This has been the year of the social network, marked with the arrival of both major and minor players (Google+, UnThink), and the accelerating growth of existing platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, among others). As the social media landscape has evolved and branched out in different directions, Twitter has been one of the last leading social media power platforms to jump on the advertising bandwagon. This couldn’t come at more of an opportune moment; this past year, the amount of sharing on Twitter grew by 576% to make up a total of 13.5% of all sharing on the web. In the latte [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

Here's our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Quora Boards: Q&A Site Adds Curation Tool That Marketers Should Know AboutQuora took a big step beyond being a a question-and-answer site with today’s announcement of a new product called Boards. It opens the door for Quora users to post and share information outside of the standard Q&A format. As Quora’s Adam D’Angelo explains in today’s announcement, Boards was driven by the way people consume informatio [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

Quora took a big step beyond being a a question-and-answer site with today's announcement of a new product called Boards. It opens the door for Quora users to post and share information outside of the standard Q&A format. As Quora's Adam D'Angelo explains in today's announcement, Boards was driven by the way people consume information on Quora. As Quora has grown, we've learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not. And behind every question people ask is something larger they want to know more ab [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Quora | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Top News

As part of a look back at 2011 Google has identified what it considers to be the most significant trends in mobile.  I've paraphrased, embellished and edited the Google list and added some additional thoughts. Many of these developments will continue their momentum into 2012. (Some of the data have been previously released.) Mainstreaming of mobile Clearly the big overall trend is the "mainstreaming of mobile" in the form of smartphone adoption and mobile internet access. Google repeated some stats released earlier this year from its research with Ipsos: 79 percent of smartphone consume [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing

Today Google announced several Google+ features that will affect profiles, pages and notifications.  These features will be rolling out over the next few days,  just in time for the holidays!  Here's a look at the main enhancements included in this update: Volume Control In Stream [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRakr5BgkB0[/youtube] One of the main gripes that users complained about on Google+ is the ability to control the messages that make it into their streams.  This new feature allows users to throttle the number of posts on a per circle format.  Google calls this featur [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Google | Google: Google+ | Social Media Marketing | Top News

It's the oldest format in online advertising, but it's not stodgy by any stretch. Display Advertising is still changing rapidly as new technologies and innovations come along and are put to the test. That may be why display been gaining as a percentage of overall online advertising revenues, commanding 37% of the total dollars in the first half of 2011 according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's latest report (PDF). But what's ahead in 2012 for this space? One area that's seen a lot of growth is performance-oriented display, often fueled by behavioral data from search or from a compan [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

In many instances, a company-created online social community for current and potential customers is a recipe for disaster. For instance, here is a good four-part series outlining the many reasons online communities fail by Joshua Paul. However, in certain circumstances, a company-created online social community can be a positive resource and provide both customers and the company with what they are looking for. Before delving into the reasons a private community can benefit a company, it is important to note that communities created by businesses are judged critically from the start. Custom [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing Column

The newest iteration of Facebook Ads, sponsored stories, has got the popular social network into hot water in California.  A California based lawsuit was brought against Facebook stating that sponsored stories violate state law and are fraudulent.  U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected Facebook's bid to dismiss this lawsuit stating: Plaintiffs have articulated a coherent theory of how they were economically injured by the misappropriation of their names, photographs and likeness [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3P79ktpTk[/youtube] The basis of the lawsuit is that the sponsored [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Advertising | Legal

On Twitter, they don't understand Klout. They also don't understand Klout on Google+. And they don't understand Klout on Tumblr. That seems to be a common thing: If you're not angry at Klout for changing the scoring model in late October, you might be telling people to stop caring about their Klout scores. And if neither of those fits, you just might not understand what all the fuss is about. Klout is taking steps to remedy the situation, especially the "I don't understand" part. Earlier this week, the company launched a new section of its website called Understanding Klout. It co [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Features & Analysis | Klout | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Here's our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: What All Marketers Need To Know About SOPA – The Stop Online Piracy ActSOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act H.R. 3261) is proposed legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that would require search engines, advertisers, ISPs and other key internet players to police content and take active moves to take down allegedly infringing content. It’s a very broad bill, with many problematic aspects for online marketers. For [... [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act H.R. 3261) is proposed legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that would require search engines, advertisers, ISPs and other key internet players to police content and take active moves to take down allegedly infringing content. It's a very broad bill, with many problematic aspects for online marketers. If SOPA (and/or its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act - PIPA) are signed into law, the implications for marketers are significant. Here's a Q&A covering the most important aspects of the bill that all marketers both need to know [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Features & Analysis | Legal | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Search Marketing | Top News

