A Pew Research report published last week has outlined some of the major trends in social media use over the last year in America. Unsurprisingly, the popularity of many social networks continues to grow, with many platforms seeing significant increases in user numbers.
Many webmasters spend time updating their blog, news section or product pages throughout the year. They often spend a lot of time focusing on building new pages as well. But when was the last time you did a detailed review of your Contact Us page?
The impending release of Windows 10 is surrounded by rumors and, for Microsoft supporters, high hopes. More will be learned about the new OS at an event on January 21, but for now, it’s thought that Windows 10 will cater as much to enterprise PC customers as it will to personal users.
Even if you’re not familiar with the term “knowledge graph,” you’ve probably had experience with Google’s Knowledge Graph technology. Whenever detailed information about your search pops up directly on the search engine results page, that’s the Knowledge Graph at work. For example, a Google search for “Benjamin Franklin” returns birth and death dates, works written, images and much more in a box placed prominently on Google’s results page.
According to the latest comScore numbers, Microsoft sites got around 3.7 billion searches in October. While that’s only 19.5 percent of the search market share, the numbers are high enough to suggest that Bing should not be ignored – especially if your site targets an older or wealthier audience.
Marketers have known for years that video content is effective at driving traffic, links and sales. Check out this now vintage-seeming case study from 2006 (less than two years after YouTube debuted), in which it’s shown that short video clips can generate thousands of impressions at a fraction of the cost of PPC advertising.
The importance of mobile traffic should not be underestimated. Earlier this year, comScore reported that people spent much more time accessing digital media on smartphones and tablets than on desktops. Also, according to eMarketer, smartphone users could total 1.75 billion by the end of this year.
Despite talks of breaking up Google in Europe, search marketers know that it will continue to be the most important search engine in the foreseeable future. Also, as far as browsers are concerned, Google’s Chrome is the most popular in the world.
Are the major tech giants running out of original ideas? Maybe not, but a trend in which companies try to steal some share from others’ flagship markets seems to be increasing as of late. For example, Google launched Google+ after the success of Facebook, Microsoft launched Bing to directly compete with Google, Facebook launched Graph Search to get into the search game, and there’s evidence that Apple could be doing the same.