Investors have been worried that Facebook facing slowing user and revenue growth may be hard pressed to justify its valuation in the long run. The valuation of the social network giant would be much higher than iconic global majors like Ford Motors and Abbot Laboratories and looked hard to defend for long. So alternate revenue streams were a necessity for Facebook which appeared to be ideally suited to transform itself into a social network with online shopping. Though the challenges to online shopping is immense Facebook agreed to take the plunge, but in a limited way. In a surprise move FB amended its prospectus filed with Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. Facebook has informed its share holders that it will launch its new App Center within a couple of weeks.

The social media giant will also start of an app store front selling paid apps after rating it by its users classified demographically. Gender preference and user age will be marked as apps get rated in 5 star categories. This will help Facebook get an insight as well as a revenue stream from apps used by its 800 million active users. It will also give FB a foothold and look at understanding and profiting directly from the huge 2 billion plus mobile market which powered by smart phones and huge numbers from the emerging economies is growing much faster than the computer based social networks.

Find a the Right Posting Frequency
It’s important to be active in social media, but you also can’t go overboard. Posting just once a day might mean that you will get lost in the shuffle, but posting five times a day might annoy followers. It’s important to find that sweet spot somewhere in between. Posting frequency can vary from one network to another. If you find that Twitter converts better than Facebook, post a few extra times on Twitter and leave it to once or twice on Facebook. Understand where customers are most receptive to your message.

Build a Strong Content Marketing Foundation
Without content (blog posts, pictures, articles, albums, videos, etc.), what are you sharing in social media? Social media is a great place to have a conversation, but essentially followers want something more. It’s the content that you create and share that really fuels a social media strategy.

Keep Content Relevant
People have decided to follow your brand for a reason and are expecting posts to be related to what you offer in some way. If you are a software company, don’t go on a rant about the latest news in politics or start telling jokes. It’s OK to be funny or edgy at times, but only if it’s in line with your brand and what you offer and is appropriate.

Actually Be Social
Seems like a no brainer, but so many businesses that use social media continue to use it as simply another place to promote and don’t engage in any actual dialogue. Social media followers are a captive audience and you should use them to your advantage. Ask them for their opinions and respond to their questions, comments, and concerns. If you ignore your followers, they won’t be followers for long and probably won’t even buy from you either.

Share the Work of Others
In order to improve your visibility in social media, it’s important that your followers share your content with their connections via a Share or a Re-Tweet, etc. However, you can’t expect them to do it for you if you never do it for them. It’s a two way street. If your social connections share something great that resonates with your target audience, don’t be afraid to pass it along. Then, the favor may be returned.

Apple started this trend of focused search through Apps. Then several Open Education Resource [OER] search engines moved into the space  like OER Dynamic Search Engine, Curriki, OpenCourseWare Finder  and  Learning Objects. Now as per a recent TechCrunch report Princeton Review and 2tor founder John Katzman and Joe Morgan who worked at competitor Kaplan and Colloquy is now bringing education portal Noodle into focused education search.

The Noodle search will be empowered with a dynamic recommendation engine. Noodle currently in Beta mode proposes be an end to end platform for education providers, application developers, service providers and students. It has over 120,000 education service providers spread across a dozen verticals working on the platform on revenue sharing models.

An early entrant and one of the leaders of this segment is the Moodle Open Source software. The Moodle LMS is one of the most widely used with a global footprint that spans 200 nations with nearly 50,000 registered user websites delivering internet driven education to over 30 million students. Also in the area is the high quality Blackboard customized soft ware that is considered one of the best and most expensive options.

They are all spewing out millions of students each year that would all need focused education search at some point of time. The Noodle search concept for creating a focused search engine coupled with a recommendation engine could work well in such a case. Focused education search is also available for Academic & Research by EBSCO publishing and APeJ search, in Aerospace technology by ProQuest. It is matter of time that such specialized search or edapps  takes over this education segment making it easy for students as well as teachers.

The Twitter # hash tag search is becoming the most popular mode of logging into current events happening across the world. A US baseball event, a football match in the English Premium League or cricket extravaganza in the Indian Premium League could attract a million plus tweets within a few hours.

A disruption of the civic services, an airline accident, a grisly crime could be rage on twitter for days while a juicy political or sex scandal and an oil spill story could be primetime headline grabbers for months. Twitter links are the initiators of global communication and people go after  the real story only if the tweet looks worthwhile and relevant.

The digital media growth over the last few years has become explosive with the mobile users multiplying double digit year on year. They today comprise of the fastest growing segment in the social media. According to a recent report of Nielsen and NM Incite mobile phone users spend 13.3% of their time in texting and 5.5% of time on social networking applications.

