Fast Five in Search – Week 11, 2014

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Kalena Jordan

I’ve got a bit of a mixed bag for you today. The following is a handful of recent marketing-related posts that caught my eye or that I found interesting. Let’s get straight into it:

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) Twitter is Bringing Promoted Accounts to Search Results by Anthony Ha of TechCrunch. If you’re a Twitter user, you’re probably already familiar with promoted tweets and promoted accounts – Twitter accounts that businesses use to advertise to users. Last week, Twitter announced that as well as seeing promoted tweets from these businesses in your timeline and search results, you may now also see account profiles as a new kind of ad unit. TechCrunch has the low-down on the changes.

2) Skip to the End: 5 Great Ways to Make Your Readers Care by Mike Sowden on ProBlogger. Here Mike tackles the age-old blogging problem of how to keep your audience interested and engaged. There are some clever suggestions in here for ways to hook your readers in to reading your current and future blog posts without resorting to gimmicks or give-aways.

3) 4 Surprising SEM Stats that Every e-Commerce Marketer Should Know by Jordan Elkind on Search Engine Land. With plenty of paid search advertising accounts to keep track of for clients, I like to keep an eye on large brush e-commerce statistics, particularly usage increases. In this post, Jordan shares the latest online shopping trends and e-commerce statistics from the 2013 holiday period.

4) An Introduction to PR Strategy for SEOs by Samuel Scott on the Moz Blog. Following some intense discussions at Moz.com regarding the death of guest blogging, Scott offers this interesting perspective that SEO and inbound marketing are just PR by another name.

and finally…

5) The Mashable Jobs Board by Emily Chow of Mashable. I’m not sure how I missed this, but apparently Mashable has been managing a Jobs Board for some years – a hiring hub for more than 3,000 employers, no less. If you are looking for a social media or marketing job in the digital space, you might want to check it out regularly.

Enjoy!

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

Spread the joy!

Fast Five in Search – Week 8, 2014

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Kalena Jordan

Howdy search fans! I’ve been busy researching lots of new juicy links for your viewing pleasure this week. The theme for the week is social, social and yet more social.

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) Social Media Stats Update 2013 by PewResearch. If you’re like me, you’re always chasing the latest Internet usage stats for an article, post or presentation. While looking for stats on social media last week, I found PewResearch had the most up to date data I could find, plus a free detailed downloadable report. For example, did you know that 73 percent of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind?

2) Free Social Media Analytics Reports by Simply Measured. Speaking of free data, if you like number crunching and deep social data analysis, check out Simply Measured’s free Social Media Analytics reports for Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Their Twitter Follower Report will download data on up to 10,000 followers of any public Twitter account. You can then import the data into Excel and do a deep dive into the current extent of your social reach and engagement – and better still – the untapped potential you have to grow it.

3) Social Media / Digital Stats by Digital Marketing Ramblings. Keeping with our theme of social stats, I stumbled upon this little gem of a blog while yak shaving. Editor Craig Smith pulls together original and curated news, tips and stats in the social media and digital space. If you’re looking for some offbeat stories in social, this is a great starting point.

4) Twitter Search by Topsy. We all died a little inside when Twitter and Google announced the end of their search relationship in 2011, signalling the end of Google’s Real Time search and the ability to search the full historical Twitter archive. But did you realize that Topsy has always had this privilege? Apart from giving you the ability to search all public tweets since 2006, Topsy indexes and ranks search results from various social networks, based upon the most influential conversations about specific terms, topics, pages or domains queried. If that’s not enough to convince you, think about this: Apple acquired Topsy for over $200 million late last year.

and finally…

5) Beginner’s Guide to Social Media by Moz. Whether you’re a social media newbie or just looking to brush up on your social skills, this Moz Guide will teach you a thing or two. You can download it as a PDF or view it all online.

See you next week!

Happy reading!

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

Apple Acquires Topsy, Leaps Into Social Media Data [Report]

Spread the joy!

Twitter Wins the US Election By a Landslide

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Kalena Jordan

Despite the final vote tally, Twitter was the clear winner of the 2012 US Presidential election.

No matter what your political bias, the Twitter feed for the past 24 hours has captured the highest and lowest points, the heckling, the gags, the tantrums and the vote count. Once again, Twitter was the place to be to get the most up to date vote tally as State by State fell to each of the candidates. With news agencies reporting inconsistent or biased results, confused voters turned to Twitter to get faster updates via the hashtags #Election2012, #USElection and #USAElection.

