Tag Archive for twitter

Social Media and its fit with SEO

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

Bill-Clattering White StorkSocial media is a perfect channel for diversifying SEO strategies because it can directly impact on revenue lines – it has a low cost base (time), and can help with lead generation and customer support.  Google has been pushing more of its internal resources into Google+ and integrating it with all its other products, providing clear insight into how important social is to Google. As a small business owner you can easily set up a social profile on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook or Google+ and start to build an audience with very little investment.

The advantage is that individual and small business owners have a lead over big corporate players as there is no need for legal or marketing to sign off for every posts or tweet that is sent out, you can adapt your strategy as you go. Small business can also benefit around using social as it allows the adjustment of messaging to suit the audience if initially it doesn’t work, if you test something and fail doesn’t mean thousands of lost dollars it just means a small setback.

Sharing Guidelines

The key to a successful social media strategy is to don’t make them all identical channel sharing the same content all about you, your brand and your products, to succeed you want to share social love across other people, products and brands.

If you are doing social mostly for SEO and Branding you can certainly share links to your website content including products pages but also include links to great customer reviews and good news items about you, company, staff and your products.  My advice is if you want to improve the chances of success you don’t want to make your social channel just about you. Filling the channel with up to 80% of its content about other people, products or businesses can show your audience (and the search engines) that you’re an expert about this topic.

Reputation Management

A big reason to be using social for SEO is to control the “brand” results that users see when they are searching for you. An example is when you search for “Pepsi” they have three of their company controlled social profiles showing on the first page of Google.  The advantage is that this reduces the chances competitors or businesses with similar names can steal away branded traffic. An SEO insight is that a large amount of your search traffic will always be branded, so you want to ensure you capture as much of this traffic as possible and social channels; Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest are great ways to do this easily.

Social Trust Factors

One key insight is there is little use in buying blocks of “fake” fans or spamming other social channels to get noticed in Social Media as there is a social trust factor. Anyone can easily do directory submissions, comment spam or obtain paid links but the Google Penguin algorithm has been penalising online businesses who previously engage in these aggressive tactics as their only SEO methods.  Social works well because a good social media presence can be broken down to quality and community engagement and generating trusted brand links back to your sites but can be broken down further based on importance:

Twitter

  • Quality of your Twitter followers
  • What is the ratio of Tweets to ReTweets
  • Relevance of your Twitter Followers
  • Number of Twitter followers

Facebook

  • Number of Shares of your posts (content is quality/relevant)
  • Number of Comments on your posts (content is engaging)
  • Number of Likes (number of fans)

Google+

  • How many people have you in their circles
  • How many +1s your posts receive
  • How many shares your posts receive
  • How many comments your posts receive
  • How many +1′s your page/website has
  • Is your account a “verified name”

Pinterest

  • Number of Followers
  • Ratio of Followers to Following
  • Number of Followers of individual boards
  • Number of Likes of your pin
  • Number of comments on your pin
  • Number of Repins of your pin

The more authority your social channels have, the more impact they will have on your SEO efforts. An authentic social channel will also drive real visitors/consumers to your website and the more relevant your social audience the better quality these visitors will be, translating to revenue that  you stand to make. Having a small dedicated and engaged social audience is far better than having thousands of inactive accounts run by bots as they will potentially be your customers.

Google+ Local

Google made a large overhaul to its Google Places product last year which integrated more of their local search, business data and reviews into their Google+ social layer.  The importance is that the Google+ social network now also directly impacts on your local search ranking factors. The more social interactions, photos and reviews your Google+ Local listing has the more prominence that your listing will get in Google.

Share of Social Mentions

If you are looking across all of the main social media channels, it’s easy to see how people see your content as important or interesting.  It’s possible to influence a single channel such as Facebook or Twitter but it’s very hard to “fake” authentic social mentions across multiple channels. Social media will only help your SEO long term if your social channels are authentic as search engines know it’s hard to fake authenticity. There are also other factors such as frequency and consistency of social shares and engagement that is typically harder to fake so can be a good guide to judge authenticity.

What is your social karma?

The final consideration on using social media for SEO is that it’s important to examine what is the general sentiment being discussed around your brand online and in social conversations. You need to have a general understanding across social channels as to if the current tone around your brand/products is negative or positive and how you might be able to engage via the appropriate social channels to diffuse the situation.  If there are existing negative conversations they might be encouraging future consumers to go elsewhere such as buy from competitors or report you to the state Office of Fair Trading.

Social Media can help SEO

If you focus on creating interesting, relevant and engaging content you will find that it helps improve your SEO campaign overall, by building authority signals but it can also help with your link building activities, but social media does takes a lot of effort so it’s a good time to start today.

No comments Posted in Social Media

Force Twitter Profile Header Update

Posted on September 19, 2012 by

Twitter launched it’s new profile centric “ME” pages this morning on US morning tv show, but the problem is that like any update you have to wait.  It seems verified accounts have been given early preference to the new twitter header feature, but I discovered you can force the update by visiting https://twitter.com/settings/design.  I have also outlined the steps below to show you how easy it is to enable to new twitter header image.

Step1 - Old Profile

Step1 – Still Seeing Old Profile

Step2 - Visit new Twitter URL
Step2 – Visit new Twitter URL

Step3 - Select a new Twitter Header Image

Step3 – Select a new Twitter Header Image

Step4 - Save & You Are Live!

Step4 – Save & You Are Live!

No comments Posted in twitter

Rupert Murdoch Tweets

Posted on January 2, 2012 by

It seems that Rupert Murdoch has finally got around to claiming the existing “Fake Rupert Murdoch” twitter account that was created back in March 2009. In a low profile launch Jack Dorsey has tweeted that it is in fact the real Rupert Murdoch who is now in charge of the account.

That statement is backed by the small blue verified twitter account tick that is now showing on this account. But in what is a social media fopaux, Mr Murdoch has not replaced the standard Egg avatar with his real image which fuels suspicion among Twitter users that it’s still a fake account or a publicity stunt.

