traffic Immediate Future

Mobile optimisation now mandatory

From 21st April mobile optimisation became mandatory, but we’ve all been doing this anyway right? Well, it appears now, and rightly so, we don’t have a choice as the almighty Google are now favouring mobile optimised and friendly websites over those that aren’t. What does this mean…

Finding your influencers through link listening

Knowing your influencers is a key goal for most companies. However, there is no straight forward formula, or right or wrong way to identify these evangelists. Repeated engagements and metrics such as Klout will help in assessing how engaged and how influential they are in their own merit, but without…

notonthehighstreet shuns facades, likes Facebook, and sees five-fold sales increase via social – Social Speakeasy

It is one of the UK’s fastest-growing retailers and its name and mission have shunned the city centre for nine years. But notonthehighstreet.com, which recently underscored its aversion to the high street by opening its new Surrey headquarters overlooking the Richmond roundabout, has ambitions to – wait…

5 ways to take your advertising on LinkedIn to the next level

We use the LinkedIn paid platform for clients on a daily basis. Despite its rather dated layout and reasonably thin set of features (when compared with the big boys like Google and Facebook), there is no doubt, for me, that LinkedIn still very much has the edge…

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Infographics

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Infographics The use of infographics in marketing and on social media is nothing new but here are a few reasons why you should be using these incredibly versatile tools; 1) 90% Of Information Transmitted To The Brain Is Visual. Your eyes have more sensory…

Spot.IM – The on-page social network that hits the Spot for brands

Brands use Facebook and Twitter in a variety of ways, most of them very successfully. But as effective as they are, existing channels don’t necessarily result in more sales, page views or direct engagement with the customer. Spot.IM, a free, one-size-fits-all social network, aims to…

Pinterest’s Pin Picks kick-starting a spooktacular Halloween

Pinterest has solidly established itself as one of the top visual content-sharing platforms, primed with plenty of user-generated content but also curates content itself, through its Pin Picks feature – a lesser-known collection of a few of the Pinterest team’s “favourite things”, compiled in partnership with some…

Pinterest, a picture playground?

Do you know which social media sites are best for your business? Most B2C companies would admit they focus their efforts towards Facebook and Twitter, whereas, B2B companies predominately use LinkedIn. Without research and insight it’s easy to make these assumptions, but are marketers are forgetting one of the largest…

YouTube in a minute: Are you getting the most out of your videos?

2.7 million views. 100 hours a video. 1,388 channel subscriptions. A lot can happen in a minute. We are of course talking about YouTube, the video sharing behemoth that is the third biggest website in a world and not only has millions of views every 60 seconds: it’s also raking…

Video: the king of content marketing?

As businesses begin to appreciate the value that quality visual content can bring in capturing the attention of prospects, which in turn drive clicks and sales, video becomes an ever more compelling part of a brand’s content strategy; Cisco predicts that by 2017 video will account for…

How brands will benefit from Twitter’s makeover

You may or may not have read countless articles, suspiciously pointing the finger at Twitter’s re-design and how it closely matches the appearance of another popular social network. Or you’ve logged into your account and have been taken aback by an enormous cover photo. Yes Twitter has had an image…

Maximise your social media measurement with Lucy Wren at the Social Speakeasy

For many brands using social media, you want to prove one thing: that your campaigns are delivering ROI. Whether it’s the number of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, the number of retweets, clicks to your landing pages, email registrations or product downloads, there are a multitude of metrics that…

Why ‘micro visuals’ are essential for your social media outreach

For brands using social media, visuals matter. No matter the platform and whether its Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest, incorporating visual elements into your posts is essential. But its more than just using a random photo with your posts to fill the image quota on your posts. Quality, original and…

Take note – LinkedIn publishing power is a BIG opportunity

Roll up! Roll up! Brands that are already investing heavily in LinkedIn will be licking their lips at the prospect of the new publishing power about to be at their finger tips (see the full article on the LinkedIn blog). LinkedIn influencers, launched in 2012, saw powerful…

The Rise of the SYBAW (Smart, Young and Bored At Work)

Call them what you like, Generation Me, the Lost Generation but they remain top of the lust-list for advertisers and companies alike. This new sub-demographic spawned from Generation Y can be described as “the most sophisticated and therefore the most important media consumer that the planet has even known”, and…

6 social media 2014 predictions from some of the most influential industry authorities

As usual predictions for 2014 abound. Rather than add to the melee with only our voice, we asked some of the most influential movers and shakers in digital to tell us what they thought would be big this year. Interestingly, even though we asked for opinions individually, the feedback revealed…

New Year, Same Story: 2014 is the year of mobile

2014 is the year of mobile. The same could be said in 2011, 2012 and 2013, as mobile has grown at an enormous rate and enjoyed a meteoric rise, with browsing and surfing online from devices a part of everyday life. But how will it fare in 2014? The simple…

5 Twitter tools you should not ignore

Twitter is a truly fascinating social platform. Launched merely 7 years ago the company is now valued at $24bn. Some argue this is an over-valuation (Twitter is yet to make a profit), however the numbers speak for themselves: 230+ million monthly active users 500…

5 facts about micro-videos you must know!

