Silicon Beach Training Blog » Social Media

Will Twitter finally sink the idea of a new luxury ship fit for a Queen?

Guest Author — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:30:42 +0000

In this guest post, James Christie of Social Media agency No Pork Pies looks at how Twitter has become so influential in today’s society, even having a say into the planning of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The Royal Yacht Britannia: now permanently moored in Edinburgh. Picture by Ian Mackay

In April 2009, it was announced that the British public would now be allowed to follow the Royal Family on Twitter at @BritishMonarchy (it now has 280,790 followers).

Commenting on the development, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “The Queen has been advised that it’s up and running but there won’t be any members of the Royal Family tweeting.”

A year later, the Queen ‘joined’ Facebook. “The Queen has approved the decision – she knows all about Facebook,” an aide assured us.

With this supposed knowledge of social media and micro-blogging sites, our sovereign is sure to be aware of how social network communities have reacted to the idea that a new royal yacht should be built to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The idea was first floated by the Daily Mail; the newspaper launched a campaign to build a luxurious new yacht in October 2011. The Mail backed the campaign with several lengthy articles and an impressive artist’s impression of what the yacht might look like (complete with a theatre and a deep sea submersible). However, the campaign sank without trace until 16^th January 2012 when The Guardian published a leaked letter from Education Secretary from Michael Gove.

Gove’s letter suggested that: “in spite, and perhaps because of the austere times” it would be an “excellent” idea to investigate the idea of a new royal yacht.

Much of the reaction to Gove’s suggestion has been covered by the Guardian and the Mail. But could it be that the real barometer of public opinion to the issue can be found in cyberspace? While Gove’s letter was a lengthy affair, many voters have given their reaction to it in far-more succinct 140-word tweets.

Brandwatch history of mentions of ‘Royal Yacht’

By using social media monitoring tool Brandwatch it is possible to see that the number of mentions of the phrase ‘Royal Yacht’ on the internet spiked dramatically on January 16^th when Gove’s letter was first published.

There were 8,720 mentions of ‘Royal Yacht during the period 11^th January to 24^th January 2012. Brandwatch’s sentiment-monitoring software identified that:

13 per cent of mentions were positive
22 per cent were negative
65 per cent were neutral

Tellingly, Twitter hosted the most number of mentions (84 per cent) with Facebook hosting 12 per cent and ‘other’ (online newspapers, forums and blogs) accounting for five per cent.

Twitter-users tended to be more negative than people expressing their opinion on other platforms; 43 per cent of tweets were negative, compared to 22 per cent of all tweets.

The pro-yacht argument was represented on Twitter by re-tweets of supportive articles such as a Daily Telegraph piece by Graeme Archer which insisted that “the monarch is a defining landmark of the country and should be treated as such”.

Some typical negative tweets included re-tweets of a spoof article entitled “Royal yacht plans scrapped in favour of Diamond Jubilee pedalo” and a comment which asked the government:

“Will you be using this year’s cohort of unemployed school leavers to help build the royal yacht?”

Sentiment about the Diamond Jubilee

Adverse reaction to the yacht seems to have caused a slight rise in negative sentiment regarding the Diamond Jubilee (the red line on the chart above). However positive sentiment (the green line) also increased on January 16^th and both levels have now reverted to the level which existed before Gove’s letter was leaked.

Sentiment surrounding Michael Gove

Which brings us to Michael Gove; Gove had the highest ratio of negative sentiment of all three topics (the other two being ‘Royal Yacht’ and ‘Diamond Jubilee’) but perhaps unpopularity is just the normal lot of a coalition government minister.

The Guardian – rather than the Daily Mail which launched the original pro-yacht campaign – hosted more mentions (2.4 per cent) of the topics than any other sites bar Twitter and Facebook.

While the Brandwatch monitoring tool does give a neat breakdown of where and when conversations surrounding the yacht are taking place, it can’t answer one mystery relating to the idea of a ‘Diamond’ boat.

How would such a ship be built in time for the start of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in June?

James Christie is an Editor at Social Media Agency No Pork Pies.

Top SEO Trumps Blogging Competition

Heather Buckley — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:48:24 +0000

The great Top SEO Trumps Blog Off has begun!

We have been slaving away creating the top SEO Game of the Decade. To get your hands on one of these limited edition Top SEO Trumps packs we are inviting you to take part in our Top SEO Trumps Blog Off!

Here’s a preview of how the cards look:

Simply write a blog post that meets the conditions below to be in for a chance to win.

There are 46 Top SEO Faces from the SEO world, each ranked by:

Popularity on the web
Twitter followers
Google+ contacts
Fanciablility (we are keeping our judges a secret for this category)
Geek Cred

Can you guess who is hiding behind Danny Sullivan? If you can’t guess or want to see the other 45 Top SEOs then you can follow all those who made it into to pack by creating your own SEO circle from this one we made earlier, just click on the image to view or add this circle in Google+:

35 Limited Edition Top SEO Trumps packs are up for grabs.

Anyone can enter: SEOs, marketing people, social media specialists, bloggers, content marketers, and students, anyone who thinks they can write a good blog.

There are so many ways of winning that the playing field is wide open, there is a really good chance of winning so it’s worth a go. As all great SEO’s and Content marketers know, generating great content is just par for the course anyway. What have you got to lose?

Not only that, if you are one of our 35 finalists we will publicise your fine post using our many social media accounts, and link to it from all of our resources and blogs, as well as on our own well ranked site, so it would be good for your SEO too.

All you have to do is what you do best: write a great blog post.

How to win

Write a blog post that contains a link either to one of these links
http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/seo-top-trumps OR http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/seo/
Tweet a link to your post to: @sbttraining with the message: “My SEO Trumps entry” and the Hashtag #seotoptrumps

It’s as easy as that!

For example if this was my entry I would tweet:

@sbttraining My Top SEO Trumps entry http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/seo-top-trumps (or shortened version) #seotoptrumps

You can publish your blog post anywhere (not necessarily on your own blog) as long as you identify yourself as the author somewhere in the post and tweet the link with hashtag as above.

After the closing date April 1st 2012

Votes will be counted and verified and prizes will go to the authors of the winners of the following categories:

The 5 funniest posts
The 5 most original posts
The 5 most useful posts
The top 5 posts that drive the most traffic to the destination link.
The 5 top most liked posts on Facebook – where that information is available
The 5 most +1’s on Google Plus
The 5 most tweeted posts – where that information is available

Good luck and get blogging!

Become a future top SEO trump with our many SEO related courses. SEO training will provide you with the best practice approach to optimising websites and content for higher rankings, you can then use the knowledge learnt on our Social Media course to market your website and build strong brand identity. If you want to measure how your site is doing (and your social media efforts) then Google Analytics training is essential, while Advanced Google Analytics training is available for those who already use it on a regular basis. Don’t forget, we also now provide Content Marketing training – great for building brand and author identity whilst gaining valuable backlinks!

SEO Predictions for 2012

Daniel Twigg — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:49:36 +0000

Look into my crystal ball...

2012 has historically been a hot year for predictions. The finishing of the Mayans cryptic calendar has been touted as a sign of the ‘end of the world’ by many a pessimist, citing Nostradamus’ prophecies as the evidence they need that the end is nigh.

Luckily, not all predictions for next year have to be so gloomy; there are plenty of developments yet to come out in the tech world. here are our top SEO predictions for the new year.

Google service integration

Now the most used browser on the web, Google Chrome has always offered more than just a smooth and seamless web browsing experience. With Google having their fingers in a lot of pies, many of their services are becoming integrated with the browser.

Google services such as Google Docs, which is already proving itself as an excellent file sharing facility, and Google+ (which is covered as part of our Social Media training course), the rival to Facebook which is picking up steam, will find themselves more embedded with Google’s software, encouraging a growth in collaboration and sharing.

The ability to install a wide variety of apps and extensions to your browser not only gives you a tailored browsing experience it also opens the platform up to being more than just a browser. Expect to see these built upon, with Chrome borrowing from Google’s Android mobile operating system’s seamlessly customisable app and widget based set up.

The new social sharing revolution

While Facebook is still the daddy of the Social Media world, Google+ Business profile pages still have a lot to offer. Using these pages to share content will become a vital tool in your SEO tool box, especially with the potential of Google+ having more of a stronger bearing on Google’s search results in the near future.

Death to spam

Google have always prided themselves on working on methods of detecting bad content, the kind of content that you would find festering away in your emails spam box. While it may not be possible to completely eradicate this digital menace, measures to minimise gratuitous backlinking through poor quality content, affecting many SEO campaigns, will be made, changing the way you go about content marketing. A more cautious vetting process will have to come into place in order not to negatively affect your rankings, with extra care required to:

Choose which guest posts you publish. Do they have a good page rank and authority?
Choosing who you offer guest posts to. Good quality content should be enough to help get you in with more respected blogs and sites with a decent page rank. Poor quality material will do nothing to persuade these sites to publish your work.

Edit: Amusingly, when sharing this post on social media, the first comment we received was an offer to buy Ugg Boots. It seems that human spamming is alive as ever!

2012: the year the web went mobile

There is no doubt that the mobile web really took off in 2011, but this is just the beginning. With the popularity of smart phones only rising expect to see more of an impact on ecommerce as SEO. Making use of location based services such as geo tagging, expect to see more mobile web features spill out into the real world, leading to a new real-time, real-world marketing format for businesses. High-street Browsing Optimisation maybe?

Giving businesses a new more creative way to interact with their clients, apps offer new revenue streams as well as a method of communicating with customers. This is why we expect to see the use of apps increase, with large growth in sales. As a key part of both the tablet (whose owners took up 14.5% of internet users in 2011 according to Emarketeer, who also predict that this will rise to 22.9% in 2012), and smart phone industries we predict that apps will become increasingly diverse and complex, with mobile optimisation becoming an essential part of any SEO strategy in 2012. This is why Silicon Beach Training now offers Android App Training and iPhone App Training to compliment our popular SEO and Social Media training courses.

Search results: now it’s personal

Your search and social media information are becoming even more important tools in creating customised, bespoke search results. Information such as your location, search history, Google+ profile information and data from your Gmail account will become increasingly important factors when performing web searches, relying more on social engagement to make connections between businesses and potential clients.

Social Media Marketing, It’s Christmas Every Day

Heather Buckley — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:45:06 +0000

Christmas Cards – the first form of mass communication?

Sir Henry Cole commissioned the first Christmas card in London in 1843. He was a busy and rich businessman who had tired of the practice of writing letters to friends and family every festive season (which was traditional then for those who could afford postage costs).

He came up with the idea and commissioned illustrator John Callcott Horsley to design it. The illustration of a family with a child drinking wine proved controversial but turned out to be a phenomenal success. How many business ideas still remain popular after 100 years?

First Christmas card

So what has that got to do with Social Media?

Well, Cole had helped introduce the Penny Post three years earlier. This allowed people living in Great Britain and Ireland to send letters weighing 1/2 ounce or less to anywhere within the kingdom for one penny. Sir Henry Cole had played a leading role in pushing for the Penny Post, believing cheap and easy communication was needed for the growth of business. The masses took advantage of this to send Christmas cards; it was no longer only for the rich and aristocratic. So you see the Christmas card was the first commercial mass communication system, designed as a way to offer seasonal greetings without having to write out hundreds of personal messages.

Make something special and original

How do you feel when someone makes something just for you? A homemade Christmas card, a hand knitted scarf, a Christmas bouquet made from hand picked holly tied with a crimson satin ribbon. You feel special. Successful social media marketing is all about making people feel special, it’s about appealing to what makes us human, it’s about personalisation, connectivity and conversation.

Google, we know, likes fresh content, but fresh doesn’t just mean hot off the press, fresh means different, unique, quirky and new. Writing really fresh content is more much more effective than rewriting old ideas and quick fix posts, have a bit more fun. If you spend more time on coming up with original ideas that will appeal to your customers, your gift to them if you like, they will be much more likely to share, enjoy and remember you.

