Many business owners have started to take advantage of the opportunities that social media adds to their marketing efforts. Facebook is the most common social media platform used by business owners today. Since most business owners were already familiar with Facebook to begin with, the jump to creating a business page wasn’t that far. Twitter is still like the new kid in town for a lot of business owners. They know it exists, they have heard this and that about it, they are curious, but they don’t know what to do with it. Matt McGee of Small Business Search Marketing put it this way:

For a lot of small business owners, I think Twitter is like one of those odd & curious gifts you get at Christmas: It looks kinda interesting and seems to have potential, but what do you do with it?

Matt McGee has laid out the 8 most common questions that he gets from business owners, along with his thoughts on each one. Here is a summary for that part of you that is craving some long overdue Twitter knowledge!

 1.) Do I really need to use Twitter?

Not necessarily. If your customers and/or potential customers aren’t active on Twitter, you shouldn’t be spending too much time on it, either.

That said, you may also want to consider that even if the majority of your target audience isn’t on Twitter, it’s still a great place to find and connect with influencers in almost any industry.

2.) How do I know if my customers are using Twitter?

I’d start by asking them, either in person or via your website. You can also check your analytics software to see how much traffic you’re getting from Twitter

 3.) How many followers is a good number to have?

Don’t worry about how many followers you have. I know that’s easier said than done, but there’s no direct benefit to your bottom line from having tons of followers. (Twitter doesn’t send out monthly checks based on your follower count.)

Rather than counting followers, count how many new customers your Twitter activity brings in (or all of your social media activity, for that matter). And remember that quality is better than quantity when it comes to all of your social media connections. Better to have a small group of loyal and active followers than a large group that ignores you on Twitter.

4.) How much should I tweet every day?

There’s no hard and fast rule on this. Tweet as much as you can while still being interesting. Don’t worry about counting your tweets on any given day. It’s okay to tweet a whole lot one day, and then much less the next day.

5.) Is it okay to retweet praise from customers, or does that look like we’re bragging?

I’d be careful here. It’s probably okay as long as you do it in extreme moderation. Do it humbly. Be grateful. But keep in mind that your followers will find it incredibly boring if you retweet praise too often.

A better idea, though, is to just send a direct reply to those kind tweets. Thank the person directly, one-to-one, and s/he’ll probably be even more appreciative of your customer service savvy.

6.) Should I link to other sites in my tweets?

Sure. Why not? Your customers/followers know what the Internet is. They know you don’t own the only website on it. Don’t pretend you do. If you find interesting content on some other site that you think your audience will enjoy, share it with them.

7.) Should I link to (or mention) the competition in my tweets?

I think there are circumstances where linking to a competitor is the right thing to do, and something that will make you look good. For example, if another Twitter user asks a question about a product or service that you don’t offer, why not be helpful and point the person to a competitor who has what s/he wants? That’s good customer service, and the person will think more highly of you because you made helping him/her your top priority, even if it means also helping your competition.

8.) Should I reply to all users who tweet something to/at me?

“All” might be pushing it; you should ignore spammy messages. But if the question above said “customers” instead of “users,” the answer would be “yes.” Acknowledge everyone who tweets you until you become so successful that it’s impossible to do so. (That will probably take a long time, if it happens at all.) Answer their questions. Offer assistance. Be available and reachable. Don’t underestimate the value of a social network reply to your customers and prospects.

Thanks to Matt McGee for these amazing tips!

Google has made two major updates to its search algorithm over the last couple weeks. The first one was a refresh of the Panda algorithm aptly named Panda 3.5 and the second one was named Penguin. These animals went on the attack with two main goals. Panda 3.5 was designed to fight over- optimization of websites. Penguin was unleashed to fight web spam.

Panda 3.5 was released on April 19, 2012 and Penguin was released on April 24, 2012. Panda 3.5 fought against over-optimization and reportedly affected about 3% of searches. Most of the noticeable changes however, were dealt at the hands of the Penguin update. Penguin is designed to fight web spam which includes:

• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes
• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages
• Purposeful duplicate content

There have been countless posts on the Google help forums from people complaining to Google that their rankings have dropped significantly since April 24, 2012. While Google is taking a lot of heated feedback, it has been pointed out that in almost all of the complaints, there was evidence of violations of one or more of the Penguins “thou shalt not’s.”

