what made this a winning campaign...
It has been a while since I dissected the content marketing efforts of a major brand, and what better subject for my first one of the year than the almighty NFL.
The 32 NFL teams generated $11.09bn in revenue between them in 2014. The English Premier League, by comparison, turned over just £3.26bn in the same period.
I thought it would be interesting to delve into the content marketing strategy of this enormous money-making machine to see how the channel supports its success.
Before a piece of marketing can have a chance of persuading anyone of anything it needs to be seen.
The necessity of registering in someone’s brain via their eyes has all but been forgotten in the fad for ‘brand publishing’.
While it may always be impossible to sell actual out-of-home impressions, billboard technology is evolving rapidly and creating a newly agile medium for advertisers.
Clear Channel has just bought almost 2,000 phone booths from Arqiva and is expanding its use of automated digital six-sheet screens.
These new kiosks won't just be advertisements, but will provide a host of benefits to the public as well as advertisers.
Let's look at the future of out-of-home...
Posted by Wayfair
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
At Wayfair.com, we conduct a lot of SEO tests. We're constantly measuring and evaluating our strategies, some of which were shared in our last post for YouMoz, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Sometimes, however, we stumble across what we call "accidental SEO tests." This typically happens when a bad code deploy unintentionally hurts our SEO, and we end up learning something useful from our mistake.
One of our accidental tests involved regularly 301-redirecting large batches (i.e., tens of thousands) of product pages. On average, we found a consistent (and essentially permanent) traffic loss of about 15% for 301-redirected URLs.
In the past, Google has said a small amount of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect, which is the same as through a link. Now, for the first time, we can put a hard number to how much that loss is.
Like any good SEO team, our product pages were set to use the name of the product in the URL. Furthermore, if for any reason a product URL was changed, the old URL was set to automatically redirect to the new one.
What we didn’t realize, though, is that our merchandising teams were also busy being good at their jobs, part of which involved changing the naming standards of products on a regular basis. Every change they made was good for the customer. But when the the naming standards changed, it caused thousands of products to change names. This, in turn, updated the URLs of those product pages, triggering a 301 redirect on every page.
For example, when updating for the purpose of having a consistent style, the merchandising team changed “barstools” to the more accurate two-word version of the product name, “bar stools.” Wayfair had over 8,000 bar stools, all of which 301-redirected to a new URL following the name change. Then, a couple of months later, the merchandising team found that they were getting better results by including the height of the bar stool in the product name, so they updated the product names again, which resulted in the product pages 301-updating once more to a brand new set of URLs.
This process of updating product names was being implemented across dozens of different product classes, with multiple updates per month. It quickly added up to a lot of 301 redirects.
After reshaping our URL logic to prevent the constant redirects, we realized that we had a great opportunity to find out exactly how 301 redirects affect organic traffic. Nailing down data was easy. We had the exact dates of the changes; groups of thousands to tens of thousands of pages, with tens of thousands of organic visits; and could compare those classes against others that we knew didn’t change to exclude the impact of Wayfair’s overall increase in organic traffic.
We found with surprising consistency that we had a drop very close to 15% of organic traffic for any product class that changed URLs. In our bar stools example, we lost just under 15% of organic traffic at the first change. When the URL changed again over a month later, we lost another 15%.
Every product class we looked at showed the same drop within one to two weeks of the change. Sometimes the drop was almost immediate (like with bar stools); other times, however, it was spread out over a couple weeks (e.g., area rugs, with over 30,000 products).
We did not see any evidence of recovery from the impact of the 301 redirects, even after many months. There was the appearance of recovery — class traffic levels eventually returned to where they started — but that was because our overall organic traffic was increasing across the entire site. We were still 15% below where we would have been without the redirects.
What’s particularly fascinating about this number, 15%, is that it is exactly the amount of PageRank loss Google described in the original PageRank paper. So our measured results matched theory with surprising precision. Perhaps the broader authority signals Google now measures follow the same logic for flowing through pages as they did in 1998? Or perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence.
We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.
It’s worth stressing, however, that we are not saying that 301-redirecting any particular page is going to cost you 15% of your organic traffic. If you rank in position #1 for competitive terms, a redirect could drop you to position #2 or #4. That would cost you far more than 15% of your organic traffic. On the other hand, your page could be so strong that you may not not see any loss in rankings after redirecting it.
What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.
While 301-redirecting a dead or changed page to the new location is still good practice, the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place.
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Marketing now is as much about getting buy-in as it is about doing, well, 'marketing'.
And in order to get buy-in, marketers need to do presentations - a lot of them, according to big brand marketers.
Econsultancy’s recent Digital Transformation in the Financial Services Sector report found that “customer experience” was a recurring priority for senior executives from firms such as BlackRock and JP Morgan Asset Management.
Personalised and relevant content was seen to be key for delivering against this priority.
We often discuss basket abandonment on this blog, and one of the quickest ways to lose your customer is to bore them with a seemingly endless checkout process.
