Digital Marketing, SEO and Web Design Experts

How does the Facebook News Feed Algorithym work?

2010-11-03T04:47:00.001-07:00

Social Media Marketing- How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed?

Facebook will always guarantee to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for various types of on-going advertising. The algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along is known to be unreliable or altogether hidden!

There was a one-month experiment carried out into Facebook’s news feed and the following discoveries were made:

Facebook is seen to be biased against new additions.
Most recent posts does not give a story.
Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
“Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
You need to raise your visibility by getting people to comment on your page and updates.

Facebook, like Google with its search algorithms, it consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and recognizes relevant content. For more information about how Google SEO Marketing works visit a Digital Marketing Agency.

Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly on your wall, while others are never seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities without letting us know? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

So how was the code cracked on Facebook's personalized news feed.

An experiment was undertaken, creating a virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. A 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move carried out this interesting experiment.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti's only friends were more than two dozen volunteers at random who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, recording any sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook is seen to be biased against any new additions- Simonetti spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made "friends" never noticed anything on their news feeds. Those with well-established lengthy friends were a lot more visible than himself. Simonetti’s lonliness on Facebook only stopped when he instructed volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

2. Facebook's Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways. But you aren't likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don't have exposure in the first place.

3. The SEO Marketing of Facebook: "Top News": The real fun began when he eventually instructed different subgroups of his volunteer-friend force to interact with him in a controlled manner.

Suddenly, Simonetti began popping up on feeds. But which ones? The current newsfeed system offers users two options: "Top News," a highly selective feed of updates from friends, and "Most Recent," a "fire hose" that shows updates in reverse chronological order.

A bunch of interactions, however, still do not guarantee that you'll get on anyone's Top News, which is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information. Some of our volunteers reported frequent sightings of Simonetti's updates in their Top News feeds, while others saw him rarely—and in some cases, never. Top News will show you hours-old updates from some friends while ignoring newer postings from others.

Facebook has a reason to do this: If users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might get bored and tune out—a disaster for Facebook, which needs eyeballs to earn revenue. But in doing so, Facebook's ranking system makes judgments about items it thinks you will be interested in.

What became clear after two weeks was that it's not the amount of activity you have, but the type of activity you have.

For more information on Social media marketing visit our Digital Marketing Agency.

How do I change the Title tag of my posts in Blogger?

2010-10-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

When Google displays search results to a user it bases a lot of its judgement on the relevance of the page to the search term, this relevance is determined by many items on the page, the Title tag is one of the most important. The Title tag heavily influences search results because it should give a good overview of what the page is about, similar to a title in a book, it summarises the pages content for the reader (search engines read Title tags the same). If your blogger title tag is just the title of the blog (blogger defaults to this) even when you are on a specific posts page then you are not using it to its full potential - and not helping search engines determine the pages true content - penalising the posts potential positions within the SERP's.

With a simple block of code that replaces your original title tag you can have your blogs title displayed on the home page like so "My Blog'. And a more specific one when you go to a specific posts page like so "My Post | My Blog".

This method is much more effective when it comes to SEO because it is a descriptive title tag and will include the keywords that help search engines determine the pages subject.

So, how do you change your title tags in Blogger?

Within the Edit HTML portion of the blogger dashboard. All you have to do is replace your original title tag code in the template which should look something like this.

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

With this.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

Simple! Now Google knows what your blogger pages are about and will move them up the rankings (within the SERP's) accordingly.

For more information on business blogging on blogger or any of the other platforms, or even info on Social Media Marketing contact Rathbone Digital Marketing Agency.

How to add Google Analytics to a Facebook page

2010-10-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

Wow, who would have thought it be so difficult to find out how to add analytics to your Facebook page!

We wanted to find a way of monitoring how many people visit our clients Facebook pages, how long they are there and where our clients visitors are coming from.

Facebook Insights shows some demographical information, and some of it is even useful (we are sure they will be updating this soon) however, the information is limited to info about the interactions of the fans. We researched into more analytical solutions to this and found out that the Google Analytics can be added which provides a far more comprehensive data.

Adding Google Analytics to your Facebook fan page can be done easily but requires some special steps? we will assume you have admin access to the page you are adding the Google analytics too.

