Using our own online petitioning site, Twitition.com, we utilised a sample of its 7.6m signatures to gather data on the value of tweets on SERPs positioning, and found that the more tweets a URL receives, the higher up the rankings it sits.
If you’ve ever used Twitition.com, you’ll know that when you sign a Twitition, you send a tweet out containing the Twitition’s URL, so we can assume that a Twitition signature equals a tweet.
Our study found that URLs received a significant boost in Google rankings up to 50 tweets, when the effect seems to level out.
The subsequent benefit of gaining tweets is fairly minimal until around 5,000 tweets, when the average ranking of a URL is 31. URLs with over 7,500 tweets enjoy an average Google ranking of 5, whilst URLs over 10,000 tweets are almost guaranteed first page rankings.
Of course, there could be many factors at play here and we only used Google for this study, but what the results have conclusively shown us is that there is a correlation between number of tweets and Google rankings.
Take a look at the post on Branded3’s B3Labs for more information, and get in touch if you’d like to know more about this and how it could affect your SEO strategy.
Were you caught out on April Fool’s Day by a clever digital PR stunt? There were certainly plenty of weird, wonderful and downright wacky stories shared via social media yesterday.
Everyone enjoys scouring the net or rifling through newspapers on April 1 to determine what’s real and what’s blatantly just creative writing, so here are few examples of April Fool’s jokes that caught our eye at Branded3.
Sony. The arrival of VAIO Q, hailed as the world’s smallest Ultrabook, created a stir among techies and Sony also released a YouTube video that has been viewed over 140,000 times in little over 24 hours.
Interflora. The guys at Interflora revealed two new types of flowers – the Tiger Rose and the Leopard Rose – via a blog post complete with convincing pictures.
Google. A flurry of activity from Google HQ raised plenty of eyebrows. A new function on Google Maps surfaced for the first time yesterday that allows users to see an 8-bit version of the world by clicking the ‘Quest’ button in the top right-hand corner. Google and NASCAR also announced the launch of Google Racing, which was a concept of self-driving cars.
ThinkGeek.com. The idea of an iPad version of Hungry Hungry Hippos that has all the frantic fun of the original board game proved immensely popular, although visitors to ThinkGeek.com will be left disappointed after clicking ‘buy now’.
The Observer. One of the more obvious April Fool’s stories revolved around Shaun Ryder becoming a special advisor to David Cameron. Stranger things, though, have happened in the world of politics! Staying on theme of politics, the Mail on Sunday claimed the Government were set to tax chilled champagne following the ‘pastygate’ farce.
The ECB. The England Wales Cricket Board publicised plans to station ‘Balldogs’ around the boundary rope at certain games to help fetch the balls whenever a four or six is hit.
YouTube. The powers that be at YouTube fittingly made a video that has gone viral and had over 1.4million views after giving people the chance to own ever video uploaded to the site.
02. To address the issue of smartphones with a short battery life, 02 released the 02 Jet, which offers 1,000 hours of talk time and can be left on standby for 92 days.
Time Out. Time Out reported that the London Eye will rotate five times faster than usual during the Olympics in order to keep up with the increase in visitors to one of the city’s major attractions.
Mashable. Pete Cashmore was ousted as Mashable CEO for a few hours by comedian Conan O’Brien, who wasted little time in revealing the future of Twitter before resigning in a series of video clips.
As part of their push for Mother’s Day next Sunday, international florist chain Interflora is launching a number of initiatives targeted at consumers in London. Hiring the services of Manning Gottlieb OMD, they have gone all out to persuade commuters in the capital to buy their products for the 18th.
To promote both its three-hour delivery service and their mobile website, Interflora has put up a number of interactive flower displays across Central London where commuters can create a display that’s to their liking. Another key part of their Mother’s Day marketing push is the installation of large flower displays alongside big canvases, all of which will have QR codes that commuters can scan using their smartphones, thus demonstrating how easy it is to use Interflora’s mobile service.
Elsewhere, Interflora’s Mercury Man, their Messenger God, will be making an appearance near the displays at Paddington, Liverpool Street, Euston and Waterloo train stations. People are being encouraged to tweet him at @MercuryMan to tell him why their mother is worthy of a bespoke bouquet of flowers worth £1,000. The campaign is set to run from the 8th to 17th March.
The unparalleled growth of the smartphone market has seen QR codes become increasingly popular. Many companies are using them to appeal to consumers who work long hours and find themselves with very little time to shop for their products, and Interflora have recognised that.
Interflora’s marketing director Michael Barringer confirmed that Mercury Man will be around for the foreseeable future to help people in need, citing the long list of special occasions that happen during the year. MG OMD’s campaign was created after they were appointed to Interflora UK’s £1m media planning and buying account.
Branded3′s Head of Search – Tim Grice – gave an interesting talk this morning at the TFM&A event in London. Take a look at Tim’s presentation slides below for some valuable tips and insights into using social media to help your SEO campaigns.