The algorithm update and resulting penalties come as no surprise. Google has their guidelines well documented in their Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Just as it is for most situations in the real world, you can’t rely on ignorance to save you from the Pandas and Penguins in Google’s world. Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies out there that use spammy tactics on a daily basis. Our philosophy has been, and always will be to play within the rules, and plan for long-term successful marketing campaigns. Choose to keep the animals in their natural habitats; they don’t want to attack you, so don’t make them.

As simple and well-intended as these filters sound, there has been a lot of negative feedback from users that have lost all kinds of reviews or have experienced other negative outcomes due to the filter. One case involved a guy who used a moving company that had a 5-star review which was visible on their Yelp listing. Sounds great, right? Right, except that there were 10 other 1-star reviews that Yelp had filtered and were therefore hidden from the public’s view. The moving company lived up to all the negative 1-star reviews that were hidden from the public’s view. As a result, the customer ended up being “strong-armed” into paying $2000 more than originally quoted. He would have been aware of the fact that this had happened to other people if the negative reviews had not been filtered.  Check out the full story here.

That is an example of how the Yelp filter can work against the consumer. The negative outcome for the business owner comes in the form of losing genuine positive reviews. To describe it in its simplest form, the Yelp filter algorithm trusts users who are frequently active on Yelp and distrusts users who only use Yelp once in a while. So if you have an incredible experience with a business and leave them a great review on Yelp, and you have never used Yelp previously, and don’t use it again in the near future, there is a very good chance that your review will be filtered out from public view. The review won’t be completely removed, but rather put into a section at the bottom of the page for filtered reviews that can only be accessed by a dizzying captcha.

There is no doubt that Yelp’s intentions are good. As online reviews become more predominant as the number one source that consumers trust for buying decisions, there comes an army’s worth of spammers to go with it. Just look at this ad for a company openly advertising a job position to post fake reviews all day long:

So it’s not a question of whether or not Yelp should have a review filter, because with spammers like the one above, it reminds us that they clearly should. The question is whether or not Yelp’s filter is too tight, or needs to be tweaked to prevent perfectly legitimate reviews from being sent to filtered review purgatory.

So keep this in mind as you work out the strategy you use for attaining customer reviews for your business. One of the most important rules is to not have all your eggs in one basket. Have customers leave reviews over a variety of sources such as Google Places, City Search, and Insider Pages.

Bing began its journey under the name MSN search and later Windows Live. It wasn’t until 2007 that Microsoft announced that it was going to be separating its search product from the Windows Live services. In 2009, the official rebranding into “Bing” took place and the company began to march its way into the world of search.

From the beginning, Microsoft has planned on turning Bing into one of the leading search engines in the world. In July of 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal that would have Bing replace Yahoo! over a 10 year phase out period. In the meantime, Bing and Yahoo! continue to run their unique search engines but are both under Microsoft ownership.

When Bing was first launched, Microsoft put $100 million worth of advertising behind it. This seemed to be a clever move as Bing saw its market share grow to 10% in the first year. The reaction for Yahoo! has been a market share decline over the years, finally falling behind Bing for the first time this past December.  Bing officially overtook Yahoo with its share of searches at 15.1% compared to Yahoo’s, which fell to 14.5%. Google is still the leader by a long shot, capturing 11.7 billion searches in February of this year alone. This is compared to Bing at 2.7 billion and Yahoo! at 2.4 billion during the same month.

With Microsoft holding the reigns, there is no doubt that Bing will continue to gain market share in the world of search engines. Microsoft has always been a visionary company that can see where things are going and make a connection to it. Microsoft has also grown its partnerships and capitalized on the growth of social networks such as Facebook. For example, Bing’s search results can display one’s Facebook friends when a Facebook account is linked with Bing via Facebook Connect. Users then have the option to send messages to their friends in the search results.

It certainly has a nice ring to it, bounce rate. At first it may conjure up images of a downtown nightclub being manned by a 6’5” ex-football player at the front door. He is bouncing rowdy patrons out of the club at a rate of 3 drunks per hour. Not too shabby of a bounce rate if you ask me. Actually, the bounce rate that I wanted to write about has everything to do with your website and nothing to do with a 6’5” ex-football playing bouncer.

According to Google ‘bounce rate’ is “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”

Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated: “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis.”

Essentially this means that the more captivating your landing page is the greater the chance that visitors will stay on your site and convert. For the most part it is a bad thing to have a high bounce rate. One of the few exceptions could be a high bounce rate due to the fact that visitors are finding what they need right away and then leaving your site. Also, it’s important to consider the type of visitor that you are trying to attract to your site. What is your goal once you have them at your website? Maybe you don’t need them to click past the first page anyway. With that said, sites that have high bounce rates are generally hard to navigate, hard to read, are poorly designed, and have a lack of trust.

Matthew Hunt of Small Business Online Coach has put together a list of 12 ideas that can help you lower your bounce rate:

1. Invest in solid hosting (make sure your site loads quickly)
2. Make sure your website font is easy to read
3. Make sure you use proper copy-writing formatting (Headlines, short paragraphs, & lots of bullets points)
4. Make sure you share your benefits (again copy writing)
5. Make sure your photos support your products/services
6. Make sure you have a compelling offer
7. Add video to your website
8. Add testimonials & social proof
9. Add icons to creditable associations like the BBB and Verisign SSL Certificate for secure transactions
10. Make sure you have clear contact info: address & phone (should have both local and toll free phone numbers)
11. Add a chat button, to answer questions live on your website
12. Offer money back guarantees

Last year Google released the Search Ads Pause research study  that looked at the correlation between paid and organic search results. Google concluded that if you were to remove your paid ads you would see an 89% drop in clicks. Scrutinizers immediately started asking questions. What happens if your brand is the top organic result for the keyword? Surely the results would be different than if your organic result was on the second page?

“When we released the first paper, we had a lot of questions coming back, asking for  more details around incrementality and under what situations can you expect different numbers?,” said David Chan, Google’s lead researcher for this study.

Chan went back out and furthered his research and just last week released a new study on the interaction of organic results and paid search ads. After looking at the new study results, the 89% number makes a little more sense since paid search ads appear without an accompanying organic search result on the page 81% of the time, on average. A paid ad is accompanied by a top ranking organic result only 9% of the time, accompanied by a 2 to 4 ranking organic result 5% of the time, and accompanied by a lower ranking, 5 or lower, around 4% of the time.

The study goes on to explain that even when advertisers have an organic ranking in the # 1 spot, 50% of clicks they get on ads are not replaced by clicks on organic search results when the ads don’t appear. “It is a very surprising result, and, I think in some ways, it runs counter to what people would think but the data speaks for itself,” said Chan.

The takeaway: SEO and paid search advertising are complementary to one another. In today’s online advertising environment the competitive edge is what’s needed to draw in your potential client’s attention to your website, Google Places page, Yahoo Local, etc. In order to have the greatest chance of attracting potential clients before your competitors do, it is crucial to have a great SEO strategy as well as a paid search ad campaign.

Check out Google’s Impact of Organic Rank on Ad Click Incrementality for some great visuals to help better understand the study.

1.    The company posted too frequently.
2.    My wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them.
3.    The content became repetitive and boring over time.

Here’s the full chart from ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans, and Followers report:

Businesses should use this study as a guideline. Remember, you can’t please everybody at the same time. No matter what you do or say, some followers will just have a change of heart. With that said, it is vital that businesses who use Facebook, or any social media, remember that people do not want to feel like they are being sold something. The goal of social media is to offer free information, interesting tips and a platform for related discussions. The minute one of your followers smells sales tactics coming at them, there is a good chance that they will end their relationship with you on Facebook. There lies the power of the consumer, and an equally great power that the business has, that if used correctly, will retain these followers for years to come.

A study done this year titled Local Consumer Review Survey (2012) has shown a significant increase in the amount of customers who are trusting online reviews when making a decision on which business to give their business to. 72% of the people who were surveyed said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 52% of the people surveyed said that a positive online review would make them more likely to choose a local business.

