SEARCH CLINIC

New research has shown that websites with blogs get considerably more traffic, links and credibility than static business sites that don’t interact with social media- and potential customers.

If you have a blog, you know that it’s good for your business. But just how good– and how much?

To answer to those questions, HubSpot looked at data from 1,531 of their customers- mostly small- and medium-sized businesses. 795 of the businesses in their sample blogged and a roughly equal amount 736 didn’t.

The data was crystal clear- companies that blog have far better marketing results.

Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages

Please, just take a look for yourself in the graphs below:
Why are website visitors important? Because more visitors mean more people to convert to leads and sales.
Why are inbound links important? Because they signal authority to search engines, thus increasing your chances of getting found in those search engines.

Why are indexed pages important? The more pages you have on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in search engines.

For more information on HubSpot’s blogs improve your business report please click here now.

Dr Search asks if you have a blog for your business? If not what are you waiting for- your competitors may well have one- how long do you want them to steal your potential customers and sales?

For a free chat why not contact the Search Clinic NOW?

YouTube have announced this week that people are now uploading 35 hours of videos every minute.This upload rate is also increasing.

Just eight months ago in March YouTube announced that 24 hours of video were being uploaded per hour. The YouTube official blog post announcing this record also comes out with some interesting statistics.

As you can see from the above chart, the number of uploads to YouTube have more than doubled in the last two years. How come? Here are some of the factors contributing to the growth:

* The time limit for videos uploaded by users increased by 50% from 10 to 15 minutes.
* The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB via our standard uploader.
* Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos to YouTube.
* More companies integrating our APIs to support upload from outside of YouTube.com (Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops. as one very cool example where you can record and share video footage from within the game).

“If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.  Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.”

With 35 hours of video being uploaded each minute, it’s becoming more and more clear that you can watch basically anything on YouTube. Which is why Google owned YouTube has such trouble deleting off Al Qaeda incitement to terrorism videos.

Dr Search reminds you that YouTube is a great, free channel for you and your business to promote your services- with a rapidly growing audience.

According to Technorati, 78 percent of bloggers use Twitter and the number one reason bloggers use the social networking site is to promote their own blog.
Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere 2010 report shows that social media is becoming increasingly indispensable for bloggers, with 87 percent using Facebook, in addition to the 78 percent on Twitter.

They do so to promote their own blogs, share interesting links, stay informed with news and events, and measure what people are paying attention to online.

Technorati has conducted the study for the past six years to analyse blogging growth and trends.

This year, the study specifically examined brands in the blogosphere, professional blogging activities, how bloggers are making money, the importance of Facebook vs. Google to bloggers, and the impact of new trends, like smartphones, on the blogosphere.

Overall, respondents are spending more time engaging in online activities than they were in 2009, and spending significantly more time reading social media sites.

Specifically, bloggers spend more time on social media sites each week than reading other blogs.  Bloggers spent an average of 9.9 hours on social media sites each week, compared to just 5.5 hours among the American general population.

The findings were released this week by Technorati President and CEO Richard Jalichandra in his annual “State of the Blogosphere” address at the ad:tech conference in New York City.

The study divides bloggers among their reasons for blogging, from the “hobbyist” blogger who writes for pleasure to the “corporate” blogger who writes for their company, with “self-employed” and “part-timer” falling in between.

What’s drawing bloggers into social networking this year seems to be what makes it attractive to us all: time.

As compared with 2009, hobbyist bloggers are updating their blogs less frequently. The number of bloggers updating once or twice per day significantly decreased, while the number updating once every few weeks significantly increased.

Across audiences, bloggers were more likely to share blog posts with their social media followers than with their blog readership, indicating that social networks are seen as a marketing tool by each group.

A deeper dive into the study found some interesting results when it comes to bloggers’ uses of Facebook and Twitter specifically.