I’m not just talking about your own web content. With content marketing becoming the most effective way to link build, SEO companies, marketing professionals and individuals are all jumping on the band wagon, churning out the same old content, anything quick and easy just to get the links out quickly. Link building has always been a tedious and monotonous task, but there is another way…

Christmas is about being generous

As I have already mentioned, content marketing should not be the same as article spinning. The real secret to great content marketing is to give away your best writing. I know the feeling you get when you have just polished off that great piece of writing, you want to keep it for yourself. But wait, give generously and you will reap rewards. If you write great content and give it away, you can earn respect from great bloggers with attractive ranking and a wide social following. Remember, if your article is really that great then people are going to share it and the pages with the most social shares will have the best page rank and authority according to Google.

Think about those who receive your generous gifts

Forget the boring old gift sets, step away from the socks! One of the most common social media mistakes is to forget about your audience. Think hard about what your target audience, your clients and customers, really want. Give them something useful, give them something that will make them laugh and brighten their day, or give them something that will help them achieve something. Give them something they will unwrap and enjoy, not something to chuck in the useless gift pile.

Christmas is a time for Sharing

Come to Brighton for your Training - Image by Brighton Photographer Katariina Jarvinen - http://www.lighttrick.co.uk/

Don’t just share your own content; share the best content you find on the web with others. Indentify those influencers and share their content, that way they will be more inclined to share yours.

Sprinkle with glitter

Create content that sparkles. Take notes of things that catch your eye, what was it about that article that made you want to read or share it. Think of catchy titles, sparkling wit, entertainment value, originality.

Images are also important, even those you give away with your guest posts. A brilliant image will sell your article. I use Photoshop all the time to create images to fit my subject. I often create caricatures of the people I’m referencing. Deck your posts with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la.

Happy Christmas form Silicon Beach Training ;)

Why not treat yourself to one of our Social Media and SEO Courses in Brighton for the new year. Maybe even a Photoshop course to spruce up your fantastic content, or an iPhone or Android App Training course to supercharge your marketing . After all that virtuous generosity and giving don’t forget to treat yourself!

Social Media’s Four Degrees of Separation and the Global Village

Craig Charley — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:00:25 +0000

Facebook’s latest blog asks you to consider that the person sitting next to you in a crowded place is likely to know a friend of a friend of a friend of yours. The article argues that the widespread adoption Social media makes this is even more likely. The changes in the way we consume and share content makes it likely that any post you read, share or publish on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. could be read by one or more people on your commute to work.

Make sure you’re up to speed with all the latest Facebook changes with our COMPLETE GUIDE TO FACEBOOK TIMELINE. After reading you’ll know about all the new features and we’ve even provided a FREE Facebook Timeline Photoshop template so that you can create your own cover image!

On Monday Facebook released two studies that looked at the ‘anatomy of Facebook’, the most interesting takeaway from the data released is that there are only 4 degrees of separation between Facebook users. This figure that has shrunk since 2008 when it was originally claimed by Frigyes Karinthy and popularised by a play written by John Guare, that everyone was on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth. As social networks and connections grow, is Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village becoming a Global Cul De Sac?

Anatomy of Facebook

This isn’t the first study of its kind. Earlier this year research showed the average degree of separation between Twitter users to be only 3.43. However, due to limitations of that study and the more common practice of following celebrities and weak acquaintances, the Facebook study is grabbing more headlines. Unlike the Twitter study, which was limited in the number of tests, Facebook examined all 721 million active Facebook users. That’s over 10% of the world’s population! Add to this the more personal approach to Facebook in which connections are more likely to be both real-life and digital and yesterday’s figures give the most accurate study of social networks to date.

Facebook’s study shows that:

721 million users studies share 69 billion friendships
50% of Facebook users have over 100 friends while the average friend count is 190 (skewed by users with 1000′s of friends)
99.6% of all pairs on Facebook are connected by 6 hops (5 degrees)
92% are connected by only 5 hops (4 degrees)
The number of hops has decreased from an average of 5.28 in 2008 to the 4.74 in 2011
4 degrees becomes 3 degrees when the data is restricted to single countries
84% of connections are between users in the same country
Users tend to cluster towards age groups, especially for younger generations

While this article looks at global connections it is interesting to note that a large number of connections are local/age based. This trend is strongest for users around their 20′s – as they’re more likely to befriend school, college and university acquaintances and not have made many connections around the world. However, for the sharing of information a somebody in Brighton only needs one friend in another country to share their content and they hav global reach.

Degrees of Separation and the Small World Experiment

Stanley Milgram’s research in the 1960′s is often associated with the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’. While he did not use the phrase himself, his experiment produced results which helped coin the phrase in popular terminology. The idea behind the six degrees of separation is that everybody in the world is only six steps away from each other.

Milgram tested this with an experiment in which people were given the name of a person at random and asked to send a letter to them with as few steps as possible – the one rule was that you must send the letter to somebody you know. The results of the experiment drew an average of 6 steps between the first and last contact and has led to the common belief that we are all 6 degrees away from each other. The phrase has made it into popular culture with the film Six Degrees of Separation starring Will Smith and the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea of the Kevin Bacon game is to connect an actor to Kevin Bacon in as few steps as possible – they are then given a Bacon number depending on proximity.

Stanley Milgram called his research the ‘Small World Experiment’ and the idea was to show how vast distances (he set up his experiment to span both geographical and social distances) can be shrunk through personal connections.

Facebook’s study takes Milgram’s research to a whole new level. Upping the data sample to 721 million people across the globe gives a better picture of global social networks and the distance of paths between connections. If we take the small world experiment as reliable data and compare it to Facebook’s study then we have lost 2 degrees in 50 years and the figure is still shrinking. These graphs from Facebook show that the four degrees are shrinking even further:

As you can see the line is shifting to the left, showing the hop distance has shrunk between 2008-2011. As both Facebook and the internet grow and spread around the globe the hop distance will shrink even further.

Facebook’s Global Village

The concept of the Global Village was popularised by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960′s. McLuhan predicted the internet when he that a future medium will extend consciousness and that computers will be used for research, communication and a form of mass library with instant retrieval of data.

The implications of the Global Village meant that as people were connected to each other round the world and were able to spread information almost instantly with one another they would become more aware of their global responsibilities in a way unseen in a time before phones and computers.

This concept has had a dramatic demonstration this year with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests. Many have commented that neither would have been possible without the internet and social media. Instant communication has allowed rapid organisation on a rapid and vast scale. One Tweet or Facebook message sent out and shared has allowed for huge groups to assemble within hours of the original message – leading to widespread protests around the world which would not have been previously possible. It has also allowed those inside the protests to broadcast out, giving a new, alternative version of events to the news.

Facebook has shrunk the globe. While 10 years ago you may have been able to connect with somebody in another country via email, phone and letter, Facebook allows for instant communication and also a chance to see into their private lives. Somebody in the UK can ‘friend’ someone in Japan on Facebook and immediately see what the look like, who their friends are, their likes, interests and job. Often we know more information about our global Facebook friends that we do about the neighbours on our street.

You often hear older generations talk about how everybody used to know each other on their street and how they would leave their doors unlocked and have street parties. Well, this practice has spread to the internet. You now know everything about your internet friends and have unprecedented access to their life as they provide you with regular ‘updates’.

Changes in Sharing

So why are the degrees of separation decreasing? What impact does this have on the way we share information?

The big difference in sharing from Milgram and McLuhan’s days is from one-to-one sharing to many-to-many sharing. In the past, people have had to rely on one-to-one sharing and one-to-many sharing to spread information around the globe. This type of sharing includes telephone, letters and e-mail. While you could say that e-mail allows many-to-many sharing (chain letters for example) it is not the most practical as it still breaks down each connection individually and does not allow for mass participation.

