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According to the GlobalWebIndex 2012 Q4 study, Google+ is now the second social network behind Facebook in total number of active users. In a phoneArena.com article, Maxwell R. explains that Twitter surpasses Google+ in share of users and growth at 40%, but Google+ has roughly 43 million more active users than Twitter. Google+ has been able to capture market share through its integrated services and has grown 27% in this past month alone.
Search is becoming more social.
Businesses who have adopted... Continue Reading
2012 was an exciting year for our industry. In addition to fun new gadgets and online services, technology and social media are shaping the world we live in. We had a US Presidential campaign conducted heavily through, and possibly determined by, social media (dubbed the “Twitter Election”). The notorious group of hackers, Anonymous, left behind their prankster origins and grew into a political action group, helping to defeat the internet censorship bill SOPA and most recently... Continue Reading
From responsive design and SEO algorithm changes to social network changes and real time marketing, 2013 is going to be an exciting year.
In last year’s post I said that addressing your mobile audience would be a requirement by the end of 2012. With recent data showing mobile already accounting for 30% of total internet traffic, mobile users expected to surpass desktop users and mobile orders more valuable than desktop orders, if you haven’t already incorporated mobile into your marketing plans it’s time to catch up!
Have you ever done a Google search and noticed that some of the results have photos next to them? This is thanks to Google Authorship, a feature of Google+ that allows you to distinguish your content, increase your click throughs, and build a following.
There are several key benefits to Authorship, the first and most important to me is the potential increase in click throughs. On a page of text-only search results, images stand out and are more likely to get a click. Sites that have implemented structured markup on their content have reported increased click through rates of 30 to 150+ percent.
Searching Google by image (aka how to find stolen images)
Dragging an image across my desktop today, I accidentally stumbled upon an amazing Google search feature that I never knew about. Google’s image search allows you to search for a particular image across the web, which could help you identify the source of an image or help you find websites that have “borrowed” your imagery. Their image search is not just looking for matching file names either, but is actually using image... Continue Reading
91% of online adults use search engines to find more information on the web and 59% of daily internet use is done on a search engines. Read more on this study that shows the growth of search in 2012.
Beginning this week, Google is adding a new signal to the 200+ factors that make up their search algorithm: the number of copyright complaints a site receives.
With the new change, sites that receive a large volume of copyright removal notices will be pushed lower in the search rankings, although at this point Google has not mentioned any plans to remove sites completely from their results.
Google has long been under fire from media groups around the globe who claim that Google facilitates piracy... Continue Reading
There has been a lot of discussion over Google’s most recent announcements of making a shopping feed that will be paid inclusion only by the end of summer 2012. This will discard the free Google Merchant Center. There are many benefits of this feature, but there are also some inquiring concerns as well. We laid out the seven basics of how this could affect organic and paid search for your business’s products.
How will Google Shopping work?
By discarding the idea of the free Google Merchant Center,... Continue Reading
Have you looked at your Google Place page today? If so you might have gotten a surprise: Google Places officially morphed into Google+ Local this morning.
Since Google+ launched brand pages almost a year ago it has been rumored (with good reason) that the next step was to integrate Google Places. As Google+ continues to fight for more adoption, particularly from businesses, streamlining the brand pages and map listings definitely makes sense.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that this is a great... Continue Reading
Over the course of the next few days, we’ll be publishing a series of articles with 2012 predictions by our own Red Clay Interactive staff. First up is Greg and his predictions.
Google Speech Recognition gets big and better
Siri has been a big hit for Apple – being able to casually speak to your phone instead of navigating a series of icons is the stuff of Star Trek. Google has had a head start with this technology, but it’s just not heavily marketed. Google Voice can transcribe... Continue Reading
