You don’t have to tweet and post all day and night to get your content noticed. This nifty infographic will tell you when you should push send to get the most click-throughs.

Learn more at London Loves Business,  online website that provide the latest technology and business news.

The Problems with Groupon

We have all seen those wonderful offers and wondered if they were real. Groupon sells discounted coupons online, keeping part of the money that customers pay for the coupons, with the rest going to participating merchants. Thousands of businesses have run deals through this site to attract new customers. However, using Groupon as a part of your small business marketing strategy is sustainable. 

It’s been a torrid few weeks for the group-buying website Groupon, their share prices slump to around $10.5 from a high of $31 in November 2011. These are worrying signs for a company once estimated to be worth in the range of $12 to $20bn, and it became the first start-up ever to raise just under a billion in venture capital.

Groupon prey on vendors’ insecurities, attracting those who are unable to market their products and services effectively. While insiders may argue that Groupon has tapped into a new market, the reality is that the model of ultra-discounted deals appeals to businesses that are transfixed with old-fashioned traditional media. Groupon at its most basic level is no different to an old-fashioned newspaper advertising campaign.

Many small businesses see this marketing option as a panacea because they are seeking the widest possible distribution for their campaign. They think listing a deal on Groupon will drive traffic to their products and that customers will browse and buy beyond the ‘Groupon deal’. The short-term benefit appears to be brand extension and the hope of additional sales. But the risks and sacrifices are far greater.

Groupon is attractive to consumers who are looking for massive discounts, often 50-70% off, with them taking a chunk of the remaining price. This leaves very little – if any – margin for the business owner offering the deal.
Groupon may help win a few new clients, but they, at least at first, are never going to be as loyal as your current customers. Why then would you risk a regular customer seeing that you can afford to give away a 50% - 60% discount? The deals offered on Groupon aren’t usually end of line or Christmas sales; they are goods and services struggling to find new markets. And savvy buyers know the difference.

Groupon has been largely used by small businesses that don’t have any real budget for marketing. The deal might seems attractive at the beginning as it is the easiest way they can think of to market their business or product with the limited marketing vision, budget and resources at their disposal.

Will Groupon work for your business? You could end up gaining loyal customers off the back of a promotion, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the campaign will be a success, or even be worth the risk.

Before jumping into Groupon is essential to know if your company has the infrastructure to handle the potential volume of purchases you hope for. A Groupon promotion can truly hurt and erode your brand differentiation, ultimately sacrificing customer relationship for a low cost commodity approach.

Get the latest technology and business news from London Loves Business

Google Search, Plus Your World

Google introduced this week “Search, Plus Your World” to provide more personalised search results to internet users that now will have access to personal information about their friends, included from the social networking service, when they enter a search query.

The famous search Google algorithm will now merge with the personal search algorithm and a personalized search algorithm. What does it mean? Basically, your search results will be a mixture of Google+ profiles and pages, your own personal photos and posts, and most significantly, anything that’s been shared with you on Google+. Google is going to retrieve listings from the web boosted by your personal behaviour and social connections. Some private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web. “Search Plus Your World” doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter or any other social network.

You will find 3 types of search results:

1.    Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts-both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page.

2.    Profiles in Search, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following.

3.    People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks.

From a SEO point of view, is this a good or a bad thing?

According to Rand Fishkin, CEO and Founder of SEOMoz social search is taking over the “pure SEO” tactics of accessibility, keyword research, content optimization and link-building.

Other SEO experts consider that now will be necessary to have two SEO strategies running parallel to each other; a personalised SEO strategy to target those affected by Search Plus, and a non-personalised SEO strategy to target those who are not affected.

Why did Google decide to add social media to their Search Engine?

A Nielsen Global Online consumer survey carried out in 2009 seems to be the source of inspiration for the changes. The survey concluded that 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 % trust consumer opinions posted online.

Will this work?

This new system has already been heavily criticised. The main reason why Google has become the main search engine, worldwide, is because it’s really good at returning relevant results for any given search query. That is the reason why I use Google. If I want to know what my friends think about a specific subject or product, I will approach them directly. When we use Google, we are mainly looking for information that is relevant to our search query.

The changes will make things harder because it will more difficult for your customers to find your website. To achieve good results, you have to get your Google+ brand page into as many influential people’s circles as possible and try to reach people outside of your immediate network.

Google wanted to gain market share in the social network market. They didn’t just wanted sit back and watch how Facebook and Twitter were becoming so powerful. So they decided to create their own social media network. With “Google Search, Plus Your World”, you can’t have search without social (unless you opt out) and, more often than not, Google+ results will be appearing before public listings, so users will feel “forced” to become an active member of the network. As many Online Marketing and internet experts have pointed out, by embedding Google+ into search, Google is essentially prodding people to join its social network out of SEO fear.

I don’t have problems with Google getting into social media and I think that the idea of having different spheres (circle) for each subject can facilitate the interaction with other members. I just don’t like the idea of including that information in the search results.

Google+ attempts to reach 400 million users by the end of 2012. That’s twice as many as Twitter. At present, the site has about 62 million users worldwide. They should have waited until Google+ is more relevant before integrating the social information with the search results. Or they could have added a social button as an alternative to the main search results, without mixing them, and including information from Facebook and Twitter, arguably the more active social networks.

What is a Good Click-Through-Rate for Organic Results?

How to calculate your CTR?

CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. You will find this data in Webmaster Tools. Knowing your CTR in organic results is essential to evaluate your website online performance.  Bing uses CTR as a ranking factor in organic search results, and there's every reason to believe Google also does. They have never admitted it but SEO experts believe that there is a positive correlation between a high CTR and improvement on search engine rankings. According to Edmont Lau, a former member of the Google search quality team “any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results”.

This metric can also help you to improve your conversion rate. Having a high CTR is just one step forward on your attempt to increase sales and revenue.  While a high CTR is good, it is almost meaningless if your clicks are not turning to conversions. What happen after the user clicks on the snippets? You want the viewers to spend some time on your website and move to the goal page where they should do the required action (filling out an online form, making a purchase, downloading a demo, etc.) If they leave the site straight away is because they didn’t find what they were looking for, and you will need to optimize the landing pages in order to increase the conversion rate.

What is a Good CTR for Organic Results?

Optify, a provider of marketing software and services for the Real Time Web, carried out a research to find out the average CTR for organic search results. To do so they built a database constructed from organic keyword visits from Google US for the month of December 2010. They analyzed 250 sites, 10,000 keywords and 1.2 million clicks. According to the study, the top 3 sites on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) get 60% of the clicks. The first results should get about 36.4% of the clicks. The average CTR for the first page is around 8.9% while the average CTR for the second page is 1.5%. These results show why is so important to move the target keywords to the first page and then to the top one. The study also concluded that ranking first on the second page is slightly better than ranking 10 on the first page.

Some experts might think that the study is not 100% scientific. However, it provides us an overview to understand what to expect from your SEO strategy. If your site is on the first page of Google but you are not getting the expected number of click, your snippets are probable not appropriate.

Improve your CTR

Controlling SERP is a challenging job because, in some cases, search engines chance the snippets to make them more appropriate to the given query. However, it is advisable to improve all the elements that can contribute to increase CTR of organic results:

•    Make your page title stand out. The title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website and is a key factor to increase the CTR in organics results.  Ensure that each page has a unique meta-title, always include your target keywords and emphasize the quality of the product or service.

•    Optimize your meta-description. This tag will appear in the text of the listing of most (not all) search engines when Internet users do a search. Use interesting words because this is what your reader will see. An engaging, call to action meta-description will convince the viewers to visit your site.

•    Create pages to target specific keywords search. If you use common keywords across multiple pages the site will compete with itself for rankings and dilutes the ranking power of internal anchor text, external links and keyword relevancy.

•    Use your Adwords ads. If you are running (or have run) an Adword campaign, pick up the most successful ads, in terms of CTR and conversion rates, and use them as meta-descriptions.

•    Include relevant sitelinks and rich snippets. Websmaster Tools provide the tools to create rich snippets and modify sitelinks.

•    Write reviews. Google Maps you can add reviews to your business. A site with a high number of positive reviews is more attractive to the viewers.

•    Use +1 action. Social metrics are already well correlated with good rankings.  Using +1 Google allows you to endorse URLs. e Google +1 is still in a bright new and experimental stage but Google has established that social recommendations with the +1 button could be used to influence search results, since they improve the relevancy of a result.

Social Media Marketing: Tips to Implement an Effective Strategy

Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone. Social media networks are a great way to promote businesses and to build relationships with prospective customers and partners. Social networking is essential for branding particularly for small businesses because it is a relatively inexpensive marketing platform.

There are some networks that are more suitable to some types of business; however, an appropriate use of social networking sites requires adapting the message to the specific site and audience. Before developing a strategy for a specific channel, it is advisable to analyze and understand the behavior of the prospective audience in order to find the best ways to engage virtual communities.

Leveraging Social Media Marketing

•    Determine your objectives. Social media can be used for branding purposes, to increase website traffic, to promote offers, to obtain backlinks, etc. Understanding what you're trying to actually do with your social media presence should be the first step in developing a social media strategy.

•    Evaluate the brand and find the most suitable strategy for each particular channel. People use the different social networks for diverse purposes. While Linkedin and other professional networking sites are commonly used to share expertise, Facebook allows you connect with the audience in a more “playful” way.

•    Analyze the characteristics of the type of social media you want to have a presence on. It will help you to find the most suitable approach to fit in.

•    Leverage the effect by using multiple channels. To build vibrant communities in social networks, businesses must develop a diversified channel strategy that allow them to reinforces the brand and get their corporate message across.

•    Spend some time getting to know your audience. Are they old or young? Technical or non-technical? Male or female? Rich or poor? Liberal or conservative? Do they like sports?

•    Join the conversation to develop relationships. The key is to reach out to customers in a non-intrusive way, to establish their needs and by building a good customer relationship. Don’t be intrusive and avoid hard-sell tactics. Listen what they are saying. Before start selling your business you have to build relationships with online communities.

•    Ensure you make regular updates to your profiles. Participating in social media takes a lot of work, time and dedication.

•    Measure the result of your strategy. Have you increase the number of followers or traffic? Can you identify the leads coming from social media sites?

•    Evaluate and adapt your social media campaigns to improve the results. Social media marketing is ongoing process. In many occasions I have heard business owners saying that social media marketing doesn’t work for them. Maybe they need to change their approach

•    Keep yourself abreast of the newest Social Media networking platforms. Always trying to stay one step ahead of the competition.

•    Do not follow the herd; set the trend for your field. Successful social marketing campaigns require innovation and creativity. Invite your team to participate in your brainstorming session.

•    Trigger an emotional reaction from your audience. To connect with your audience you need to get their attention and emotions will move them. Marketing experts try to associate a brand with a particular emotion.

Which sites are essential for social media marketing?

The following list includes the top 20 most popular social media sites: