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Facebook Upgrades To Keep In Line With Google+

Doug — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:15:18 +0000

Social networks are big business today, as we all know from the well documented story of Facebook co-creator and 14^th richest person in the world, Mark Zuckerberg. With the launch of Facebook’s main competitor, Google+, in July this year, some updates to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ were surely close behind.

So low and behold, people were greeted with a revised and updated Facebook layout last week, but with such sweeping changes will people be put off? Some of the main differences and new introductions were:

Changes to the news feed mean that you now see ‘top stories’ above the most recent ones, with a button on the top right of the feed to change to most recent instead.
Facebook now features a ‘subscribe’ button in addition to the ‘friend’ option. It’s very similar to the way Twitter works, and ‘circles’ within Google+. It allows you to follow someone and see their public posts without them returning the favour.
Currently in testing is a ‘smart list’ feature, that groups your friends into categories, much like the ‘circles’ in Google+. It’s not clear how they are going to make this work, but it will enable you to see all posts within a certain category like ‘work’ or ‘school friends’.
A separate feed in the top right of the homepage has been added that lists all comments, pics, status updates and other information from all of your friends, and constantly ticks over with new information, much like the stream on Twitter.

We have also been given a glimpse of future layout changes by Digg founder Kevin Rose, who seems to have pre-release access to the new profile. He was kind enough to post a picture of it on his page, so this is what the future profile will look like:

With all updates like this there is a certain backlash, but it usually dies down after a week or two as people settle in to the changes. However, with the privacy issues they faced earlier in the year where your details were displayed to others automatically, combined with other problems and these new changes, could it signal a move away from Facebook?

When the last round of changes was made several years back, there was little alternative for users who didn’t like them. Myspace was on the way out and other networks had so few members as not to be worth it, but Google+ certainly represents a good alternative. Despite the best efforts of the Facebook team to compete with Google+, you have to ask, will the changes ultimately end up pushing more people towards it?

Adding The Google +1 Button To Your WordPress Website

Doug — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:35:26 +0000

If you’ve been following the activities of Google in recent months (or you’re an SEO engineer), you’ll have undoubtedly come across the +1 concept recently introduced by the search giant.

Initially an experiment in utilising user-based recommendations to inform search results, Google has rolled out the +1 button more comprehensively by allowing the integration of a +1 button into your blogs and websites.

There will undoubtedly be numerous WordPress plugins in the coming months featuring simple +1 button integration, but in the meantime here’s a simple guide to adding the Google +1 button to your WordPress-based blogs and websites yourself in two simple steps:

1. Editing your WordPress theme files

You will need to add a line of Javascript to your WP theme files, but this isn’t as difficult as it may sound to some people. Simply login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearances > Editor.

On the next screen, locate and select ‘Footer.php’, which should reveal the coding for your website’s footer. You’ll need to locate the closing body tag, which will look like this:

Then simply paste in the following line of Javascript immediately before the closing body tag:

To help you out, here’s a screenshot of what you’ll need to do:

Once you’ve placed the code in the right place, simply hit ‘update’ and you’re ready to move on to the next step.

2. Adding the +1 button to your website

Once the javascript is added to your Footer.php file, you’ll be able to add the +1 button with a simple shortcode:

This can be added to individual posts and pages easily, by simply adding the shortcode into the body of the post or page. However, you might find it a better option to add the button into the sidebar of your blog, post, page, etc. To do this, simply navigate to Appearances > Widgets in your WordPress dashboard.

From here, you can simply select a widget market ‘Text’, drag it into the appropriate sidebar section and add the +1 shortcode. This will give you a permanent +1 button in the corresponding sidebar, allowing users to recommend your site via the new Google button.

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If you have any questions at all on installing the +1 button on your own WordPress website, simply leave us a comment with the issues you’re having and we’ll do our best to help.

The Best Social Media Plugins For WordPress

Freya — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:02:36 +0000

It’s all well and good putting huge amount of efforts into your content and your blog posts, but if nobody’s seeing or sharing that content, then all that hard work could have been for nothing.

Fortunately, if you’re a WordPress user then you don’t need to be an expert with coding or programming to add some social elements to your website; there are a whole host of plugins available with a range of different applications and functionality.

