Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

Love it or hate it, use it or ignore it, profit from it or have your customer service gaffes illuminated by it, social media is buzzing because it has become foundational to digital marketing. User generated content allows people around the world to share ideas with each other. Social media’s reach now outperforms traditional media outlets like TV, radio and print. And while it’s now undeniably part of our culture and marketing disciplines, the growth has really just begun.

Random Social Media Stats

• In 2010, Gen Y outnumbered Baby Boomers and 96% of them belong to a social network.
• 78% of people trusting peer recommendations on websites; only 14% trust ads.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. in 2009 met via social media.
• Facebook has over 500 million active users. 50% of them log in every day. Collectively, 700 billion minutes per month are spent at the site. 70% of users are outside of the U.S. Facebook has over 200 million active mobile users and are 2X as active as non-mobile users.
• Twitter has 175 million users, generating over 65 million tweets and more than 800,000 searches per day.
• The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube. The site has over 2 billion viewers daily.
• 73% of Wikipedia users edit the site’s content because they want to share knowledge.
• LinkedIn has over 60 million users with 12 million unique visitors per day.
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.

What Do Strangers Recommend?

Word of mouth is the most popular option for deciding on your next product of service, with 78% of people trusting peer recommendations on websites. The profound influence that strangers have on our decisions is relatively new and remarkable territory. Plain old advertising only impresses 14% of people.

Brand Rankings Succumb to the User Generated Content

As mentioned above, 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content. The platform provided by social media combined with sheer numbers of customer contributors outpaces the content that even the world’s largest brands can generate.

This can be a very good thing if your priorities are right. If the preponderance of your customers are saying good things, they will do the marketing for you. If not, or if your company has a bad rap for lack of engagement or courtesy, customer reviews can do more damage than any failed ad campaign. Large brands typically have it more uphill battle to humanize their messages and deal with customers at a one-to-one level. On the other hand, small companies have the most success at finding new customers through social sites.

2011 – Dubbed “The Year of Facebook” for PPC Marketers
2011 will have search marketers delving even deeper as it is anticipated to be the “year of Facebook” according to Covario, a search marketing firm to Fortune 500 companies.

72 percent of active users have two social network accounts on average, with Facebook being the platform of choice with 51 percent of users having an account – the most popular by a landslide.  Integration between search and social media is priority number one for respondents to Covario’s recent search and social media survey. The allure of user-generated inbound links to product sites is a major draw for advertisers.

Paid search advertisements on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn should also see major upticks – as much as 10% to 20% of PPC budgets – as marketers aim to engage their target audience in the middle of their networking sprees.

Make Social Media a Priority

The takeaway is that consumers now have the largest impact on a brand’s messaging and it is doubtful that we’re going to cede that voice anytime soon. Social media here to stay. So, whatever your feelings are toward connecting with consumers, engaging in social media and integrating it with your digital and offline campaigns needs to a top priority for your business in 2011 and beyond.

Our attention spans are shorter these days. With the immediate answers available from search engines, we’ve come to expect more from the websites we visit. As such, we’re all guilty of nibbling on site after site, looking for the right combination of design, content and product that will stop us in our tracks and engage our busy minds.

Your website visitors follow this same pattern. If, for instance, your website takes too long to load, they’ll just continue onto another site. Your goal as a website owner is to slow visitors down, giving them time to absorb your message and let your product or service make a lasting impression. So how do you capture their attention without frustrating them?

Simple is better. If you give people too many choices they will become overwhelmed and will go to a site that will make it easier for them to choose. Even if your company prides itself on a plethora of products and services, your bottom line will be better served by putting the spotlight on a few timely, best-selling products and guiding visitors to learn more about those products. A little bit of information can go a long way. Don’t overwhelm users with the details. Instead, focus on the information that is important to them – often the key benefits and purchase-critical information (shipping, privacy, guarantees, customer service, etc.). If you provide them with too much information it will confuse them instead of clarifying the offering.

