Social Media: Going up or going down?

Posted by andrew2 on October 22, 2008

I like to go onto Bebo and Facebook most days and see what people are up to, who’s got engaged and see peoples holiday pictures, but recently there’s not been much happening. Over the last few months there have been fewer things to read and fewer pictures to look at. Why is this? Are there less people going onto these sites or are people still going on and not doing anything?

A quick poll of the office has found that most people had a peak in their page view in July 2007 (only 8 people replied – the rest of them are rubbish!). Since then most people have declined to almost zero view a month.

My theory: When you first get a Bebo or Facebook page you search for all your old uni friends/school friends/boyfriends/girlfriends, add them and then look at their pictures (oh haven’t they got fat!?!). After this you exchange a few messages and then run out of stuff to talk about very quickly. Once you have found everyone you used to know then there is hardly any need to go onto the sites anymore. Sure you go on now and again but you don’t bother to post up your pictures and never bother to comment on anyone else’s. Once this rot starts to set in there is hardly any reason to go back to the sites…..

A year and a bit after Bebo peaked and now hardly anyone is there. Maybe this is different for school kids (you fancy him, I’m bullying her etc) but how much can they monetise children? At the moment most of the ads seem to be targeting 20-30 year olds for loans and insurance but this can’t be converting!

Solution: From an advertising point of view things might change once Yahoo roll out the use of Google Adwords across their network. Once Yahoo’s media placements can be targeted using Google’s pay per click setup then it will be far more obvious how popular and profitable the ads are. I for one can’t wait for the prospect of being able to properly target the people who are actually using Bebo…..

The other option is that there will be a new ‘must have’ social media site created every 18 months and people will simply move over to it. We’ve already had videos and pictures – maybe there is something else that we are missing out on??? Answers on a postcard.

Pay Per Click on Google Image Search???

Posted by andrew2 on October 8, 2008

The next big thing or the beginning of the end for Google image search…..it’s too early to tell. Yesterday there was some buzz around the digital marketing world when www.techcrunch.com released screen grabs of Google experimenting with adding paid image results. It had a “Sponsored Link” headline and a gold background to make it stand out as not an organic result.

This seems to be only an experiment and I don’t think we’ll be seeing it added to AdWords any time soon but it’s worth considering how we’ll use it. It has to be really useful for retailers, especially those in the fashion sector, and I’m sure the car manufacturers would love to make sure people searching for their vehicles come to the official site. There’s loads of possibilities.

If anyone has seen this happening in the UK then please get in touch with screen shots – it would be great to start planning how to use this and get some first mover advantage!

Google should think Pink!

Posted by andrew2 on October 7, 2008

October is now breast cancer awareness month where lots of people around the country dress in pink and raise money for this very worthwhile charity. Here in the PPC department we have been talking about this and think that Google should help us to raise some cash….

Our idea is that companies should be able to choose to have some of their CPC (cost per click) donated to charity and therefore benefit from a pink, rather than green display url. It wouldn’t make a huge difference to the look of Google but it would get noticed and it would raise lots of much needed money!

Hello world!

Posted by andrew2 on August 28, 2008

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