Rupert Murdoch

The tweets have been fairly awkward so far leading to some fairly open and aggressive responses from users on Twitter.  There seems to be a learning curve and it looks to be a lot steeper than the poor old guy expected. The general feeling is that unlike traditional press that Rupert was able to censor, the public may find out how thick his skin really is on an open forum.

You can track the number of tweets mentioning Rupert here, and a warning a lot of them are NSFW, including wishes he was dead, personal attacks, requests for him not to follow them back, and generally attacks around any and all News Corporation properties.  After all the outspoken anger around News Corp and News of the World scandals, social media now has an actual account/person to focus their anger towards which may end in tears.  The biggest outspoken critic of any significance speaking out on Rupert Murdoch joining twitter so far has been John Prescott.

 

 

So there is some interest in the media/journalist area as I can see a number of them are already following Rupert’s account back, the real question will be how long until someone crosses the line and provokes Rupert enough that he takes a swipe at them publically.  This will be a real test of his patience as well as his anger management as so far the social media sphere doesn’t appear to be all that warm to the idea Rupert is now playing on their playground.

Rupert’s Choice of followers?

What is going to be a very interesting insight into how Rupert thinks is who he starts to follow as this is now public information and may be a great insight.  He started with Jack Dorsey, then Mark Pincus and now Plaid Larry Page….?

Fastest growing account ever?

The account seems to be attracting interest with around around 50 new followers being added every minute so far which could put him at around 1.7 million followers within the next 24 hours. That looks to be well on track to smash Charlie Sheens 1 million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes, but the question is how many people will stick around unless Rupert actually adds some value to his tweets…

No comments Posted in news, Social Media

Refresh trends to end 2011

Posted on December 18, 2011 by

In what looks to be a trend that appears to be ramping by business up as traffic patterns typically decline as the year ends. A product relaunch can be at times risky if users love your existing design/functionality or if you take away or hide popular features within a new interface.

Twitter Relaunch #letsfly
Twitter relaunched its platform with a new version of twitter “Fly” which is designed for a more common experience across Twitter.com and mobile devices. Their relaunch was focused on bringing everything under 4 new tabs but not everyone has responded positively to the radical change to the interface. Their new interface seems to bring them closer to a Facebook style interface but even with an improved search function the new interface has been found confusing by a number of their users.

YouTube interface Refresh
In what was an expected move YouTube finally flicked the switch and rolled out its interface across all its users bringing the interface closer to the other Google properties. The rollout was unusual for Google as it was not progressively rolled out but was done in a single update which was fairly risky for the company considering the size of the audience that could be impacted. The new interface brings the platform up to scratch with a new look and feel but also seems to make it easier for Channels and Google to maximise both their advertising revenue but also the branding and visitor experience as YouTube chases higher quality content.

Path upgrades to 2.0
One of the big upsets to the idea that a refresh could hurt your growth or revenues was Path, who after upgrading their platform saw a reported 30 fold increase in user sign ups. Their personal journal style platform offered new and improved lenses; greater privacy and less noise for their users which was a successful and welcomed refresh ending 2011.

WordPress goes Sonny
While it only appeared to be a minor update going from WordPress 3.2 to WordPress 3.3, the actual admin interface refresh too a large step forward. The new more responsive admin design offers better functionality for adoption to smaller screens such as tablets. The new liquid layouts and scaling media seemed focused on the growing audience of Mobile users that WordPress needs to cater for if it’s platform is to continue to grow. The media support gets a welcome boost as does the co-editing functionality and is certainly worth the update even with the increased number of sometimes annoying notification tips.

Google Toolbar relaunched
Google just recently rolled out a consistent black Google toolbar across a number of its platforms which made navigation more consistent for users across Google properties.

Google Black Toolbar

Google Black Toolbar

Google Toolbar relaunched (again)
Just as most users had started to see and accept the new Google black bar at the top of Google pages they introduced another Google bar within a few months. The new interface has now moved the navigation to under the Google icon and centralised the search panel across Google properties. The new Google menu is a bit more confusing way to navigate Google products and the quick links are surely going to be missed by most users and will change how you navigate within Google properties.

Gmail refreshes
Gmail has been one of the slowest adopters of new Google features over the past few years but there has been a number of recent improvements including the overhaul started in July. While the navigation had a big upgrade the search functionality is still below expectations. The biggest issue for users is to get used to the new streamlined conversation view which strips out much of what was previously shown meaning searching an email thread can be more time-consuming. The biggest benefit for the mobile users is the elastic density which allows easy changing of display to suit any device automatically.

Blogger refreshed
While it happened a few months ago Google’s blog platform got an update as part of the overall Google product refresh. The biggest elements to get updated was around streamlining the blogging experience but also improving the audience analytics and insights information for admins. Recently there has been the addition of the ability to publish your Blogger posts straight to your Google+ circles. There is certainly a fair bit more work needed across the Blogger network to match WordPress or Tumblr but it’s a good start to finish off 2011.

Color 2.0 tries again
Following on from what was a slightly disastrous launch, Color decided it was time to start again following on from the success of Instagram. The new app updates focus around a “visit” which also now allows for sharing of 30 second movie clips but also offers a visual timeline similar to the new Twitter/Facebook streams. The question is it all too little and too late with the new website being far too forceful to remind users to login to interact, and their mobile app does not work on a majority of Android devices.

Facebook Timeline rollout
Based on the growing amount of media its users are sharing online Facebook has finally rolled out its timeline feature for all accounts. This is not yet enabled on all accounts but is available if you want to upgrade your profile globally. Finally Facebook is learning its a global platform and not limiting features to it’s US users. Learning from its privacy failures in the past it now offers a 7-day review period before anything that appears in your timeline is made public. It will be interesting to see how many users fill in the blank spots in their timeline as more accounts enable Timeline. There has already been so many complaints about Facebook interface refreshes it will be interesting how warmly this overshare functionality might be accepted.