Relevant content is great, but too much or the wrong content is great at driving people away. You’re the expert in your field, but don’t expect your visitors to read protracted discourses on your company’s virtues. Those are better left for business plans, not for websites. Remember the simple is better philosophy and always be relevant. Strive for engaging, succinct editorial that invites an action. Try call-outs in the sidebars with various call to action items to cater to various personalities – make sure that your visitors can get to know and get in touch with your company in the method they’re most comfortable with.

Limit distractions. There’s always the potential that an engaged visitor one second will become another site’s visitor or customer the next. Incorporating third-party ads can be a great income generator, but they can also invite site hopping. Go for ad serving technologies where you can control the ad content and disable competitive messaging whenever possible. Your goal is to keep visitors on your site as long as possible because the longer they stay; the more likely they are to purchase a product or service.

Remove the stumbling blocks. Leaving the prospect with the potential for too many decisions will send a 90% closed sale into a missed opportunity. Once a visitor turns into a prospect, you’ve got to make absolutely certain that they have all the decision making pieces in full view (i.e. price) or within one pop-up window away of “Buy now” or “Contact us.”  Abandonment is often due to not enough of the right information and that’s just an unnecessary faux pas.   

Design for easy navigation. Keep your page design fairly consistent to minimize confusion. Site visitors look for critical information in the top menu of a website – so make sure the most important pages and action items are always visible.

Not driving visitors away from your site means slowing them down long enough to understand your message and learn why they should buy your product or service. To do this, incorporate these principles:  keep it simple, relevant, non-distracting, decision-making friendly and easily navigable. By doing this, you’ll convert visitors who really want to learn and enter into a purchase. The people who are just nibbling aren’t ready to convert – but your site will be memorable and who knows, they just might come back when they’re ready to stay.

Online video is the rising star in the advertising community. Why then do so many large companies continue to advertise with display ads? According to data from TNS Media Intelligence Vonage, AT&T and Dell spent a combined $489 million on display ads in 2006. Display ads hold 21% of the market share with US online advertisers while online video only holds 8% of the market share. That places display ads with triple the amount of market share over online video. This doesn’t mean that marketers are dissing online video, however. While advertising spending for display ads will remain flat over the next few years, online video will steadily increase until by 2011 they will have 17% of the market share for online advertisers.

Companies are finding that the more diversified you make your advertising the more effective your campaign will be. A study was released in December 2006 by comScore Networks that determined that if companies utilize both search and display advertising their campaign will be more engaging and effective than companies that use a single type of advertising campaign. Per the study, online users who were exposed to both display and search advertising increased their page views compared to competing sites by 68% and increased their time on the sites by 66%. Among those exposed also increased their purchases of the advertisers products and services by 244% online and 89% offline when compared to online users with similar behavior who didn’t view the ads.

Diversifying your marketing campaigns take planning, but an engaging multimedia campaign will pay you back with better ROI and make you look like the company rock star. All advertising is important; you just have to research what truly works best for your company and utilize the outlets that best connect with and influence your future customers.

How do you create ongoing buzz about your company and speak directly to your buyers? The answer is press releases. The online environment provides an ideal canvas for distributing the news that your customers and prospects need to know about you.  And you don’t necessarily need a PR agency to write or distribute them for you. Online distribution outlets such as PRWeb, allow any size business to create and maintain an active press release campaign with little cost. Online press releases can give you more exposure with little cost and can drive quality traffic to your site. As a communication strategy, it is important to distribute releases on a regular basis to help keep your company in the front view of your consumers.

Random content won’t do though: you’ll need to set down some guidelines for your campaign. These include what you are going to include in your press releases, how you are going to create brand awareness and how you are going to get and maintain quality exposure for your company. Online press releases aren’t a license to be self-serving in your message; the content needs to be news-worthy first and foremost.  Focus on the customer, write about the benefits they’ll receive because of your new product development or how your latest partnership will yield them a better/faster/cheaper experience. PRWeb’s guidelines provide an excellent mental checklist as you develop copy. David Meerman Scott’s “New Rules of PR”  ebook is a must-read for anyone delving into the online press distribution space. You’ll understand how to write to your audience, what outlets to use and how to strategize a release schedule for consistent exposure. 