© Vine. Logo. © Instagram. Logo. As we know Vine and Instagram videos have been a great success and added something extra to the social media armoury. There is a lot said about Vine and Instagram but what are the most important figures that…

3 social platforms you should not ignore in B2B

We spend a lot of our time with our B2B clients talking about, and operating in, LinkedIn, Twitter & YouTube. Whilst these platforms (for good reason, particularly LinkedIn) are taking the floor and presenting the most opportunities at the moment, it is important for Marketers not to become closed to…

5 LinkedIn group stats you need to know

Activity in LinkedIn groups shows absolutely no signs of slowing, even with the platform’s emphasis on a content rich update feed. When Facebook made this move with their series of news feed updates, the groups eventually went, but it doesn’t look like they will be going any where fast on…

Want to drive sales? The power of Pinterest for purchasing

For brands using social media increased exposure and awareness is great, but knowing that your profiles are having the desired impact and driving people to purchase is the end goal. A new study from the Harvard Business Review has found that Pinterest in particular is having a…

A Whirl Round Waze

Waze, the crowd sourced traffic-mapping and navigation company, was recently acquired for $1.3bn by Google after a supposed bidding war with Facebook. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has actually begun investigating this acquisition after demands from consumer groups concerned that Google’s takeover of the company could…

From Monaco With Love

The team have just returned from a week of handling the social media for our client IBM and their #SmarterCommerce conference. We worked hard, partied harder and didn’t sleep much. What else would you expect when in Monaco? It was long nights and social media collaboration heaven!…

Using social media internally for your business

We read many articles advising us on how to use social media for business, but this is normally on an external level, to help with customer service, brand awareness and web traffic. However, have you thought about how social media can help your business internally? As we know, social media…

Are Enough Brands Exploring the ‘Social Relationship’ with Google Analytics?

The ‘Social Relationship’ tool within GA is not a particularly new tool, however, are brands using it enough? Brands are very familiar with using the traffic referral reports and setting up goals to identify where direct conversions are coming from, but the ‘relationship’ between social interaction and conversions drives a…

Get the user experience right and the leads will follow. Right?

Last week Twitter announced a brand new addition to its suite of Twitter Cards – one designed solely to help brands capture leads and drive purchase. The Lead Generation Card will now enable brands to push incentives and offers directly to consumers, who by expanding the tweet will see their…

Which Social Media Metrics Should I Monitor?

With such a large number of analytical tools for social media, it is understandable that you may feel overwhelmed with all of the data that is available. However, with some simple steps, you’ll be analysing the success of your social media campaigns in no time: There are so…

3 ways LinkedIn is becoming the discovery channel

With 200 million registered users and over 11 million in the UK, LinkedIn must focus on helping its user base expand their networks and engage with the platform on a deeper level. In the same way Facebook has introduced Graph Search to help it’s users to discover more within the…

The dangers of Big Data and the biases of interpretation

Health services in South West London are in the process of being reconfigured. Which means the A&E department and maternity ward at my local hospital could soon close. Residents have been told not to worry as it will only take 13 minutes to travel to the reallocated wards in Tooting.

Google Plus – where is the value?

After casting my eye on the infographic below there was one particular statement that caught my attention… Google+ pages appear in search results for 30% of brand terms searches for brands with G+ pages (up 5% from Feb 2012) In a bid to do some quick and dirty bit of…

Pinterest pins hopes on a more profitable proposition

With the ink barely dried on Facebook’s latest announcement, you could be forgiven for thinking that the social network was feeling marginally threatened by the likes of visual counterparts such as Pinterest. Facebook’s latest redesign places a clear emphasis on visual content, sending the message to brands that text-only content…

Your Weekly Social Media Snapshot

Shetland Pony ad goes viral Over the last few weeks we have seen Three’s simple, but innovative, advert of a dancing pony hit our screens and go viral on social media. The mobile provider currently has over 5,000,000 YouTube hits! In a short space of time…

Has the new web based analytics tool made Pinterest more useful to businesses?

There have been many questions raised as to the benefits of using Pinterest for business. The visual content hub is increasingly being used as a way of linking back to other, often text based content. Brands can post images on Pinterest to lead users to content on other platforms, such…

The Anatomy of a Crisis Part Two: There’s No Horsing Around

In part one of this series we discussed that issues shouldn’t be viewed purely through a social lens. Just because a company is affected by an incident doesn’t necessarily mean it becomes embroiled in a crisis. However, that does not mean crises don’t exist. And when a true…

Discover what content works in B2B social media using (non-paid) click-through rates!

After reading an interesting article from The Real Time Report last week I was inspired to share some of the metrics I know most companies won’t be tracking in the B2B space… The report above, which looked purely at website analytics as a way of determining referral traffic and…

Reverse engineering Facebook: what can we learn from three leading brands’ apps?

An app says a lot about a branded Facebook page. It can tell us whether a brand has a data and/or member acquisition strategy, while providing insight into the consistency of branding and coherency of content strategy. It can reveal the true extent of on-page geo-targeting, amalgamating localised campaigns and…

The shift to visual social media

Content marketing is on the lips of most Marketing Managers as we head into 2013. The growth of platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram are proof of the way that people are consuming content – shifting to rich engaging visual content. Our own client analysis shows that 4x more engagement…

Make the call. Optimise for mobile.

Earlier this year Econsultancy surveyed e-commerce and e-business professionals to understand if and how they were using mobile as part of their multichannel experience. The survey revealed that 74% of companies had developed a mobile optimised website, 29% had developed a tablet-optimised website; and nearly half were…

Dark social; the ghost in the social media measurement machine

When the clock strikes midnight and the un-dead stir from their graves, it won’t be Freddie Krueger, or Pennywise the clown putting the frights into social media marketeers this Halloween. Something far worse. Something far scarier. A social media metric that isn’t being measured. As Social Media Examiner reports, the…

New Twitter brand pages: a flashy ploy to justify the cost of promoted tweets?

The new UK Twitter brand pages have finally hit our shores for those companies that can afford it. Let’s put this out there, brands on Twitter still don’t have the flexibility the Facebook API allows. Twitter will keep a tight rein on what users can and can’t…

If social commerce is about to blow up, has the bomb been dropped?

As all eyes focus on the social commerce landscape for 2012, Dimensions Mall, has dropped a veritable bomb less than a month into the year. While 67% of retailers are already planning to use Facebook to drive traffic through to e-commerce in 2012, not to mention Coca-Cola,…

Waze – Geolocation emerges from its troubled teens and becomes a useful member of society

You may have seen the other day that GPS navigation system Waze hit 10m users. It’s a social tool that aggregates user reports on traffic, accidents and the like. I’m a recent convert and signed up a few months ago, since…

Q&A: RiotRemedy founder, Heather Taylor, talks community management

In 2004 social networks were a groundbreaking channel for brands to self-publicise and broadcast their news. Today, the dynamic between brands and their customers has shifted. Customers want brands to talk with and not just at them. According to Heather Taylor, founder of online community, RiotRemedy, today’s brands need to…

Social media marketing: what not to do

Social media marketing is not new. We’re all familiar with the basics and brands are actively engaging with their consumers on a daily basis. So, why are people still doing it incorrectly? Here, we share what to do and, more importantly, what not to do when it comes to the…

Measuring your online community. Does size matter?

The importance of online communities is evident to many brands. What isn’t so obvious is how you set objectives for the community and, then, how you develop a framework to measure this. What you measure depends on what you have set out to achieve. If awareness is the objective, then…

The content farms are out to pasture; but will brands be crying over spilt milk?

Google’s ‘Panda’ update is receiving a high level of search, SEO and even mainstream media attention, but the repercussion for brands engaging in social media is one can of worms begging to be opened. Big fat juicy worms, like will sites currently considered valuable for brands to engage with suddenly…

The Social Shopping Explosion

Today we are launching our report on social shopping and its impact on consumer behaviour. Online retail has traditionally been characterised by price-driven sales and purchase-driven consumers. The focus, for retailers, has been on engaging the…

Social Commerce – converting conversation into commerce

Last week I attended a pretty insightful WOMMA UK talk where Dr. Paul Marsden presented his latest thinking on The Rise of Social Commerce: Converting Conversations to Commerce. For those of you that don’t know him, Marsden is a renowned digital marketer, author and social psychologist. He…

Does TV influence search?

Research from Ofcom this week shows that we are all getting better at multi-tasking. This evolution has been spurred by our need to juggle various communications devices and channels. Rory Cellan-Jones in his BBC blog asks if…

We’re living in a virtual world

If you’re living in the UK like the team at immediate future, you’ll no doubt be enjoying a bit of classic British summertime – it’s August, and you need a coat, scarf and wellies to go anywhere. It’s frankly rubbish outside, so why not stay in and get everything you…

Natural disasters, the natural ground for social media

The latest volcanic eruption in Iceland has had a dramatic effect on many more millions of people than could have been imagined. As one person commented on Twitter this morning, interesting to see the hand of God can still command such control over us mere humans – or something like…

Brown overtakes Cameron online thanks to his weapon of mass seduction!

