House Crashers Busted Via Facebook

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Last summer, a South Carolina family took a vacation to New York. They returned home to a house that appeared to have been untouched in their absence. The truth, as they would come to find out thanks to Facebook, was that their children’s classmates had broken in and thrown a party while they were away.

The story was reported by The Today Show and you can watch their report here. The family evidently only discovered evidence of the party when pictures surfaced on Facebook. The father says he didn’t recognize the kids, but he did recognize their surroundings.

Though the incident took place months ago, police consider it an open investigation and are using photo tagging to identify suspects.

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Get the Most Out of Twitter and LinkedIn

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Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can be overwhelming. There are so many users, all looking for a different experience, that it can be difficult to find who and what you’re searching for. Mallory Woodrow has five ways to network better in her post at Forbes.

1. Connect with those with an opinion you value

Next time you’re reading an article or blog post in your area of expertise, note the author and seek them out on social media. Comment on their articles and tweet at them to build your connection.

2. Write your own content

If you have a business and an are of expertise, you must have something relevant to say and share. Write your own articles. You can share them through social media and connect with others who comment and connect with you.

3.  Use Keywords to sift through Twitter

Twitter is utilized everyday by professionals and non-professionals alike. Even your own timeline may be muddled with a range of personalities. So, to get what you’re looking for, search for keywords. Try to narrow it down as much as possible by getting specific.

Once you’ve found some relevant tweets, get in the conversation with some replies.

4. Join LinkedIn Groups

Similarly, you can search for LinkedIn groups on your specific area of expertise. In some cases, you’ll be able to poke around and make sure a certain group is what you’re looking for before you join.

5. Connect with people interested in you

Be sure to check who is viewing your LinkedIn profile about once per week. If someone who’s shown an interest in you is relevant to you, meaning involved in your field or in a position to help you, reach out to them and build a new professional relationship.

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Quick Fixes For Your New Google Shopping Issues

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Google Shopping officially switched to a paid service for businesses at the beginning of the month, which means a whole new set of issues for users trying to get their Product Listing Ads campaigns up and running.

Mary Weinstein reports for Search Engine Watch that AdWords support staff has been less than helpful when trying to resolve these new issues. So, here are the problems you’re likely to encounter and how to fix them.

You may have found that trying to get your Auto Targets to validate is extremely frustrating. Don’t throw your computer out the window just yet though.

  1. Check to make sure the wording on your Auto Target and the wording on your product type or AdWords label matches exactly. If it isn’t a carbon copy, with no special symbols, AdWords may have trouble matching them.
  2. Check your filters. Ideally, you have no filters running for your PLA campaigns. If you open the filters tab and see filters being applied, remove them from this campaign and you might just solve the problem.
  3. Check the PLA campaigns ad extension. Your AdWords account should be linked to your Google Merchant login. Also, if you have multiple logins, make sure this campaign is linked to the correct one.

Hopefully, these quick fixes will get you up and running with PLAs and allow you to avoid the time waste that is Google support.

 

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Facebook Success Measured Differently Than Marketing Success

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I’ve read a number of articles suggesting that Facebook is not an ideal marketing platform because your business will see a small click through rate from your Facebook page to your website and, perhaps, an even smaller conversion rate. And you know what? That opinion is dead on.

Those aren’t the proper metrics to measure Facebook success, however. In baseball, you don’t figure batting average by how many times the hitter successfully contacts the ball. He has to actually get a hit. Well, in terms of Facebook, your business gets a hit when a user ‘Likes’ your page, not when a user buys something from you. I know, that’s pretty contradictory when you consider the basics of marketing. But, it’s time to embrace the idea that sometimes brand awareness is the goal.

Avinsash Kaushik wrote a tremendous, but lengthy, blog post recently on this and many other topics that I urge you to read. He touches on advertising on Facebook, as well. Again, this is not a way for you to drive traffic to your site. You advertise on Facebook to get Facebook users to your Facebook page. It’s all very Facebook-centric.

Obviously, Facebook is not the only weapon you need in your marketing arsenal. Having a large, interested, captive audience on Facebook is a great thing. You can deliver as many messages to fans of your page as you want and they don’t cost you anything. But, while those fans might buy your product when a need arises and they might tell others about your product, you need other, more traditional marketing methods to truly impact your bottom line.

The most interesting part of marketing on Facebook seems to be that you can’t be marketing to users on Facebook. That is, those that attempt to use Facebook in the wrong way, which is marketing directly to consumers rather than attempting to build an audience with their page, fail with Facebook. But, if you have great content and create an entertaining forum for fans to gather with your Facebook page and don’t alienate them by bombarding users with ads and attempts to turn them into conversions, you’ll succeed with Facebook. Soon, those fans of your page will turn into conversions on their own and may even breed more conversions.

So, whether you’re struggling to gain ground or are just starting out with Facebook for your business, remember to measure success the right way and always consider your audience.

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Facebook Mobile Ads Are a Huge Hit

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Facebook recently gave advertisers the option of where to place their ads. The options, including desktop newsfeed and sidebar, desktop newsfeed only or mobile newsfeed, create many possibilities, but the best value has quickly become evident. For the highest click-through-rate and second highest conversion rate, John Constine, of TechCrunch, reports using those dollars on mobile ads is the way to go.

CEO of BLiNQ Media, Dave Williams, says their numbers suggest “that mobile beats desktop placement by a 3 to 1 ratio.”

The one drawback is a positive for users. Facebook limits the number of ads for mobile users in order to keep their experience enjoyable. This means advertisers won’t be able to overload any group with their ads. So, those advertisers will have to be more clever in how they gameplan.

Also, companies are finding that mobile users that ‘Like’ their page are “worth” less than their desktop counterparts. This is because the mobile users are less likely to view photos and videos and also because desktop users are generally more active on a company’s page since they may have to do more work to seek them out.

Though fans of a business’s page only see about 16-percent of their posts on average, Facebook certainly seems to be worth the effort. Once a company has gained that ‘Like’, they are essentially marketing to interested consumers for free.

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Content Creation Models – The 70/20/10 Approach

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The overlap between SEO and content strategy often ends up turning content creation into a marketing ploy, and little more. The blogs cite industry folks and data, and offer tips that are either glaringly obvious or recycled to the point of redundancy.

Guillaume Bouchard from Search Engine Watch has another idea for content creation. Think about what people want, not what “works” within the market. What works changes as fast as the industry can, while what people want stays relatively consistent. Long term success comes from reading what your visitors want.

For SEO professionals, you can follow the 70/20/10 model for a simple model for content creation.

The 70/20/10 model goes like this:

  • 70 percent of content should be low-risk
  • 20 percent should try to improve on what already works
  • 10 percent should be high-risk experimentation

The model comes from Coca-Cola, and can be transferred to SEO pretty easily. Link baiting is low-risk. Optimizing and trying to capitalize on some newer trends in the market covers trying to improve on what works, and that leaves 10 percent experimentation.

70 Percent: The Link Bait – Link baiting certainly has its pros and drawbacks, but for this model just think of it as content made with a purpose. It informs audiences, communicates complicated ideas, and establishes your reputation as an expert. This helps establish your brand in the industry. This acts as the mainstay of your content. Always available, but it can’t be all you have.

20 Percent: Optimize and Sharpen – For optimizing, look at what content is doing the best and what people are saying about your content. Try to improve upon what is doing best, and reinvigorating old debates with new information. Stay aware of trends and ideas in your industry, and react to them with content. This type of content creation helps keep you tuned to the changes in your industry, and keep you relevant, which will always translate to your audience.

10 Percent: Proactive and Reactive Experimentation – Time to have some fun. Experimentation requires really understanding your audience, and being confident enough to have an opinion. Think about fashion trendsetters. They see what is popular now, and act on their impulses in response. Content creation experimentation is all about seeing what is popular in the field, and making new content that people have never seen before.

This model isn’t something to keep set in stone, but it will help keep you relevant and interesting. Those are two things audiences always want.

 

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Facebook Introduces ‘Promoted Posts’ to U.S.

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It’s no secret that Facebook is searching for new ways to monetize their site and improve their IPO. In doing so, they are bound to take some missteps. Perhaps, like their latest venture, ‘Promoted Posts’.

As Adi Gaskell reports for Technorati, users now have the opportunity to pay for a better chance for their friends to see their posts. ‘Promoted Posts’ was already available in 20 countries, but it wasn’t until last week that American users were included.

To use the new feature, users simply update their status as usual, then click a button to promote it. That luxury will cost about $7 for now. That post will then appear with a ‘Sponsored’ tag, which allows the user to keep tabs on how helpful promoting has been.

For you next community event, party or insightful political post, maybe ‘Promoted Posts’ will be worth the money.

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What Is AuthorRank and Why Does It Matter?

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It’s hard to keep up with Google’s constant adjustments, and AuthorRank is a future feature that isn’t as understood as it probably should be. Its history dates back to August of 2005 when Google filed a patent for “Agent Rank”.

This patent included ranking “agents” and using the public reception to the content they create to determine their rank. Basically, the more popular websites with positive responses would be higher in rankings than less-authoritive “agents”.

After the patent, “AgentRank” disappeared for a while, until in 2011 Eric Schmidt made references to identifying agents in order to improve search quality. A month later, they filed a patent for what is assumed to have become Google+, which acts as a digital signature system for identification, which can be tied to content. And that content can be ranked. Hello, AuthorRank.

It has yet to be officially implemented, but there have been rumors all year that AuthorRank is under development, and AJ Kohn has stated it could completely change the search engine game. It would act as a factor in PageRank, which makes high-quality content higher ranked.

Mike Arnesen at SEOmoz says it’s not a matter of “if Google rolls out AuthorRank, but when.” He also has some great suggestions of how to be prepared for when AuthorRank arrives. I highly suggest reading his extensive article, because I agree strongly with the idea AuthorRank will be here sooner rather than later.

With Google’s recent focus on social media, and the natural concept that people want to see quality content in their results, it is just a matter of time before AuthorRank is a serious concern to the SEO industry.

 

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Access Public Services Online with Facebook Log-In

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The United Kingdom plans to unveil a method of logging on to government run sites with one’s social media account information. The idea is that by logging on through Facebook, users will authenticate their identity without having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

John-Paul Ford Rojas, of The Telegraph in London, reports this plan has been met with immediate criticism and concerns over privacy. Afterall, you make life easy on cyber-criminals if you use the same password for every site you join.

Some counter measures will be taken. For example, for those accessing government sites on a mobile phone, there will be verification that the phone being used is also the phone number assigned to the person logging in. There will also be a check of GPS and additional security questions.

The plan would allow users to access services such as applying for licenses, tax credits and presumably signing up for utilities. Though it is expected that users will be able to start the application process for a passport online, physical ID would still be required at another stage of the process.

Still, the security measures are certainly not infallible and critics of the proposed plan have been numerous and vocal. For those of us in other countries, it’s nice to know the UK will beta test this idea for the rest of us.

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