Facebook Data & Identity Optimization

If you didn’t know, Facebook Ads are much lower than Adwords because you can target by psychographics. Cambridge Analytica made that global news this week. We in the online industry in Menlo Park have known it since Facebook had their Beacon program settlement.

What everyone failed to realize about Facebook is that just because my friend likes something, doesn’t mean I am going to like something, believe what they do, go where they go, eat what they eat. I mean at what point didn’t high school online reunions and long lost friends using Facebook realize they were going to be taken advantage of by ‘bad actors’.

This isn’t a data breach, it’s a full scale assault using Facebook on democracy and individual freedom. That’s why I’ve never been a Facebook user.

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Experimental Geo-Marketing using Golf Balls

In February, 2015 Twitter  announced it had reached a deal with Google to make its tweets more searchable online. If you’re looking to expand the ‘social signals’ that Google count in their ranking algorithms, consider this innovative approach by long time colleague Steve Bennet who has had 48 Titleist golf balls marked “If Found, tweet course/hole to @professorVC“. There are many ways to promote your business using geo elements.

As Google Place Pages have become Google Plus Pages and Twitter campaigns integrates more with search, combined with users wanting to charge their location and what they are doing, this is a innovative marketing technique I wanted to share. I hope it inspires you to go and play golf and think about combining geo, Twitter and social into your online optimization campaigns.

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The Power of Awesome

Everyone is awesome in Silicon Valley. That’s what you say to people here in “the Bay” so they’ll like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter and Instagram and talk nicely about you to everyone. Social currency is traded on Facebook and now as you walk through Valley Fair in San Jose, they sell wooden signs that reinforce the real reason social media is so popular…. take a look…

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Headline SEO – social media’s answer to keyword optimization

At a basic level, website optimization is about including keywords across meta tags, body copy and links on a website to rank highly in search engine results pages. Yet social media doesn’t work this way, rather the more ‘shared’ or ‘liked’ a piece of content, video or image becomes, the greater the effect of social media optimization.

I love this image below from Upworthy.com which shows their new metric called “attention minutes”. Their study found users with 25% of the average attention minutes on an article actually shared it more than those who spent 100% of the average attention minutes on the article.

The point is that people share an article more if they engage with it less. They read headlines, think it’s going to make them popular and then repost, retweet, like and share it – without even reading the entire information. Are you one of those people?

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Why Social Media is Critical in SEO

Social commerce is in it’s formative stages and whilst we believe buying within Facebook may happen one day, it’s not here today in a big way which is why we built SKUmatic.

A recent study by Forrester Research titled “The Purchase Path of Online Buyers in 2012,” in September 2012 cites a selection of statistics supporting the influence of social media on user buying decisions:

  • 17% of users have bought something based on a friend’s post about it using social media
  • 40% of online buyers think that social content created by friends about brands is “a great way to discover sales and promotions”
  • 48% of consumers think that posts created by others in their networks are “a great way to discover new products, brands, trends, or retailers”

View the Video demonstration and see over 50 of SKUmatic customers using our product catalog management software for Facebook at http://www.skumatic.com