Will All of You Writing Apps and Forming Social Group Pages Send Them all to me and THEN BE DONE!

My girls got me started on FaceBook after informing me that email was “so 90’s.” I never did get into the My____ thing, because I could never figure out what the heck the ____ was until they too were obsolete. Glad I didn’t invest any time there. After “friending” the entire family, the congregation of our church, half of Woodside High School and most of my kids friends, I was labeled as a lurch. Apparently overtly spying on your children’s activities by looking at the weekend beer-pong photos and tables filled with bongs is frowned upon in the current “hip” social circle. Too bad, I’m a parent – not their best buddy.

My first exposure to LinkedIn came from an ex girlfriend sending me an email that simply stated “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” That seemed simple enough. She was a colleague in a marketing role within a well known software company, so there seemed to be some value there. I’d never heard of LinkedIn but have been a relatively early adopter so I jumped on it. I signed up and promptly forgot that it even existed.

Having been around for a while (I actually remember key-punch cards, CP/M, Lotus 123, and DB5) I have seen lots of things come and go. My first desktop computer was an Apple II with a 2MB external drive – hot stuff back then. It was no earth shaking event to find a platform with a bit more professional atmosphere than the “well he was all.. oh my God, and she said…” banter that was FaceBook at the time.

I took a quick class on “social media” and came back stoked at the business implications of LinkedIn. I set a goal to acquire 100 professional contacts, and began emailing everyone I had ever worked with. The more I played with it, the more applications I found for connecting with associates, groups, chats, conversations, etc. It became kind of an obsession. I started teaching classes on the business/job search applications of LinkedIn and got even better at it. You know what they say: if you really want to learn something, teach it. I began broadening out with my associates at ProMatch and expanded the course work to include FaceBook and Twitter. I was asked to write for a social media blog with the State of California EDD, and taught a few additional adult education courses for the county. That was when the real fun began.

I took a Masters Certificate in Internet Marketing from USF and figured out how to integrate all this wonderful social media with websites to generate leads and attract business through the internet. I haven’t made a “cold call” since.

In the following years of helping my clients generate traffic to their sites, I developed a pretty good, tight little grouping of sites that I feel relevant. I use WordPress to create my blog/content, twitter to broadcast it, and my LinkedIn and FaceBook fan pages (FB is not just for High School students any more) as my portfolio sites. There are videos that need to be posted on YouTube, Slide Shows on Slide Share, we need to use Google alerts to monitor the feedback on our products and services, Yelp to express our opinions of others goods and services, and after a daily review of Search Engine Land and weekly webinar with the Internet Marketing Club, it is exhausting to keep up with it all.

Google + looks like it is going to be a “must have” in the professional quiver, and Stumble Upon, Digg and Redit, gain more attention by the day. Google + really looks like a good more intuitive knock off from FaceBook, except that adoption is still very sparse now and there really isn’t much on it.

Enough is Enough! Slow down and let me catch my breath. There are now 15 “share” icons below some of the articles I read, and more coming every day. To set up a social media suite there are 10 different sites, avatars’, and registers to complete profiles in to get a client started. I can consolidate all the proliferation through Postling, but for crying out loud! I spend 5-10 hours a week just keeping up with what I need to understand to help my clients, and the other 40 doing the work. I need a maid!

 

This is why I never felt comfortable putting all my eggs in the Google basket …

Keyword “Not Provided” By Google Spikes, Now 7-14% In Cases

by Daniel Waisberg

 

Google’s new encrypted search for logged in users now appears to be blocking a much higher percentage of search terms than when it initially rolled out two weeks ago. In some cases, it might even be higher than the 10% or less figure that the company initially predicted might be impacted.

Blocking Search Queries

Two weeks ago Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.

This change caused strong reactions, both in the web analytics industry (as this means that organic search becomes less trackable) and also in terms of whether Google was protecting privacy fully (since advertisers still receive this information).

Single Digit Impact Predicted

Google predicted that the change would impact 10% or less of searches:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

In fact, the week the changes started rolling out, various reports put the “Not Provided” percentage — which is what those using Google Analytics see if terms are blocked — at around 2% to 3%.

High Single Digit To Above 10% Now Happening

However, as of October 31, we have seen a very significant increase on the Not Provided figure here on Search Engine Land. It’s not just us, either. Looking at data from several websites across industries, we see a range of 7% to 14% of total organic keywords now being blocked.

