Month: April 2012

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How to Add Photos to Facebook Using HootSuite

If you use HootSuite, you may have found out that since Facebook has made some sweeping changes you can no longer add photos to your Facebook updates by clicking the attach file icon to a scheduled status update. For some this has really impacted their use of HootSuite.

Unfortunately HootSuite has not come out and directly addressed this in their forum, but has posted a work around that is not linked to the forum questions but one of our clients found and shared with us. Thanks to Suzanne Patterson of Esprit de Corp for sharing this HootSuite resolution.

  • Click the attach paper clip icon just underneath the HootSuite entry field.
  • Select a TWITTER profile, then select your correct FACEBOOK profile where you want the photo to actually go.
  • Click the upload photo icon under the update entry field.

Note the image will not be posted to your Twitter profile, only used to upload the photo as a workaround due to Facebook’s API.

You can see the visual instructions to perform these actions at HootSuite.

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Google Statistically Documents AdWords and Organic Click Activity

This is a very interesting article and one worth a quick review if you are advertising on Google AdWords or thinking of advertising on Google AdWords. The title is “Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality“. The study done by Google, in a nutshell, shows that when an advertiser with high organic placement stops advertising on Google AdWords, the high placement does not replace the click activity from AdWords.

“A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlighted the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when search ads are turned off. We found that on average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results. In addition, we found that on average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental. The estimate for average incrementality of the ad clicks increases when the rank is lower; 82% of the ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic search result is between ranks 2 and 4, and 96% of the ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser’s organic result ranked lower than 4.”

The bottom line is that even with high organic placement AdWords ads will bring more traffic and clicks in to your website. The lower your organic placement the higher percentage of click activity will be from AdWords. When you stop Google AdWords ads, the traffic from your organic placement will not rise, but rather your click activity will actually drop as much as 50% for top placed websites and as much as 82% for lower placed websites. The lower your organic position the more important AdWords is for click activity and the boost of exposure.

From these findings even top ranked website can benefit significantly from an AdWords campaign. If you are interested in trying AdWords, we invite you to visit our services page to review our AdWords account management program.

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AdWords Exact Match and Phrase Match Changes Coming in May

AdWords announced this past week that in mid May they will be changing the way they use exact match and phrase match keywords for ad delivery. In the very near future, AdWords will imitate adCenter in using plurals and misspellings of words you have set with these selected match types in addition to the specific words and phrases.

Google has stated that:

“Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.”

You can read the full article and see some examples of this new behavior on the AdWords blog.

As Google feels that they can identify the intent of a search from the query and search history, it makes sense to deliver ads to users when their is small variation and even though the specific keywords may not be in an advertisers keyword list. I consider this enhancement good news, and one of the things I particularly liked about Microsoft adCenter which supplies the pay per click ads for Bing and Yahoo.

 

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Helping Your Blog Writer Do A Better Job

Blogging is a core business for my firm, McCord Web Services. I have found that website owners that take a little bit of time to help our writer get their footing, help us to do a better job delivering what they need for organic search placement and development of web authority.

Here are a few tips to help your blog writer when you start blogging.

  • Make sure to let your writer know your audience – age, gender, typical demographics.
  • Supply a short list of about ten keyword phrases that you think people will use to find you.
  • Offer a short selection of links of blog sites that you like for style and content.
  • Let them know which two or three blogs you read in your own industry.
  • Be patient, it will typically take four to eight blog posts for the writer to hit a stride in writing for you.
  • Make sure to read your own blog and help the writer to understand what you like so that they can do more of that particular topic or style of blog post.
  • As you browse the web send them links of content that you think would make a great background for a blog post. This actually helps them to know what you like.

The more initial interaction you have with your blog writer the better and more effective the blog posts will be for your personal business needs. That doesn’t mean that you need to do these steps beyond the initial break in period, but for the first week to two weeks your input will be hugely helpful and will shape the future of your blog post content.

If you are looking for quality blog writers for your own blog, I invite you to review our services.