Category: Social Media

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InfoGraphic vs InfoVideo, Which Would Win in the Wild?

Super cute link bait infovideo from MDG Advertising about Pinterest. It’s a bit hard to read at times, but is painfully cute nonetheless.

The video format is interesting but I wonder if it would have gotten more shares as an infographic instead of a video? Or perhaps an HTML5 interactive piece where you could roll over different components and have the data zoom out to the foreground or the sizes of the elements change?

It would be very interesting to do a test of some sort to determine which format was the most effective. But I can’t think of a way to format such a test. If you do it sequentially — first video then static then HTML5 — you risk the latter formats getting less buzz based on saturation of the information from the previous formats. But if you release them simultaneously on different social platforms — say YouTube for video, Pinterest for static and Facebook for HTML5 — you obviously risk the biases introduced by the size of the audiences there.

I suppose you could always do standard A/B testing of the format on your own site, but the most interesting thing is what happens to the information off your site. Where and how it’s shared. Which formats have stronger reach on which social networks. You can make suppositions but what if the data surprised us? What if the sheer volume of Facebook users wiped the floor with YouTube sharing? And would that change if the primary home of the video was a blog post on your site that embedded the YouTube video rather than sending traffic to Facebook or YouTube itself to see the video? So many interesting questions. Too bad I’m an SEO and not a data analyst.

Thanks to Melissa Fach over at SEJ for the post idea.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Facebook Buys Instagram, Bing Delirious with Joy

Today the interwebs are abuzz with the news that Facebook is buying Instagram for $1 billion in pre-IPO shares.

Bing must be delirious with joy. They have an exclusive relationship with Facebook to include data in Bing search results. Hello personalized search data boost!


I’d love to know how many non-FB Instagram users Facebook is acquiring. I’ve got to think there’s a lot of overlap, but out will be interesting to learn more.Two photo sharing giants coming together, this is huge. Obviously FB is more than photos, but easy photo sharing has been important to their success. Now adding the size of the Instagram network and the appeal of their filters (which I still don’t get, personally) to the massive FB social overlord is just huge.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Purina’s “We Are Cat People” Campaign the Cat’s Meow

Purina Cat Chow tapped into both my love for my cats and my vanity with it’s “We Are Cat People” Twitter campaign. That’s a potent combination! They invited people to tweet the reasons why they are cat people, and selected some of those tweets to appear in Times Square. That was pretty neat already, but I was surprised to see that they also took a photo of the billboard and tweeted it back to the submitter. Now THAT is a recipe for increasing engagement! Here’s how it looked:

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Using Social Signals to Personalize Organic Search

Excerpts from my latest article at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog: “How Social Media Boosts Organic Search.”

Search engines like Google develop algorithms to determine the quality of a site’s content as well as its contextual relevance and link popularity. Site quality is a pretty nebulous concept for a piece of software to understand, but search engineers have linked social signals such as Facebook’s Likes, shares and comments, Google+’s shares, +1s and comments, and Twitter’s tweets and retweets to the quality of the page being shared. The more shares, the higher quality a page must be. There are other quality signals in play as well — hundreds of signals factor into each engine’s algorithm — but social signals are thought to be harder to manipulate than linking signals.

The most obvious way that social signals impact search results is in each individual searcher’s personalized search. For example, a Google search for “social search” returns different search results depending on whether I’m logged in to my Google account. On the left below are the search results I see when I’m logged out of Google search. On the right below are the results for the same search when I’m logged in to my Google account.

The point is that I may be the only person who will see this exact personalized search result. My circle of friends in Google+ shared 130 items relevant to the phrase “social search.” To have the same set of results, you would have to have those same 130 friends in your Google+ circles….

Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Google’s Search Plus Your World & SEO for Ecommerce

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

 

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introduction of Search, Plus Your World. Last week Practical eCommerce explored the social media impact of Search, Plus Your World, in “Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results.” In this article, I’ll focus on the search-engine-optimization impact of this new feature.

Visibility in Search Results

The biggest impact SPYW has on SEO is the visual and personal nature of the results it returns. Compare these two search result sets for a very common search phrase: “shoes.”

Read more »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.