To save you the time of trawling through the seemingly infinite list of WordPress plugins looking for the right one for your website, we’ve put together brief list of some of the best social media plugins available for WordPress:

1. Sexy Bookmarks

Sexy Bookmarks is one of the most exhaustive social media plugins available, with an extremely large number of social networking platforms available for inclusion at the top or bottom of your blog posts. If you’re looking to offer your readers as wide a range of options as possible when it comes to sharing your content, then Sexy Bookmarks should certainly be one of the first plugins you install.

2. Smart Sharing

Smart Sharing is one of my personal favourite social media plugins; whilst it doesn’t have the variety of platforms available via the Sexy Bookmarks plugin, Smart Sharing gives you a social sharing box (pictured above) that scrolls down the left hand side of your blog post with the user. This means the social media options are always available to the reader, rather than just at the top or bottom of the post; resulting in a higher conversion rate (in terms of reader clicks) and increased social sharing metrics.

3. WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box (as you may well have gathered from the name) provides a greeting box to visitors to your blog, post, page or website. What makes the plugin special is that the displayed greeting changes depending on the website that referred the visitor – for example. if you visitor comes to your website via Twitter, then the plugin will display a tailored greeting for Twitter users, as well as offering the reader the option to share the content via whichever platform referred them (see the image above for the Twitter example). What’s great about this is it provides a direct call to action to the reader, which is known to improve conversion rates and should help you get your content out there much more effectively (particularly when combined with other social media plugins such as Sexy Bookmarks or Smart Sharing).

4. Active Share

Active Share is another of my own personal favourites, as it provides an effective call to action for readers who have taken the time to read your blog post. Active Share provides a Javascript drop-down box with social media sharing options – the box drops down as readers reach the end of a post, giving a clear call to action at the perfect time. Whilst Active Share may not offer the same volume of platforms as something like Sexy Bookmarks, it boasts the major platforms, provides a clear call to action and looks particularly impressive (compared to other social media plugins).

There are plenty more social media plugins available for WordPress – a quick search via the plugin section of your WP dashboard will reveal hundreds of options – but these four are the ones I’ve personally found to be most effective (in terms of design, functionality and conversions).

Do you have use a great social media plugin that we’ve missed in this list? Let us know in the comments below!

Google Gets Social With +1

Freya — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:35:19 +0000

Social media hasn’t exactly been the forte of Google so far. To date they have had 5 attempts themselves (Orkut, Dodgeball, Lively, Wave and Buzz) which range from unmitigated failure to still-around-but-not-that-popular. They have had some good results with both Blogger and YouTube, but these were existing businesses that were purchsed by Google.
However, they seem intent on breaking into the social market, and this is probably due to the staggering success of Facebook in recent years. There has been a lot of chatter about a Facebook rival from the big G, and now it seems they are gearing up for a social media push of their own. A leaked internal memo from Google shows the importance they are now placing on this, with 25% of the employees bonuses at stake! Obviously some urgency is required with this…

The latest offering from the search giant is a ‘+1′ button. Currently it is only available to logged in users with Google accounts, it has to be activated to use. When activated it gives a +1 button next to any link returned in search results, allowing you to recommend the site to your friends and other Google users. In a statement by Google, they say:

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Although only Google users can currently rate sites, it is widely thought that this will be rolled out across the whole Google network if popular enough. Google have basically admitted in the small quote above that this will contribute to search engine rankings as well (i.e. others on the web). This would bring a whole new way for Google to rank sites, and bring social media into another of the web’s most used sites.
Soon, you might have to add another icon to your site. Follow me on Twitter, like our Facebook page and +1 us on Google.

Help Japan With Your Website

Freya — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:10:26 +0000

In the wake of one of the worst natural disasters, Japan is in a bad state. The fifth largest earthquake in history left much of the island in ruins, and the resulting tsunami caused as much damage again and was felt all around the world. This is obviously being made a lot worse by the deteriorating state of the Fukushima Daiich nuclear plant, which has the potential to make this a lot worse for all of us.

With the Internet and social media now acting more and more as a voice for the people, here it is being used to help. The ‘Hello Bar’ is a product from Digital Telepathy, and floats along the top of your page discreetly displaying a message and a link. It can be used for anything; displaying a welcome message, telling jokes or in this case trying to raise money for a good cause.

Digital Telepathy are currently only beta testing this hello bar, but with the tragedy abroad you can sign up now by using the code ‘HELP JAPAN’. This will give you access to the code snippet you have to embed in your site, and it is all very easy. Other great features include the bar initally displaying then hiding itself, run multiple hello bars on one site and control them from one dashboard, and the option to install on WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger blogs. Once you feel you have raised enough funds / awareness for Japan, why not change it to another good cause?

