Got Facebook Fatigue? (Sept-27-2013)

Facebook, once the center of social connection, seems to be now losing its addictive craze. But what could cause such a predominate part of social interactions to slowly take a fall back to Twitter and Instagram?

 

Brand pages are most contributing to the fall of Facebook. Everyone has it so I see why our favorite brands would want to have a profile themselves. It seems like brands have realized how useful Facebook is for creating awareness and generating conversation. Ads and posts bombard us consistently by brands we do and do not choose to follow. The content can be good, but the amount of content we see on Facebook every day has begun to annoy us and mix the good posts into the lump of bad ones. It was only a matter of time before sidebar ads became posts. Right in your feed all day, every day. 

 

So does posting ads and “vanilla” content work for generating sales? No, brands are getting confused about what Facebook is useful for, conversation.

 

How can a brand differ itself from the rest? Engaging, relative and useful content should be the aim and focus. If you are posting relative content that is useful or interesting in one way or another it breaks that brand away from the rest. Understanding what they want to get out of having a Facebook profile and what use it will have for them is key to maintaining and collecting followers or ”likers”.

 

Becoming less of a brand and more of a “real person” will put you above the rest. Create conversation and post interesting, relative content. 

 

Read more about this topic here: http://soshable.com/disconnected-are-brands-contributing-to-facebook-fatigue/#more-10139

 

 

What is a Destination URL?

A Destination URL is the URL that is shown with your ad in a search. This usually a green link at the bottom or top of the description. When someone clicks on it, the Destination URL that is set will take the searcher to your website. This is not to be confused with Display URL. However; the Destination URL and the Display URL do go hand in hand.

(visual example)

The URL shown at the bottom of the ad is the Display URL, but it doesn’t mean that you have to send everyone to the homepage of your website, especially when they are doing a specified search. And why would you if you could give them what they are looking for with just one click?

Destination URL: The URL for the page in a website where you would like people to be sent after they click on your ad.

The Destination URL can be set to send people to a specific page within your website that is tailored to their search. This is beneficial because then they wont have to spend forever searching for something within your website when you can just hand it to them.

It is recommended that you use a URL in the same domain as your website, but it doesn’t have to be the same as the Display URL.

Example:      Display URL: http://www.blah.com

               Destination URL: http://www.blah.com/gohere

The benefits for you are that your potential customer doesn’t have to waste their time searching thorough your website for the reason you came up in their search feed. This makes it easier for them to make a purchase decision right there on the spot. Rather than having them have time to change their mind when they get frustrated trying to find the un-findable. (We have all been there).

For more information you can visit: http://adwords.blogspot.ca/2006/05/display-vs-destination-urls.html

Spiders and SEO

Lets say you want to find a service, product or business, but you don’t know where to start. So you go to Google, type in the search box, and click enter. Did what you where looking for pop up? Maybe it’s ranked 3rd down on the Google list, but it is still right there in front of you. Ever wonder how Google manages to find exactly what you’re looking for? Or how they rank it?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is key to helping businesses, products or services be found by taking all the data on the internet and sorting through it. Billions and billions of pages and links can be sorted through in milliseconds. But what or who does all the sorting?

Determining importance is the “Spiders” job.

Spiders (a.k.a. “crawlers”), are the electrical sorting robots that sort through all the links within the web. They try to determine what is and isn’t important for you and how to rank it. Incorporating “popularity” of a page into the metrics of the search helps them determine the importance of a page. The more popular a page, site or document is, the more important its data must be.

Do they do a good job? Usually yes, but it isn’t just up to the robots to help you find what you need.

SEO is a complex process no doubt, but once a business understands what it is and how to use it, they can link themselves to the top of the search list.

Businesses, products and services want you to find them just as much as you want to. Using good SEO and structuring themselves with the proper links, keywords, and how they are all bundled together helps you to find them. But how do they build in the links, keywords, and even pictures together to make it found and pushed to the top of the sorting process?

This is a part of what we will be beginning to understand this semester. This is fascinating to me, and  I excited to learn more.

If you would like to know more about SEO and how it works please visit, http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate