LOCATION3 MEDIA NEWS:
As the final numbers for 2012 are released, the team members at Location3 are proud to share our growth over the last year. This rapid expansion hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Denver Business Journal’s Book of Lists showed Location3 Media was the top advertising agency in the Denver area by gross revenue in 2012. The newspaper also ranked Location3 #10 in Flight II of its annual list of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
As comScore puts it “With smartphones surpassing 125 million U.S. consumers and tablets now owned by more than 50 million, we have crossed into the brave new digital world, a paradigm where consumers are always connected”. In line with this Google announced the biggest change to happen to AdWords since AdWords, the launch of Enhanced Campaigns.
How are the engines ranking these days? Google is sitting around 67% of search queries while Microsoft came in at 16.5% and Yahoo at 12.1%. Combined Bing and Yahoo hold 28.6% search share. For more information visit the latest press release from comScore.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LOCAL?
Bing has now improved their auto search suggestions by making it both faster and more accurate. Similar to Google’s Instant Search, Bing auto populates possible searches in the query field for users.
Google has changed their guidelines to allow multiple listings for departments within locations such as hospitals, universities, and businesses if they have a unique phone number. For example, now a Political Science department could have its own listing separate from the general university listing.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
Noticing some strange differences in your visits between Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics (Omniture SiteCatalyst)? Check out our blog by Tara Dunn on some key differences between these major analytics tools that may help explain what’s going on.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN DISPLAY?
Big announcements impacting the future of display happened in February, with Firefox setting their default browser settings to block third party cookies. Learn more about what this change means for marketers.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN VIDEO?
Nearly 180 million U.S. internet users watched 36.2 billion online content videos in January, while the number of video ad views reached 9.1 billion. In a world where users are on multiple devices throughout the day advertisers need to shift their advertising dollars to where consumers are going to be entertained. Speak with your Location3 client rep today to organize a plan to address this and expand your reach.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Vine App
Twitter released a new video sharing app, Vine, in late January. Vine allows you to take quick, six-second video clips and create different views for a sort of looped stop-motion, or animated GIF-like experience. It’s like Instagram in that it is an app and managed via mobile devices. Vine is already being embraced by several top brands and is especially useful for those that host public events, have the potential for behind-the-scenes content (fashion and entertainment brands) or are just looking for a new way to connect with users and share original content.
Instagram on the Web
Instagram expanded to the web, launching a non-mobile version of the extremely popular photo-sharing service. The web-based version is essentially the same as what is available on mobile devices—a stream of photos from your contacts, and the ability to Like and comment on those images. Many are predicting that the move was to prepare for ads, which only makes sense now that Facebook owns Instagram, but is still speculation. We’re rooting for search functionality to be added to the web version first, allowing for a more efficient process for tracking brand accounts and hashtags.
Twitter Passwords
Burger King and Jeep’s Twitter accounts were hacked, resulting in off-brand and inappropriate posts going out under their names. To protect yourself from these sorts of hacks, we advise you to change passwords every six months, and ensure that the password is something random (i.e., not “[brandname]Social#1”). When you do change your passwords, please alert your Location3 social media rep to make sure we have the most current information for your accounts.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
There was more buzz in the industry this month about Google targeting certain “unnatural” link building practices. Primarily, it emphasized the importance of placing guest posts within high-quality sites, specifically ones that aren’t filled with content from outside sources. Guests posting is still ok, however sites that rely only on guests posts and don’t have enough authority built up on their own content could be negatively impacted. This is something we look out for in our screening process when selecting sites to reach out to.
Another key idea is authorship: in other words, building the persona around the author of the guest blog posts, including a linkage between the author page and a Google Plus page. This is why we emphasize more than ever the importance of utilizing personas from the brand itself, rather than an author at Location3. This will help the authority of these posts build over time as they are associated with a personality connected to the brand and the vertical.