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act H.R. 3261) is proposed legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that would require search engines, advertisers, ISPs and other key internet players to police content and take active moves to take down allegedly infringing content. Want to know more about why SOPA is a big deal for marketers? Check out our What All Marketers Need To Know About SOPA – The Stop Online Piracy Act. Meanwhile, here's a list of links for more information, categorized by topic. Legislation (Summary and Full Text) H.R. 3261: Stop Online Privacy Act S. 9 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google | Legal | Legal: Copyright & Trademark

StumbleUpon has replaced MySpace in Hitwise's rankings of the Top 10 UK Social Networks and Forums. That news alone probably isn't very surprising; anyone familiar with the social networking space should be aware of MySpace's general decline. But this chart shows just how dramatic that decline has been. Hitwise says that MySpace's share of the social network space in the UK has dropped from 5.8 percent in November 2008 to just 0.31 percent three years later. If my math is correct, that means Hitwise has lost about 95% of its UK traffic since November 2008. StumbleUpon has grown s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | MySpace | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | StumbleUpon

Another small sign of the mainstreaming of Google+: Pop singer Britney Spears has become the first person with more than a million followers. As we reported previously on Search Engine Land, she became the most popular Google+ user about three weeks ago when she passed Google CEO Larry Page. At that point, Spears had about 739,000 users following her. A little quick math says that she's getting added to circles by about 87,000 people per week. To compare that with her other accounts, Spears has about 11.8 million Twitter followers and 15.6 million Facebook fans. Comparing those to t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Google: Google+

Yahoo Answers celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this week, notching another year comfortably atop the Q&A space. It's been a while since Yahoo has announced any Q&A-related milestones, but the last one was a biggie: In May 2010, Yahoo Answers received its billionth answer. Yahoo Answers' spot as king of Q&A is unlikely to change anytime soon, but there's a sense that Quora -- which is about a year-and-a-half old -- has the most momentum among Q&A sites. And new traffic stats that Experian Hitwise compiled this week for Marketing Land confirm Quora's momentum. Consider this: U.S. traf [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Quora | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Yahoo | Yahoo: Answers

Nielsen recently released a collection of Q3 US smartphone data, some of which it had been trickling out in blog posts over the past month or so. It's a bit like a "greatest hits" record. But seeing it all together in one document -- some of the data are based on user surveys and some on behavior -- is striking because it clearly demonstrates how powerful and important mobile is now. In 2009 only 18 percent of US mobile subscribers owned a smartphone. Currently the figure is 44 percent. In 2009 the top mobile handset was the Motorola Razr V3; as 2011 ends it's the iPhone. However Android is [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iPhone | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Twitter | Twitter: Statistics | Word Of Mouth Marketing

I've been doing affiliate marketing for over a decade now. Back then, creating an SEO strategy for your affiliate-based website was pretty cut and dried. Pick a market and buy a keyword-laden domain name. Next you'd do a search on the Overture keyword tool (I'm completely dating myself here) and pick the top 50 keywords in your niche. Then you'd create pages for each with about 400 words of content on each one and then start working on your link development with some reciprocal linking. And if you were really advanced in your link development strategies, you'd also work on some one-way link [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Column | Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing

The popular bookmarking site Delicious rolled out a new look this week.  A major change to Delicious occurred in September, and the new look helps to enhance the new changes and is a byproduct of user feedback. Delicious was re-purchased by its original founders in April, and has been working on major feature upgrades since the transition.  The new enhancements are geared to make content discovery easier as well as improve the look of the site. Cleaner Design While the September design helped to give Delicious the visual push it required, some elements were still outdated.  The new l [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Delicious | Social Media Marketing

Here's our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Microsoft Launches So.cl – A Social Experience For StudentsToday Microsoft has announced So.cl (pronounced Social,) an “experimental research project” geared towards students. This project is currently active for a group of selected schools, users outside of these schools join a waiting list. The active schools are University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. So.cl offers a few different benefit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

Today Microsoft has announced So.cl (pronounced Social,) an "experimental research project" geared towards students. This project is currently active for a group of selected schools, users outside of these schools join a waiting list. The active schools are University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. So.cl offers a few different benefits for students including the ability to combine of social networking and search to help find interesting content.  This is not an extension of Bing, rather so.cl has been created by the FUSE Labs portion of Microsoft.  To see the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Microsoft: So.cl