Instagram announces new business tools
June 1, 2016: Social media managers rejoice: Instagram is rolling out new features for businesses. On May 31, Instagram officially announced a new set of tools that will help businesses monitor their success and reach audiences through ads more seamlessly. This announcement comes after a series of leaked screenshots revealed the look and feel of […]
What kind of businesses are using Facebook Live Video?
May 27, 2016: Facebook has introduced Live Video capabilities to all its members to encourage more personal sharing. While it’s impossible to predict the degree to which businesses, large and small, will flock to live streaming, anecdotal sampling of Facebook’s live streams reveals who the early adopters are. This data is based on a sample of Facebook […]
Twitter tweaks the Tweet
May 26, 2016: Twitter announced this week that it is overhauling the basic structure of the Tweet to better handle the media types often associated with Tweets, which often include multimedia attachments such as GIFs, images, and videos. Today, we’re excited to announce an upcoming set of changes rolling out over the coming months to enable people […]
Local search ads coming to Google Maps
May 25, 2016: On May 24th, Google announced that advertisers will soon have a chance to place local search ads directly onto Google Maps, a service that to date has been ad-free. The announcement was made at a physical press conference in San Francisco and also on Google’s Adwords Blog. Technical documentation for the new Maps-based […]
Google’s new Rich Cards boost Schema
May 25, 2016: Last week, Google introduced “rich cards” via a post to its Webmaster Central Blog. Rich cards are an improved way of displaying Schema-formatted content. Until last week, this content appeared on results pages in a static “rich snippet” with a small thumbnail image (as seen in the center image, below). Now, a […]
Mom blogger quits biz, reveals key tactics
May 24, 2016: Business Insider reports the remarkable story of Josi Denise — a top-flight “Mom Blogger” who quit the business and published an epic rant on what the job actually entails. While the point of Ms. Denise’ lengthy blog post was to lambaste the entire category of Mom Bloggers – and the brands supporting […]
SEO bombshell: 78% of UK businesses surveyed willing to use Negative SEO
May 23, 2016: To assess the willingness of UK-based businesses to engage in negative SEO (the practice of deliberately causing links from “bad neighborhoods” to point to a competitor’s site), UK-based SEO agency ReBoot Online sent a fake e-mail campaign hawking such services. 84 businesses owners, including plumbers, lawyers, accountants, and IT service providers were […]
The most common mistakes businesses make when using LinkedIn
May 19, 2016: LinkedIn offers enormous potential for business people to gain qualified leads and generally extend their reach and influence. But LinkedIn – compared to social networks like Facebook and Twitter – is a complicated environment and both its “rules of engagement” and other requirements are demanding enough to cause many business people to make […]
Google Spaces has launched – but Facebook doesn’t seem to recognize it
May 18, 2016: As more traffic moves to the messaging environment, Google has been very active: last week, it released GBoard – an improved keyboard integrating Google Search designed to make it less cumbersome to share addresses, map locations, and other information via messaging. This week, it launched a new social application (Google calls it […]
Google to begin running ads in the “Images” Search tab
May 17, 2016: Google has seven standard tabs on its home page (“All,” “Shopping,” “Images,” “Videos,” “Maps,” “More,” and “Search Tools”) that let searchers specify the kind of results they want to see. Paid placements have run in four of them (“All,” “Shopping,” “Videos,” and “Maps”) for some time; recently, Google announced that it will […]