Among them:
* 81 percent of bloggers use Facebook to promote their blog, while 64 percent use it to interact with readers.
* 45 percent see Facebook as a more effective driver of traffic to their blog than a year ago, while 34 percent report the same for Twitter.
* 73 percent of hobbyists versus 88 percent of professionals use Twitter, and more than half of all bloggers link Twitter to their blog.
* One third of Twitter users, meanwhile, say they prefer Facebook to post short updates and links.
* 33 percent of all bloggers report tablets and smartphones have impacted their blogging style.

Dr Search points out that using Twitter and Fecebook to promote blogs is a no brainer.

Firstly linking blog posts into Twitter accounts widens the potential readership and secondly the targetted process that is Twitter means that one can reach a specific target audiance easily.

In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby.On any given day, only 1% of internet users are using these services.

Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla use internet-connected mobile devices’ geolocation capabilities to let users notify others of their locations by “checking in” to that location. Location-based services often run on stand-alone software applications, or “apps,” on most major GPS-enabled smartphones or other devices.

Key findings include:

* 7% of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service.
* 8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
* 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
* 6% of online men use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, compared with 3% of online women.

The results are surprising not because of the numbers of users on the two biggest location-based networking sites –  Foursquare has just four million users while Gowalla has under one million – but because of the media hype and attention surrounding their introduction onto the social media scene.

The “geosocial” trend grabbed the spotlight by taking social networking one step further, allowing users to “check-in” to various locations and tell their friends where they are.

Like a game, they allow users to “unlock” badges, become the “mayor” of businesses and sites they frequent and, now, with the expansion of Facebook’s Places, win special deals and discounts.

The Pew study found that mobile users and twenty-somethings are the heaviest users of these sites, with eight percent of those ages 18-29 saying they use location-based services, and seven percent of adults who use a smartphone logging on.

Not surprisingly, your friends who update their status constantly are also the most likely to make sure you know where they are at all times.

Pew reports that among online adults, 62 percent use Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. Of those, six percent use Gowalla, Foursquare or other location services.  And of the 24 percent of online adults on Twitter, 10 percent also use a location-based service, more than twice the rate of the general online population

Men are more likely than women to share their location, the study said.  Among races, 10 percent of online Hispanics use these services, significantly more than online whites (3 percent) or African-Americans (5 percent).

Still to be determined is how heavily Facebook will market Places among its 500 million users and how much that influence will spread to Foursquare, Gowalla and the sector as a whole.  Also of note is research showing that U.S. businesses will spend $1.8 billion on location-aware marketing in 2015, according to estimates from market research firm ABI Research.

Pew’s research can be found at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Location-based-services.aspx

The internet is worth £100bn a year to the UK economy, a study has concluded.
The research, which was commissioned by Google, found that the internet accounts for 7.2% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

If the internet was an economic sector it would be the UK’s fifth largest, said the report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This would make the sector larger than the construction, transport and utilities industries.

Some 60% of the £100bn a year figure is made up from internet consumption – the amount that users spend on online shopping and on the cost of their connections and devices to access the web.

The rest comes from investment in the UK’s internet infrastructure, government IT spending and net exports.

The report on the The Connected Kingdom website says that the internet’s contribution to GDP is set to grow by about 10% annually and will reach 10% of GDP by 2015.

The UK, according to the report, is the world’s leading nation for ecommerce. For every £1 spent online to import goods, £2.80 is exported.

“This is the opposite of the trend seen in the offline economy, which exports 90p for every £1 imported,” the report says.

The Connected Kingdom PDF report by BCG can be downloaded in pdf format here (900kb)

Internet companies play a vital role in employment with an estimated 250,000 staff, the report finds.

Small businesses that actively use the internet report sales growth more than four times greater than that of less active companies.

The report also attempts to compare the UK to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Under its scoring system, the UK ranks sixth, above Germany, the US and France. The highest ranked country is Denmark.

It ranks the top ten nations as:
* Denmark
* South Korea
* Japan
* Sweden
* Netherlands
* United Kingdom
* Norway
* Finland
* Germany
* Iceland

“The internet is pervasive in the UK economy today, more so than in most advanced countries,” said Paul Zwillenberg, partner with BCG.

“Several industries – including media, travel, insurance and fashion – are being transformed by it.”

