Seybold Scientific

An Analytical Approach to Marketing Online.

Social Media, an Exploration of Interactivity, Sharing, and Collaboration

Like it or not, the Internet is changing, and it is changing fast. This change, however, is in our favor. In favor, that is, of individuals, small businesses, authors, and small presses. Web 2.0 and Social Media are here to stay, and are likely the beginning infrastructure of a fresh, new Internet. So, if you are not using these tools and technologies yet, you may want to ask yourself why. More >

Email to a friend.
About This Post
Published: November 1, 2008
By: George Seybold

This article is filed under:
Social Media | Social Networking

Would you like to provide feedback?

Facebook :: Sharing the right content with the right users

Facebook Pages are a powerful way to reach a mass audience and their friends. Sometimes, however, you’ll want to limit who sees what. Here are three tools to help:

(1) Age Restrictions for Pages: You can restrict your Page to users over age 13, 17, 18, 19, or 21, or the legal drinking age where they live. On your Page’s edit page, scroll down to “Settings” at the bottom.

(2) Targeted Messaging: When you send a message to fans, you can target it by geography, gender, and age. For example, a musician can promote a concert to fans in the area. When sending an update, check the “Target this update” box.

(3) New FBML Tags: If you use FBML (http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878), you can restrict content by country and age. For example, if you have licensed content for U.S. and Canada users only, you can to restrict it to those countries, and show alternative content to other users. More details are on the Facebook Developers Blog: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=150.

Email to a friend.
About This Post
Published: October 17, 2008
By: George Seybold

This article is filed under:
Social Media | Social Networking | Web 2.0

Would you like to provide feedback?

Twitter SEO Value Revisited

I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post.  I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage.  For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed.  So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea.  It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines.  In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future?  Absolutely.  One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services.  For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds.  As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online.  As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient.  Would I say not to use it?  Never.  Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time.  There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client.  I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

Email to a friend.
About This Post
Published: October 8, 2008
By: Rick Smith

This article is filed under:
Branding | Search Engine Optimization | Search Marketing | Social Media | Social Networking | Word-of-mouth | twitter

Would you like to provide feedback?

Companies Should have Social Media Presence

An overwhelming majority (93%) of online Americans say companies should have a social-media presence, and 85% believe these companies also should be interacting with consumers through social media, according to research from Cone.

See the full article here.

Email to a friend.
About This Post
Published: October 1, 2008
By: Rick Smith

This article is filed under:
Branding | Social | Social Media | Social Networking

Would you like to provide feedback?