TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

Marketing

2013 Reviews of the Year

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As 2013 draws to an end, almost everyone is busy either compiling their reviews of the past 12 months, or publishing predictions and trends for 2014.

Predicting the future is always difficult, even when you spend your life watching an industry closely – it’s easy to get caught up in enthusiasm and shorten the timeline that you might have logically thought, and there are always external factors and events which we don’t know about yet which could mix things up a bit more…

Annual reviews can also lead to an overwhelming amount of information and data, but there’s often inspiration to be found, so we’ve compiled some of the 2013 reviews from the big internet names to share:

Tumblr 2013 Year in Review:

Tumblr2013YearinReview

Tumblr has released a big categorised review, including everything from New and Top blogs, to the most popular in Movies, Music, and even Sponsored Posts. Plenty of inspiration and enjoyment to be had, particularly if you’re a fan on animated Gifs.

Pinterest: Top Pins of 2013:

Pinterest2013TopPins

Staying with categorised imagery, Pinterest has also released a ‘top pins’ for 2013, separated in categories such as Home Decor, Art, Design and by country ( UK, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland).

Google: Zeitgeist 2013:

GoogleYearinReview2013

As always, Google has produced a range of videos and data to cover the top searches in 2013. Exploring the data via Google Trends is a bit more useful from a business perspective.

Bing: Review of the Year 2013:

BingReviewoftheyear

Bing has released the 2013 top searches etc in a more traditional article style via MSN news. Strangely they released the url bingtrends.com which redirects to MSN news for the UK. Either way, the information is there.

Facebook: Stories 2013

FacebookStories

Facebook Stories 2013 includes video and the Most Talked About Topics etc near you, as well as personal Year in Review features. Also available in text format for global and US information.

Reddit Top Posts and Stats of 2013:

redditlogo

When you start a look back at 2013 with 56 billion pageviews, 731 million unique visitors and 404,603,286 comments, it’s not been a bad 2013 for Reddit. Also includes top countries, top posts, and highlights from the End of Year awards.

Slideshare Zeitgeist:

Instagram has released blog posts covering 2013 Top Moments, and 2013 Top Locations.

And with a day to go, the most popular articles on TheWayoftheWeb.net in 2013 were:

TheWayoftheWeb quoted in Econsultancy article on SEO

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It’s always nice to be able to contribute to respected websites and publications, particularly when it means I’m quoted alongside some people who I respect a lot in the marketing and search engine optimisation world, such as Rishi Lakhani, for example.

Econsultancy

The  article is a response to Google encrypting even more organic search queries, and features responses by myself alongside Rishi, Andy Heaps, Neil Yeomans and Kevin Gibbons. It’s well worth reading for both the insights in the article and also some good contributions in the comments regarding something which has been seen as a bit of a bombshell for the SEO industry, despite signs it was coming for a long time.

I won’t quote from it too much, but there was one answer I gave which I intend to expand on in a future article:

Could it be good for SEOs, in that it makes it harder for amateurs?

It won’t massively affect larger agencies and companies who can afford the additional time and cost.

But it will damage small businesses, including agencies, who now have an additional challenge to building their businesses, and I think eventually this will hurt both search results and indirectly impact on search usage, as the incumbents for any term become much more entrenched.

I don’t believe making search engine optimisation less accessible is a good thing – the majority of SEO outsourcing isn’t a question of intelligence, but generally one of training, resource and cost, and this continues that trend. I don’t believe that’s good for small businesses in particular, I don’t believe it’s good for consumers who have their choice limited, and I don’t believe it’s good for Google if it is perceived to be closed to all but the big players who can afford enterprise tools.

We work with a wide range of clients, from individual consultants and small businesses to large global manufacturers, and there are great things about working with each size and type of company. The idea that cost will become a restriction to the entry level for quality SEO measurement isn’t a pleasant one.

Google+ adds embedding for posts

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Joining Facebook and Twitter with easier ways to share Google+ content, you can now embed any Public Post made on Google’s social network by selecting the Embed option from the drop-down on every post.

The embed code can then be put onto any website, and will look and function just like it would on Google+, including the ability to follow the author, +1 a post, add comments and read them etc.

Google+ Embedding Posts

There are more details available for developers, including loading the JavaScript asynchronously to improve page load times, explicit rendering and loading etc.

In addition, Google has also integrated Google+ Sign-In’s with Google’s Authorship program, which means that if you sign in with WordPress.com and TypePad, you’ll automatically have your articles associated with your profile. It’s coming to a number of other sites in the future.

Facebook testing new tools for business and personal use

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Facebook continues to quietly launch and test new services for both businesses and individuals. On Monday, they announced that selected news individuals can now integrate real-time information by using either a Public Feed or Keyword Insights API.

That means the likes of Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC, BSkyB and Slate can now hook into a feed of public posts for a specific word, or the total number of posts that mention a specific term in a given time frame, which can also displays anonymous, aggregated results based on gender, age and location.

FBGrowthGraphic_V2

These tools will become available for other media partners and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers in the near future. The benefit for Facebook is that it is likely to be used far more in coverage of news and events, alongside the existing usage of Twitter.

For individual use, Facebook is also testing the option for users to add Professional Skills to their personal profile – it’s similar to LinkedIn, allowing you to add list the skills you’ve acquired in your education and career. It’s currently available on a limited number of personal profiles during testing, and could then be rolled out to all users in the future.

Facebook updates rules for Facebook Page Promotions

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Facebook has made it easier to run promotions on Facebook, which is good news for all page owners. The requirement for all promotions to be run through dedicated applications has now been removed, meaning that you can promote your page and business on your Page Timeline as well as in an app.

That means you can:

  • Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
  • Collect entries by having users message the Page
  • Utilize likes as a voting mechanism

One area which Facebook has now tightened up on is tagging – the new Page Terms now prohibits Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content they are not actually in:

  • It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize
  • It’s not OK to ask people tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize

You can download the full Facebook Promotion Guidelinesas a PDF, here.

TheWayoftheWeb on Facebook
TheWayoftheWeb on Facebook – click to go and Like us.

 

Great news for small businesses:

This is particularly good news for smaller businesses who may not have had the knowledge or resources to choose a good Facebook Promotions or Competition App, or might have found the process to run it confusing.

While we’ve worked with several low cost Facebook Apps for this purpose, starting from a typical cost of $10, it can be slightly time consuming to set up, and dissuades brands from last minute offers, giveaways and competitions, which remains a prime reason for choosing to follow a company on Facebook.

And it will encourage more experimentation with promotions, which is only a good thing.

 

Also good for larger businesses:

It’s also good news for bigger companies, as often promotions and giveaways are constrained by time and effort, rather than budget and availability. This means that bigger Facebook pages will also be able to get more exposure and benefit from any contests and promotions which might be available last thing on a Friday, rather than missing the opportunity due to the hassles of setting up applications.

 

Top tip: Have boilerplate terms and conditions ready to go:

The one thing that all companies and promotions will still require are suitable terms and conditions to be legal in the country in which your business operates. Far too many companies fail to consider this in the planning stage and then find themselves unable to run offers and promotions, so it’s well worth investing some time and effort to ensure you have a standard boilerplate Terms and Conditions which can be easily changed to be applicable for any promotion, and possibly a longer version available via a link to your website.

 

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