Social Networking has created many-to-many sharing and has revolutionised the way information is shared. Google+’s new Ripples feature shows this sharing in action:

Google+ Ripples of a Dalai Lama Post

As the image demonstrates, the original post shared by the Dalai Lama was shared out to his entire network, who then shared it themselves. When other big influencers such as Google bigwigs Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra shared the post it encouraged even more sharing. According to Google this post had 2,552 shares. If you consider that the Dalai Lama, Sergey Brin and Vic Gundotra have 1 million followers between them and then add on the followers of the other 2,500 users who shared the post and one piece of information has had incredible exposure – on the scale of a global news website or national television news.

Unlike those platforms, social networks allow users to reply to posts and to add their own thoughts when sharing them. When reading my claim at the start of this article that it is likely that somebody on your train has read a post that you have read, shared or posted you may have tutted in disbelief but after seeing these figures it is easy to imagine this as a possibility.

Perhaps in 10 years it will be possible to have a mutual friend (however arbitrary – a celebrity for example) with everyone on your train who uses social networks.

Imagine if your business was at the centre of the ripples diagram above. Going viral – it is what marketers dream of. Knowledge of Social Media is essential is today’s digital marketplace so make sure you’re up to scratch with Silicon Beach Training’s Social Media Course.

Images courtesy of sagindie and Mishel Churkin on Flickr.

Why Inspiration Should Never Party With Plagiarism

Heather Buckley — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:04:28 +0000

Image by gnuckx on flickr

If you are regularly guest blogging and publishing content in order to get quality back-links and provide fresh content for your website, then we think you are doing a great service for your SEO and Social Media strategy.

After the lastest Google freshness update, content marketing has become the most powerful weapon in your artillery, the most respected authorities in the world of SEO are all agreed on this one. Looking for the best and most popular posts on the web is a must if you want to keep up with what’s hot and what’s popular (this is all important for those vital media shares) but what is acceptable and what amounts to simple plagiarism? It’s not just a moral dilema, Google will penalise duplicate content.

If you need more help with your SEO and social media then we offer some great deals on SEO Training, Google Analytics courses and social media training. Below Christopher Fielden, a published author, offers his opinions on the subject of plagiarism - all in his own words!

Plagiarism Definition

If you nick someone else’s idea and pretend it is your own, that’s plagiarism.

Inspiration Definition

If you see something which tickles your imagination enough to write an original story, that’s inspiration.

Examples of the Differences Between Plagiarism & Inspiration

If you went to see Lord of the Rings in the cinema and then decided it ‘inspired’ you to write a book about Rodeo Shaggins and his landscape designer, Jan-Flys Ganges, who discover a magical toe ring which has been imbued with the wrath of the dark lord Flower-on and will bring an end to all that is peaceful by covering the land with the unholy stench of ghastly garlic gases unless the ring is transported across Middle Birth and thrown into the fiery belly of Mount Bloom, that is stealing someone else’s ideas. That is plagiarism.

If you watch the films and think that Gollum looks a little like a hairless baboon, and then, from this initial innocent thought, your mental roller-coaster launches into an unexpected creative rampage and you start imagining an interstellar spaceport called Gut Thunder Five, a paradise (forced to be located on an extremely dangerous planet as it is the only viable refuelling location for the Galactic Warp Pathways in Quadrant Dangly Giblets) surrounded by a rainforest ruled by hairless baboons who threaten the existence of the universe itself because, once a millennium, they are able to unleash sonic mind melting music from their rather disturbingly coloured posteriors; so powerful a sound that every creature capable of cognitive thought in the known galaxy has its sanity threatened by the indescribable beauty of their cacophonous rumblings and may end up driven mad by the music’s hypnotic power and thus engage on a kill crazy rampage resulting in the end of all life, that, dear reader who has shown the will and grit of a martyr and thus made it to the end of this ridiculously long sentence, is inspiration.

As you can see, inspiration does not always result in good ideas, but any ideas you come up with should be entirely original.

Plagiarism Checkers

If in doubt, you can use plagiarism checkers like Copyscape to make sure your work is unique. While these can’t really recognise if ideas or plots have been stolen, they can see if content has been copied. So you can pop your work through these checkers to see if some evil internet bandit has stolen your stories and pretended they are their own brain children.