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Using Social Media Links To Better Your SEO – An Infographic

Freya — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:26:02 +0000

Search engine optimisation (often referred to as SEO) is a tricky game at the best of times; throw in a new algorithm update and an increased reliance on social media, and it’s extremely easy to quickly find yourself lost.

Two of the major search engines operating in the UK – Google and Bing – have both confirmed that they’re using social media signals as part of their ranking algorithm, meaning you need to start putting a greater emphasis on social media activities during your ongoing SEO campaigns.

So how are social media links considered by search engines? How can they impact on your overall rankings and subsequent organic traffic?

Rather than write an extremely long post on using social media links to better your SEO, I came across the following infographic that explains the whole thing rather well:

Top Digital Marketing Ideas Of 2010

Tanya — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:32:37 +0000

Advertising on digital platforms has now grown into the number one market, recently overtaking television advertising spend for the very first time. This fundamental shift means that each year, companies put more and more effort into conceiving interesting campaigns in order to stay ahead of the competition. This year has been no exception, with a wealth of innovative new marketing ideas. Lots of these are undertaken on one of the many new platforms that appear all the time, so are very different year on year. Here is a little roundup of some of the best and most popular of 2010:

- Old Spice Videos
This surely must be one of the miracles of the year. Old Spice had largely been seen as a joke of a brand for most of the past decade. Now, thanks to an excellent interactive YouTube campaign by Wielden & Kennedy they are back near the top of the market. The videos featured ‘Isaiah Mustafa’ answering viewers questions, with the tagline ‘Smell like a man, man’. They ended up shooting nearly 200 videos in all, and attracting a lot of celebrity attention.

- Bar Code Apps
The advances in smartphone technology, combined with the explosion in mobile apps enabled this idea to come to fruition. With a certain app from Stickybits you can scan barcodes with your smartphone, opening up a new world of opportunities for the marketers. This led to a raft of ideas, including collecting ‘karma points’ for discounts, reviews, pictures and other free gifts. The genius part of this idea is that it can use current barcodes, as well as new ones, so has now become a ‘crowdsourcing’ review system as well.

- Chatroulette
One of the more popular new sites to emerge this year, Chatroulette automatically connects you with random strangers for a video chat. The results can be very unexpected, to say the least. It wasn’t long until the idea was exploited by cunning marketers. One of the most popular examples was by travel firm Travelocity, who put a garden gnome up for a day holding different slogans including ‘Awesome things: 1) Tahoe this weekend. 2) Traveling instead of chatting.’ There are many other funny ideas here but many of them, as with Chatroulette, are NSFW.

- Captcha Advertising
An amazingly simple modification to the traditional spam filter, this replaces the ‘code’ with an advert and gets you to reproduce a part of it in the same manner as always. A very simple change and a very clever idea.

- Personalised Video
In a ground breaking collaboration, The Arcade Fire teamed up with Google to create a personalised video experience for their viewers. This involved typing your postcode of your childhood home at the start of the video. Depending on the availability of the mapping, Google will then personalise your viewing of the video with images from the area, in a bid to match the song’s theme of the ending of childhood.

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Facebook Places Rolled Out In The UK

Doug — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 11:17:51 +0000

Facebook Places, the newest addition to the social networking giant, has now been officially rolled out in the UK. The service, which allows users to ‘check in’ to locations from their mobile devices or iPhone applications, has already been unveiled in the US and Japan and the whole of Europe is thought to be next on the list.

According to Facebook, the service is designed to help users share where they are in a social environment, see which of their friends is nearby and to help people to discover new places through their friends and contacts.

The new feature hasn’t been met as positively as Facebook might have hoped however, as many people have simply accused Facebook of ripping off the already popular FourSqaure; which allows users the same feature. Mory worrying for Facebook however, are the numerous concerns raised regarding the security of the latest addition of the site. As Places shows users where other users are, criminals in the US have been using the information to burgle houses, safe in the knowledge that the occupant isn’t home. In one American city, upwards of 50 homes are reported to have been burgled by criminals using information gained on Facebook places; stealing possessions reported to be worth around $100,000.

The concerns around Facebook’s latest feature look set to have a genuine financial impact on users too, as insurance companies suggest that users of the service might see a rise in their insurance premium. Confused.com confirmed this possibility, suggesting that anything that insurers see as an increase in potential risk will result in a higher premium, regardless of the way that risk is presented.

Even more worrying for users, some have pointed out that victims of burglary may see their claims declined if they have used the Places feature without alerting their insurance company.

It’s yet another privacy and security concern for Facebook to deal with, adding to the long line of previous issues with the social media site. Zuckerburg and his team have tried to address the situation, allowing users to opt in to allowing their friends to see their checked in locations. Whether or not this will convince potential users in the UK remains to be seen, but either way it will be interesting to see how the new feature is received in Britain.

Making The Most Of Twitter’s Real-Time Search

Tanya — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:33:53 +0000

Twitter can be a fantastic tool for business, assuming you know how best to use it and you’ve decided what you’re going to use it for. It’s no good having a rough Twitter strategy and just randomly tweeting generic information about your company – you won’t get the referring traffic you’re looking for nor will you gain any real traction from your target audience.

One of the best things about Twitter is the real-time search available to users; allowing you to search for specific terms and view the most recent tweets from users mentioning your search term. The search bar can be found in the right sidebar on any Twitter profile page, and just looks like your average search box:

Being able to search for peoples’ Tweets in real-time affords you some excellent opportunities to improve your customer services, brand reputation and/or website traffic. Here are some of the most beneficial uses to Twitter’s real-time search:

Brand Awareness
The simplest way to utilise the real-time search feature is to monitor conversations about your brand; particularly useful for popular, national brands. Simply search for your company name and you can gauge how aware customers are about your brand and monitor public opinion of it. This can be very useful for putting together future social media strategies and often presents potential avenues to engage with your target audience.

Customer Services
Twitter can be an extremely effective customer services tool; not only allowing customers to contact you anytime but also affording you a method of actively searching out your customers to help solve their problems with your product. The customer services team for XBOX360 do this extremely well; searching for terms such as ‘XBOX360 problem’, ‘help with my XBOX360′, ‘red rings on XBOX360′, ‘XBOX360 error’, etc. Once they have found relevant results, they can contact the person directly with suggestions to help fix the problem, or offering to check if their system is still in warranty. Not only does this impress the customer with your level of customer services, but you will have reached them within minutes of them posting the query.

Driving Traffic
Twitter’s live search can be useful for driving small amounts of specific, converting traffic. Let’s stick with the XBOX360 example; if they wanted to push traffic towards a deeper page on their site with a video and details for FIFA 11, they could perform live searches for people discussing the new FIFA game.
Although this is time consuming and will only push a minimal amount of traffic to your site, the traffic that is referred should have a much higher chance of converting; particularly useful for e-commerce websites or sites looking for data capture.

Trending
An excellent way of using Twitter to drive more substantial amounts of traffic to your site is to use the trending information to inform your blogging topics. Twitter will give you information on specific topics or personalities, allowing you to see what’s ‘trending’, i.e. what is being talked about the most by people on the site. It’s fair to assume that if a subject is recieving a high level of attention on Twitter, it will also be experiencing a relatively high search volume. If you have a blog on your website (which is advisable in terms of SEO, particularly in relation to long-tail searches), you can use this information to inform what you write about, ensuring you include key trending terms in your blog title and/or text. This could result in driving considerable amounts of traffic through long-tail searches to your website.

The Era of Twitter

1960′s Social Media Adverts

Doug — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:40:13 +0000

Moma Propaganda, an ingenious advertising agency from Brazil, has come up with a series of incredible vintage adverts to demonstrate how social media could have been portrayed in the swinging sixties.

The ad agency produced promotional posters for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Skype as part of their ‘Everything Ages Fast’ campaign for client Maximidia Seminars.

Artwork copyright: Moma Propoganda

We love these posters; they’re extremely well designed, the typography’s beautiful and they’ve got the vintage elements just right. They’re not the first advertising company or designer to transpose the social networking phenomenon into previous decades however.

Designer Stephane Massa-Bidal came up with these fantastic book covers, demonstrating how social media might have been presented had they been popular 60′s books:

Artwork copyright: Stephane Massa-Bidal

These are extremely good examples of how to leverage the social media networks in order to increase traffic to your website. The above examples are extremely good pieces of effective linkbait; linking the most fondly remembered decade of social movements with the current social media phenomenon is a very good idea and makes for some wonderful artwork.