Over 35.7 % of US mobile users accessed the social media through the hand held device in the period ending Jan 2012 up from 25.2% in the previous quarter. If the US smartphone usage to tap social has been phenomenal the rise of mobile phone users engaging in social media through the hand held device in Asia has been unprecedented.

With nearly 700million mobile users in India growing at a phenomenal pace of 250,000 new users per day the mobile usage of social media is fast and furious. Facebook has over 38 million subscribers from India, 40% of who log in from their phones. Linked In says India is the second largest market globally and 20% to30% of users log in through the hand held device. Twitter with 14 million Indian users report half its log in through mobile devices from Indian users. The trend is found to be similar in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea and China with mobile users growing at a much faster pace than the desk top segment. As a matter of fact social through mobile will soon outstrip the growth in other segments making it easy to relay news photos, films and chatter virally across nations.

Mobile ads that were rather miniscule at $0.6 billion last year jumped to$1.6 billion. This is an increasing sign of advertiser’s gradual shift to digital media platforms in a world that is being increasingly dominated by the mobile phone and the tablet.

A detailed breakdown of the various segments showed that it was the performance based search related advertisements that were the largest earners . Last year search related ads clocked $11.66 billion in revenue and accounted for 44.8% of the total digital advertisement market. This year the share of search ads in the pie has gone up to 46.5% as it recorded a 27% rise annual rise to clock $14.77 billion.

Display related advertising revenues were the next big gainers growing by 15% from $9.6 billion to $11.1 billion that accounted for nearly 35% of the revenue pie. Among display related ads it was the digital video segment that grew the quickest growing by 29% annually to $1.8 billion in revenue from $1.4 billion last year.

Mobile advertisement was the fastest growing segment with an explosive growth of 266% from $ 0.6 billion last year to $1.6 billion . With over double digit user growth from most emerging nations of Asia and Africa, this is likely to be the fastest growing segment with maximum reach. Advertisement in mobile segment will grow with video and audio presentations with the explosion of smartphones with higher speed and data carrying capability. Mobile gaming has already caught on and will help introduce various innovations in this segment.

Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB said while presenting the PwC report “Pushing past the $30 billion barrier, the interactive advertising industry confirms its central place in media. Across search, display, digital video, digital provides a wealth of opportunity for brands and consumers. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, it is likely that the tremendous growth in mobile will continue as these screens become even more crucial to the marketing mix.”

As per a Reuters report some of the tech world’s most crafty investors heading Silicon Valley’s VC firms like Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and Wall Street biggies like Goldman Sachs are persuading Facebook to enter the arena of e commerce like online retailers Amazon and e bay to start off an additional shopping revenue stream.

The logic for Facebook entering e commerce comes from it having the behavioral data on a membership platform of 800 million users. Amazon uses predictive analytics based on the buying behavior of its 164 million on line buyers to good effect. So the big boys of the investor world feel that it would be a great opportunity for Zuckerberg to use the Facebook social data for e commerce. Not to perhaps sell products directly like the world’s largest book seller Amazon but to act as a platform for online sellers like Fab.com, Yardsellr, Beachmint and Oodle on a partnership basis, more like a landlord collecting rents  . Facebook already partners Zynga like a landlord collecting 30% of the revenue of the world’s largest social gaming company that has developed block buster games like Farmville and Angry Birds on its platform .

The big question is whether Zuckerberg who is firmly focused on building the world’s largest relation building platform will be lured by the glitz and glamour of big biz and turn Facebook into a commercial district. Facebook today is more like a residential suburb today with a little mom and pop stores that sell goods that its residents really love.

However becoming a e commerce platform will change all that with a possibility that big banner sellers will chase out some of the current residents. Entering the e commerce segment with Zynga was easy and useful for Facebook where one was dealing with high margin virtual goods or services like games that engaged people for hours which was meeting FB’s social sharing objective. Entering e commerce will mean much more. Also whether it would be possible for Facebook to sell branded goods competitively that are already sold by high end retailers with glitzy brick and mortar main street stores supported by plush online services is tobe seen .

There are many ways to market a small business online, but one of the most important ways is to invest time and resources in SEO. For a small business that has limited resources and is just getting started in the online space, the SEO campaign process will be different than it is for a large corporation that has an established website and has gotten started with online marketing.

The first step that a small business owner should take when they want to get started with SEO is to conduct some research. There are plenty of free SEO resources out there that provide a wealth of information. Business owners should be protective of their brand image and it’s important to know the right way and the wrong way to approach SEO. Heading down the wrong path (even if it’s unintentionally) can result in search engine penalties. Small business owners should spend time understanding the SEO basics and know the difference between a white hat SEO campaign and black hat tactics in order to know the proper ways to optimize a site and build links.

The next step is to get started with SEO right away, on your own. If the website just launched it’s going to take some time for that site to become “trusted” so it’s advisable to do SEO on a small scale on your own first. Attend a training session or hire and SEO consultant that can guide you down the right path. As long as things are implemented correctly, small results can be made on your own. In addition, having this experience and knowledge will help you become a much better SEO client when the time is right.

For a small company with a limited budget, it’s best to hold off on paying for services until those services will be able to make a profound impact. After getting started with SEO on your own and seeing a gradual increase in website traffic and conversions, it is time to take it to the next level by hiring an SEO firm. Since the website already has some momentum the SEO agency will be able to do much more since the website has aged and gained some search engine trust.

Keywords Unavailable (Not Provided) jumped from 12% to 22% in March. What does Google want us to do?

Two sites I manage jumped from an average of 12% keywords not reported (January and February) to 20% and 26%, respectively, in March. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) queries reports only 40% of all of the actual natural clicks to these two sites.

What does Google expect honest search marketers to do when we can no longer accurately report the natural keyword segmentation of traffic? We search marketers are held accountable for the time and effort we invest in increasing site traffic for the most relevant keyword phrases. How will we be able to measure natural keyword traffic accurately in the future? At this rate, we’re only a few months away from most of the keywords being blocked.

Regards,

Betsy

Jill’s Response

Hi Betsy,

The first and most important thing to understand is that Google doesn’t care whether you or I or anyone else can measure their natural (organic/free) search traffic. Google is an advertising company that uses their search engine as a medium to show their clients’ ads. Period. The reality is that it’s of no concern to Google whether businesses can improve their visibility in the free search results.

For anyone who doesn’t look much at their analytics and isn’t familiar with the (Not Provided) phenomenon, this is happening because Google instituted a secure searching platform. Previously, all Google searches left a trail of what keywords were used in the search query, and this trail could be picked up in server log files and via web analytic programs. With the new secure searching, Google is blocking the search queries from being shown when people who do Google searches are also logged into any Google product. It seems that they haven’t been blocking them all, but blocking more and more every week. In addition, the Firefox browser recently announced that they’ll also be blocking all search queries. It can be assumed that the Chrome browser will soon start doing the same thing.

What all this means to website owners, businesses and SEO consultants is that they can no longer rely on receiving the same keyword information they were used to getting in their analytics program. Note that this affects ALL analytics programs, not just Google Analytics (GA), so it’s not as if you can just switch. And it’s not going to go away; it’s only going to get worse. In fact, for my High Rankings site, the percentage of (NP) keywords has doubled in just a month, with more than half my Google organic traffic coming in from them.

To see something similar with your own numbers in your account, create a Google Organic Advanced Segment. (Clicking that link will create one in your Google Analytics Account for you.) With that segment turned on, just click the Standard Reporting tab and scroll down to the Search Traffic area.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about it. With the major browsers soon to be not providing keywords, I would expect to see most sites with at least 75% of their keywords being NP’d very soon. Sites whose target markets are those who are typically logged into their Google account, such as those for my Google Analytics Custom Report Sharing (CRS) site, are already close to that number. While my CRS site is new and doesn’t receive a whole lot of Google traffic yet, its NP keywords are already at a whopping 72.5%!

Thankfully, I’m not relying on Google for traffic to this site, with most of it coming from Twitter and word of mouth at the moment.

What Does This Mean for SEO?

For now, we can still have some idea of which keywords people are using to find our sites by thinking of the keywords they do show us as simply a sample. You can also learn what some of the NP keywords are by looking at the search queries report in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account.

For instance, when checking the keywords that were used to find my “blog ideas” post, Google Analytics showed me 219 NP keywords. It also showed the following number of visits per keyword search:

212 blog ideas

69 blog topics

10 ideas for blog

7 ideas for blog topics

5 blogging topics

Plus many more similar phrases from fewer searches. By comparing those keywords and numbers to my GWT account, I was able to recover 65 of the NP keywords that were the same as the top 3 keyword phrases showing in GA. That still leaves 154 keyword phrases unaccounted for.

The Good News

The thing is, while many pages of a website may get found for hundreds or even thousands of different keyword phrases, they’re typically some variation of some core keywords. With pages that see lots of Google organic traffic, the exact numbers and keywords aren’t going to be missed terribly. In fact, you may not have ever paid much attention to them in the first place. You’ll still be able to see those core, high-traffic keywords in your GWT account, if not your GA one.