The survey was conducted from the middle of January to March 1, 2012. 18 questions put to a survey of 4500 local consumers in the US, Canada, and UK.  They had over 2800 respondents. This is the second phase of the study. The first phase was conducted in late 2010 and early 2011. The following is a list of key findings from part 1 of the 2012 survey which looked at “Consumer Attitudes & Consumption of Online Reviews”:

•    Do you read online customer reviews to determine whether a local business is a good business?
o    27% of consumers regularly use online reviews to determine which local business to use (vs. 22% in  2010)
o    24% of consumers never use online reviews. (vs. 29% in 2010)
•    How many online reviews & ratings do you need to read before you feel that you can trust that business?
o    65% of consumers read between 2-10 reviews (vs.58% in 2010)
o    Just 7% of consumers read more than 20 reviews (vs. 12% in 2010)
•    How do online customer reviews affect your opinion of a local business?
o    58% of consumers trust a business which has positive online reviews (vs. 55% in 2010)
•    How do online customer reviews influence your decision to use/select a local business?
o    52% of consumers are more likely to use a local business if they have positive reviews
o    Just 28% of consumers cite location &/or price as main decision making factor (vs. 28% in 2010)
•    Do you trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations?
o    72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

More consumers are reading online reviews now compared to 15 months ago.  There has been a decline in the number of reviews that a consumer needs to read in order to make a buying decision. In other words, consumers are reading fewer reviews, but putting more trust in them. The study notes that although consumers are reading fewer reviews, the quantity of positive reviews that a business has is still important. Having a high number of reviews gives the users more confidence in star ratings and allows them to put more trust in the few reviews that they do actually read.

The value of the online review continues to grow as consumers trust online reviews more than personal recommendations. It makes a lot of sense. If a close friend or associate tells you about a great restaurant, chances are that you will check it out online. Checking out the online reviews for the business gives you an overall consensus that helps you form your opinion and ultimately decide where you will be spending your money.

Finally, do not create fake reviews for your business. Consumers are very smart and can pick up on this right away. On top of that, search engines and business directories have filters in place that are designed to weed out the tricksters. In the end you could end up losing all of your reviews as a consequence.

Source Article

According to Facebook’s recent public filing, 50% of their traffic is driven by mobile devices. This is 5 times greater than the average website. Facebook is no longer something that businesses can continue to put on the back burner of their marketing strategies. Facebook is a very important marketing tool that if used correctly can yield all kinds of positive results. One of the great benefits of Facebook is the long-term relationships that can be built up over time. For businesses, Facebook should not be regarded as a quick solution to increase profits, but rather a way to generate loyal customers and fans that will spread the word about how great your business is.

As mobile Facebook users continue to grow in numbers, here are a few optimization tips to drive more traffic to your Facebook page:

First off, your Facebook page needs to be easily found on Google. Well over 60% of searchers are clicking on first page results. You need to be found on page 1 for branded searches to have any chance at all. Some strategies to try:

•    Optimize your website’s Facebook link to include your brand name as your link anchor text, instead of the usual “Find us on Facebook.”

•    Include a few keywords in your profile name. This technique optimizes the title and URL of your Facebook page for keyword searches.

•    Optimize the text fields. You can add keywords into the “about” and “description” fields for example. Remember not to be too spammy. It should feel human!

•    Quote reviews from your Google Places page. The user-generated keyword rich content will help increase the relevance of your profile.

•    Link to your Facebook page from other social network sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus. Include your brand name in anchor text on sites that will allow it, such as Google Plus.

It looks as though it can no longer be said that the future is mobile. This is because mobile is already here. Getting your Facebook profile page out there and found will do wonders for your business for years to come. If you agree, try to incorporate some of these tips into your Facebook efforts!

To learn more, including some paid search tips for Facebook, check out the source article 10 Optimization Secrets To Drive More Mobile Traffic From Facebook

The use of mobile technology continues to be one of the hottest trends in the world of local search. Mobile technology continues to grow at a pace that is unlike anything we have seen in the past. With this ever changing technology comes an equally great shift in the way that consumers are behaving when it comes to finding local businesses. Igor Faletski, the CEO of Mobify, has identified 5 facts that will have big implications for the future of mobile search.

1.    Customers Now Spend More Money Shopping on Mobile Devices Than Desktops
2.    Mobile Shoppers are More Focused
3.    Click-Through Rates are Higher on Mobile Than Desktops
4.    Mobile Shopping Peaks at Night
5.    The Importance of the Mobile Web

By 2015, more people in the U.S. will access the internet via mobile devices than PCs. Canalys reported that 488 million smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2011, compared with 415 million “total client PCs,” including 63 million tablets. Finally, tablet ownership in the U.S. nearly doubled this past holiday season.

“Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet,” said Karsten Weide, research vice president, Media and Entertainment. “Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it’s going to make the Internet a very different place.”

For more detail on the 5 Facts, check out 5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce