Its something that the SEO community has known for long and its now got validated by Google’s Matt Cutts. Google does not use Meta Keywords in its searches. Its a much abused meta tag and Google knows that and therefore does not use it in its searches.

What it does like however is the Meta Description. So it makes sense to write smart, apt, unique descriptions for each of your pages as Google uses them and shows them as snippets in its searches.

Nothing new here really, but its good to get Google’s word here on the subject. And yes, its now much easier to convince clients that meta keywords do not matter, atleast not with Google. And that there is no reason to worry if your competitors stuff their meta keywords with your brand name. That is just not going to be the reason for Google to divert your traffic to the competition.

With all the hype and hoopla over using Twitter to promote your services, you are piqued to know who is saying what about your brand in real-time. While Twitter search can itself tell you what people are saying about your services, the data that it gives you is most recent, say the last couple of minutes. Ideally, one would want to be able to view what people are saying about one’s brand over a certain period of time and analyse the trends.

The need to do this brought me to this nice site called Trendistic. Trendistic, as the name suggests shows you trends for your search term over a longer period than the simple twitter search. Infact you can view the data for the past 30 days. The screenshot below shows the tweet peaks for the last one week for the brand Tata Nano.

As you hover and click a peak, you can see the tweets of that particular day. See below.

Although this data is still not enough to do any serious business analysis, it is a good indication of getting a pulse of the market. Ideally, one would like to see a lot more data. For example, of the tweets about my brand how many are from which country, which city? What is the profile of the people tweeting about my brand? And a whole lot more. Twitter obviously is in a better position to make this happen. By providing companies with these insights, twitter will also be able to monetize its free service. Infact, given the nature of its service, the tweet data can be invaluable in Market Research.

That said, some brands are currently more suited for analysis of trends on twitter than the others. Its not meant for everyone yet.

Results using Twitter Search:

Update: Incidentally, as I finished writing this, I was sent the link to this article on Twitter being ready to roll out commercial accounts this year. Twitter is all set to roll out commercial accounts where the users can pay for premium services like detailed analytics. “We’ll continue to support the ecosystem with a whole new set of commercial APIs”, says Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone.

Google has some great tools that can help you check the rise and fall ofyour brand in popularity vis-a-vis your competition. Google Insights and Google Trends offer valuable insights into search trends based on historical data.

These tools offer a great way to validate your findings through other modes. Sometimes, they can pop surprises and wipe off any fuzzy interpretations and get a clearer picture.

Take a look at this interesting example that shows the interest levels for mcafee, norton and avira anti-virus. Notice particularly, how April 2009 onwards, Avira has gained more in terms of interest level.

Now, lets look at the growth of each brand relative to the Antivirus and Malware category. Despite the negative growth for the category, Avira has seen a positive growth. And that too of 88%. This should get any competitor to stand up and take notice…

You can also view results by Regions and also see the popular search terms for your brand. And compare this data with that of competing brands.

There is a wealth of search information made available by Google. And as Google’s blog says you can “…forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations. One could identify deviation from such forecasting and identify new factors that are influencing the search volume…”

If this interests you, take a look at this demo from Google -

If you would like us to help you analyse your brand online, give us a shout.

If I were targeting the Australian market, then a sound social media marketing strategy with specific focus on Facebook, would be high up on my priority list. This recent report by Comscore validates why social media marketing would be big in Australia. At a quick glance,

• some 70% of internet users, or 9 million people in Australia visited a social networking site in June 2009.
• This is an increase of 2 million users over the year.
• Facebook tops the list of the social networking site most visited by the Australians, with a figure of 6 million visitors.
• MySpace is a distant second with 3.5 million visitors.
• Windows Live Profile and Bebo follow next in terms of visitor stats.
• Twitter, expectedly, has shown the most rapid growth (6122%)
• Facebook also clocks an impressive growth of 95% over the previous year.
• MySpace saw an unimpressive growth of 5% in visitors.
• Bebo on the other hand had to contend with 9% less visitors!

According to Will Hodgman, comScore’s Executive VP, Asia-Pacific region, “Social networking is now an essential part of peoples’ daily online routine, providing a level of engagement and reach that far exceeds most other content categories. Understanding how to leverage this audience successfully is both a challenge and significant opportunity for most digital marketers today.” True enough!

If the target market for your product or service includes the youth in the UK, this piece of news will interest you. A recent survey by Comscore, Europe says that there has been a 14% year-on-year increase in the number of 15-24 year olds using social networking sites.

And there is evidence to suggest that these younger users are getting more inclined towards Facebook as against other online social networks.

This is a big surprise given the common perception that Facebook attracts more users in the middle age group.

The survey measures the change in usage behaviour of social networking sites from June 08 to June 09. In terms of absolute figures while Bebo and MySpace still pip Facebook for the top slots, both these social networks have seen negative growth rates of -27% and -25% respectively.

Even in terms of number of minutes spent, both MySpace and Bebo have seen a downward trend. Facebook users on the other hand are spending 59% more time on it now as compared to last year.

Google has a tool called Page Speed that helps web developers check the download speed of their web pages and also get information on how to improve the performance of their web pages. Page Speed is a Firefox/Firebug add-on which means you can use it from within Firefox (no, you can-not use it from within Google Chrome as of now) and you need to have Firebug already installed. Page Speed is the same tool that Google uses internally to optimise its web pages.

Yahoo has a similar tool called YSlow which is also a Firefox/Firebug add-on.

YSlow was released in April 09 while Google PageSpeed was open-sourced in June this year. We have since then begun to build these tools into our web design and development practices. We now use these tools to analyse the performance of web pages we design and develop. Tools like PageSpeed and YSlow factor in all possible reasons for a poor page performance.

PageSpeed, for example, analyses the web server’s configuration as well as the client side code and returns a Page Scrore based on its performance against certain “rules”.  It also gives suggestions based on the best practices, that is practices that Google and other prominent sites follow.

YSlow also analyses web pages based on a set of rules for high performance pages and provides its own recommendations. Following these recommendations helps us improve the download speeds of the websites we create for our clients.

YSlow

Page Speed

Given that most of us are busy marketers, busy small business owners who have a lot of things on our hands to juggle, it can often be difficult to keep up the social media marketing effort. Despite how little time one has, one can’t ignore the importance of tweeting daily. Fortunately, there are plenty of free tools available online that can make tweeting a breeze.

These nifty tools help you keep up with updates any time anywhere, make sharing information convenient and help you manage the time you have allocated to social media marketing, more efficiently. We have compiled a list of our favorite tools and shall keep updating it as and when we discover a new tool that helps us do the job better.

TweetDeck: A stand-alone adobe-air application that shows you the status updates, your DMs, replies, favorites and more, all on the same screen. TweetDEck is also available for Iphone. Why we like it -

• Unlike with your home page on twitter.com, you do not need to refresh your browser every now and then to see updates. Tweetdeck’s browser refreshes on its own periodically and intimates you with a sound effect when there are new notfications (updates).
• Lets you manage multiple accounts without the need to switch from one to another.
• Has a nice local trends feature.
• You can save searches and follow in real-time.

Tweepular: Lets you manage your followers and those you follow on twitter. Why we like it -

• Easily see the list of those whom you follow but do not follow you back. And the list of those who follow you but are not followed by you.
• Shows brief bios and last tweets on rolling mouse over the profiles.
• Bulk follow/unfollow feature.
• Intuitive interface.

TweetCube: With this application, you can upload and share files like pdf, zip. jpeg, videos, songs with other twitter users. The maximum upload size is 10mb currently but you can upload as many files as you want. Files are deleted after a period of 30 days.

TweetLater: recognizes that we are humans and can’t be on twitter 24 hours a day. Yet we want to be heard by people in other parts of the world, who are active on twitter at times different from ours. TweetLater lets you create and save tweets to published at a later date and time. Why we like it -

• You can save tweets to be published at night.
• Tweets can also be specified to be rotated, that is published more than one.
• Provides integration with your bit.ly account, so lets you tracks clicks on your bit.ly urls.
• Can handle multiple twitter accounts.

TwitterFeed: This nifty app tweets every new blog post you write. Simply add your feed urls to your twitterfeed account and each time you publish a post on your blog, it will tweet info on the blog post. Why we like it -

• Does away with a lot of copy and paste headache.
• Lets you track the clicks you get from the tweet.

TwitterBar: A firefox plugin that lets you post directly from firefox. Why we like it -

• No need to copy and paste a url from one application to another.
• No need to access multiple apps to share a link.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list. Its just those apps that have made tweeting easier for us. Newer tools are being launched everyday and checking each one out can be an overwhelming experience. You can find out more about the various twitter tools available at these sites.

http://mashable.com/2008/05/24/14-more-twitter-tools/

http://www.openjason.com/2009/01/08/100-twitter-tools/

Let us know too what you find useful!

Twitter’s blog announced this Thursday that Twitter was working on making Retweets easy for its users. Retweeting is something most twitters do often and is known to carry significant potential in terms of social media marketing. If I follow Mark and Jen. But Mark & Jen do not follow each other, and so do not see each other’s status updates. But when I retweet Mark’s tweets, they appear in Jen’s timeline as well.

Lets take this example of my timeline:

DigitalB RT @Mark Preparing for a talk on ‘How to use Twitter for your business at the ABC webinar tomorrow.

Mark Preparing for a talk on ‘How to use Twitter for your business’ at the ABC webinar tomorrow.

Jen Thinking of a concept for a flash site.

Now, when I ReTweet as above, it appears in Jen’s twitter home page:

DigitalB RT @Mark Preparing for a talk on ‘How to use Twitter for your business’ at the ABC webinar tomorrow.

Pauline @Jen Is that a client’s site or your own?

Jen Thinking of a concept for a flash site.

Jen gets to know what Mark is going to be talking about “How to use twitter for your business” and if the topic is of interest to her, she can get in touch with Mark to find out more details. Mark on the other hand, gets more exposure for his talk at the webinar and perhaps gets a potential client as well.

However, Retweeting as it exists today is a cumbersome process. You need to type RT @, refer to the original author and then copy and paste the original tweet. Not very user-friendly! Besides, a lot of twitter users are not aware of it either. It would be interesting to note here that API’s like TweetDeck already have a single click retweet feature.

Twitter now wants to make retweeting through its site a single-click process and simplify the exchange and disemination of information. The Retweet function is still in the development stage though but its something a lot of twitter users will keenly look forward to.

Incredible! Its just one development after another in the search and social media landscape. First it was Google launching Caffeine, then Facebook acquring friendfeed and now Facebook has announced its new search feature, which is interestingly, real-time search. With Facebook’s new, improved search, users will be able to search the last 30 days of their News feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes.

The search results will also include content of those users who have chosen to make their content available to everyone. The search page results have finds grouped under “People”, “Pages”, “Groups” and “Web”. The latter is powered by Bing.

So, if you search for “dinner” you get to see the restaurants your friends have been to recently and how frequently. Wondering what to do over the weekend? Try searching for “weekend plan” and you will know whats hot and whats not. Search for “Harry Potter” and you can figure out what people feel about the movie.

With these recent developments, its pretty clear that Facebook considers Twitter its main competition. Despite the fact that Twitter’s user base is miniscule compared with the 250 million strong userbase of Facebook, Twitter is growing very fast. A survey by Nielsen puts Twitter’s year on year (Feb ‘08 – Feb ‘09) growth at 1382% as compared with 228% of Facebook.

The survey also indicates that the ability to tweet via mobile phones has been a driving factor in Twitter’s spectacular rise. Perhaps that is why Facebook earlier in June this year offered its users the ability to receive their friends’ status updates via sms and also the ability to reply to these updates via text messages.

Facebook knows how MySpace was edged out of its comfort zone and is aware that it needs to innovate and keep ahead of the competition. Its time for Twitter now to roll up its sleeves and not lose the momentum. As a social media marketer, I see exciting times ahead!

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed for nearly US$ 50 million. TechCrunch has the first interview given by Friendfeed cofounder Bret Taylor and Facebook’s VP products Chris Cox, post the aquisition.

Through this acquistion, Facebook benefits by adding the growing community at Friendfeed to its already swelling facebook customer base. With this Facebook also gets a star team of designers and developers that includes folks who were instrumental in developing products like Gmail and Google Maps. PLUS, it gets to integrate friendfeed’s twitter like real-time feed. Facebook has for long been eyeing real-time search. It had recently changed the home page to include twitter like status updates of friends and later also expanded by offering the users the option to receive their friends’ status updates on their mobiles, taking a leaf out of twitter’s book.  It had even some time back, tried to acquire Twitter. So what implications does this have for your website’s social media marketing strategy?

Lets look at how the acquisition impacts facebook use:
1. Friendfeed is actually real-time, more than Facebook’s news feed.
2. Friendfeed allows integration between various popular social networking sites including Twitter.
3. Users can exchange updates that are more than 140 character long.

The above means that you will soon be able to start a conversation on twitter and carry on and elaborate at Friendfeed/facebook. This kind of integration will help web marketers leverage their user base on both networks without having to spend too much time handling the accounts separately on Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. As a user, you will be able to publish your twitter stream directly to Friendfeed/facebook. If its all about getting eyeballs, facebook’s acquisition of friendfeed is going to make it a tad easier for you to manage your social media marketing effort.