The Bad News

Unfortunately, for newer and/or smaller sites or pages that rely on highly long tail search traffic, things are looking more grim. While you may be able to recover a similar ratio of NP keywords for those URLs, the sampling of actual keywords is likely to be too small to be helpful. My hope is that Google will start showing more actual keywords in GWT, but as I said at the beginning, they have no incentive to do so, so I’m not going to hold my breath for it!

What You Can Do

Other than checking your GWT account more often and/or using your paid search keyword data (which isn’t a bad idea), there’s nothing you can do to recover most of the lost organic keywords. But you CAN still see which pages of your site people are landing on from Google organic search. And you can use that information to make some assumptions on keywords.

Eventually we may just have to stop thinking in terms of measuring keywords and instead look for overall traffic to any given URL. Obviously, if you’re getting lots of Google organic traffic to particular pages of your site, whether you know the exact keywords or not, you do know you’re doing something right.

You can look specifically at the landing pages that your NP keywords brought people to, by keeping on that Google Organic advanced segment I mentioned earlier, and clicking the (Not Provided) link.

Then click the “Secondary dimension” tab and add “Landing Page” (within “Traffic Sources”). This will now show you all the pages people landed on from Google organic searches that have the (Not Provided) keyword.

From there you can make sure that your usual highly trafficked pages are still getting traffic, and also see how any new content is faring. While you may not know all the keywords, you can assume they’re similar or some variation of those that you can see.

Till now media giants operate on a yearly or quarterly subscription basis. This  has not really taken off due to consumer resistance to shell out a large sum of money for a small read at one time or a single music title download. This especially when competing with free reading material that is available on the internet. It is assumed that if the micropayment concept picks up, readers would not mind shelling out a few cents every time they read an article on the internet provided registration hassles do not prove time consuming.

The Belgium start up called Paycento who created the system says “The payment is really seamless … so it’s like a one click payment on the internet,” explaining that it is actually a registration free one click operation if the authorization procedure is not used. The time consuming registration procedure is waived once you enter the portal with your social media password, waiving the lengthy form filling exercise for account holder details thus making the exercise user friendly. The Paycento system is scheduled to be Beta tested by an European media giant from June this year.

The success of Kindle Stores and iTunes and mobile phones  to persuade users to pay online for content through micropayments have created hope that the micro ‘Pay Wall’ model once considered doubtful will eventually succeed. Besides the big names there have been other ‘Pay Wall’ programs that have been raging successes in the recent past. A couple of weeks ago a single high quality science story format started appearing in the Kickstarter campaign that at $ 0.99 a read had earned $ 50,000 in 36 hours and $100,000 in the first 9 days. It was called ‘Matter’ and was home to an investigative long format journalism narrative about science and technology. It gave the hope that paid journalism can survive and even prosper against the Google model of ad driven content. If that happens then high quality content will survive even if they are outside the closely protected domain of Apple or Amazon who have been successful monetizing content.

Sign Up

With Google+ you can be a part of your customer’s everyday life. Through a variety of tools, your customers can be constantly engaging with your page, your recommendations and updates. Not to mention, very little is required on your end.

• Place a Google+ badge on your page to get followers clicking through. As the network grows, it’s becoming increasingly more popular to add this to your list of social media buttons.
• Get recommended when customers +1 your page. Show up in personal results and see an influx of traffic.
• Get customers to your page quick with the direct connect feature. When they enter the + sign before your business name, they are taken directly to your page.

Fill It In

Google+ offers a succinct way to incorporate all your business information into an easy to read and navigate menu. Avoid the long list of applications on your Facebook page, and get more information than Twitter allows.

• In the about section you can give the usual mission statement, but fill it out with recommended sites and links to your other sites. This adds value to a simple profile.
• Push your promotions and new products out with new posts. As the posts get +1’d, you’ll see more views and higher social ranking in the search engine.
• Allow users to see what you’re reading with your list of +1’s.

Use It

There are numerous capabilities that differentiate this network from Facebook and Twitter. Consider the ways in which you can amplify your marketing plan.

• Circles: Separate your customers into various groups. From promotion lovers to frequent buyers, you can sort, making your efforts more accurate.
• Hangout: Connect with your customers on a personal level or reach a large audience. Set up a chance for Q&A or a business related announcement. This is a new level of engagement that can be very powerful.
• Statistics: Built in statistics features provide a quick and easy way to see who’s circles you’re in, and where you rank in popularity.

Google+ offers a wide range of possibilities that will allow you to further engage with your customer. Be a part of their everyday lives as they search for what they want and find you in their pursuits. If you interact, you can count on your customers to do the same.