Social Media Monitoring Case Study - Eurostar at Christmas

Our advanced social media monitoring tools are capable of capturing up to 3 months worth of data from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms that cannot picked up by Google Alerts or other free tools.

This means that we are able to get the complete picture of mentions online for any given query, giving us a unique and valuable insight into the opinions and sentiment of social media users on a particular topic.

To test the capabilities of our tools, we chose to do a case study using the example of Eurostar over the Christmas period. Christmas is a tremendously busy time for the pan-European train operator, and we wanted to see what an analysis of social media traffic over that period could tell us about Eurostar’s reputation online.

The data we gathered and the analysis we subsequently carried out threw up some fascinating results, and we compiled our findings in a report, along with a set of conslusions and recommendations based on those findings.

Click here to read the Eurostar case study report.

Posted in General, Resources, Social Media, Tools | No Comments »

How Blogging Can Improve Your Site’s SEO

We’re big fans of blogging as a way to boost your site’s SEO performance, but sometimes it can be hard to convince clients of their value. For some, the thought of having to add new articles every week is daunting both because of the time involved and the worry that they won’t be able to come up with enough content to fill the posts.

So why are blogs so useful for SEO, and what can you do to make your blogging as easy and effective as possible?

The Benefits of Blogging

Blogs are a fast and simple way to upload content to the web. Blogging platforms like Wordpress and Tumblr are extremely search engine friendly, and if you have picked the right keywords you could see your posts appear in the search engine rankings just minutes after you posted them!

Blogs also have a positive effect on the SEO of your whole website, because Google picks up on the fact that you are adding regular fresh content, and considers this to be an indication that the site is credible, authoritative and up to date.

A weekly blog also allows you to shine a spotlight on different parts of your site with every post. Selecting a different product or service to talk about each time, and giving links back to relevant bits of your site will ensure the SEO benefit is shared around the entire site, not just focused on the homepage and the blog itself.

(The best way to link to other pages is by using carefully selected keywords embedded into your copy e.g. “Key Multimedia is a leading Dorset SEO agency based in Dorchester”).

Top Blogging Tips

The internet is full of abandoned blogs. People usually start with the best of intentions, but lack the discipline to carry on posting regularly. Google hates a quitter and does not look kindly on blogs that have been left untouched for months or even years. Start blogging only on the understanding that it will be a commitment that you have to fulfil for a significant period of time.

The good news is that you don’t actually need to write heaps of content – about 300 words should be enough for an average blog post. Keep it short and sweet, and adopt a more informal, conversational tone than you would normally use for content writing.

When it comes to promoting your blog, make full use of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, as well as social bookmarking tools such as Reddit. If your content is good enough, you may be able to get other bloggers/websites linking back to your blog, which is enormously beneficial from an SEO perspective.

We blog regularly for a number of our clients, so if you really feel writing is not your strong point, or if the demands of your business make doing a regular blog impossible, then why not give us a call? We can design, set up and write a highly optimised blog for your business utilising all our SEO tools and know-how. To find out more, get in touch on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »

Can Google Predict the Christmas Number One?

In an era of ever-falling music sales, the battle for the Christmas number one is one of the few events we still manage to get excited over each year. This time around it’s a straight head-to-head between X Factor victors Little Mix and late favourites The Military Wives Choir.

With just two sleeps to go until the big day, we at the Key Multimedia office were wondering what Google could tell us about the fight for the top spot. Can we use their search data to effectively gauge the popularity of the two singles, and predict whether the Wives have what it takes to ruin Simon Cowell’s Christmas?

Here’s a graph showing the volume of searches for both contenders over the last 30 days. It shows a significantly higher level of interest in Little Mix, culminating in the huge peak on the 11th when they won the X Factor final.

However, when we look at the data for this week only (when the sales are actually being counted) we can see that it’s a much closer contest, with a late surge pushing the Military Wives out above Little Mix. It looks like the Wives have picked up momentum at exactly the right time, putting them in pole position for the Christmas top spot this year.

So there’s my prediction. Of course it’s a very crude exercise, but I think it’s a neat way of showing the kind of predictive insights that Google’s vast resources of data can give us. Google search data is now being used to forecast everything from flu outbreaks to house price fluctuations and unemployment figures, so it’s a godsend for any marketer trying to stay one step ahead of the curve and spot the breakthrough trends before they happen.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Pay-Per-Click, Resources, Tools | No Comments »

Choosing the Best Times to Tweet

Knowing the best times to tweet is vital if you are going to make your time spent on Twitter count as much as possible. You want to get your messages out at a time when they are most likely to be seen and engaged with by your followers, rather than just vanishing into the dark recesses of their feeds.

How Can I Work Out My Optimum Tweeting Times?

Well, why not take a look at what the big names are doing? Here’s a list of the UK companies with the largest followings on Twitter. All these firms will have invested heavily in their social media strategies, and done some seriously in-depth research into the best days and times to post. In the early stages of your Twitter campaign, you could certainly do worse than to take a lead from these big hitting companies.

Using a basic Twitter analytics tool, we can get a visual representation of what times a Twitter user is most frequently posting, and when they get the most retweets and replies. So for example if your business is retail, it is well worth taking a look at which times some of the big chain stores are tweeting, and use their know-how to inform your own strategy.

We can see Waterstone’s (@waterstones) tweets are spread widely throughout the week, but they post with increasingly frequency on Monday and Tuesday after about 4pm. This suggests to me that Waterstones are trying to catch people on the last hour or so of their working day, when they will most likely be online and receptive to Twitter messages.

Seeing all the tweets from Visit Britain (@visitbritain) mapped out like this, what really jumps out is the density of tweets on Friday mornings, between 9am and 12pm. Presumably they know this is when people are planning their weekend activities, and are switched on to ideas coming from social media. Tourism businesses take heed!

When are my Followers Online?

While looking at other companies will give you broad insights, to get a more specific understanding of your own optimum tweeting times you need to look at when your followers are online.

The above graph shows what times the followers for one of our local clients, the Dorchester BID (@DorchesterBID), are most commonly on Twitter during the week. For obvious reasons, the peaks coincide with all the main breaks in the working day (10am teabreak, 1pm lunchtime, 5pm just before clocking off) and then it goes up again in the evening from 7-8pm.

We’ve taken this data and applied it to our social media strategy for the BID, meaning that instead of just taking a scattergun approach to pushing out messages, we now schedule their tweets to hit the peak times their followers are online, giving them the maximum possible exposure.

Of course Twitter is a broad church, and there are no absolute rules for the right or wrong time to tweet. Some times are inevitably better than others though, and it’s certainly worth doing a bit of experimenting to discover which times work best for you.

If you’d like to know more, why not give us a call? We’re one of the leading Dorset social media agencies, and you can reach us Monday to Friday 9am-5pm on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Pay-Per-Click, Resources, Social Media, Tools, Website Management | No Comments »

2011 in Online Marketing

Hear that mournful whistle? That’s the winds of change, my friend. 2011 is almost at an end, and it’s been an enormously exciting and dynamic year for online marketing. Here is our round-up of the most important online developments and changes we’ve seen in the last twelve months.

Google Panda Update

In February Google initiated its so-called Panda Update, tweaking the algorhithm the search engine uses to determine rankings in search results. The goal was seemingly to ensure the primacy of original content by demoting ‘content farms’ and other sites which use copied or recycled content. This had a noticeable effect on the article marketing we do, which involves essentially farming out content to other sites in return for links pointing back to our client’s website. It still works, and forms a part of most of the SEO campaigns we run for clients, but it is now no longer the quick win it once was!

Emergence of Mobile Browsing

It’s been on the up for a while now, and 2011 saw the continued rise in popularity of people using smartphones to access their emails and other online content. As of October, it was estimated that just under half of the UK population owned a smartphone, and we can safely assume that proportion is likely to go up a bit further on Christmas morning this year!

This key development is something every business with an online presence needs to be aware of, and in the next year or two we are sure to see a trend towards websites being optimised for mobile browsing. This means taking into account some of the important differences and limitations of mobile, so while an slick all-singing, all-dancing Flash based website might seem like a good idea, when you consider that the most popular smartphone, the iPhone, is unable to render it, it may make more sense for going for something plainer and more universal to avoid losing out on mobile traffic.

Google+

After a few problems getting off the ground in the summer, Google + is motoring on fairly well now, up to 40 million followers worldwide (for comparison, Twitter has 200 million, and Facebook has over half a billion). Time will tell if it can pick up enough momentum to challenge the big two of social media, but since Google + has now introduced brand pages, we think it certainly wouldn’t hurt any businesses setting up their own page and starting to build up their own mini network. Here’s what I wrote about potential SEO and customer engagement benefits of Google+ businesses may see in future.

Changes to Facebook

I wrote a piece on the Facebook changes back in October, and it’s interesting to see how some of the changes have since become an integral part of the Facebook experience, and others have been almost ignored entirely (Facebook video chat, anyone?)

The biggest thing that changed from a marketing perspective was the shift from a purely chronological wall feed to one in which posts are given prominence according to how important to you Facebook deems each one to be. This means that businesses on facebook can no longer just rely on getting as many likes as possible - if an individual ‘likes’ a business but does not ever engage with them, then Facebook will consider posts from that business to be of low relevance, and will bump them right to the bottom of the user’s feed, where they are unlikely to be seen.

Twitter

2011 was above all else surely the year of Twitter. Its role in the revolutions that swept the Arab world showed the incredible power and potential of social media as a tool for uniting people in creative and unprecedented ways. Take the example of the protesters in Egypt, who used the hashtag #cairo to tweet updates on their activities, meaning that even those in the city who didn’t personally know any protesters could easily find out where and when they were gathering, and join the demonstrations themselves.

As well as helping to topple governments in North Africa, Twitter users also caused a major headache for the UK legal system by flouting the super injunction imposed on Ryan Giggs’ off-field antics. A great leveller, Twitter was able to subvert the long-standing monopoly over news and information held by traditional media in this country, probably for good.

So in such a tumultuous twelve months, what was the biggest trending topic of all – the Arab Spring? the death of Steve Jobs? The London riots? The Japanese tsunami? No, in fact more widely talked about on Twitter than all these things was floppy haired teenage singer boy Justin Bieber (click here to see the full list of top Twitter trends in 2011).

As a barometer of stuff people on Twitter care about, the top trends list makes pretty desperate reading, but don’t give up on Twitter just yet. It may have its inane and trivial side, but this year also we’ve seen what a tremendously useful marketing and customer service tool Twitter can be, especially for those businesses who are willing to put the time in and use it the right way.

Just here in Dorchester, we’ve seen local traders take to Twitter with enthusiasm and energy in recent months, creating a vibrant little Twitter community based around the town’s shops, arts organisations and interest groups.

Conclusions

So what lessons have we learnt from the year? Despite changes to the Google algorhithm, content is still king – well-written, relevant content on your website, blog and social media platforms is still the core of any online marketing campaign. Huge new opportunities are opening up in social and mobile web, so it’s vital to stay on top of those and not be left behind. These points are well worth mulling over when you are considering your marketing priorties for 2012, and remember if there’s anything you’d like to discuss with us, you can give us a call Monday to Friday on 01305 755609.

Chris Redhead

Posted in General, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | No Comments »