If you are a Victim of Plagiarism

If you have been a victim of plagiarism, I’d suggest visiting plagiarism.org where you can find out about the various courses of action available to you. They also offer free resources, facts, solutions and support for writers who have had their words stolen.

Written by Christopher Fielden, a published author who enjoys sharing writing advice with other writers and using his own short stories as case studies to illustrate how to get published.

Google+ Business Pages Comprehensive Guide

Heather Buckley — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:26:59 +0000

Yesterday, Google unveiled Business Pages for Google+, a feature they’ve been promising for months. At first only a handful of businesses were able to create a page but it now seems (at least for us!) that Google have opened up business pages to the public and business pages are springing up left, right and centre.

Before you do anything else – circle our page on Google+ by clicking this button:

Google+ Business Page Layout

Here’s how our brand new Google+ business page looks:

As the page is similar to a personal profile you can use our guide to pimping your Google+ profile on business pages too. Make sure you stand out from the crowd!

The business page concept will be very familiar to those who use Facebook Pages. Even the way you switch between personal and business profiles with a drop down menu is straight from Facebook:

Using your Google+ Business Page

Google+ business pages function in the same way as personal profiles. You can post updates, links, photos, videos and more and you have a home feed of the people you follow.

One major difference to other social media marketing tools is that you can’t add people to your circles unless they have already circled your business page from their personal profile. So you have to wait for people to circle you before you can circle them back. However, you can add other business pages. This is quite a challenge to all those who were drooling at the thought of Google+ as a marketing tool. Businesses now have to rely on promoting their page through other channels, personal Google+ profiles and most importantly they need a good existing brand reputation to gain followers. Again, this is very similar to Facebook pages which also allow you to ‘like’ other pages but not Add Friends.

This is going to make it very hard for small businesses and start ups to create a brand identity on Google+, in fact you will need to use other channels in place first to promote the page. On the plus side this will go some way to stop spam from businesses on Google+ as they can’t just add everyone but it does severely limit Google+ as a marketing tool. Perhaps that’s what Google want?

While this does in some way limit your reach – you can’t add en masse – it actually increases the value of your followers. Everyone who has added you to their circles has done so because they value you as a company and will listen to what you have to say. Bad for numbers, great for customer interaction.

Optimise you Google+ Business Profile

Relevant Links

Don’t miss this opportunity to add relevant links to all of your other Social Media profiles, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. Include any affiliate or partner sites. You can add these in the “About Section” of your profile.

Content

You know the mantra “Content is king”, make sure you include your keywords whilst making sure it is clear, legible, accurate and useful. You can also add links to your introduction on your about page, but be careful to make them neat and relevant, you don’t want to come across as a link farm.

Pictures

Googles’ albums look beautiful. Make sure all your images are high quality, post good quality pictures regularly, they will show up in Google image search, give them keyword rich titles, tags and descriptions. this is a good place to share info-graphics about your niche.

Other Google+ Business Page optimisation pointers:

Your page name will be the title ( the name in the browser tab).
Your page name + tagline will be the META description of the page.

Google+ Direct Connect

Flying in the face of claims that Google promote their products over others in their search engine, Google have added a feature to Google search in which adding a ‘+’ when searching for a brand will bring up their Google+ business profile. This doesn’t yet work for all pages and so might take a while to become fully functional.

By providing users with Google+ Direct Connect, Google are really pushing social interaction for businesses. It will be interesting to see if people begin to search for Google+ profiles instead of company websites as they go in search of up to date information and a chance to interact – often lacking from many websites.

Hangouts for Businesses

One of the best features we can see is using the ‘hangouts’ feature. This will allow businesses to communicate face-to-face with customers on a regular basis.

Some of the possible uses of this feature include:

Q+A sessions with customers - allowing them to pose questions to a human face enhances consumer trust in a brand as they know they aren’t receiving an automated reply.
Competitions – set up a competition in which you pose a question during a hangout and you could drive a huge amount of traffic onto your page at once.
Employee meetings – one default business page circle is ‘team members’, by ensuring all your team members are part of this circle you can use hangouts for cross-department meetings and as an alternative to finding a meeting place.
Client meetings – Many businesses already use hangouts to connect with clients and hold face-to-face meetings without being in the same room. By setting these up through a company profile instead of a personal profile the process becomes more professional.