You will need to use a programme such as the FBGAT (Facebook Google Analytics Tracker - see link in step 1) a free and open sourced programme (an app you will find on Facebook) you will need to install this to the Facebook page in order to be able to get Google Analytics working.

With the use of this programme and a few special steps we are now able to track visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor countries, and keyword searches for both the clients website and Facebook pages through our Google Analytics.

We encountered a few problems and issues on the way, but found an easier and simpler way in the end. We have marked the steps below to show you how easy, but effective this tool really is!

Before you begin: you must install the FBML to your page (application on Facebook) to make this work.

Step 1: Get a Google Account
If you already have a Google Analytics account, create a new website profile to separately track visits to your Facebook page. Google will then display your tracking code. The tracking code generally looks like this: UA-1231234-5.

Step 2: Get Tracking Images
The way to work around the Facebook JavaScript limitation is to generate custom images. FBGAT is a free tool that will generate your custom image code to track visits on each of your Facebook fan pages (sounds tech"y really easy to do).

After clicking the "Generate Code" button, you"ll get a code, which you"ll need, to copy in full. You"ll have to generate a separate code for each fan page you want to track and place it as shown in step 3 below.

Note: If you have multiple pages powered by FBML, you can do this for each page.

Step 3: Add the code to Facebook
Place the code generated as shown within your Facebook page using an app like Static FBML. Programs like Static FBML allow you to add HTML to your pages.

Google Analytics will track all visits to those pages. Give Google 24 hours for results to show.

And that's it! Google analytical information about your Facebook page within your Google analytics!

How handy!

For more information on Social Media marketing contact Rathbone Digital.

What is pay per click advertising?

2010-10-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

Pay per click advertising (PPC) or cost per click advertising (CPC) is the method by which search engines monetise their search results. Search engines place relevant ad’s related the search query, in Google (the largest of the search engines these are known as sponsored links.

These PPC ads are sold on an auction basis which can be compared to a simple supply and demand costing matrix – the more clicks or impressions there are the less they cost, the more people that demand the impressions or clicks the more the cost goes up. Advertisers can bid any amount of money to buy that search term. Bid the most and you have a good chance of ranking number 1 or being the first ad displayed at the top or the right of the page.

There are also other facts that determine the ad position, you can’t simply buy the term and bid the most and expect to be at the top of the page, there is also a factor called ad relevance. Ad relevance (Google) is the relevance of the ad and landing page that you are advertising to the search word or keyword that you are buying. Google wants to display only the most relevant ad’s so that its users so that they click more often. The more relevant you are to a term, the higher the ad relevance. The higher the ad relevance the less you have to pay to be top ranking or in a premium position.

Advertisers are charged when a potential custom clicks an ad, this cost is based on the cost per click at the time (any value up to your maximum bid) and charged accordingly. Daily budgets can be set to limit spend so you ca always be in cotrol of your budgets making Pay per click an excellent method for both large and small business to promote themselves in the internet.

For more info about us looking after your Pay per click follow this link Pay per click management

Why is pay per click Advertising efficient?

2010-10-19T08:49:00.001-07:00

A correctly run PPC campaign can be an extremely efficient marketing tool.

The main reason for this is that the advertiser is buying terms relevant to their business, these keywords launch the ad and are only displayed when that search term is searched for. For this reason a basic efficiency is achieved simply by displaying ads when potential customers are interested in a broad subject matter.

This subject matter can of course be further refined by adding more words thus increasing the efficiency of the campaign further.

Vintage Cheese company based in the UK who specialise in rare and vintage cheeses.
Buying the term – Cheese
Refined – Vintage Cheese
Further refined - Vintage Cheese UKFinal refinement – Buy Vintage Cheese UK

As you can see by extending the phrase and adding keywords and making longer tail key-phrases we increase the efficiency of the campaign by selecting search terms that are more relevant, this increased relevance also leads to higher conversion rates. This efficiency can also be applied to bid costs (varying the bid costs on different days at different times), buy testing and utilising more and more efficient ads and groups of keywords and of course the campaign can be targeted regionally, nationally and internationally at high value markets.

These are just a few of the many methods by which to optimise PPC but some of the reasons why this is one of the most accurate and efficient advertising mediums currently available.

Do you want us to look after to your PPC Management, or Search Marketing?