Watch the Facebook Timeline (download video)

Ending 2011…
So it seems that a number of platforms have taken the time to allocate resources to updating their interfaces, how many will rollback functionality after user riots during 2012? Mostly it seems the interface updates revolve around making them more usable on mobile devices so will desktop users benefit from this continuous update process or will it led to more resentment and drop off?

2 comments Posted in review

Twitter for Newsrooms

Posted on June 30, 2011 by

Twitter Media Logo

Twitter Media has rolled out a nice platform update in the last few days that offers a best practice guide for Newsrooms wanting to use twitter to report and publish better. There is a growing need for media organisations to start to follow some consistency and not mix and match terms between Twitter and Facebook and it’s obviously upset the right branding people inside the Twitter Media term who put a fair bit of effort into the contents of their expanded Twitter media platform.

The Twitter Newsroom tips and guides cover 4 primary areas

  1. Report (Search Strategy,Finding Sources,via Mobile)
  2. Engage (Effective Tweeting,Personal Branding)
  3. Publish (Tools,Display/Brand Guidelines)
  4. Extra (Support,Blogs,Partners)

It’s really a fairly decent overview but the platform needs a fair bit more promotion to ensure journalists know that it is there and that it contains valuable information they should check out!

France Bans Social Media

Under what is an interesting government decree passed back in 1992 which prohibits news organisations from promoting brands during newscasts, the countries TV council has now enforced the law that prohibits specific mentions of Twitter or Facebook on TV. It’s an interesting move as many networks are pushing and promoting Twitter & Facebook over their company websites so it might please their webmasters but is it taken free-market law too far? It’s raised some interest in Australia with the government-funded ABC heavily promoting platform but it’s typically banned from promoting commercial partnerships.

Quick video review of the portal

I’ve published a quick video review of the service and found there is certainly some great content and advice there so check out the video below and check it out.

No comments Posted in twitter

Google Plus +1 for Websites goes Live

Posted on June 2, 2011 by

Google Plus One

It has taken some time but finally Google has rolled out their +1 button for websites, it was leaked early and it hasn’t been a well-kept secret but its already starting to cause concern among both bloggers, webmasters and SEOs on what it all means for them.  The obvious big point for bloggers is that it offers you one extra way that people can show their appreciation for your blog or article by voting it +1 but will it dilute the clicks you previously attracted to your other social buttons?

Webmasters are likely the biggest losers in this game as they are the ones that have to work out how to implement it dynamically quickly but also ensure that it matches with their social media strategy plans and their designers don’t have a breakdown when they see how the button destroy their carefully balanced world.  SEOs are probably the most cautious about the new button and I haven’t heard of many who are happily clicking the +1 button linked to their Google account just yet… it’s going to be a massive trust issue to give their social media graph to Google on a silver platter.

Early Issues with +1 Button
TechCrunch shows how it’s going to be a nightmare for webdevelopers who will have to look at changing their websites to accommodate the extra button but also make sure it plays nice with all the other buttons. The other issue is also trying to get the button centred it seems to have a preference for ignoring the code and choosing to be left justified.  You can see below that until you elect to like that particular page or website you will be presented with a shitty visual experience that because it’s an iFrame you don’t have too much control over at this point. Much of the button chaos was previously solved by ADDTHIS which was an easy way to add in multiple buttons or use a combination or image and buttons but recently it’s fallen out of favour as website narrow down the number of social media services they really care about and choose to focus on just one or two.

Google Plus One IssuesWordStream has also highlighted the issues with websites now having to deal with half a dozen buttons which all have different actions, sizes and even purposes.  The confusion of the consumer is likely and it seems early installations of the button is showing issues of the button vanishing even with users are opted into the +1 experiment and logged into their Google account. Early bugs and issues might shake the confidence of the launch partner websites as it seems a number of them have not bothered to roll it out just yet.  They have got some free publicity by promising to roll it out in the near future but also have time to sit back and evaluate how extensively they will roll it out and when that might happen.

The big issue I can see is that the style of the button doesn’t really fit in and it will take a fair bit of good will to get publishers to start promoting it as heavily as they do with Twitter or Facebook.  If you visit HuffingtonPost you are greeted with a popup requesting you should connect with Facebook, I struggle to think how long it will take for publishers to have that same popup saying Why don’t you login via your Google Accounts. The Connect with Facebook platform and message works well with consumers the login via Google Accounts just doesn’t have the same appeal to most users.

Ray of Sunshine from Mashable?

The only ray of sunshine is from Mashable who are very heavily promoting the +1 feature below its Mashable share widget, while the article is possible skewed in asking for a response there are 10 times the number of +1 than there is Facebook likes. The only thing that is not clear is if the placement of the button by Meghan Peters in the middle of the article got a majority of the +1 votes, but Linkedin got 25% more shares than +1 and Twitter got almost 3 times the amount of shares as +1.  So it’s interesting that the Mashable story was more popular to share via Twitter and Linkedin than it was via Facebook or even +1 buttons the article was focus on, but it makes sense as what is the current benefit of +1 is not yet visible.

The article about the +1 button launch over at TechCrunch got a massive number of votes and again around 10 times the number of Facebook likes and had the button in the standard spot with the rest of them, but Twitter didn’t fare as well so maybe the platform is more suited to Technology blogs than the social media types that Mashable attract.

Social Media Share Buttons

Should Facebook be worried?

Based on these two articles it’s likely the biggest loser in this social media war might actually be Facebook in the short-term, but I would prefer to allow people to easily share my content with 600,000,000 Facebook users at this stage. The only loser I can see at this point is the number of blogs willing to also include the Facebook “Send” button once they add the Google +1 button, but until Google rolls out some analytics around the impact of the button to match Facebook’s analytics it’s going to be a tough call to make either way.

Social Button overload?

follow the lost agencyFollowing on from Twitters Tweet button there is now the one-click Follow button which does now offer the ability to keep users within your website rather than sending them away to Twitter, it also means that you know need to consider offering two buttons on your website just for Twitter.  The benefit of the Tweet button is that it promotes sharing of content even amongst your existing followers where the follow button just increases your followers who may share your content at some point in time.  It should be fairly easy for twitter to follow Facebook’s lead and use an iFrame and sense if you are an existing follower and then only show you the Tweet button but if you are not following them you get first shown the Follow button. It is a big step beyond using third-party platforms like ShareThis or AddThis but it’s a very much a stop-gap solution but it’s also likely to be used differently in a site such as next to the article authors replacing the previously used @Thelostagency hyperlink.

If you want to add the one-click follow button you can find the resource here but the downside you don’t get any Twitter analytics but you can easily tag up the button with web analytics. I’ve tried to change some of the settings such as the colour background to be used and if it should show the follower count but it really seem to do what it wanted and appeared to alternate between showing and not showing a follower account.

Social Sharing Widgets are dead?

It will be interesting how AddThis and ShareThis integrate the new Google +1 button as it’s a much smarter solution than having to decide which button you are going to keep just in case people want to click it and which button is going to get used by your visitors.  It might be the case that they actually grow their market share as it’s going to be much easier to replace the chaos that see above with a simple widget so don’t discount them just yet.

Facebook Share better

Facebook has long had the monopoly of Like buttons that have spread across the web but the recent addition of the “Send” button seems almost redundant as when you select to like something you can share it on your wall but the use of the share button works on the expansion of Facebook’s messaging platform.  Instead of just sharing within the Facebook platform you are able to share to an email address which moves beyond Google +1′s limit audience of those logged into their Google account. As not many people yet understand the potential of the button or even how to use it there is a relatively low-level of adoption and even big sites are still struggling to see its benefits over just having the “like” buttons.

WordPress.com blogs left out

Again as with many scripts you try to a widget WordPress.com automatically strips out of the code, it’s moves like this that will slow the adoption of the +1 button across the massive WordPress.com blog network.  It might be in time that WordPress rolls out an official feature you can enable Google buttons on your blog as they did with the Twitter share button.

Update: WordPress has now updated their Twitter widget to allow you to easily enable the Twitter Follow button so it’s again another step ahead of Google & Facebook, only downside is it’s having some teething issues right now so you might just see an error message on the right side of this blog.

Open to Mischief?

The only thing that button does rely on is a trust element as you can specify the URL that is getting the vote so you could take liberty with that and place it elsewhere on any site to gain votes for another site.  It’s likely there are some safeguards in the Javascript but it’s likely going to be a fun week for the early adopters who have a bit of technical understanding around the javascript it uses to power the button.

Google Products soon

With the rollout it seems the promised updates to start to show Google Plus One data in your account has not yet materialised so the question is when will this data start to show in your webmaster tools.  Also according to the official blog post +1 buttons are apparently been progressively rolled out across Blogger, Google Product Search and YouTube but nothing has been seen just yet….

Add +1 to your pages to help your site stand outHow to add Google Plus One?

I’ve published a quick guide with tips on How to Add Google +1 to your website.

Keep up with The Sun?
39 comments Posted in Social Media

Apture Helps with Highlights

Posted on May 2, 2011 by

Apture Logo

One of the cool plugins I noticed last week on the WSJ was Apture, it was being used to link to a relevant YouTube clip. What I liked about the plugin was that it did not open a new tab or take me away from the article it simply opened a popup window. The advantage is the user experience is improved but also the visitor is much more likely to stay on your website. Apture advise that their plugin offers publishers around 2-3 times more engagement on average.

Apture already has publisher integrations with

  • Scribd
  • Venture Beat
  • The New York Times
  • The Financial Times
  • Wall Street Journal
  • Economist

Limited scalability with manual tagging
One of the issues that publishers have flagged in the past about Apture is that it can be too much work to create each of the Apture links manually. While it’s great to have control over what content or sites you link out to, it’s also very time-consuming if the whole process is manual. It seems that a number of the publishers don’t always make full use of the plugin and how extensively it is used often comes down to the writer or editor who needs to be more proactive.

Plugin makes it scalable
Back in August 2010 Apture rolled out the first version of their Browser plugin. This meant that it was possible for anyone with the plugin to enable Apture links on any page. this is an improvement on the previous version which only allowed searches within Apture content with the same version of Apture installed.

Apture Highlights Chrome Plugin
There is currently 25,312 Chrome users with the plugin and the audience is growing at around 1,081 weekly installs. You can download the Apture chrome browser plugin here.

Apture Highlights Firefox Plugin
There is currently 366,684 Firefox users with the plugin and the audience is growing at around 20,175 weekly installs. You can download the Apture Firefox browser plugin here.

Search quickly through content

One of the advantages of the plugin for SEOs is that you can quickly define terms and source content directly from within the CMS to bulk out the article you are writing. You don’t have to even highlight the whole word as Apture is smart enough to highlight the whole phrase or keyword. The auto-round feature for your text selection ensures you can highlight text recklessly but still get the right results.

Apture expanded screenshot

Get more information in one place
Once you have highlighted the phrase you can get information from Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Images and Twitter by clicking the Learn More icon. The Apture window also offers results from both Google & Bing which is useful for quick research.

Apture SocialLinks “Beta”
One of the cool new features they are rolling out is Apture SocialLinks (beta). The Apture Highlights automatically turns the most popular search terms into links. The other advantage of this new sociallinks is that it offers click analytics data.

Apture SocialLinks Plugin

Apture Plugins don’t work with AdBlockers

One of the downside to any technology like this is that because of how it operates, many Ad blocking plugins prevent it from functioning correctly. The problem is that many basic users won’t have the patience or technical expertise to implement the work around so it will work with Ad blockers installed.

CMS Plugins still needed?

I believe that there is still a need for website owners to have a reasonable amount of control over what external content you are linking to but also to expand the platform beyond just those who have the browser plugin. It would be useful to specify a certain list of keywords that should always be changed to a SocialLink where possible.  Similar to Affiliate or Kontera style plugins I should be able to advise of keywords or phrases not to auto tag.

