Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

Foursquare is the location based social network in vogue. Last year we wrote a complete guide on how to set up a campaign on Foursquare.

Foursquare has now upgraded the tools and analytics making it easier and more engaging for consumers; and more insightful for business owners.

Enhanced Specials management system

Specials are rewards that businesses can give to consumers in return for checking into their location.

Business owners now have a lot more control of their specials. There are now seven different types of specials – some for rewarding existing customers and some for attracting new ones.

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In almost every case the Sponsored stories format yields greater engagement and traffic than traditional ad formats on Facebook.

With the launch of Page Post Sponsored Stories Facebook have made it possible for your page posts to be seen by a far greater number of people than those just looking in their News Feed.

When you upload a photo or video, share a link, ask a question, or update the status on your Page, you only reach a subset of your fans via the News Feed. Page Post Sponsored Stories gives more distribution for your Page posts so that more fans have the opportunity to see your updates.

Here’s how  a page post sponsored story works

1. Let’s say you like Barracuda Digital.

2. We make a status update announcing that we’re giving away £100 of free clicks on Adwords.

3. We launch a Page Post Sponsored Story which means that no matter where you are on Facebook we can reach you with our status update about our £100 of free clicks.

Here’s how a Page Post Like Sponsored Story works

You can use Page Post Like Sponsored Stories to allow the friends of your fans to discover your brand, even when they are not fans of your Page.

1. Fidji is a fan of Adidas and has 110 friends on Facebook.

2. Adidas shares a photo album with the fans of their Page and Fidji likes the album

3. Adidas runs Page Post Like Sponsored Stories so that Fidji’s friends can see that she has liked the photo album on the Adidas Page.

That’s it

If you want Barracuda Digital to help set up a Sponsored Story campaign for you, just get in touch.

Facebook and the SEO platform BrightEdge have published a whitepaper about how to help your Facebook page rank better on Search Engines. According to the BrightEdge data, 70% of the Facebook Pages of the top 200 companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t ranked when you search for their brand name on Google.

Boosting the rank of your Facebook page in the SERPs is a good way to outrank those negative results than can damage your brand’s reputation, or retailers that are well ranked for your brand’s name. This can also help you to manage your brand’s online reputation, improve your visibility and increase the engagement of your Facebook users.

The main recommendations in the whitepaper are:

1. Set your vanity URL to exactly match your brand’s name. Try to avoid secondary keywords because you are not going to be well ranked either for your brand’s name or the general keywords. Try to keep it simple, short, and stay focused on your brand’s name.
2. Link to your Facebook page from your website. Link to the vanity URL and use as anchor text the brand’s name: “BarracudaDigital on Facebook”. Put the link on your home page, which is the page on your website with highest PageRank, as well as on inner pages.
3. Use your brand’s name in the post title when you publish something on Facebook. This text is read by crawlers and can help you to rank better.
4. Achieve more “likes”. Those links that are present on users’ open walls and fanpages linked to yours are crawled by search engines and makes your page more relevant for that search term. Also use the social plugins from Facebook on your website as well as the Sponsored Stories format of Facebook Ads.
5. Create sub-pages for specific keywords. If you have sections or categories within your website that you want to promote, try to create different facebook pages and link to them from the different categories on your website. On your main Facebook pages set up the secondary ones as favourite pages in order to link to them and make a ring of your brand’s pages.

Facebook has realised that it’s quite hard for business to keep up to date with the constant innovations and changes that Facebook is publishing all the time. This advice can help anyone to improve the performance of their marketing efforts in the SEO and Social Media fields.

That’s all, try to keep it simple, relevant to your brand’s name, and earn links and likes as much as you can. Take a look at the full report and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need help ranking your Facebook page.

Until early last year, links to your website from Social Media were interesting and useful for users, but of no benefit to your website rank. If people were chatting about your website on Facebook or Twitter then it might be that their recommendations were followed, but there would be no secondary search benefit.

