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Archive for September, 2009

How to get more from Twitter Search by using advanced search operators

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Real time search is the new battle ground for search engines. The driving force behind this shift is undoubtedly Twitter, who have place search more centrally within their product offering.

Twitter search offers an unparalleled opportunity find out what people are talking about right now. For brand owners this can give a great snapshot of what your customers and the market is saying about you and your competitors.

But are you getting all you can from searching on Twitter? Thanks to some cool search operators it’s possible to dig even deeper onto your Twitter search data.

For the uninitiated, a search ‘operator’ a symbol or word used in conjunction your search keyword that allows you to be more specific about the circumstances in which that keyword has been used. Whilst all search engines allow the use of operators, Twitter has made these more accessible than most.

Using Operators on Twitter allows you to bypass using the advanced search form. The upside is that you can type operators directly into the search box, which saves lots of time. They also allow you to do a lot more than the form alone.

At the basic level, there’s the exact match operator ” ” that allows you find just exact matches of a keyword phrase. This is going to be particularly useful to cut through the noise if you are looking for mentions of a multi word brand name.

The word ‘from:’ and ‘to:’ in association with a username lets you find out what particular users are sending and receiving. This gives good insight into how your competition is using Twitter: Are they getting asked sales questions or price quotes? Or are using Twitter to deal with support issues? Are they using Twitter more effectively than you – and what can you learn from that?

The operators ‘since:’ and ‘until:’ lets you find Tweets that have happened within a period of time. This is a great way to discover how an event is discussed at the time that it’s happening, as opposed to retrospectively. You can also use this to look at how your competitors have changed their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most insightful operator are the and symbols. These allow you to search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, to find out how you or a competitor has been mentioned in a positive way, search for your brand + . The results will show all Tweets that have used common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements.

The ‘near:’ operator lets you specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius around which you want to find all mentions of a particular keyword. This is good way to find out how far your sphere of influenced goes if you have a fixed place of business, such as a shop.

For the more advanced user, the operator “filter:links” lets you search for Tweets that just include links to other sites. This is an effective way to discover if your competitors are making use of their follower base to push traffic to their website. This might allow you to see when their followers like a particular offer they have on. Or it might allow you to see how effective a traffic driving competition is.

Here’s an image the operators:

For a full list, have a look here.
Try some out and let us know how you got on.

Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 4 Comments »

‘Twitter Premium’ for paying Tweeters

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

The business community has a real love hate relationship with Twitter.

Business users are aware that it holds the potential to really connect with current and future customers. But there are enough Twitter blunders out there (think Habitat’s use of Hashtags) for businesses to be wary of this exciting new channel. And as Twitter is such a difficult thing to measure, many businesses are not sure whether it’s really worth the time investment.

Twitter themselves are very keen to be embraced by businesses. They’ve launched their very own guide that shows businesses how to get to grips with the microblogging platform.

The other thread to this is that Twitter themselves need to start making money at some point. They’ve got around $40m from investors in the bank, but keeping a free service going that is used by up to 45m people doesn’t come cheap.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone indicated that this circle may start to be closed. He said that Twitter was developing commercial accounts that business users would have to pay for. But these commercial accounts would include premium services that would make it much more worthwhile for business.

As to what those ‘premium services’ would actually be, Stone was playing his cards close to his chest. One thing he did say is that they would include detailed analytics so premium account users could determine how and when people were interacting with their profile. Understanding these interactions could be key in determining how to best use Twitter as a communications channel.

Stone also said that they were constructing several Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allowing third party developers integrate ‘business oriented applications’ for premium account holders. These APIs could add a ‘commercial layer’ on top of the micro-blogging platform.

Stone said “…we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

Twitter is also expanding their “verified accounts” program, which prove to followers that the account holder is the official one for the business.

Stone wouldn’t be tied down to any official launch timeframe.

With or without these Premium accounts, Twitter already holds huge potential for almost any brand. Euston Digital has already helped several businesses engage with their current and future customers using this open communication channel. For advice on how to use Twitter to help your business, just get in touch.

Tags: twitter
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

The fastest growing Search Engine? That would be Facebook

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Searching is the web’s most common activity. Many of our Internet sessions start with a search of one form or another.

The brand fueling this search for much of the nineties was Yahoo. Then came the millenium and the baton was taken up by Google. Over the last 6 months it has been Microsoft’s Bing that has grabbed all the search headlines.

But now there’s a new kid on the block. Well I say new, it’s actually quite an old kid. A teenager in Internet years: the company experiencing the fastest growth in search traffic is apparently Facebook. According to the ComScore monthly search report, Facebook searches exploded by a massive 35% last month.

Yes, the website whose main purpose is Social Networking has introduced new search features which has catapulted it into the search big league. Members can search for stuff like photos, videos, links and even member updates. Whilst they used to have to hunt for these within other users’ profiles, the new Search Engine Results page (SERP) delivers them in categories, depending on what the member has searched for.

Its a little bit different to searching on Google – members are not going to be looking for products and services in this way. It is those product and service searches that advertisers really like, and the reason why Google has so much advertising revenue. But this is just the first step in Facebooks’ journey to become not just a social networking site, but a real player when it comes to search.

Facebook clear has real search ambition. The company has also enhanced its ability to provide real-time search, a battle ground that has only this year become more intense. And of course last month they bought FriendFeed, which will add another layer to the searchable, real time nature of the service.

Google isn’t taking this lying down. They are making the journey in the other direction, from search engine to social media enterprise. They have recently added lots of social features to their web properties in order to make them stickier. And their own moves towards real-time search shows they are defending their interests there too. But if Facebook search continues to grow at this rate, Google may have to move to protect its pure search homelands.

There were casualties in the search market too. Those experiencing declining search volumes were AskJeeves (down 4%), and Yahoo and AOL (who dropped 5% each).

Do you think Facebook has a chance to rival Google as a search engine? How will Facebook monetise their new services? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: facebook, google
Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 18 Comments »

How much do you think your brand is worth?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.

This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.

Here’s the top 10:

As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.

One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.

Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).

Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.

The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).

Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.

So what does ‘brand’ mean?

The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.

So how do you improve your brand’s value?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.

The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can.

The obvious way to expose this experience to more people is for us to carry out a Search Engine Optimisation program to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Your should also kick off your Social Networking strategy start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.

Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: brands, google, SEO
Posted in SEO, Search Engines | 4 Comments »