Below you see how the “Not Provided” figure has suddenly spiked for Search Engine Land:

 

Below you can see how the percentage of Not Provided for the total organic keywords for November 1st to the site is above 10%, 12.87% in all:

 

The figure is even more dramatic, however, when you consider it as a percentage of Google-driven keywords. In other words, the 12.87% figure above means that for ALL keywords from ANY search engine to Search Engine Land, 12.87% of them were blocked.

As this blocking is only happening by Google, what’s the percentage of only keyword traffic from Google? That works out to 14.2%.

Of course, one might expect Search Engine Land to have a higher percentage of search-driven traffic than other sites. But as said, we’ve also looked at sites beyond Search Engine Land.

Danny Sullivan’s personal blog, Daggle, had 13.65% of its Google-driven keywords blocked. One non-tech site had 7.1% of its Google-driven queries reporting “Not Provided.” Another non-tech site we know of had 8.83% of all its keywords reporting as “Not Provided.”

We’d love to hear what others are finding — please comment below, if you’d like to share your figures.

Rollout Still Happening; Percentage Could Get Higher

The rollout was supposed to take place over the course of several weeks. The process is still happening, and it seems as if it was suddenly enabled for more users on October 31.

Google wouldn’t confirm that, nor say how complete the rollout is at this point. In general, the company said:

As we noted, this change will occur over the next few weeks. Traffic figures will naturally vary depending on a website’s audience. What we provided was an estimate.

If there are significantly more people not yet being included in encrypted search, the percentage of Not Provided queries would likely grow over the coming weeks.

Related Entries

• Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search
• Guest Opinion: Is Google’s Privacy Move Really An Anti-Competitive Practice?
• Google Puts A Price On Privacy

 

Why “Second Chance” Tweets Matter: After 3 Hours, Few Care About Socially Shared Links

by Danny Sullivan

There have been various studies suggesting that if someone doesn’t see a tweet or a Facebook post within a few hours, they’ll never see it at all. Now link shortening service Bit.ly is out with another. After three hours, Bit.ly has found, links have sent about all the traffic they’re going to send. So start thinking about doing “second chance” tweets, as I call them.

The Half-Life Of A Link

In particular, Bit.ly has measured what it calls the “half-life” of a socially-shared link. By half-life, it means the point in which a link has received half the clicks it will ever get. From the company’s blog post:

We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak.

Personally, I find this a bit confusing. The link will still continue to generate some additional clicks beyond this period, substantial amounts, even. It’s just that the link — after the half-life period — is headed to rapid decline. The real near zero point will be a bit longer than the half-life.

Three Hours To Decline

Still, terminology aside, the half-life concept is useful in stressing how quickly attention shifts away from things that have been shared. Bit.ly found measured the half-life of links on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Here’s the chart:

And the numbers:

• Twitter: 2.8 hours
• Facebook: 3.2 hours
• YouTube: 7.4 hours

In short, after three hours, links shared on the two major social networks — Twitter and Facebook — are headed to obscurity. However, YouTube links last a bit longer. It’s unclear what Bit.ly means here, but I think it’s saying that a YouTube link that’s shared on Twitter or Facebook will attract attention longer than other types of links shared on them. I’m checking on this.

Postscript: Heard back, these are indeed shortened URLs that get shared on YouTube such as in comments or descriptions there.

Second Chance Tweets

Here on Search Engine Land, we’ve long tapped into the decline of attention by doing what we call “second chance tweets.” On our @sengineland Twitter account, we tweet a story as soon as it’s posted. However, many of our Twitter followers might easily miss this, if they’re not online, busy and so on. That’s why we schedule a “second chance” tweet for most major stories to go out a few hours after they originally get tweeted.

Typically, we receive about 50% more traffic from Twitter from our second chance tweets as from the original ones. In other words, by simply tweeting a story again, some hours after the “half-life” of the original tweet has expired, we pick up 50% of the traffic that the original tweet generated.

In fact, I was coincidentally looking at some of our stats earlier today. In one case, a second chance tweet that we did generated substantially more traffic than the original tweet. That’s not normal, but it highlights how if you assume all your followers have seen your original tweet, you’re probably making the wrong assumption.

Of course, no one wants to have the same tweet shoved at them over and over again. We’ve been deliberate and careful in how we do things; we’ve had less than 10 complaints that I can recall over the half-year that we’ve been doing this. So, I figure we’re doing it OK.

Bottom line: Tweet and tweet again. In moderation. And turn that half-life into an extended life.