Don’t miss Branded3 tomorrow at the TFM&A event in London, where CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Head of Search Tim Grice and Search Expert Matthew Jackson will be available to offer insights and tips for your campaigns.
Tim will be taking to the stage twice during the event at Earls Court 2 tomorrow, to deliver some expert talks. Firstly, if you get to the event early enough you can catch Tim talking in the Social Media Theatre on ‘How to use social media to improve your SEO’.
This talk is essential for any search enthusiasts wondering how social media affects SEO, and the following topics will be covered:
Maximising link potential through social media
How Social Media & SEO are joined
What is Social Link Building?
Using Twitter to build links and followers
Social media tools and services
And last but not least, our very own award-winning social media phenomenon, Twitition
Head to the Search Marketing Theatre later on tomorrow afternoon at 4pm, to hear Tim’s talk on ‘Advanced SEO Strategies for 2012’.
Tim will cover the following in this talk:
Developing natural link signals
Developing ROI from your SEO campaigns
International SEO
Plus much more…
Come and talk to Branded3 in the VIP area tomorrow, or if you can’t make it – get in touch with us for any SEO or social media advice, or if you’d like to receive the presentation slides.
Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed Interflora ‘Love Machine’ Facebook app.
Our very own Design, Development and Social Media teams built the Facebook app to coincide with the most romantic day of the year, giving visitors the chance to find out whether 2012 will be the most romantic year of their lives.
As a Facebook user, you need only ‘Like’ the page to get the cogs and springs of the ‘Love Machine’ working.
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005. For an average searcher they probably wouldn’t think this was amazing but I think it’s pretty mind blowing. To have Google searching the web and images stored in my Picasa albums is just amazing to see working.
I think the way Google has launched this is really clever. In the past both Twitter & Facebook have tried to stop Google indexing all their content and wouldn’t give them full access to crawl sites. Twitter used to give Google a feed of all tweets but turned that feature off and killed the real time search that Google used to show for breaking news events. Now that Google has launched with a massive favouritism for Google+ data we here Twitter making statements saying that this isn’t fair.
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
So Twitter stopped the agreement to give Google a feed of tweets and is now saying that this new system isn’t fair and wants to be included. All Google has to do is agree to include Twitter and ask for full access to data and Twitter will probably agree.
At the moment unless you use Picasa and Google+ or have friends that do then the new system isn’t a major change to the organic results. But once Google gets Facebook and Twitter on board as well as perhaps LinkedIn then this will be amazing.
SEO at present is about getting people to link to sites and the search results are based on a voting system that takes into account how trusted each linking site is. This has no relation to whether the person linking for the site is actually trusted by the searcher or not. I can see in a few years that Google will be focussing more on surfacing sites and search results that a users friends like as well as relying on links from sites that the searcher might have never heard of.
The new changes have a major impact on PPC. A search for “cars” brings up the Google+ results shown below for Ferrari & BMW above the PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. For BMW & Ferrari where PPC is mainly a brand play I’m sure they would much prefer to have their logo and a long snippet of text rather than a PPC ad, especially when it’s totally free.
Getting users to share your content on Google+, Twitter & Facebook has to be a part of your SEO strategy for 2012. Certainly brands need to be working on building up followings on these social networks every single month.
For those people who think this is the end of SEO I can assure you it isn’t. As long as people still search for things then there will still be sites needing to use SEO to get to the top of the list of search results. Whether SEO is about on-site optimisation, links or encouraging sharing via social media sites or some other method is irrelevant.
Most of the UK has been doing very little for the last couple of weeks thanks to 4 bank holidays but there is still a load of interesting SEO news to wade through.
Firstly Google Analytics now has a page speed report which is very good for finding the slowest pages on your site.
Next up is Village Voice who were caughtspamming reddit and then said they were very sorry, blamed an agency and said they knew nothing about it. Turns out they were caught spamming Digg years ago. Plenty of people spam social media sites but you need to have the guts to stand up and admit it if you get caught. Read more →
This week I’ve been at TFM&A talking about link-building strategies and also at the Some Comms conference in Manchester talking about our Twitition.com site and how we get 1.2m visitors per month to it.
Presentations are below via Slideshare, any questions drop me a note in the comments.
Buried in the middle of an otherwise fairly uninteresting New York Times article about Digg is the following piece of information, emphasis added by me:
According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.
Yet a more pivotal reason that Digg is falling behind, analysts say, is that users are simply spending more time on Facebook and Twitter than they are on Digg. Instead of Digging, many social media users know that they can post a story they like on Twitter or Facebook.
When was the last time you saw a story page from Digg ranking? Now I think about it I’ve not seen one for months. In 2008 Digg used to outrank the original piece of content on quite a number of occasions even though the page added no value aside from a few dozen inane comments.
Some background in a 2009 post from Danny about social media sites. Google is quite right to do this but if Digg wants the traffic back they need to start trying to add some value to the pages rather than just keeping doing something that Google clearly sees no value in.
Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed 
