Welcome to 2013!

2013 looks to be another year of changes in the technology and marketing world! 2012 was all about mobile and smartphones and 2013 is supposed to be all about tablets. Tech companies are scrambling to create better tablet and user experiences on their devices. There have been big announcements and changes to social media sites within the past few months and Google has been making constant updates on their search algorithms. How do all of these changes affect your business?  Actually, any technological change in search or in social media will have an effect on businesses!

Google released their Panda update a few years ago and they have been making updates every month since. The most recent update was in January. Google is constantly updating their algorithm that affects a website’s search rank. Correct Search Engine Optimization and content management play a key role in having good organic search results. Google is looking for unique and dependable content in order to rank websites during a search. They are not looking for an over-abundance of keywords or “black hat” SEO tactics. Google is looking for fresh content, images and video (especially on company home pages). Google continues to try to encourage users go to Google+, Google’s social network. According to a recently released study, Google+ is the 2^nd biggest social network worldwide with 343 million users. Google keeps adding “social layers” to all of their products and services. Google Places is now Google Local where a Google+ page is created for your business automatically. You will see Google+ show up on the first page of searches as well. However, Google+ is still not fully in mainstream use.  It is important to have a presence there, but there still isn’t a lot of engagement with business pages.

The social media networks have seen lots of changes over the past year and are continuing to make announcements of advancements and changes for 2013. The fastest growing social network of 2012 was Pinterest.  This visual sharing site continues to gain new users. Instagram also saw a large growth in the past year. This application is only available to mobile and smartphone users. LinkedIn  continues to change its user interface to be more visual and connected. Facebook made a big announcement 2 weeks ago to introduce Facebook “Graph Search”. “Graph Search” is a search engine within Facebook which allows the user to do socially relevant searches. For example, you will have the ability to search through your friend and like list to get recommendations for businesses and services. Instead of doing a Google search to find out a local pizza place, you can do a search via Facebook to find out if any of your friends have recommended a certain pizza place in the past. People most likely will follow a friend’s opinion about a business. This could have a much bigger impact on businesses that are currently on Facebook. The businesses will have to be more engaged, committed and creative in the content that they are putting on social media.

The one non-changing rule about marketing and technology is that it is always changing! It is important to know about these changes and their impact on your business websites and social media sites. In future blog posts, we will discuss these changes in more detail. Stay Tuned!!