Blogs

This week, Sean at The Wall Blog reported on a social media firestorm whipped up by one 466-word post by one disgruntled customer on ODEON Cinemas’ Facebook timeline.

Sean has suggested in the comments section of his post that one nice follow-up to it would be to highlight the implications of EdgeRank on such complaints – so here it is, Sean! Continue reading »

We received some excellent news this week that we’re really happy about and couldn’t resist sharing. Our amazing tool Twitition has been awarded verified-account status on Twitter.

In case you haven’t already tried out Twitition, it’s a Twitter utility that allows users to create, sign and share petitions with people on Twitter.

Some of the most popular Twititions to date have included ‘Bring 1D to NYC’, ‘We Want Season 2 For “The Secret Circle”’ and ‘Get @Rileyy_69 off Twitter’.

This status is usually reserved for high-profile celebrities such as those in the music, film- or TV-industry, or global news platforms (e.g. Mashable), so you can see why we’re so happy that we have achieved this prestigious status.

Although Twitter doesn’t reveal too many details about its process for verifying accounts, its FAQs state:

Twitter proactively verifies accounts on an ongoing basis to make it easier for users to find who they’re looking for. We concentrate on highly sought users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, advertising, business, and other key interest areas. We verify business partners from time to time and individuals at high risk of impersonation.

What’s different about a verified account?

The most obvious difference from a user perspective is the blue-tick logo that appears alongside a verified account so that all users can clearly recognise that it is officially verified.

Another obvious difference is that on the profile of the Twitter account, under Tweets, users can choose to view all tweets from @TheVerifiedUser or to filter out @replies from @TheVerifiedUser to @OtherUsers, as in the example below.

This means that the tweets that appear on @TheVerifiedUser’s profile page won’t be cluttered with @replies to other users, keeping the feed focused and all about what the fans want to see.

Another benefit to having verified-account status is that verified user can see analytics relating to their account, such as:

• Number of:
  • Mentions, follows and unfollows over specific time periods;
  • Favourites, retweets and replies;
  • Tweets that include the verified user’s website URL over various time periods;
  • Verified user’s website links that have been clicked on Twitter regardless of who they were tweeted by;
• Link stats that show no. of shares (on Twitter) and no. of click-throughs;
• Effectiveness of onsite tweet-button integration by showing the number of tweets that have come from the tweet button;
• Best tweets according to engagement level.

We’re delighted that Twitition has been awarded verified-account status and are now eagerly anticipating the same for our other awesome Twitter tool, Competwition.

Competwition, if you didn’t already know, is a completely free service that enables brands or individuals to create prize draws for Twitter users. Users enter competwitions completely free of charge using just their Twitter handle – and when they do, they follow the competwition creator and tweet out a link to their competwition, helping it spread virally throughout the Twittersphere.

Hi all, my name is Emma and you may remember me from such B3Labs posts as How to identify kill-stealing in your online campaigns and Judging a website by its Domain Authority Profile. A recent post of mine focused on one element of a natural link profile, so I thought I’d do a follow-up on another aspect: anchor text variation.

I’ll start by saying that there are quite a lot of good blog posts out there on this subject; in fact, Tim Grice at SEO Wizz wrote one not long ago. I thought I would follow up the idea that ‘exact anchor text has had its day’ with some research and messing around with Excel.

For this case study, I used six websites – three ‘winners’ and three ‘losers’ in SEO. These come from Search Metrics organic visibility charts. Below you can see the most recent (as of 28/08/2012) charts for relative winners and losers in the UK.

Continue reading »

The one keyword that most SEO campaigns never focus on is your brand name. Why would you care about SEO for your brand name if you already rank number one?

The problem with ignoring the brand keyword is that quite often we see that clients are either not making the most of their brand search traffic or are spending way too much on PPC for that keyword. There is always a lot that can be done to improve the efficiency of your brand keyword via SEO and PPC.

Let’s start by looking at some data for August 2012. The chart below shows a few of our clients chosen at random from a “big clients” list and a “small clients list”. You can straight away see that not all clients get the same click through rate with some large brands varying from 64% to 21% which is a huge difference. We have some clients with half the search traffic as others and yet they are getting the same number of search clicks.