And then search started to get social: Twitter integrated with Google and Bing; recommendations from users’ social circle started to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages; and the whole game began to change.

So when it comes to using social media to boost your website rank, what do you need to work on? There’s no definitive rule, but if you want to boost social media indicators then these are the types of issues that you should be considering:

1. Number of Likes

Have you integrated your website in the Facebook Open Graph protocol? Adding a ‘like’ button to you websites allows people to express interest in your site, and let their friends know what websites they’re into.

2. Number of Fans

Facebook Fans are important, not just for their social influence, but because their liking your brand on Facebook is taken into account as a ranking factor.

3. Number of Comments on your Facebook and YouTube Pages

Anyone can game ‘likes’, but comments on a Facebook page represents genuine engagement that search engines take note of.

4. Number of Views of your video content

Highly watched YouTube video content – which of course should link to your site in the description – can pass great value to your website.

5. Number of links from other YouTube profiles

A powerful YouTube channel that engages with its audience should generate inbound links from other YouTube channels – and these all have a value that can help your channel and by association your website.

6. The title of your YouTube Videos

Video titles that are themed tightly to your website will help to pass authority to your website, when linked. Don’t forget the tags too.

7. Number of likes on YouTube, and the percentage of Likes vs. Dislikes

Likes represent engagement. Dislikes do too – although Google won’t want to highly rank disliked content.

8. Number of followers on Twitter

The more followers you have, the more influence Google perceives you to yield, and the more highly it will rank your listed website.

9. Percentage of followers vs follows

You yield influence if many people follow you, but you don’t follow many. You are perceived as a hub of authority rather than a reflection of it. A higher percentage of followers to follows is the equivalent of a website with lots of inbound links and not many outbound.

10. Influence of your followers

If powerful and influential Twitters follow you, then you by default are powerful – the same as if a website with high page rank links to you.

11. Number of Retweets

If you are powerful and popular, others will retweet you. Retweets are votes of authority to your twitter profile and by default your website.

12. Number of tweets & retweet links followed

Tweeted or retweeted links that are followed obviously carry influence – people are taking note. Google takes these into account when calculating rank

That’s it for now

It’s clear that Google and Bing look at Social Media to help rank websites. This is list is probably is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s by no means all tested and proved. Set up your social media strategy to achieve the goals above, and aside from engaging users you will help boost your website too.

Most businesses are cottoning on to the idea of having a YouTube channel. YouTube on it’s own is the 2nd biggest search engine. Watching video online is one of the web’s most popular activities. Engaging customers through video is a natural extension for almost any business.

An effective YouTube channel takes more than just adding a load of support videos onto your own user channel. Take the following steps to make your channel stand out from the crown

1. Customise your background Image

This is the easiest and biggest step you can take to improve your YouTube channel. The background image can’t be bigger than 256 kilobytes and looks best when 2000 pixels high by 1500 pixels wide.

The content in the middle of the page is 962 pixels wide, so bear that in mind that that part of your image will be covered.

If you’re making a “frame” to fit your content, keep that measurement in mind.

Log into your channel and Click on “show advanced options” under ‘My Channel’ and ‘Themes and colours’ to upload your new background image.

Here’s a example of a channel with a great background image.

2. Choose the right palette

The important thing here is to tie your background image into your colour scheme. Ultimately, make sure your page is very easy to use, and that the text is easy to read.

The palette options are again within the ‘themes and colours’ section of ‘my channel’. Move through to the advanced options to enter a hex triplet.

3. Highlight your best work

If you do nothing YouTube shows your most recent video in the main “Featured” window on your channel page. If your most recent video isn’t the best example of your channel’s content you can set another video to occupy that slot.

Just go to ‘my channel’ and then ‘video and playlists’ and find the ‘featured video’ menu drop down – just choose one from the list, or paste in the URL of the video.

4. Choose great thumbnails

A thumbnail is a small but immediate preview of your video, so it’s important to choose one that entices the user to watch.

To change the thumbnail choose ‘my videos’, and find the video you want to amend. Click ‘edit’ and scroll down to choose the 3 thumbnails to choose from. Once you’ve decided just click save.

5. Don’t forget Channel Tags

Tags help people find your channel content, and help it rank for relevant searches. Take time to tag it with the most relevant keywords.

Just go to the “My Channel” menu and select “Settings.”

6. Read & Respond to your Comments

Your YouTube channel should be at the heart of your Social Media Project, and that means having a conversation with your audience. So when they do decide to comment, make sure you take note and respond.

You also need to delete spammy comments so that your page doesn’t look neglected.

7. Recent Activity Module

Add the “Recent Activity” module to your YouTube page – this shows your users what you’ve been up to lately.

If you like or favorite a video on YouTube, this action will show up in your “Recent Activity” as well as the “Recent Activity” box of the content creator.

This is a great way to boost traffic since video owners who’ve been liked or favourited tend to click through and take a look at your content in return.

8. Try the Moderator Tool

Asking a question or calling for a suggestion using the ‘moderator’ tool is a good way to engage your viewers with your content.

There’s another way to engage your audience via your channel. You can ask questions, call for suggestions or start a discussion through the “Moderator” tool.

You can find this within your “My Channel” settings under “Modules”. Just check the “Moderator” box to bring up the options.

That’s it

A YouTube channel is a great asset to any business, but to make it work hard take these steps to personalize and invigorate it. If you’d like us to set up a YouTube channel for your business get in touch.

The growing use of Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube represents a huge opportunity for marketers to reach out and engage potential buyers in whole new way. Forward looking businesses are devoting serious time and investment to initiatives designed to exploit the attention we all give social media.

Research from Nielsen indicates that social media makes up more than 25% of time spent online:

And we’ve probably only seen the tip of the iceberg – social is here to stay, and in an ever increasing way too.

Search Engines Take notice

Whilst social media was initially seen as a self contained activity, Search engines are shifting to include social elements to their results pages.

To start with, Bing and Google had a crack at including ‘real time’ results in their index.

Next each revealed that they were using ‘signals’ from Facebook and Twitter to help identify relevancy. Both went onto say that whilst links from social media mostly consisted of no-follow or shortened links, they were beginning to be used as ranking factors.

More recently, Google and Bing have started to socialise the results page by showing friends ‘likes’, comments and recommendations in association with the results, and even boosting results that had been highly recommended by a person’s social circle.

New Research

The current buzz in the SEO community is that ‘likes’ and comments on a company Facebook page is having a direct impact on rank too. There appears to be a correlation between the number of times a brand website is liked and commented on, and it’s opportunity to show up high in the SERPs.

Making use of Social Media to help your SEO

So if social media is having such a strong impact on search, it’s clear that all website owners should have a clear social media strategy and be working hard to foster and grow their presence on social media.

For tips and advice the actions to take have a look at our Social Media channel.

Measuring it all

The key to learning about the impact your social media presence is having on the SERPs, you need to start measuring what’s going on.

1. Start using a tool like Raven to track shares, likes and comments on Facebook, and Tweets, retweets and followers on Twitter
2. Reconcile your social media activity with website visitors, traffic levels, and keyword ranking on search.

You need to pull both sets of data into a single report to identify what’s happening.

That’s it

Whilst social media is worth the investment in its own right, your efforts will have the added benefit of a boost in keyword rank too. To find out how Barracuda Digital can help get in touch.

On Monday, the Barracuda Digital SEO team attended a search event organised by Jo Turnbull. It was a very interesting and informative meet-up where Nichola Scott spoke about how an SEO approach to social media can impact search presence and traffic.  The presentation slides can be viewed here.

This is a quick round up of what was discussed:

Brand Search Domination

We all know how valuable it is for a brand with customer awareness and brand image to dominate SERPs for brand searches. Big brands are more likely to get clicks from brand searches and often find that PPC campaigns are cheaper on those keywords, and the conversion rate is much higher: therefore there is little question about the value of this.
I often find that my client’s resellers  also rank for the same brand name and, in some cases, offering better deals. This is an issue particularly  in the case of a big high street brand that competes with its own retailers. It’s necessary to reduce the retailers’ impact on the brand’s organic traffic as these could hurt the brand reputation (and reduce sales for the brand itself).

Brand search domination of your business market should always be the ultimate goal.

Twitter

Since Google confirmed that social signals count as quality signals for web ranking it is time to take advantage of these social media outlets and spice up the results page with our real-time presence.

Google is already indexing tweets so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing within Google search results. Considering that the effect of tweets is temporary, we should make sure that we tweet regularly.

Here is an example of tweets showing up in SERPs:

The authority and engagement levels of your Twitter account (such as number of followers, mentions and retweets) is an important factor. For example if someone who has 50 followers and tweets your press release carries a smaller weight than if someone with 1000s of followers and  mentions tweets the same.

I also think that as the time goes by and as Google becomes more insightful, the authority of your followers will be a factor too. I have found businesses offering services where they help you get 1000s of followers in a very short period of time. This sounds to be a black hat technique and as we know Google is fighting against black hat practitioners. The only way Google will be able to weed this out is by looking at your followers’ authority and engagement too.

In order to achieve a great online presence and dominate SERPs, it is strongly advisable that every brand/company create a profile on each and every social media websites. Although this can be done by yourself, it is very time consuming. Another way to do that is by using KnowEm which offers a complete sign up of all profile info in hundreds of social media sites.

XFN

What is rel attribute in HTML? The rel attribute defines the relationship between the target page and the linking page. XFN stands for XHTML Friend Network and is a simple way to represent human relationships on the web using hyperlinks. It puts a human face on links. Everyone has his/her own social network and by using this XFN, you can tell search engines who your friends are or what your relation is with others in your own social network.
There is a very good representation of XFN here. XFN can be used for example on your LinkedIn profile to tell Google what your relation is with your connections.

Social Search

Google’s push into social this year consists in pulling more content from social sites into search results and site links showing your social connections. Google social search helps you discover relevant content from your social connections – a set of your online friends and contacts that Google knows by looking at your XFN. Content from your friends and acquaintances is sometimes more relevant and meaningful to you than content from any random person.

To use this feature make sure you are logged in.

This is only the beginning, Google is getting better at understanding you and your social circle. The questions we are asking now such as “Where is the nearest hair dresser that is good?” “What movies are worth to see?” will eventually be answered in according to what your friends are recommending so that social context will be leveraged here.

Last year Google introduced Social Search. This surfaced comments and recommendations from people in your social circle within the Search Engine Results Page.

Google have now updated social search. To start with, Social search results will be added throughout the results according to their relevance (previously they were at the bottom).

In Google’s example: if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then Google will boost the post in the SERPs and add a note and picture.

The next update is ‘notes’ which show which people have shared a particular link on Twitter and elsewhere. (Previously only links shared through a Google Profile would be highlighted). These notes are only visible to you, and only if you are signed in.

Again, in Google’s example: if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:

Last of all Google have added extra controls about how you connect accounts. There’s still the option to do this on your Google Profile, but you can also do so within your Google Account.

If Google identify a public account that might be you – because it has the same username for example – they will invite you to connect from the search results page, and in your Google account settings.

Here’s a Video which shows all the new features of Google Social Search:

The advice from Barracuda Digital to merchants remains the same, but becomes more important, and centres around generating positive reviews [LINK]. It’s a huge opportunity to foster recommendations and endorsements from your current customers, which will encourage others in their circle to choose you when searching for your products online.

Facebook have launched ‘Insights’, allowing Facebook Page admins to find out how people are interacting with their Facebook Page and website.

The new Insights dashboard provides a single view of all your Facebook analytics related to:•

Websites: including fully-integrated sites, sites that use social plugins, as well as non-integrated domains•

Apps: including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop apps•

Facebook Pages: including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

Metrics can be viewed by going to the Insights dashboard (http://www.facebook.com/insights).

Here’s some of the new stuff you can find out…

Page Overview Tab

The Page overview tab shows you key metrics about who the people engaging with your Page are, as well as how they interact with it. You can change the date range to monthly or weekly.

Users

In the User section, you can learn more about the people who engage with your Page.

From the users tab you can also get Insights about the people using your Page including more detailed breakdowns of the people using your Page based on their demographics and activity on your Page.

Interactions

The Interactions section of Insights allows you to track how people interact with your stories, by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These people help to share your content organically throughout Facebook, as their interactions lead to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feeds.

The Interactions tab can also give you more details about how people are interacting with your Page, including granular data on the interactions on your page, such as the number of impressions and feedback on specific posts, and the breakdown of the type of interactions, from people writing on your Page wall to people mentioning your Page in their status updates.

That’s it

If you want Barracuda Digital to help you gain more insight into who is looking at your Facebook page, and how they’re interacting with your content, get in touch.

One of the trending topics for SEO this year is the impact of Social Media campaigns on SEO. It’s clear that Search engines, especially Google, are using Social media signals as a parameter in their algorithm for organic results. It makes sense that if an article is frequently retweeted or referenced in social networks that could be interpreted as a signal of authority and therefore would rank better in search engines.
The time is right to take advantage of this.

What factors are Search Engines considering when they rank websites?
A few weeks ago, Google announced they were making several changes to their Social Search functionality and that they would continue to give more and more importance to social media factors in their ranking algorithm.
The main areas that Google & Bing could be considering to rank pages are:

Tweets
There is a concept called “Author Authority” and it is the equivalent to page rank applied to a twitter user. There are several things that could impact on your author authority:

• Follower Count: Google and Bing look at how many people follow you, and how many people you follow. I don’t want to say that followers=influence (so spammers, don’t waste your time), but this is probably part of the calculation.
• Retweets: A good signal of authority depends on how many retweets you can achieve. If you have authority you are supposed to post interesting content and people retweet it. This is a kind of link quality signal.
• Use of @accountname: Could this be a trust indicator? Probably – if the account is managed by a spammer, it doesn’t have direct messages, @mentions, and so on. If I were Google, probably I would look at this kind of messages trying to detect and filter spammy twitter accounts.
• Account Age: In Social Media, the account age can’t be as important as domain age is in SEO. New trends and early adopters mean that the digital environment is constantly changing. However, account age could be an indicator related with authority.

Is this the same for Facebook?
When it comes to Facebook, there are probably similar signals that search engines are using to calculate the social authority of a user or fan page. Very likely they look at how many friends you have, or either how many “likes” your fan page has.
The key is to be social, to be relevant for your audience, and create quality content designed to spread.

Blogs
Using a blog is an obvious way to spread your content on internet. It lets you talk about topics that maybe in your core web you can’t discuss, and adopt another perspective. This is especially useful when you are trying to rank on long tail keywords.
Of course, linking to your core website is an incoming link source that could help you reinforce your root domain.
Finally you can use bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon to make your content go viral.

Is that all?
Of course it’s not. The power of Videos to reinforce your SEO efforts is an important factor without a doubt. Since Google shows video results in organic SERPs, the importance of video content creation has increased and video content implementation should be part of the overall SEO strategy.
On the other hand, there are plenty of social media sites that search engines are monitoring and considering when calculating the quality of certain content or website. Think about flickr, tumblr, del.icio.us, etc.
Nowadays Social Media is not a luxury, it must be a core part of your SEO strategy.

So finally
Think on social. There are SEO topics that have not changed with time, but search engines are evolving and your strategy has to adapt. Don’t be spammy and don’t rely on massive social media bookmarking. Try to be an authorative user in your topic, write quality content, and take your time to do networking while establishing relationship via the internet. It’s a lot of work, I know, but it’s the only way to achieve success.
What do you think? Do you agree with us? Have you noticed the impact of Social Media in your SEO efforts?

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