Heuristic. David on Demand. Giving your links more value. A Tweet's Effect On Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study. Let me tell you a tale of an unexpected case study on the value of a tweet on a page's ranking and traffic. This tale will mostly be told using graphics, as the images tell the story better than I can.
Let's begin... Last Monday while I was checking the morning tweets, I noticed a ton of tweets about our Beginner's Guide to SEO. It didn't take long to realize that Smashing Magazine had tweeted about it and the retweets were seriously rolling in. (And yes, they really did spell Beginers wrong ;).
Exhibit A - The Initial Tweet I quickly emailed the marketing team, with a "Sweet! Exhibit B - Rand's tweet as we realized we were ranking for general keyword Whoa. Rand had searched on "Beginner's Guide" about a month or two earlier and it wasn't anywhere in the SERPs, and we definitely weren't getting any traffic for that term. Exhibit C - The SERP Sure this was really interesting but the question was "will it last?
" All pretty interesting but we all know ranking isn't everything right? The Facebook Like Button is not Viral : Momentus Media. Since Facebook released the Like Button in early 2010, the web has become plastered with buttons. The Like Button offers two promises: 1. Ability to message people who have Liked your page by posting to their newsfeeds. 2. Viral spread of your page by Likes posting into friends’ newsfeeds Since release, we have performed experiments to pull out numbers on how effectively the Like Button performs these two promises. Reengagement with the Like Button and Graph API We’ve found that a post to a Facebook Graph Object Wall has a click rate around 0.25-1%. Spreading content virally with the Like Button We set up an experiment here. From this test, we can determine that the Share Button is 23x more viral than the Like Button. The Share Button creates a large newsfeed post with an image and appears on the user’s wall and friends’ newsfeeds.
The Like Button creates a small non-graphical post that usually only appears on the user’s wall. Our Recommendation 1. 2. 3. Update: Why? Cateogories: Uncategorized. Americans Now Spend As Much Time Using Internet as TV [STATS] Americans are now spending as many hours online as they do in front of their TV screens, according to a survey released by Forrester on Monday. The average American now spends roughly 13 hours per week using the Internet and watching TV offline, Forrester finds, based on its survey of more than 30,000 customers. The Internet has long captivated the attention of younger Americans to a greater extent than TV and is now proving more popular to Gen X (ages 31 to 44) for the first time ever. Younger Baby Boomers (ages 45 to 54) are spending the same amount of time per week using both media. While the amount of time Americans spend watching TV has remained roughly the same in the past five years, Internet use has increased by 121% in the same time frame.
Regular Mashable readers will not be surprised to learn that Internet-connected mobile devices have aided this growth in Internet use. So what are Americans doing online? Shopping, mostly. Image courtesy of Flickr, San Jose Library. How and Why Facebook Users Interact with Brands. Market research & statistics: Internet marketing, advertising & demographics. Facebook For Old Farts: Americans 50 and Over Double Social Media Presence. Mom just posted a message on your facebook status. Get used to it. The social media revolution has been fueled by the Millennial (born roughly between 1980- present) and X (born roughly between 1964-1979) Generations, but the Baby Boomers (born between roughly 1946 – 1964) and the Silent Generation (born between roughly 1925 – 1945) are catching on.
For the same Americans who may have once watched television on a wooden box, social networking has “nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010,” according to a report released on August 27 by the Pew Research Center, entitled Older Adults and Social Media. Among the more telling statistics is this one: “one in five (20%) online adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day.” Further proof it may be time to take down some of those pictures. Research. New Experiments Question the Power of Social Proof on the Web. In a lot of my presentations and research, I’ve talked about social proof, and I’ve hypothesized that it has an effect on social and viral behavior online, but I had never actually proven it. So a few weeks ago, I began a series of experiments designed to test the assumption that the effects of social proof and social conformity can be exploited on the web.
In the first two experiments, I split tested ReTweet buttons with different ReTweet counts shown on blog posts. First I compared “0 Tweets” with “776 Tweets.” The results were exactly the opposite of what I expected. After 36 hours, the button showing no Tweets had been clicked more than double the times the other button had. While discussing these results with Alison, she suggested that they may have been due to a “first post” effect, where people want to be the first to share a piece of content. The results of the first two tests had me questioning whether or not social proof has the effect online I thought it did.