Some of the items you need to include in your press releases are the same things you need to include on your website, which include links and keywords. When you are constructing your campaign your goal is to create in-bound links to your site. You manage this through creating a press release that is rich in keywords that relate to your site, but you want to be careful to not over saturate your press release. Incorporating a good balance of two to three keywords is optimal, with a primary keyword and two secondary keywords. It is essential to research your keyword selections to make sure your keywords are geared toward your target audience and subject matter.

Brand awareness is important when working on your press release. You can optimize your press releases by utilizing media portals such as PRWeb and Internet News Bureau. Both websites will help you syndicate your press release to thousands of news outlets. It is imperative to include back links to a relevant landing page as it will provide valuable traffic to your site. 

As always, when creating any type of content for your site, whether it is press releases, blogs, articles or general product information, it is important to maintain a consistent voice and strategy in order to maximize the potential for long-term exposure for your business. If you provide great content with optimization you should be able to yield good results for your press release campaign.

Market research in regards to search is on the rise and it is more in-depth than keyword research. Companies are beginning to use market research and analytics to more thoroughly understand their customers’ search and browsing intent.  Businesses are integrating the findings into their Web design strategy to create a more focused environment for a site visitor’s behavior, often focusing on personalization to deliver a better overall experience.

Many companies focus on keyword research instead of market research. They believe the hype that has been generated by the large search engines in an effort to increase their advertising sales that all websites need to do is focus on their keyword research and they will succeed. Unfortunately, many companies do not understand that to fully understand your keyword research they need to understand market research. To be able to fully comprehend the desires of your target market and generate keywords that will spark their interest, companies need to understand their market which means they need to research not just the keywords that will work but the market as a whole. Companies need to remember that for all the advances in search, searches are conducted by humans and humans are complex individuals.

In the future, the focus will be on finding out what the consumer wants, understanding their mindset and figuring out how they will search for what they want. If sites are able to provide the content and information they are looking for, then they will be able to match their product mix to the consumer’s personal choices. This will be able to be analyzed through the use of statistics such as time-on-site, page views, repeat visits, click-through rates, etc. Companies also have the option of utilizing site search statistical software to help improve your analytical research. If the companies are able to attract their target consumer then they will also attract the attention of search engines.

Search optimization is in a state of transformation at the corporate level, which will change the way that consumers and companies view search and therefore your site. If anything has changed, it is that the bar has been set higher for Search Engine Optimization.

Why do you read a newspaper? Read a magazine? Watch television? Listen to the radio? The answer to all of these questions is content. That’s right…content. If advertisements were the only things offered in the newspapers or magazines you read, television stations you watch and radio stations you listen to, or if the articles, programs and music were always the same, would you continue to use these media devices? The answer is no. Since this is the case, wouldn’t the same thing apply to your website? To improve the optimization of your website you need to provide fresh, new content on a consistent basis.

Content brings to a website what articles bring to a newspaper and magazine. Without it newspapers and magazines would be empty and stale. This also applies to websites. When robust content is added to your website it will help to improve your page ranking and site visitations. Another of the benefits is that you won’t get one-time only site visitors but rather, people who will come back on a consistent basis to read and interact with the new content that has been created.

It’s great that content will dramatically help your visitor acquisitions and retention rates, but what happens if you’re fresh out of ideas and resources? That’s the perfect time to identify online copywriters and content contributors with tried and tested written skills. You’ll need people with industry knowledge, a willingness to learn or some sort of following (i.e. bloggers, columnists or industry experts) because the aim is that they develop compelling content about what you do and how it makes your customers lives better.

Once you realize the benefits of improving the content on your website and are actually able to initiate it, then you can send people to your website in a few different ways. There are different services that are offered on the Internet that can assist you in getting your information out to the general public. One of the ones you can use is www.digg.com, a blog site, which allows you to post articles on their website with a link back to your site. If you really need some inbound links and inexpensive coverage, www.payperpost.com is a fee based system used to hire authors to write articles about your website. www.sitepronews.com offers a slew of actionable information on how to get more traffic to your site the right way, and for the long-term.