Social Media: Huge, surpassed email in popularity.
Twitter: Real Search Engine: 19 Billion queries per month.
Twitter Ads: “Promoted Tweets”. Expand program through 3rd parties. 75% of traffic is via API’s. UberMedia…currently tussling with Twitter.
Facebook: Pages, apps, ads, polls…analytics via Facebook Insights.
Real time search: Is displacing traditional results. Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real time algos.
Mobile: Mobile advertising is the new point of sale. 25% of Facebook users are on mobile.
Google dominates mobile web ads. IDC: More mobile devices sold in 2011 than PC’s. Apple: 60% of touchscreen market. Most mobile campaigns are ad-hoc and lack the focus of traditional campaigns.
Consider optimizing part of your site for mobile.
Location-based social networking is hot (Foursquare, Gowalla). Geofencing detects location & can place ads on devices.
Video: YouTube is now the second largest search engine by traffic. Video will be 70% of mobile data traffic by 2014. Need to embed metadata, create relevant titles & filenames, appropriate on page optimization, lots of descriptive text where video is embedded & include URL’s in the video to encourage viral linking.
Takeaways: Search marketing continues to grow importance…more opportunities than ever for clever SEM’s, we haven’t begun the upslope curve of hockey stick groth in this industry.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.