Google+ Business Page Problems

As is to be expected with the launch of a new product we have encountered a few problems.

Not being able to find your page to edit it! You need to log on as the administrator> go to your stream/home on your personal profile and hover just to the right of your profile picture, a drop-down will appear with your page/s. Alternatively go to the right of the stream/home of your business profile to sign back into your personal profile.
Not yet showing up in Google Search results – at the moment very few businesses appear when searching using the ‘+’ symbol in Google search. This is probably a combination of Google taking a while to recognise new businesses and the sheer number of businesses creating pages right now.
Not able to add followers – We’ve already mentioned how you can’t add followers as a business profile. While this is fine for global corporations with recognised brand identity (ie. Pepsi) this does make it very hard for small businesses and start ups to build a following on Google+. In fact it relies on businesses to use other marketing channels to encourage people to sign up on Google+. See above for why this could be a good thing.
Only one registered user – As a platform for a company brand, having only one registered user for a company page is very limiting. For a large company with a number of employees using social media channels they would all need access to the personal profile the page was created with – not ideal.
Notifications - As yet pages do not receive notifications alerts (the red numbers that appear top right when logged into your personal profile) so you are not told about new followers and posts to your wall unless you click on the notifications stream.

Hopefully these problems will be ironed out as Google cope with the inundation of new businesses and earn their place alongside Facebook pages.
If you’re new to Google+ and want to get started setting up a business page then make sure you’ve first seen our Google+ Hints and Tips to get you off to a flying start. For a complete overview of Google+ and how it fits into Social Media Marketing as a whole come on our highly recommended 2-day Social Media Training course.

Facebook Security Issues Addressed

Craig Charley — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:37:08 +0000

UPDATE: Facebook Timeline has now gone live! Use our Complete Guide to Facebook Timeline to change your privacy settings so that you don’t unwittingly show off some embarrassing antics from the past! We’ve also included a free Cover Photo Photoshop Template Download and a guide to the new features.

While the infographic doesn’t address issues with default sharing settings that could potential lead to embarrassing info going public, it does reveal a number of methods Facebook does to protect your privacy that you won’t be aware of, charting the security measures you go through from logging in to going offline.

These measures are all focused on reducing spam – Facebook claims less than 4% of shared content on the platform is spam – and protecting your account from hackers. Personal favourites include LinkScanner which automatically checks links for spam when they’re posted on Facebook and the Trusted Friends feature to help you log in to your account when you forget your password or have had your account hacked.

The Trusted Friends feature involves picking some close friends (remember they will be responsible for helping you log in so pick wisely!) who can send you a unique code when you’re locked out – a bit like handing a spare house key to a trusted neighbour just in case. Although this key they can’t use to access your Facebook so it’s not like handing out your password.

We’ll have to see how well Facebook’s security holds up on Saturday if the Anonymous threat to Facebook turns out to be real. Interestingly the reason behind the attack is due to Facebook’s privacy issues!

The only feature we think is missing is a way to address public chain posts which are remarkably similar to the old chain emails, with messages such as ‘If you don’t pass this on to 7 people you will die’ and ‘pass this on 6 friends and you’ll meet the love of your life at midnight’. The current trend is to hide them as text in photos so they’re not picked up by filters. Really this is an issue that has only appeared with the introduction of public sharing and is demonstrating how Facebook is evolving from a private platform of content sharing with friends to a public one where the aim is to get your post shared across the world; and that is why Facebook needs such a tight security process.

Public sharing on Facebook is making it a marketing dream come true – if you want to learn how to make the biggest impact on Social Media then come on our fantastic Social Media Training course, taught by the sea side in sunny Brighton, Sussex. You can even take it with a number of related courses including SEO and blogging by choosing one of our Social Media Packages.

Here is the infographic in full:

Infographic courtesy of Facebook. Edited image courtesy of marko8904 on Flickr.