So I suggest you check it out as it’s a fairly nifty little browser plugin and you will wonder how you did without it soon enough.

One comment Posted in technology

Trunk.ly – Link Engine

Posted on January 10, 2011 by

Trunk.ly LogoEveryone know the pain in having to search back through hundreds of past tweets trying to find exactly what was that link URL that you ReTweeted that you need to use right now or want to help out friend request on Twitter as someone looking for that exact URL. Well Trunk.ly has created what I term as a “Link Engine” where you are able to make all the links you have shared socially to be search-able.  Most people freely admit that Twitter’s search functionality is fairly limited and and most platforms don’t allow for searching across multiple data sources from a single search window but Trunk.ly appears to have solved that issue.

It was highlighted today in a Tweet via Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz who made the bold prediction that this platform could get big.  I would have to agree with his statement as I was able to create an account, follow a few suitable friends it suggested and add in my RSS feed from my blog and all my previous tweets in less than 5 minutes.  The point is that the website got the usability down to a fine art and my account is created and progressively expanding my history of links. It was covered by RWW back in December last year but didn’t seem to make that much press elsewhere until more recently when a number of members in the SEO and Marketing industry such as Rand started promoting their use of the tool.  While Trunk.ly was first created to deal with the pending death of Delicious it also emails you to start to manage the ever growing mountain of links shared via social media in a personal link engine.

Trunk.ly Interface

You can see below a partial screenshot of the interface with the ability to tab between your own links or those friends you chose to follow with a enhanced search as you type module to find links via keyword. Their search platform is very powerful and allows you to conduct a search via keywords, phrases, partial domains extensions, link urls, link title, text of the tweet and even text on the linked page. That’s right if you share a link but can only remember what is the content on the page you can now discover this using Trunk.ly along with who else shared the link, total number of shares, ability to delete the link or edit the link details.

Trunk.ly LinksThe downside is that at this stage you can only view Friends links and cannot search through them as a whole group but can click on a user and you can quickly search through any of their links from all the sources they have connected to Trunk.ly.  You can see in the screenshot below you can see you bio, one web link, location and the total number of your links that are now searchable via Trunk.ly and anyone you are following or following you.  The image is powered by Gravatar.com which makes it easy to ensure you have a consistent profile picture across a number of web 2.0 properties, but it is slow to update and may require a click on the “check this gravatar” to speed up the refresh.

Trunk.ly Profile

What about no results?

It’s kinda cool that Trunk.ly thought outside the box when it provided the zero results screen as it encourages users that if they just connected it may take several hours to process your initial links but you should also connect to some social networks.  The more data they have the better your results will be and the more data they will have to refine their search algorithms and suggested users you should consider following, but it would be great if it then could allow you to click and search the links of those friends you are following.

No Trunk.ly Results

Who else shared the Links?

Trunk.ly offers a far more advanced understanding of who has shared a particular link, but is limited to those who are Trunk.ly users.  But you can start to see the potential of the platform as you can start to see how the value of the link stats will grow with more users joining Trunk.ly, including how many people shared the links, when it was first shared and who first shared it. This can be useful to complement platforms like Bit.ly for measuring your social media campaigns as many users may select to share links generated by other shortners such as TinyURL or FB.me or via a standard link and the sharing data could not be captured.

Shared by the following Trunk.ly users...

Edit Trunk.ly Links

It is possible to retro-actively edit links stored within your Trunk.ly platform to fix incorrect titles, update URLs, descriptions or add tags to improve the search results.  It’s important to note that any #Hashtags used in a tweet will be automatically added as a tag for the link saving you time, but also making it possible to search based on Hashtag later to see what related links you shared. While it may not be used much it is useful as often a link URL Title might not be accurate or the note/text related to the tweet might be incorrect or scrapped from a site’s meta description providing no real value on what the link relates to.

Edit Trunk.ly Links

Trunk.ly supports what platforms?

It’s great that one of the key benefits of the platform is the ability to connect multiple social platforms, book marks and even RSS feeds. Trunk.ly makes it easy to import your blog URLs for a searchable record of what links you included and when you added those links and has tested it with WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr & Instapaper. It is likely that other platforms such as Reddit, Digg, Linkedin and email might be added in the future as the platform expands it’s userbase and demand for alternative platforms rises.  Most websites these days do provide a public RSS so it’s easy to add these to your Trunk.ly connections and you could potentially add your favourite RSS feeds to monitor what links are being shared/promoted without having to read the article.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • RSS Feeds
  • Delicious
  • PinBoard

Trunk.ly Connections

You can easily load your links from 5 main networks within just a few minutes via their authorisation page but at peak times Trunk.ly advises you might have to wait a few hours.  I found that this was not the case and unlike a number of other web 2.0 platforms within just minutes I had access to both everyone link I have ever included in this blog and also every link I have tweeted via @TheLostAgency.  This was a great start to using a new platform and now that I have authorised these 2 accounts Trunk.ly will continue to check these services for new links every few hours.

Existing Trunk.ly ConnectionsYou can see above that as part of the transparency of the Trunk.ly model it lists what connections you have linked to your account, when it was last updated, when it was last checked and the type of connection it is.  This is useful in your search results as you can see what platforms that you might have shared that link by including Facebook, Delicious, Twitter or Pinboard.

Trunk.ly Limitations & Privacy Warnings

When you first connect Trunk.ly to Twitter they can store your last 3,200 tweets but you are unable to search any links prior to this due to Twitter limitations but can capture everything from that point forward.  If you delete or unfavour a tweet once it is in Trunk.ly this will not automatically remove it.  You cannot currently extract with the Facebook API any links that you just selected to Like but did not comment on, also no privacy settings are followed so any links you share will be stored and available to all Trunk.ly users. If you don’t wish to have your links that you share public you can set your Trunk.ly profile to private. The advice from the developers is that Trunk.ly will continue to grow and look at privacy features but you can read about it in more detail here.

