This Week In Search and Social
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Another interesting week draws to a close, and we’ve got a lot to talk about.
Big Changes to Facebook, Foursquare hits 1B Checkins
The biggest story of the week by far is the massive change coming to facebook. At yesterday’s f8 keynote event, Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to the way your profile works and to how your activities are shared.
Highlights:
- Your profile will now be a “Timeline”, which is kind of a centralized dashboard for all of your activities.
- Some stuff will be pulled out of the newsfeed and put into a “Ticker” feed on the right-hand side of the screen. Kind of like a stock market ticker. The ticker is place where you will see updates that are less relevant to you. For example, if a friend comments on someone else’s post.
- Any service or app that you connect to Facebook will now share your activities automatically. This might annoy some people.
Mashable.com has a great roundup of all that’s coming to your facebook profile. The new Timeline profile is being rolled out slowly, but this article at TechCrunch will show you how to do it right now.
Social checkin platform Foursquare has now passed one billion checkins. While checking in remains low on the list of things that smartphone users like to do, there’s no doubt that it’s gaining some traction. If you have a brick and mortar business, you can’t really afford to ignore social check ins for too much longs.
Goolge +1 For Mobile and Display Ads, AdWords Testing Built In Forms, Bing is Losing Tons of Money
In search news, the Google +1 button is now live on search results for mobile devices. More importantly, ads on the Google Display Network will now also feature the +1 button. It appears that +1 activity will influence the AdWords auctions. This is becomes a challenge for search marketers, since they now have to design ads that ask for two actions: a click on the +1, and then a click on the ad itself.
In other AdWords news, it appears that Google is testing out AdWords ads that have a lead capture form built right in. This could be very useful if you are using adwords to capture leads rather than sell something online, since users won’t need to click through to your landing page before giving you their information.
It appears as though Bing and Microsoft Online Services are bleeding money – an astonishing 1 billion dollars per quarter! Over at Search Engine Journal, they point out that this translates to $11 million per day or nearly $500,000 per hour. Even for a company of Microsoft’s size, this is not sustainable. In the same article they quote Microsoft’s president of online services as saying that Bing needs to reach about 30% of search market share in order to be profitable. The trouble is, Bing’s recent growth has come at the expense of Yahoo, rather than Google.
What search and social news did you pay attention to this week?
