Tag Archive for: Homepage

Study: 70% of Facebook and Twitter Pages from brands don't rank in Google

BrightEdge recently uncovered with a research project that social profiles of most leading brands don’t rank well in Google. Although many companies still invest a lot of their budgets in SEM/SEO activities, most of them forget to increase their social media presence from a search results perspective.

The research reviewed 200 of the world’s top brands for their social media presence. Most of the those brands, nearly 100%, stay on top or near the top ranks for their brand names on the SERP’s. However, a high percentage of 71% did not have their Facebook pages in the top 20 results. For Twitter it showed more or less the same result: 68% of the brands surveyed were not amoungst the top 20 results of the Google SERP’s.

“Brands today are pouring countless resources into social media channels and are creating great content that will help them engage with consumers, optimizing these for SEO purposes is a crucial way to drive exposure. Brands may be missing critical customer connection points if consumers can’t easily discover their social media pages in search.” Jim Yu, CEO, BrightEdge

Interestingly enough, there seems to be no necessary correlation between the number of friends and followers and SERP rankings according to the analysis of various social media pages that the BrightEdge surveyed. For example, the Facebook page of a leading photography brand did not perform in the top 20 search results, although more than 160,000 were fans of their Facebook page. On the other hand, a leading auto manufacturer with only 17,307 fans had a Facebook page that ranked in the top 10 of search results.

The least effective brands at optimizing Social Networking sites are coming from the finance and insurance sector. Only three of the top 43 companies had their Facebook pages rank in the top 20 search results. In comparison, retailers were much more successful: 13 out of the top 23 retailers surveyed were found in the top 20 search results.

Spot On!
Brands could argue it is more important to find your homepage or branded pages for products or services in the top search results. Social Media experts might see this different as some of the main brands invest a lot of their branding activities in the leading Social Media sites at the moment. Especially, under the aspect from last year’s report that some big brands reported to loose their traffic on corporate websites to Facebook, the search impact for brands might become more and more important in the future. Would you agree?

eblizz – the next social shopping extension

In the last four weeks, some of the users of The Strategy Web might have seen a small icon on the right hand side of my blog called ‘SocialSpace’. You might have wondered what it is. Or how to use it. Here comes the answer. Now, that the team around the eblizz founders, Jeanette Okwu and Martin Wawrusch, has completed the integration of the social software tool, I will introduce you to a technology that I would call the next social shopping extension for future business.

Social networks are on an all-time high. Corporate websites and shops loose out on traffic and referential linking as people start talking, connecting and linking via social networks like Facebook, Twitter or other social networks. SEO doesn’t work here as closed front doors don’t allow access for SEO tactics. And with the massive rise of social networks, especially Facebook, the question comes up how to bridge the lack of a connection between social networks and homepages or shops.

eblizz offers this solution. It brings social networks and brands together. In a way that social Networks become an integral part of brand websites – be it homepages, shops or blogs. For now, eblizz starts with Facebook – but Martin told me, other networks will follow.

With eblizz users can interact with their social networks without leaving branded sites. Content can be shared with friends on Facebook. Users can immediately comment from the website they are on. Or store products visually in ‘The Shoebox’ and keep it for later purpose or use. Content can be, or as eblizz calls it, has to be ‘liberated’

What is the benefit of eblizz?
Business perspective Think about it. Prosumers create masses of content on the social web. Consuming that content, prosumers realize that brands become more and more exchangable. This causes problems for companies. They need to increase efforts to make their brand get heard. So ideally, companies make use of recommendation marketing to use the buzz of their brand fans.

User perspective Consumers often find things like nice products in online-shops. Or great music. Or funny videos. Or great pictures. And they want to recommend this to friends they are connected with on social networks. Today, it is impossible to take your friends from homepage to homepage, and easily share that content via a social network with one click.

Imagine your Facebook friends follow you from website to website. And, when you want to recommend something to them, you don’t have to change browser windows. You don’t have to cut-and-paste content. You just drag and drop it to the relevant person. Watch the short explanation and tell me if this isn’t really cool…

Companies pay a fee to get their websites eblizzed – no matter if it is a shop, a homepage or a blog. Their sites will be defragmented like a cake. This makes it easy for prosumers to share and recommend relevant pieces of content of a website: videos, links, pictures, etc.

Once a site is eblizzed, users find a button called SocialSpace – the button I started talking about at the beginning. The user logs in with on the question-marked face with their social network account. The SocialSpace opens up in a small picture on the website they are on. The users see their profile, the friends and updates immediately. They can also search for friends. And, they can immediately interact with their social network friends.

Users can even ‘bookmark’ interesting content in their Shoe-Box. The Shoe-Box is a place for personal content belongings. Here the users keep very special things in their SocialSpace. Maybe to recomment or remember a product or present for a Christmas or birthday in the future.

eblizz offers a next generation website customer service. eblizz integrates social network interaction in companies websites. And eblizz will become the driver of social commerce efforts by enabling engagement and brand buzz.

“Prosumers” create masses of content on the internet, including blog posts, product reviews and ratings. Producing all that content, prosumers begin to blur the lines between brands, making them more interchangeable. Not good for individual brands. That’s why companies need to increase efforts to distinguish their brand from all the rest. One way is to capitalize on “recommendation marketing” — build the buzz created by their brand fans. eblizz can help.

And here is how it works…
Consumers often discover products that they love online. And great music, funny videos and awesome pictures. They want to recommend them to their social-network friends. Today, it is impossible to take social-network friends from homepage to homepage, and easily share that content via a social network with one click. This is a universal social web problem!