Matt Brittin, managing director of Google UK, said: “The internet is a central pillar of the UK’s economy.

“The sector has come of age, and with great prospects for further growth the UK internet economy will be vital to the UK’s future prosperity,” he added.

The number of search engine keyword search terms are a good predictor of the success of films, songs and video games even weeks ahead of release, researchers have found.
The findings echo a study in April showing that the number of mentions of a film on Twitter could predict its opening box office take.

However, in some cases predictions based on search do not significantly improve on those made with other data.

The research appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was carried out by a team at the research arm of search firm Yahoo.

They compared the total number of searches containing a given term, such as the title of an upcoming film, determining how much that number correlated with the film’s success on release.  They did the same with songs on the US’ Billboard 100 music chart and video games.

In all three cases, the correlations were strong – a much-searched term was a good predictor of the eventual success, even as much as six weeks ahead of time.

For the most part, the search data did not much improve on those made based on different, more traditional data.

Study co-author Jake Hofman explained that the search data seemed to make the most difference in the case where the data available ahead of release was limited, such as video games.

Bernardo Huberman, the HP researcher who showed substantially similar results using the volume of tweets about films, called the new effort is “good work”, in no small part because “they have a lot of data – they’re Yahoo”.

He pointed out that prior work by Google researchers indicated a similar correlation exists between house prices and search terms.

The picture that’s starting to emerge is one in which millions of people are essentially browsing for data, and us being able to capture that browsing allows you to predict.

Yahoo’s Dr Watts remarked on possible future implications of the approach, saying that “you could imagine expanding this study to other kinds of consumer behaviour, thinking about hotel vacancy rates or how many people will be flying into Las Vegas this weekend – all of that is probably correlated with some kind of search activity”.

However, the crystal ball that people’s technological habits might represent is not, he said, always the most important thing.

“In life, it’s not so interesting sometimes to predict the future, but to know what to do once you know what the future will look like.”

Malaysians have the most friends on their social networks, while Japanese users have the fewest.
This is one of the findings of a large scale research project, looking at online behaviour around the globe.

It also found that digital sources are overtaking TV, radio and newspapers as the media channel of choice for 61% of the online population around the world.

The study, conducted by research firm TNS, interviewed 50,000 consumers in 46 countries for the study.

In Malaysia the average number of friends is 233, closely followed by 231 in Brazil and 217 in Norway.

This contrasts to an average of just 29 friends in Japan, and 68 in China.

As well as having the most friends, Malaysians are also the heaviest users of social networking sites, spending an average of nine hours per week on them.

It is followed by Russia, where people spend an average 8.1 hours per week online and Turkey where 7.7 hours a week are spent on social networks.

The study found that consumers are now spending more time on social networking sites than using email.  This is fuelled in part by the rise in mobile net access.

In the US, a third of online consumers expect to be accessing social networks via their mobile phones over the next 12 months, compared to a quarter via a PC.

In Sweden, over half said they would access social networks via mobile and just a quarter cited the traditional PC.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams stepped down Monday as chief executive, handing over to a Google veteran brought in last year to help the website make money.
Evan Williams, in a post on the company blog, said Twitter’s chief operating officer, Dick Costolo, would take over as chief executive of the San Francisco based startup.

Mr Costolo, whose Web content distribution company Feedburner was purchased by Google in 2007, has been at the forefront of efforts to begin monetizing Twitter since he joined the company last year.

“I am most satisfied while pushing product direction,” he said. “Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.

“This is why I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO,” he said. “Starting today, I’ll be completely focused on product strategy.”

Mr Williams said Mr Costolo has been a “critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office.

“Given Dick’s track record as a three time successful CEO, I’m confident we can make this a smooth transition,” he said.

Twitter, which allows users to send messages of 140 characters or less- known as “tweets,” has enjoyed huge popularity since it was launched in 2006 by Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone.

Mr Williams said Twitter now employs around 300 people, up from 20 when he took over as CEO from Dorsey two years ago. Dorsey is presently Twitter’s chairman while Stone serves as “creative director.”