According to Twitter staff, election conversation saw Twitter reach a peak of 327,452 Tweets per minute this evening, with not a single Fail Whale in sight – something Twitter staff were extremely proud of. The company has clearly improved on their server load contingency plan since the last election.

And just as well too, because newly re-elected President Obama (@BarackObama) chose Twitter as the medium for his first acknowledgements of victory:

More than half a million people retweeted President Obama’s victorious “Four More Years” photo tweet.

However, not everyone was happy with the election outcome. Outspoken Republican Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump) surprised everyone with his vitriolic, bizarre and seemingly unpatriotic stream of tweets immediately following Obama’s victory:

Possibly the most amusing point about this epic tantrum was Trump’s incorrect assumption that Romney had won the popular vote and that the world was laughing at America because of a miscarriage of democracy caused by the electoral college system.

The tweets highlighted with the green pepper were actually deleted from Trump’s feed within an hour of them being posted, suggesting that Trump’s minders may have stepped in to prevent him from further embarrassment.

Trump’s tantrum prompted a wave of hilarious responses from the Twitterverse, some of which are highlighted in the images below.

But for those of us who stayed on Twitter during President Obama’s victory speech, the hilarity continued. About halfway during his speech, someone on Twitter pointed out that the woman in the crowd directly over the President’s left shoulder had decided to stick her US flag into her hair and was waving it about with great enthusiasm.

The gesture generated an instant Twitter meme, similar to the one NASA employee @tweetsoutloud prompted when his space-influenced mohawk was spotted on camera during the recent Mars Rover landing.

Within a minute or two, the hashtag #hairflag was born, with witty tweets temporarily hijacking responses to the President’s moving and heartfelt speech.

I couldn’t resist a #hairflag tweet of my own! By the time President Obama walked offstage, the #hairflag meme was in full swing, with inspirational posters, Facebook pages and parody Twitter accounts.

So Election Day closes with 31 million tweets posted and Twitter a clear winner, once again. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Spread the joy!

2012 Social Media Demographics: An Infographic

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Kalena Jordan

I know not everyone is a fan of infographics, but I love them. Sure, they’ve been done to death at conferences and meetings, but nothing beats an eye-catching graphic to quickly highlight important data within complex statistics.

Today I was searching online for the latest social media usage statistics to incorporate into a presentation I am giving and I stumbled upon this brilliant infographic put together by OnlineMBA.com.

Click on the image for a larger view:

Here are the highlights:

Social Media Usage:

More than 66%of adults online in America are connected to one or more social media platforms.
67% of Americans use social media to stay in touch with their friends.
64% of Americans use social media to stay in touch with family.
50% of Americans use social media to reconnect with old friends.

Facebook:

Facebook has 845 million active users.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
The average Facebook visit lasts 23 minutes.
46% of Facebook users are over the age of 45.
57% of Facebook users are female (43% male).
57% of Facebook users report having been to “some college” (24% bachelors or graduate degree).
47% of Facebook users report making between $50,000 – $99,000 annually (33% between $25,000 – $49,999).

Twitter:

Twitter has 127 million active users.
13% of Internet users also use Twitter.
33% of Twitter users are over the age of 45.
54% of Twitter users use Twitter on their mobile devices.
36% of Twitter users tweet at least once a day.
The average visit on Twitter lasts for 14 minutes.
59% of Twitter users are female (41% male).

Google+:

Google+ has had 90 million unique visitors.
Google+ users are 71% male.
The most common occupation of a Google+ user is an engineer.
44% of Google+ users are “single”.

Pinterest:

Pinterest has had 21 million unique visits.
The top two locations for Pinterest users are Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee.
The top interests of Pinterest users are crafts, hobbies, interior design and fashion.
82% of Pinterest users are female (18% male).
The average Pinterest visit lasts 17 minutes.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn has 150 million registered users.
75% of LinkedIn users use it for business purposes.
There are 2 million companies on LinkedIn.
50% of LinkedIn users have a bachelors or graduate degree.

So as suspected, Facebook users are the biggest time wasters. Puts a new perspective on the value of Facebook advertising though, doesn’t it?

Spread the joy!

Ask Kalena

Your Daily Search Engine Advice Column

Category Archives: twitter

Twitter Wins the US Election By a Landslide

Related articles across the web