So, imagine your Facebook friends follow you from website to website. And, when you want to recommend something to them, you don’t have to change browser windows. You don’t have to cut-and-paste content. You just drag and drop it to the relevant person.

eblizz was created to make things easier for anyone who wants to recommend content, product and services to any or all of their social-network friends. Websites and blogs sign up to get “eblizzed”. The fee seems very reasonable. Once a site is eblizzed, a button appears on the site’s homepage called “SocialSpace.” When a user logs in with their social network account information, Facebook for example, the SocialSpace opens up into a small picture that displays the user’s Facebook profile, Facebook friends (and their pictures!) and updates that are happening on facebook right from the website the user is on. The user can then drag and drop anything from the website right onto the Facebook page of any or all of their Facebook friends.

The user can also ‘bookmark’ interesting content from the website by dragging into their “ShoeBox.” This content stays in the Shoe Box for the user’s later use, can be edited and also shared.

Spot On!
So for me, the reason for a website to get “eblizzed” is simple. eblizz integrates social network interaction for all the users who visit a website, making it easy for them to recommend and share the website’s content. That’s how eblizz helps companies distinguish their brands. What is your take on it? Maybe you want to test it with my eblizz SocialSpace button? Drag and drop me your best videos on advertisement, funny pictures, shopping tips or cool texts. Looking forward to it!

And sure, let me know what you think about eblizz…

Real-time is the future and real-time starts with Twitter?

It was about time to relaunch the Twitter front page and some days ago, Mashable already mentioned this next step. From the old front page it was nearly impossible to understand what this platform is all about, the new one shows what this platform could be in the future…

Twitter becomes more like a mixture of user-generated CNN, Facebook and Google in taking the best of bread from all platforms. It is a real time information exchange news service in a social networking coat.

new-twitter1
Now, their new front page focuses on their biggest benefit for every single user in the world: their real-time search engine. In placing this in the main center of attraction and attention, Twitter leaves a lot of open space for thoughts and speculations about their future strategy in expanding their business (and business value).

The new real-time strategy is supported by the three tag lines…
– Popular topics right now (main tags real-time search)
– Popular topics today (last 24 hours)
– Popular topics this week (last 7 days)

Will they finally follow the Google business? At least some kind of similar bottom up strategy can be seen in this approach. A road that Google started off some years ago…

old-twitterCompared to the old front page (see right), the main benefit of Twitter becomes more clear now for new users and makes the USP of the platform obvious right from the start.

If we are just talking about search and the business benefit of “being and knowing first-to-market”, this will be a clear winner for Twitter compared to Google where search results for certain topics can be some years old.

Real-time is the future (of news business) and real-time starts with Twitter?

How to attract more visitors – The 10 most important visitor resources for blogs

How can you find a lot of users for your business blog?

How can you find a lot of users for your business blog?

Is there a secret, why corporate blogs and business blogs have more success than traditional corporate websites? Is it the modern architecture of blogging systems? Is it the exiting and exhilarant spelling style of bloggers? Or is a conspiracy of the digital natives against the internet retirees?

Nothing of it! Blogs and bloggers are simply using some very effective methods to attract visitors.

The 10 most important visitor resources for blogs:

  1. Feeds – Blogs are read via feed reader predominantly, not via browsers any longer. Well-known blogs have more than 100.000 feed reader per day. On a normal day in Germany, there are some blogs with more than 10.000 feed reader.
    Highlight your RSS feed on your blog and take advantage of a feed service like Feedburner
  2. Google – Visitors through search engines are the second largest visitor group of blogs. Bloggers use always methods of search engine optimization (SEO) in order to achieve good rankings with important key words.
    Write in a search engine friendly way. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and install a SEO plug-in like wpSEO!
  3. Pingbacks and Trackbacks – Links don’t just offer a value-add for your own users but also backlinks and numerous new users.
    Link all directions as often as possible and learn to use trackbacks in a proper way.
  4. Twitter – with the micro-blogging service you can approach users faster than with your blog. News with real add-on information are spread via Twitter the “viral” way very fast.
    Work on broadening your Twitter follower base. Promote your Twitter account on your blog and vice versa. Twitter your blog postings at the right time!
  5. Social Networks – Promote your important blog postings on XING, Facebook or LinkedIn.
  6. Forums – Are you an accredited expert, for example a wine blogger?
    If you see in a forum the question: What are the most expensive wines or the 10 most dry French ones? Write a posting on your blog and post only the link in the forum.
  7. Blog directors and RSS feed directories – Just some selected directories (Technorati, Blogoscoop, Bloggerei, Wikio) generate new visitors. Especially, if you are ranking well in these directories.
  8. Your comments on other blogs – Make yourself heard on other blogs as a constructive business partner – far and foremost in not well-known blogs. This will result in new visitors. Beware the free of sense comments! This will damage your own blog reputation in the long term.
  9. Comments of others on your blog – This is the secret of well-visited blogs:
    Be responsive to comments – You will win permanent visitors!
  10. Guest writers – Invite readers/users, other bloggers or “VIP’s” from the offline and online world to write guest posts. Every guest author will be talking to others about it or link directly to this post.
    Your creativity has no limits: travel agents blog about journeys of their customers, hotel managers animate guests to write about their vacation resort, … Your customers don’t want that? Ask them if they want to publish some of their holiday pictures on your homepage! You will be surprised seeing the reaction…

Did I forget something? Is your ranking of visitor resources different? Where do you see options to attract more visitors for your blog? Looking forward reading your comments and reading your ideas and thoughts!

Guest writer Karl-Heinz Wenzlaff is the German expert and consultant for business blogging. He knows the useful tips and tricks, and is specialized on professional company blogs, product blogs or employee blogs. Some month ago, he helped me migrating from Blogger to WordPress in order to set up a magazine theme.

Thank you for being one of my guest writers, Karl-Heinz.