Discover my Shared Links

If you find that you want to see what links I have shared on this blog or via Twitter you can see my Trunk.ly links here, and don’t forget to signup and test the platform for yourself.

Keep up with The Sun?
No comments Posted in Social Media

Delicious and Altavista cut?

Posted on December 18, 2010 by

Yahoo EVP & Chief Product Office learned today the lesson of discussing shutting down services via internal webinars and the sh!t storm it creates when it’s leaked online.  The internal screenshot contained a list of what Yahoo services were to be sunsetted, sold or merged into other products was leaked via yfrog by MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier and onto twitter. While the image is no longer available you can still see the thumbnail generated by AllThingsDigital shown below.

Following Layoffs, Yahoo Cuts Products: MyBlogLog, Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz

To show the true power of social media the image was viewed over 52,667 times, liked 38 times on Facebook and Tweeted 683 times but didn’t exactly get the typically company response.  The leak angered Blake Irving enough to take a swipe at both Eric Marcoullier but also Joshua Schachter and threaten the staff member who leaked the screenshot, the response from Blake Irving proved interested enough for 20 others to retweet it, which has increased the interest around the story but taken the focus off the Yahoo product closures. Social media is a bad place to bring personal attacks or make snap statements without following up quickly with an official company post/article as early as possible to counter any negative press that might build up around your business decisions to close platforms.

Note that Blake has tried to back peddle on the issue with an updated post appearing by Chris Yeh on the Yahoo Developer Network blog covering what is next for Delicious, but why wasn’t this posted sooner or before the webinar went live? So all the focus seems to be around Delicious but what about the other platforms that are to be sunsetted including Altavista, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Picks or MyBloglog or are already closed like Geocities? It seems that a number of the services listed should have been merged, made into a Yahoo feature or sunsetted long ago as some haven’t been updated for over 3 years like Yahoo Picks.

Altavista

Only Babel Fish Translation service still offers some value

Altavista was one  of the web’s most popular search engines started back in 1995 but was passed around between companies eventually to be taken over by Overture Services in Feburary 2003 and then Overture by Yahoo in July 2003 where it was left to slowly die. Since December 2009 the average number of unique visitors has dropped from 878,000 to around 495,000 today according to Compete.com, which is a massive loss of potential for what was once a star.  Altavista had one of the best image search functions and still has a very powerful translation service that could have been a challenger to Google Translate but was also left alone to die but hopefully will emerge again with an update in 2011.

My Blog Log

MY Blog Log could have been a serious competitor for Facebook Connect

My Blog Log had the makings of a serious way to tie both your online communities to you blog but the only sites that appear to have done much with it are AllFacebook.com and JohnChow.com who still use the platform and have a reasonable amount of members.  It could have easily been expanded and developed into an embeddable widget like the Facebook news widgets or Facebook like buttons and built and expanded it’s community members to ensure the service was viable enough to continue.  The number of unique visitors spiked at the start of 2010 with over 6,891,000 but has since dropped back to around 3,388,000 as of November 2010 and seems to be gradually falling according to Compete.com.

Yahoo Bookmarks

Not updated since 2009 this could be merged with Delicious

I have never actually ever used this service but it does seem like a valid platform to merge with delicious or even make it possible to share between the two platforms via a private API, but it might be too late to save this product as an individual platform.  The platform has already had data merged once when MyWeb service was closed in 2008 and all the users were moved to Yahoo Bookmarks but it looks like they might be moved again, but how many people will have trust in the platform for a 3rd time?

Yahoo Buzz

A competitor for Google Trends & Twitter Trends and previous Bing xRank

Yahoo Buzz had the makings of a great platform which could rival Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Google Trends but it was not effectively implemented to make it easy to use and failed to capture the attention of the social media mavens.  It would have made sense to link Yahoo Buzz into more Yahoo properties such as Delicious and even it’s Chat and Email platforms to make it easy for people to share stories or track what is stories are trending, discussed and shared based on Yahoo’s massive audience base.

Yahoo Picks

12 years of the most emailed picks of the web

Yahoo picks was closed back in 2008 but it was also left there to slowly die off but showing some potential it does have 4 sharing options: email, delicious, my web and digg.  While My Web was closed around the same time as Yahoo Picks they platform did show where the platform could have headed if it was allocated enough resources to compete and continue expanding it’s content and improving the interface.  You can see at the bottom of the page the footer was last updated back in 2007 which showed the product was starved for resources long before it was closed down which is a shame.

Yahoo needs to think Data Portability!

This type of worry by the use of cloud based platforms like Delicious was covered in some detail in my previous post on data portability able to prevent the web 2.0 shipwreck created over the past few years occurring when platforms have been closed due to business models fading or companies getting bored with the mundane day to day running of their platforms. So hopefully delicious is made stronger by merging Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Picks and Yahoo buzz into a single platform but that might take another few years at this rate….

Keep up with The Sun?
No comments Posted in Yahoo

Rockmelt is Facebook Browser?

Posted on November 10, 2010 by

Rockmelt LogoA fair amount of questions have been asked about does the market really need a new browser and why does it appear to be more akin to a Facebook browser than anything. Could RockMelt be the secret browser or platform that Facebook was rumoured to be working on as to use RockMelt you must login using your credentials from Facebook. The platform is slowly creating a bit of a wave as it might be the beginning of a new round of cloud hosted technologies that are deeply tied to a social platform, moving away from established technologies like Google Accounts, Windows Live ID or OpenID.

RockMelt = Facebook Browser?
While Ron Conway is an investor in RockMelt he is also one of the early investors in Twitter so it’s not surprising to see Twitter is featured as one of the apps in the sample screenshots. Because of the browsers central share button it makes it quick and fairly easy to post links to your Facebook wall but that share feature does seem to further pressure platforms like Bit.ly that have helped business track how people are sharing their content via social media. What analytics or data will be shared back to your Facebook insights account and what might be lost if you are using the new RockMelt share buttons? The question is if the platform is so closely aligned with Facebook over time as it grows in users will Twitter become a secondary application and push RockMelt moves closer to being the beta Facebook browser?