What? For the first time in a week, search demand for Gordon Brown has crept above David Cameron: Not since the 22nd March, when Gordon trumped Cameron’s baby with his super fast broadband and Institute of Web Science announcement has there been such a result for Labour…

A good birthday for Facebook

February marks a milestone in the social networking calendar as Facebook celebrates its birthday. The site turned six last week and is showing impressive figures of late, with double the amount of users (now standing at 400 million worldwide), compared to this time last…

Social networks in the UK – Twitter climbing, Facebook leading but stagnant

Just for fun I thought I’d use Google Trends to compare the leading social networks in terms of how much traffic they’re getting from UK web users. This first chart shows that Bebo and MySpace both declined at a fairly similar rate over the past 12 months, while Twitter has…

Understanding the difference between online PR and SEO

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of online PR these days. Too many people think that the sole job of online PR is improve the client’s search engine optimisation and help drive traffic to their website. Granted, SEO and online PR do go hand in…

Online PR, a powerful marketing channel – I think not

I am speaking this week at the IAB’s seminar, demystifying online PR. It is interesting that in their blurb on the seminar they say… Demystifying [tag]Online PR[/tag] – Online PR has changed the roles of creative and PR agencies in a client’s communication strategies.

Traditional Media will have to become social media relations experts

Emily Bell has run an article in today’s Media Guardian commenting on the Guardian’s new look homepage that grabbed my attention. Most interesting is a point referenced to Jeff Jarvis, highlighting the recent drop in importance for the homepage. Visitors to…

Search results for "traffic"

Mobile optimisation now mandatory

Finding your influencers through link listening

notonthehighstreet shuns facades, likes Facebook, and sees five-fold sales increase via social – Social Speakeasy

5 ways to take your advertising on LinkedIn to the next level

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Infographics

Spot.IM – The on-page social network that hits the Spot for brands

Pinterest’s Pin Picks kick-starting a spooktacular Halloween

Pinterest, a picture playground?

YouTube in a minute: Are you getting the most out of your videos?

Video: the king of content marketing?

How brands will benefit from Twitter’s makeover

Maximise your social media measurement with Lucy Wren at the Social Speakeasy

Why ‘micro visuals’ are essential for your social media outreach

Take note – LinkedIn publishing power is a BIG opportunity

The Rise of the SYBAW (Smart, Young and Bored At Work)

6 social media 2014 predictions from some of the most influential industry authorities

New Year, Same Story: 2014 is the year of mobile

5 Twitter tools you should not ignore

5 facts about micro-videos you must know!

3 social platforms you should not ignore in B2B

5 LinkedIn group stats you need to know

Want to drive sales? The power of Pinterest for purchasing

A Whirl Round Waze

From Monaco With Love

Using social media internally for your business

Are Enough Brands Exploring the ‘Social Relationship’ with Google Analytics?

Get the user experience right and the leads will follow. Right?

Which Social Media Metrics Should I Monitor?

3 ways LinkedIn is becoming the discovery channel

The dangers of Big Data and the biases of interpretation

Google Plus – where is the value?

Pinterest pins hopes on a more profitable proposition

Your Weekly Social Media Snapshot

Has the new web based analytics tool made Pinterest more useful to businesses?

The Anatomy of a Crisis Part Two: There’s No Horsing Around

Discover what content works in B2B social media using (non-paid) click-through rates!

Reverse engineering Facebook: what can we learn from three leading brands’ apps?

The shift to visual social media

Make the call. Optimise for mobile.

Dark social; the ghost in the social media measurement machine

New Twitter brand pages: a flashy ploy to justify the cost of promoted tweets?

If social commerce is about to blow up, has the bomb been dropped?

Waze – Geolocation emerges from its troubled teens and becomes a useful member of society

Q&A: RiotRemedy founder, Heather Taylor, talks community management

Social media marketing: what not to do

Measuring your online community. Does size matter?

The content farms are out to pasture; but will brands be crying over spilt milk?

The Social Shopping Explosion

Social Commerce – converting conversation into commerce

Does TV influence search?

We’re living in a virtual world

Natural disasters, the natural ground for social media

Brown overtakes Cameron online thanks to his weapon of mass seduction!

A good birthday for Facebook

Social networks in the UK – Twitter climbing, Facebook leading but stagnant

Understanding the difference between online PR and SEO

Online PR, a powerful marketing channel – I think not

Traditional Media will have to become social media relations experts