December 10th, 2011
SURVEY: SEO is The Most Important Channel for Local Businesses
A recent online survey conducted by lead generation company MerchantCircle showed that SEO is the top marketing channel that local businesses use to capture leads and promote their products or services. The Merchant Confidence Survey was conducted in November from a sample of 2,500 small businesses from MerchantCircle’s 1.6 million SMB member base.
The most notable question was: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?” As you can see in the graph below, SEO overwhelmed mobile media, paid search, traditional media, and social media.
Almost all marketers are spending their budgets on paid social ads nowadays, but I reckon that some of those marketers are clueless about the efficiency of SEO or SEM. So while every business is jumping Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, the social bandwagon doesn’t hinder the continued growth and progress of SEO. As a matter of fact, with the launch of Google’s social network, Google+, SEO will be enhanced in significant way as search marketing becomes more social. Great things are in store for SEO as social media platforms increase in use as well.
September 21st, 2011
Facebook Ticker Returns, Dynamic UI Launched
After launching the much-hyped Subscription button, Facebook unveils another new enhancement to its user interface this week. The interesting changes is now apparent on everyone’s news feeds. The Facebook UI now sports a more newspaper look and makes the feed a lot more sporadic and real-time.
Thanks to the infamous ticker (which might become the game-changer in paid social ads) the usual feed is brought to life by making it more updated and instant. The ticker presents updates ala Twitter timestreams, so when a friend makes a comment, likes, or shares something, a user can instantly join the conversation in a snap. According to The Next Web, a handful of content will appear on feeds, but will depend on the privacy settings of your contact. Here are those:
- Likes on Page posts
- Comments on Page posts
- Status mentions
- Comment tags
- Check-ins
This is what Facebook has to say about the ticker, according to the Facebook Blog:
If you haven’t returned in a week, you may want to see a summary of top stories first. If you’ve already visited several times that day, you probably care more about recent news.Starting today, it will be easier to keep up with the people in your life no matter how frequently or infrequently you’re on Facebook.
Of course we all want to stay on Facebook, but not all users have the same amount of activity and time to be spent on Facebook. For those of you who want to get rid of the ticker, someone figured how to remove it using a Chrome extension! How ironic, isn’t it? While the ticker may tick off most users, this new Facebook tool is sure to play a vital role on Facebook’s ad platform.
Obviously, the ticker is a major distraction, heck, anything that moves is a distraction and will be easily noticed! But businesses and marketers will be smiling soon, why? I mentioned earlier that the ticker functions like the Twitter timestream. Twitter has already promoted tweets for businesses to enhance brand awareness. Expect Facebook streaming ads soon.