At least RockMelt is Open Source
The idea that the platform is built on Chromium is interesting but at least they have built it around an open source project and not tried to re-invent the wheel, but does that mean the barriers to entry are too low and another clone based on the idea could be made available? The platform took 2 years but it’s fairly easy to see that the idea while not everything could be cloned in a much shorter period of time.

Rockmelt SignupCould it work outside Facebook?
It would actually be quite interesting to see how the RockMelt idea could be tweaked to make it so that you could use your login credentials for Myspace, WordPress or Twitter and it would be personalised to your preferences, bookmarks and settings. The other issues have not be discussed is around privacy of user data and the transparency on how you share and engage in content and what is made public via posts or updates to your Facebook wall.

RockMelt re-thinks Privacy
It what is a very interesting development the sign-up button has added a link “Concerned about privacy? We are too.”

So it seems already there have been some concerns and likely enough to lead to this update on their sign-up button which will massively affect conversion rates for beta testers thinking of trialling the product.  RockMelt have advised that their browser will never auto-post to your Facebook wall but stranger things have happened with changes in Facebook applications T&Cs. The RockMelt privacy faqs have also been updated to advise that it’s not actually sending your browsing data with third parties like Facebook and all your browsing and search history is kept locally on your machine.

Interestingly RockMelt has thrown water on the idea that it would be seeking to use your browsing history or behaviours to target you with ads, as they have advised they are not monitoring it and don’t yet have an incentive to do so. Much of the language in the privacy policy is refreshing simple and clear but it will be interesting to see how it might change or how future apps or products might adjust their privacy policy to suit.

RockMelt Promotes ADD
The idea of constant checking of your favourite websites for new posts or updates is interesting but also makes the browser not as suitable when concentration or focus is required as little notification windows or icons could get distracting. The constant updates and changes on who is online with Facebook chat brings the platform closer in competition to MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger & Google Chat but do you really want everyone to know you are online every time you open your browser?

Super Google Instant Search
The interesting point is that RockMelt seems to take Google Instant to a whole new level as you can now flip through the search results and should no longer need to click the backwards button to find a more suitable search result. This does mean that potentially websites will in time get a massive uplift in visitors and a huge jump in bounce rates if visitors can just flip through to see your site and move on with a simple click. Questions will be raised around how to track this accurately in your web analytics. It is likely that this new Instant search is being powered by the Instant previews that was recently announced by Google on their blog.

The idea of RockMelt is around 4 basic principles

  1. Share Easily
  2. Search Faster
  3. Connect with Friends
  4. Keep up on News

You can watch the promotional video of the RockMelt and how it can work with social media platforms below

Oh and since RockMelt is still in a limited beta you have to apply for an invitation, and remember you need a Facebook account because you have to connect via Facebook connect and since it’s hosted in the cloud it should be fairly easy to install and use.

Keep up with The Sun?
One comment Posted in technology

Top Twitter users by resources used

Posted on September 8, 2010 by

Twitter LogoFollowing on from today’s coverage on Mashable it was revealed through a tweet from Dustin Curtis that Justin Bieber’s Twitter account uses around 3% of Twitters server resources I thought I could explore this in some more detail.  Using the principal that Justin Bieber was the most engaged Twitter account and also has the highest score based on Klout’s algorithm, I calculated the estimated Twitter server resource used for each list they were featured on.  While this metric is not perfect it does provide an interesting concept on how the rise of the celebrity user may account for the re-occurrence of the Twitter fail whale in 2010.

As shown below in the chart, it’s the top few Twitter accounts that are using a far higher share of Twitter’s resources compared to a standard Twitter user.  Their high follower numbers are reinforced by the sheer number of times they are featured on other power users Twitter lists and often have a majority of their tweets re-tweeted by more than 100+ users.

Top 100 Twitter Lists

Top 100 Twitter by Lists

The chart below also shows there is a slight correlation between top users followers and the number of times they might be likely to be featured on a users Twitter list.  The chart below shows that there is also a much more even spread of the number of followers and the top 100 Twitter accounts.

Top 100 Twitter Followers

Top 100 Twitter Followers

The chart below is almost identical in how it tapers off from the top 10 twitter accounts as the number of lists because the estimate was calculated based on the number of times they were featured on Twitter lists. I’ve calculated that the top 100 Twitter users are managing to use around 35% of all the resources leaving the remaining 65% for the other 100,000,000 Twitter users.

Top 100 Twitter Resources Used

Top 100 Twitter Resources Used

Below is a chart showing the distribution of the top 100 Twitter accounts based on lists shows that Justin Bieber does make up a significant proportion of resources compared to any of the other top 100 Twitter accounts.  It seems likely that he could in fact account for 3% of twitter’s server usage but will the rise of more celebrities decrease his share based on % or will more fans who join Twitter follow him keeping his lead.

Top 100 Twitter Users by Resource

Top 100 Twitter Users by Resource

It’s interesting to see that some of the top 20 twitter profiles by lists subscribers feature a number of commercial businesses such as CNN, New York Times and Google, so how much support or priority will Twitter continue to provide these firms as the Twitter user base continues to grow? Twitter still is not monetising its platform as much as it can and outside Google what is the cost/benefit for continuing to support some of these power users who use around 14.4% of Twitters server capacity.

Top 20 Twitter users by Resources

Top 20 Twitter Resources

The chart below shows the estimated breakdown of Twitter resources used with a % calculated based on list subscriptions, its interesting to see that some of the original power accounts like Ashton Kutcher & Britney Spears or even Oprah Winfrey have failed to keep pace with the pop stars like Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga.