I say ‘seemingly endless’ because, however long the process really is, if you don’t include some kind of progress indicator then people have no way of telling how close to the end they are.
So they might as well assume they’ve got a long way to go, get bored and give up.
Google's unabridged Page Quality rating guidelines were released in November 2015.
Whilst some outlets covered this at the time, I thought I'd do so in purely practical terms.
So, here's a very simple checklist, based on Google's approximation of highest and lowest quality content.
It by no means covers everything in the guidelines, but references those bits that caught my eye.
66% of marketers believe location-based advertising is the ‘most exciting’ mobile opportunity for 2016, according to a recent IAB UK study I quoted in our digital marketing stats round-up.
This is a huge endorsement from the marketing community, but how many people really use this channel to its full potential?
For those still relatively new to the term, or for anyone wanting to refresh their knowledge, I’ve created this location-based advertising guide for you.
Posted by KelseyLibert
Did it feel like everyone you knew was watching “Making a Murderer” at the same time? It may have just been an illusion, thanks to a few key members of your social network.
Researchers at the University of Southern California recently uncovered that when something appears more popular than it actually is, it can create the right conditions for it to be widely spread. They named this social network phenomenon the majority illusion, which happens due to highly-connected individuals within a social network skewing the group’s perception. These findings explain something we already knew — well-connected individuals can wield extraordinary influence. The majority illusion may also explain why it can take only a handful of the right influencers to make something go viral.
Marketers can leverage the majority illusion to create the tipping point needed to drive action or spread a message far and wide. It starts with identifying influencers who have the potential to create the majority illusion among your target demographic, and then encouraging those influencers to help amplify your message.
Are you surprised when your non-marketer friends are completely unaware of something that was major news in the marketing world? You may think it’s popular because you kept seeing it discussed by key members of your network, which can give the impression that it’s universally popular.
Let’s say that in the figure above, each of the colored nodes is a Nickelback fan. The networks are identical, except different people are Nickelback fans in each figure. Since the Nickelback fans in figure A have more connections, it may appear to their network that Nickelback’s music is popular. This is how the majority illusion can create the impression within a group that an idea, behavior, or attribute is common, even if the opposite is true.
By illustrating how a social network is organized, we can see how an idea can potentially spread across communities or stay within a select group.
We modeled a network graph of 77 Twitter influencers across eight different verticals: automotive, business, entertainment, finance, health, lifestyle, technology, and travel. Influencers were chosen based on criteria including relevance to a vertical and engagement. In order to create a usable graph, we then narrowed down the influencers’ 19 million followers to about 8,600 second-degree influencers. We chose those users based on a set of criteria that signaled mid-level influence: a following greater than 30,000, a follower to following ratio of at least 1:1, and a “lists per followers” rate of at least 6.5 (the number of times they have been added to a Twitter list per thousand of followers). Side note: Wondering why you can’t find Rand? He’s too popular to meet the parameters we set for a “mid-level” influencer.
The resulting network illustrates the hierarchical relationships of first- and second-level influencers within a social network. Click here to see the full interactive graph.
The nodes represent individuals, while the relationships between individuals are expressed as lines. The larger a node, the more relationships the individual has within the network. It’s important to understand this does not mean the large nodes have the most followers within the network; rather, they have the most connections within a particular network (some being first-degree, second-degree, third-degree connections, etc.).
By examining this graph, you can see that social influence is more like six degrees of Kevin Bacon than a popularity contest. Because of this, marketers should focus on getting their message spread by influencers within a focused niche or strategically-positioned influencers to maximize reach, rather than looking for influencers who merely have a large following.
Tools such as BuzzSumo and Followerwonk are a good jumping off point for finding influencers within a vertical. But you want to look at more than the number of followers, because influence depends on far more than popularity.
There are three main factors for determining the most powerful members of a network:
So which of these variables are most important? It depends on your goals.
Do you want people to take an action? Niche influencers may be best to create the majority illusion and give the impression of popularity, thus spurring others to mimic their behavior. An influencer’s closeness may be the most important factor in this case, since it signals they share a lot of connections with other individuals in their network. When you consider all of the common relationships within a niche group, it’s easy to see how these groups are susceptible to the majority illusion effect.
Are the goals for your content expanding brand awareness or increasing viral potential? Influencers with connections to other communities may be most effective for reaching a large audience. Betweenness centrality is the greatest signal of strategic positioning, since it shows the individual’s potential to influence and connect different groups.
If you want to create the majority illusion within a niche-focused group, target influencers with followers similar to them who have a low number of followers.
Notice how some groups are isolated on the edges of the graph. We can assume the “majority illusion” is likely to happen within these groups since they have little to no overlap with the other communities.
The researchers found that the majority illusion occurs most frequently in networks where individuals with a low degree of connections tend to connect with individuals with a high degree of connections. Those with a low number of connections may be easier to influence since they aren’t exposed to a wide range of ideas and opinions — plus they have less noise in their stream, so they are likely to see what the influencer posts.
Getting a handful of niche influencers talking about your brand within the same time period may be the key to creating an impression of popularity. I see this happen all the time on niche blogs, where several blogs do a sponsored post or review of the same product within a short time period. It does have the effect of making it feel like you’ve seen something everywhere, even though only a few people are talking about it.
If you want your content amplified to the widest possible audience, target influencers who are followed by other influencers and have diverse connections across different communities.
The closer an influencer is to the center of the graph, the more visibility they have across multiple verticals. This gives your content a better chance of escaping the echo chamber likely to occur within the more isolated groups. Individuals strategically positioned within their network, rather than those who are the most popular, may be the most effective at influencing a large number of people.
Two great examples of this within our network model are Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) and Daniel Pink (@DanielPink). Notice how their connections are spread across different groups.
Example: @MarketingProfs
Example: @DanielPink
You don’t need to build your own social network graph to identify influencers with high betweenness centrality. Look for a mix of these two factors to spot strategically-positioned influencers:
Need help finding the right influencers? Check out our guide to identifying effective influencers. Once you pinpoint the influencers who can help you achieve your desired goal, be sure to deploy Rand’s advice on getting influencers to amplify your message.
By visualizing the structure of a social network, you can see that having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to influence. Influencers within closely-knit groups may be best suited for influencing their followers to take action or adopt an opinion, since this type of group is primed for creating the majority illusion that "everyone’s doing it." To reach a large audience, marketers should enlist the help of influencers who are strategically positioned between social communities, rather than those with a Kardashian-sized following.
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Thanks to Company Pages, you can create a powerful content-rich brand asset:
Showcase pages are the extension of company pages. They are a way to “show off” your business and its social clout. Use showcase pages to:
Showcase pages allow you to represent your company, just like you are representing yourself. People can get a better feel for your brand and what it is all about.
You are encouraged to have multiple showcase pages (the limit is ten showcase pages per one company page) that work for different projects within your company, all connected to you. Adobe does this, for example; they have Adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Adobe Marketing Cloud among their listed Showcase pages.
Adobe Showcase Page example: Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office has used their Showcase page as a social hub for regular updates on projects, information on their product, and connecting with people who use Office for professional reasons.
It was perfect for their needs, since LinkedIn is a place for professionals, and that was who they wanted to target: people who are using the word processing program and connected features for their working life and projects. They only get a few engagements per post, but anyone who has seen most LinkedIn company pages know what a huge boon that is.
I started with Microsoft example because it perfectly illustrates the SEO value of showcase pages: Each of its showcase page has been picked up as a sitelink:
This is one powerful SERPs asset to rely on!
Adobe Showcase Page example: Adobe Creative Cloud Showcase Page
As mentioned before, Adobe has three different Showcase pages available. The first is their primary, and the other two are separate cloud services. Now, they could have chose any number of products to feature in this way. But they made the smart move of focusing on very specific audiences that were more likely to branch out.
After all, many Adobe products fall under the same audience banner, whereas the clouds focus each focus on different needs less likely to intersect. It was a great way to reach out without casting their net too wide.
Adobe Showcase Page example: IBM Analytics
IBM took a different, but still effective, route. They broke their products down into the basic categories: Primary, Cloud, Analytics, Security, Systems, IBM with MSPs, Watson, Watson Health, Social Business, Commerce, Internet Of Things, MobileFirst and Research.
They didn’t confine themselves within the boundaries of a main group and a couple of others than might appeal to different groups. They opened themselves up to every audience with its own Showcase, and it worked. They also put a lot of focus on their employees, which are listed on the main page, and careers that can be applied for by following a link right there in the right sidebar.
Adobe Showcase Page example: Cisco Data Centers
Cisco is the most active of all the above pages. They post every hour with something interesting that is directly engaging to their followers. They communicate with people directly. They even have multiple groups that are separate from their many Showcase pages in order to get people connecting on a deeper level. Their approach is thoughtful, much more so than you usually see from such large brands.
Being realistic, we have to address a couple of the negatives to Showcase pages and their capabilities. The biggest is the one that tends to turn people off the most: It makes things more confusing.
After we are already confused enough with differences between pages, groups, communities, “updates” and so on, showcase pages make the whole thing even more messed up. They are hard to scale and manage if you create several pages (and creating several showcase pages for every aspect of your business is what they apparently are for).
Another issue is the format. It has been compared in many ways to a less robust Google Plus, and while that isn’t really accurate it is hard to deny the comparison entirely. Unlike other networks that feel very alive, Showcase pages are pretty stagnant. To get it moving you really need to keep up on engagement.
Basically, you are going to need to promote and maintain. If you are willing to put in the work, it can be a great platform for connecting with a new audience.
Have any tips or tricks for Showcase pages? Let us know in the comments!
The post Linkedin Showcase Pages: Create More Brand Assets with LinkedIn Company Page appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