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Ever since Facebook’s IPO earlier this year, there‘s been a pretty obvious and significant increase in the amount of Facebook advertising opportunities. There has also been somewhat of a cold war brewing between Facebook and Google for a while, with many comparisons being made between their offerings, especially between Facebook and Google’s social platform Google+.

Speculation surrounding Facebook search has also been rife for a while now, especially since it was reported by Businessweek back in March this year that Facebook had employed about two-dozen engineers led by a former Google engineer, Lars Rasmussen, to work on improving its own search function.

And now it seems that Facebook is fighting even harder to move further into the search giant’s domain, having launched its very own PPC search advertising option, ‘Sponsored Results’.

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Twitter founders Evan Williams & Biz Stone announce launch of new content-aggregation platform.

Thirteen years after introducing Blogger and six years after giving Twitter to the world, Evan Williams and Biz Stone have launched Medium and Branch as they look to make another “evolutionary leap” in publishing.

Both of the new publishing platforms promise an exciting experience for users, whose content will gain more exposure if it is rated by readers, or sink to the bottom of the pile if it isn’t.

But how exactly will Branch and Medium work?
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At Branded3, we are privileged to work with many different clients across many different sectors. One of the sectors we are growing in is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). One of the major players in CRO is the usability of a website. If a user cannot successfully navigate your website, it would be a bit much to hope that they are going to convert.

Something that the Data Insights and CRO team are very keen on looking at is site search.

By evaluating conversion data for 27 websites, we found that users were more than twice as likely to convert if they used a site search. The average conversion rate for users without site search was 2.41% – this jumps to 5.45% for users who used site search.

Continue reading »

The news that financial services companies are turning their backs on social media, as reported by Anthony Cooper of Pearlfinders, was no shock to anyone who has witnessed the very public shattering of the banking industry’s reputation in the UK and across the globe.

For any organisations facing crises in the mainstream media, social media channels can quickly become a very sharp thorn in the side.

Negative publicity on social media grows exponentially – or even virally – in much the same way as any other form of engaging content.
Users make posts that are visible to their friends and family, who then have the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon and twist the knife if they feel like it.

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The results are in! For thousands of A-level students, today is the moment of truth, when they discover the grades that could shape their futures.

But after receiving those all-important results, what do you do next? Phone around your chosen universities? Scramble for a uni place through clearing?

Or do you log into Facebook?

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) has taken to social media in a big way and is utilising both Facebook and Twitter to answer the queries of teens throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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Many businesses in the US have taken advantage of the Google Maps asset which allows customers to virtually walk-in from the street. The seamless route from street view to establishment is not only an amazing break-through in Google technology, but a massive selling point for any company and now it seems that businesses in the UK are following suit.

Some of the business types that could really reap the benefits of a 360 tour of their premises would be; retail stores, especially those with a particularly interesting aesthetic; pubs and bars; and museums and art galleries (perhaps to give a taster of exhibitions).

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Excel is the staple data processing tool for any technical SEOer, and has been for a long time.

While Google Docs may have stolen some of the limelight with their importXML and XPATH web scraping capabilities, if you’re doing any serious data processing then you’ll most likely turn to the trusty Microsoft stalwart.

Amongst the many SEO-friendly features of Microsoft Excel comes the VLOOKUP function. What this function does shouldn’t need any explanation; if it does it probably means you’re not going to enjoy the rest of this post!

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Getting the most out of Twitter for your brand

There have been many conclusive studies carried out that prove the correlation between social signals and SEO, but it may be fairly short-sighted to view your social media efforts with a solely search aim in mind. There are many other valid reasons why brands should be actively engaging with their customers via social media:

A forum-style dialogue with individual customers; cementing brand awareness; building a reputation as industry experts; keeping up with your competitors – to name a few.

Out of the big boys of social media, Twitter as a platform, encompasses all of these factors but only the more shrewd social media marketer can yield the true potential of the channel and utilise it fully for their brand.

There are some truly innovative applications, websites and tools that allow for a genuinely insightful use of Twitter. Any one of these could really help every brand refine its usage of the platform:

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