Top 20 Twitter Resources

Top 20 Twitter Resources

The most consistently reliable metric seems to be attributed to engagement calculated by platforms such as Klout or Twitalyzer rather than a pure focus on sheer follower numbers.  Justin Bieber gets a perfect score of 100 with Klout and is noted as being in the top 99.9th percentile on Twitalyzer but has not improved his score in the last 30 days. I’ve taken some screen shots of the top 4 Twitter accounts based on the number of list subscriptions and it does show that even Klout struggles to calculate their true impact/reach.

Justin Bieber Klout Score

Justin Bieber's Klout Score

Lady Gaga Klout Score

Lady Gaga's Klout Score

Taylor Swift Klout Score

Taylor Swift's Klout Score

Barack Obama Klout Score

Barack Obama's Klout score

Even with Klout’s missing metrics it still seems that a combination of List subscriptions and Klout score that you can estimate the true power of a Twitter user.  Just with a glance of the 4 profiles you can be fairly confident that your Klout score is a much better metric for calculating both the importance of your Twitter account and its impact both on network reach and potential impact on Twitter resources.  It’s likely that celebrities will continue cause a strain on the platforms resources even with specific servers allocated for high profile accounts their reach will continue to impact on the standard accounts due to the over reach via Twitter lists.

One comment Posted in twitter

Linkedin becomes Twitter

Posted on September 3, 2010 by

Linkedin LogoLinkedin appears to be going to great efforts to upset its users on a daily basis from poor innovation to painful additions such as the ability to automatically update your status from Twitter. I get it you want to be Twitter but in reality you a driving away those who actually login to use your platform and making it another place that people can self promote via an automated Twitter API.

I do try to login regularly to Linkedin to get a quick update on what my professional contacts have been doing but it’s becoming a complete waste of time with the massive time besides the occasional sneak at who has been viewing your profile.  The screen shot below shows of the updates only one is actually a Linkedin update and its to promote an IT Whitepaper but it’s possibly relevant to my audience and was not done automatically by the Twitter API. The other 11 updates shown below sent via Twitter API and it doesn’t really make much sense that my Linkedin network feed mirrors my twitter feed….

Linkedin Stream

Linkedin is mostly Twitter updates

I wanted to ensure that it wasn’t just an odd occurrence so I went back through 4 pages of recent updates from my network including in the count multiple updates that are hidden under the “show (x) more updates from link. The actually numbers appear to be shocking with almost 80% of my Linkedin feed now being flooded from the Twitter API you can see the pie chart shows the impact on your Linkedin news feed. So basically Linkedin have sunk the usability of their social network and useful network updates by allowing people to import their Twitter feeds.

Linkedin Updates

Linkedin doesn’t allow filtering

I know you can set it so that Linkedin can choose what tweets to share as your LinkedIn status between “share all tweets” and “share only tweets that contain #in”.  It’s clear that most people just select the option to share all tweets which is fine if you only have a handful of Linkedin connections or don’t use twitter much, but for those who rely heavily on social media its feels like pulling teeth everytime you login to Linkedin. Really I need the ability to filter out Twitter updates or there is no real value for my to login to Linkedin unless i get a message and even then I can just reply directly from within my email.

Linkedin Twitter Settings

Linkedin please allow more settings

I’m not saying that it’s always such a bad idea but I need the ability to filter out or chose to hide the Twitter updates if I want, it’s a simple matter even in Facebook.  I just select the application and choose to block it and I will should longer received messages or updates that are generated by the Twitter application in my friends feed.  I don’t want to block my friends or hide them from my update, I just don’t want the constant stream of random tweets, scheduled tweets and retweets that carry on 24/7.

Block Twitter Feeds

I downgraded my account from their premium business account because the features weren’t exactly that useful, I had sent several inMail messages but found that it didn’t actually make any impact on getting through to the contact as much as a Tweet or contact form on their website did.  I can understand the value for business development or recruitment consultants but most users just won’t get the value and the process to downgrade requires you to submit a support request which is a bit backward.

Linkedin has the ability to grow its platform but people who use it don’t want it to try to be Twitter or Facebook, it’s a place for professional networking and its going to kill your advertising model if more and more users no longer login because the network update feed is just importing date from external APIs. So I encourage you to please don’t share all your tweets in your LinkedIn status and join many others who have downgraded their account to the free option.

No comments Posted in Social Media

WordPress Tweet Button

Posted on August 15, 2010 by

Tweet ButtonWordPress has moved very quickly to add the new official Tweet Button to all its hosted blogs with a simple click, no coding or hacking required. Typically WordPress.org blogs have the ability to add a number of extra plugins but often WordPress.com hosted blogs have to wait several months or years for the same functionality.  It’s great to see that WordPress.com blogs can now be one of the first blogging platforms to benefit from the Tweet buttons, increasing the ease that visitors can share content.  The hype around the new Tweet button follows on from last weeks exclusive coverage about the new Tweet Button by Mashable, it seems a number of blogs are rapidly dropping the TweetMeMe buttons in favour of the new official tweet buttons.

I noticed the Twitter update via an announcement today when I logged into my WordPress dashboard, the steps to add the extra functionality just required me to click the link, and tick the box “Show a Twitter “Tweet Button” on my posts, and it was done. You can see below how easy it is to add the official Tweet Button to your hosted WordPress blog, no more need for hacking or adding in code, it’s just requires one tick and its enabled for all your blog posts.

Wordpress Extras Settings

Wordpress Tweet Button

You can see the Tweet button at the bottom of your blog posts, we have taken the image above from a previous post, but you will also see a live version at the bottom of this blog post. One of the first search industry blogs to add the new official tweet button was the Oxford based search agency SEOptimise on their SEO Blog.  I asked Kevin Gibbons on his views and he was kinda enough to give some initial feedback via Twitter that they thought it looks good and the Tweet count seems to be more accurate too which is good.  From a styling perspective I would have to agree it’s quite cool, but its harder for me to compare how TweetMeMe performed in the past on this blog. So I suggest you login to your WordPress.com blog and enable the new official Tweet button today and start benefiting from some better insight into what articles your visitors like to share via Twitter.

6 comments Posted in twitter
« Older Entries