“In those same two years, we grew from three million registered users to more than 160 million today,” Williams said. “By all accounts Twitter is on a roll. We’ve redesigned our website to great user feedback.

“Our user and usage numbers are growing at a rapid clip all around the world,” he said. “We’ve launched an early, but successful, monetization effort.”

Mr Williams’ departure comes just three weeks after Twitter unveiled an overhauled website that lets people more easily sift through the growing mountain of micro-messages and creates more opportunity for advertising.

Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” advertising service allows companies and others to place “tweets” at the top of a page of search results.

Online marketing with social media is not just for large companies- any business can prosper.Any small business that invests its time wisely can improve it’s customer or client loyalty and word of mouth marketing with an effective social media strategy.

Social media is useful for almost every type of business. Cafes, retail stores, and even B2B professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust.

By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections.

Facebook is the most popular social networking website on the internet, and often the first site that comes to mind when people mention social media.

Establishing your business presence on facebook requires an ongoing effort, but can have some great rewards if done well.

Here’s Dr Search’s advice for getting started with Facebook.

1. Create a business page – Creating a page for your business is really quite simple and gives you an instant presence on facebook to share information about your company.

To get you started visit www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages and click Create a Page. Here’s a few suggestions for populating your page with relevant business information:
* Overview of the business
* Website and contact information
* Your logo and pictures of the business
* Videos
* Press releases and blog posts
* Company news and updates
* Your contact details

2. Interact with your fans – Once you’ve setup a page for your business, the most important step is to interact with your fans!

Try and post updates to your page at least weekly which can include new blog posts, competitions and links to new products or special discounts.

It’s also important that you engage with any customers that leave a comment on your wall or wall posts. Remember that facebook is a public forum so take care with your replies and show potential customers that you provide excellent customer service.

3. Promote your facebook page – The tricky thing about facebook pages is that you can’t friend someone the same way you can from your personal profile. People can elect to become fans of your page, but only if they know about it.

Here’s a few ideas on different ways to promote your page:

* Identify contacts from your personal profile that are business contacts and invite them to become fans of your business
* Include links to your facebook pages in the footer of email communications with customers
* Include a facebook icon on your website or blog and give customers some incentive to become a fan (special discounts, coupons etc.)
* Promote your facebook page using other social networks that you participate in like Twitter and your blog posts.

Facebook has reached 500 million members – the equivalent of connecting with eight per cent of the world’s population or the third largest country.
The milestone figure comes only five months after the social network signed up its 400th million user. The pace of its growth has accelerated rapidly – Facebook had only 150 million registered users in January 2009.

Facebook, the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg while he was still studying at Harvard University, launched in February 2004.

To mark the half a billion milestone, the site has launched a new application called ‘Facebook Stories’, a website within Facebook, that encourages users to share their experiences of the social network.

These stories, which are limited to 420 characters, (the same number as a Facebook status update) will then be sorted by location and theme. The application will also be hosted on several launch partners’ Facebook fan Pages, such as the X Factor and the White House.

The site has approximately 26 million UK users, which is more than a third of the country’s total population.

Last month, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, said it was “almost a guarantee” that the site would hit one billion users, while speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. He explained: “If we succeed in innovating and remaining relevant there is a good chance of bringing Facebook to a billion people.”

He also revealed that Facebook had just four remaining countries left to conquer: Russia, Japan, China and Korea, according to Zuckerberg. “We are down to just four counties where we aren’t the leading social network.”

Zuckerberg also recently visited the David Cameron in Number 10 Downing Street and praised the British Government’s efforts to open up its data to software developers.

The Social Network, a film about Facebook’s rise to prominence is due for UK release in October 2010. It charts the birth of the site and has the tagline: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”

The site recently faced heavy criticism from both European Information Commissioners and users alike, for over-complicated privacy settings, which users said led them unwittingly to make personal information public.

Concerns about privacy on the site were running so high that 60 per cent of the 1,588 Facebook users questioned by Sophos, a computer security organisation, in May, said that they were considering deleting their accounts on the social networking site.

A further 16 per cent said they had already stopped using Facebook because they felt they had inadequate control over their data.