Australia leads the world in social media engagement with the highest global average time of 7 hours per month, according to Nielsen’s Asia Pacific (APAC) social media report.

Now is a perfect time for businesses to dip into the social media realm to increase online brand presence, attract new business, and improve customer service and loyalty.

Nine million Australians are now interacting on social networking sites according to the Nielsen 2010 report.

• Facebook dominates online social networking
• Twitter records strongest growth in social media usage
• Mobile social networking increasing

It also found Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are the top 3 in the most popular social media websites in Australian visits.

Does your business have a social media strategy? If not contact us today to get you the best results from your Social Media Campaigns.

Google Caffeine

The speed, accuracy and relevancy of Google search results are only getting better.

On the 8th June 2010, Google announced one of their largest ever search algorithm updates.

Built to make search more up-to-date, Caffeine will index new content within minutes of it being published with Google to “provide search results that are 50% fresher than their previous algorithm.

Google’s new indexing system called Caffeine will produce real-time search results that previously only covered breaking news articles, and will now include information from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Google have commented on their blog: “Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)”

What impact will it have on a business? The considerations will both be:

1. Some businesses search engine rankings within Google may increase or vanish.Historically, large Google updates have seen some sites significantly affected both positively and negatively through the algorithmic updates. While for some the position change is marginal, other more significant movements have seen websites entirely vanish from view. However as always, Google’s focus is around keeping its search engines results fresh, accurate and up-to-date and so these regular updates are crucial in Google maintaining its position as a market leader in the search engine industry.
2. Real-time search resultsWebsites that have previously sat at the top of Google’s organic results will now find that their sites move down to make way for real-time results. While real-time results may only show temporarily, for sites that are currently getting top spot through a fixed could find a dramatic drop in website traffic even over a temporary drop. A company who has no social media strategy, (or not a strong one) will need to rethink their approach to web marketing to keep the Google as a viable source of traffic.
3. Real-time inclusion of social media updates within organic results may also see more widespread usage of social media platforms as it increases reach to search engine users. A study found 51% Facebook users and 67% Twitter followers were more likely to buy the brands they liked and followed on these sites. Social media gives a face to a brand and by engaging customers in sharing content that demonstrates their expertise, will help divert quality traffic to their website and hopefully into conversions.

If your company’s website has been affected by the recent changes, you may want to talk to your SEO expert to find out what can be done to help improve your site rankings and make it more robust for the future.

In the current economic environment, consumer confidence low and many businesses are feeling the pinch of poor sales. Retailers like Myers and David Jones are competing aggressively to stimulate sales in a down market, so what are you doing to improve your sales?

What strategies are you planning to entice new buyers? Perhaps discounting certain stock items may help cash-flow.

Once customers are attracted to your business, it’s much easier to cross or up sell on additional products or services. In this way it’s good to think about what items are easy to cross or up-sell. E.g. if you are a beauty salon owner, you might advertise waxing at a discounted price, and then once you have your customer through the door, up-sell them to laser hair removal or a skin care treatment.

It’s surprising how many businesses cut their marketing budgets in weaker economic conditions at a time when marketing is crucial to preserve existing clientele and attract new buyers to the business. Naturally costs and overheads are a factor for any business so the key is marketing your business smarter. If you currently use traditional marketing methods such as newspaper, magazines, radio and letter box drops why not consider web marketing. Web marketing by comparison to traditional marketing methods is quite low cost, and is often not only more effective but more measurable as well. This means you can better track the cost of obtaining a sale.

If you’re already utilising web marketing, take the time to work on developing and improving your web strategy. You should consider improving your current site from an information perspective and improving it for sales conversions. Increase or develop a social media presence, send out email newsletters, write blogs etc.

Whilst some of these strategies will drive sales immediately, other strategies will develop sales long term.

Not getting the best results from your website and not sure how to get them?
Call us today on 02 8904 0288 or complete our free website assessment here.

Google recently announced their new Twitter timeline search feature. It is quite an exciting feature, as it helps to track hot topics being searched for, what was being discussed relating to those topics at specific times and so, provide better insight into user behaviour and interests.

Google’s initial release allows you to explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

To access this feature:

• Search off the topic of interest
• Click “Show options” on the Google search results page, then
• Select “Updates.”

The first page will show you the familiar latest and (what Google considers) best updates from a comprehensive set of sources, with the new timeline chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.

So how will this benefit you? Where there is a hot topic in your industry, it gives you the opportunity to leverage off that topic, and apply it to your own business. This  will be extremely valuable if you have your own Blog, Twitter or Facebook account, and start discussing that topic. By doing so it gives you more opportunity of having one of your web marketing mediums picked up by a potential customer as they are searching off that topic.

Other ways this can be utilised is to change your Pay-Per-Click or Organic SEO campaign(s) to use these words. For example, if you are a dietician, and the hot topic is on a new diet fad sweeping Hollywood, you could use these topical keywords for your campaigns, and write your opinions on whether that diet is effective, or dangerous (if using Pay-Per-Click, don’t forget to make sure your Ad Campaign landing page is the page where you have discussed this topic). Not only are you more likely to have your website found this way, you are also building credibility, and have the opportunity to increase sales for your business or services.

The only thing I found when searching various hot topics is that these results are not very ‘localised’, and so if you are looking for topics that are within say Australia, or even your city, you may be disappointed. In the example screenshot below, I have search off ‘interest rates australia’ for April 2010, then narrowed down to the spike shown on the 6th April 2010. The top 10 results displayed did not include any Australian websites, only international ones.

In saying that, this is a newly released feature, and as Google is ever evolving, we may see localised results in the near future.

search: ‘interest rates australia’ for April 2010

search: ‘interest rates australia’ for 6th April 2010

Looking for the best results in building your business on the web? Call us today to find out how we can build your business.

Recent consumer research shows over 50% of Facebook fans and Twitter followers are more likely to buy or recommend than before they were engaged in Social Media

Recently Chadwick martin and bailey and iModerate Research Technologies did a study of social media usage, and how that translated into new business for consumers looking to buy. “Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers.”

The study found that:

• 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.
• 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.  With over 400 million users Facebook, this provides a lot of opportunities for those marketing using Facebook.

More on this Social Media study can be found at: Consumers Engaged Via Social Media Are More Likely To Buy, Recommend

This simply reinforces the importance of having a social media campaign. Call us today to get started.

Source: chadwick martin bailey