January 13th, 2012
Report Shows SEO Still Ahead of Social Media Marketing
The hotdog vendor has a social media strategy, do you?
Social media is now a bonafide marketing tool for small and medium enterprises. A recent report from Borrell Associates showed how SMEs have adopted social media strategies to enhance their marketing efforts. Most local businesses have contributed to the SME adoption of social media as a marketing boost. It’s not a secret that a social network like Facebook has become a marketplace turning it to a destination-location for merchants and customers.
The report shows that most local businesses between 45% and 70% have already established a social media presence through Facebook and about 60% and 64% of these businesses have a formal presence on social media sites. These aren’t surprising figures, MerchantCircle found that 70% of SMEs are already using Facebook as a means to promoted their products and services. However, Borrell’s report showed that social media marketing was still behind SEO and paid-search last year.
Many local businesses still depend on SEO for potential customers to find them and improve their lead generation. But SMM is catching up in a tremendous way, the report estimates that $6.2 billion was spent on paid-social in 2011. Facebook’s advertising platform has covered 65% of the entire social media advertising last year. With Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Facebook enhanced advertising platform, it’s a possibility that budget for social media advertising will surpass SEO and paid-search.
SEO pundits might raise their eyebrows with these findings, but it’s a fact that Facebook being more complicated to use with its gamut of changes and the lack of a standard metric for social ROI conversion rates. It’s too early to tell if social media advertising is the end-all and be-all to improve your online marketing. One thing’s for sure, as long as Google’s social products like Google Places and Google+ integrate smoothly with Google’s search engine, search engine marketing is always the old reliable.
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.
