Month: January 2013

Twitter Vine is an application that lets Twitter users create their own content in the form of short videos, rather than relying on 3^rd parties such as Youtube or Flickr. Much like Jack, Twitter is in search of the goose that laid the golden egg, to increase revenue and increase user engagement.

Content Miser or Liberator?

 

In the original version of the story, Jack is an immoral character, squandering the cow, playing wife (giant) against husband, and eventually murder for riches. While Twitter isn’t murdering anyone, it clearly wants to take away market share from some of the same platforms that helped it become popular in the first place. Much like “newer” Jack is seen as a hero for slaying the evil giant, Vine will develop as something meritorious because it gives Twitter users a chance to create their own content; praised by many, and unquestioned.

Don’t Muzzle the Ox

Twitter is Muzzling the Ox, or in this case the original players in this content space. If the video sharing ability was extended well beyond a few seconds, perhaps minutes, or hours, it would become very clear that it’s just another video host, now hosted by Twitter. Yes, owning your own content has its benefits but Twitter’s business model is not based on keeping users on Twitter. It’s always been about aggregating real time news and giving access to websites, images, and videos from all parts of the web. Spreading the love and wealth.

Youtube will survive, along with Flickr and other content creation platforms, but why stop with short videos? Why not add the ability for people to blog directly on Twitter? Can you see how the lines between content aggregator and content creator are being blurred? It doesn’t lead to anything good, and usually results in favoritism within the network. Even Google has gone down this path (blogger, Youtube, gmail, etc come to mind), shutting down Knol after realizing it couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, which was completely open and created for a purpose.

Time to Sell the Cow

Twitter wants to increase the average time spent on their website. They need more revenue (don’t we all?), and outside of their inhouse advertising system (which is very solid), the only way to accomplish this are advertisements within their network, which usually can only be paired with content.

Jack sold the cow for a handful of magical beans. Twitter is selling out the very content creator’s it helped create, in hopes of more riches in the future. Yes, the average user doesn’t care what video or image service is used within Twitter, but it strikes one more blow in any new content creation website disseminating their information through Twitter. They should also expand upon Direct Messaging and throw its hat in the email arena. Then you can upload videos, blog, and email people…a slippery slope that leads to Tom from Myspace as your default friend.

Now let’s get to the SEO / Online Marketing portion of our story 🙂

Vine.co currently has 794 indexed pages (not a lot considering thousands are probably using it, but it’s extremely early on).

As more people embed their Vine Hosted “videos” they will be increasing the links back to Vine.co, inreasing it’s power and pagerank but we have a major onPage SEO problem

http://vine.co/v/b5HpgZT3ZwL

Look at the Meta title: Mike Isaac’s post on Vine

or this one:

http://vine.co/v/b5DKJ9PbFA7

Meta title: Rex Sorgatz’s post on Vine

For them, it’s an after thought, because they will be successful with our without unique page content from within Vine. For you or me it’s another reason not to use their in house video service as it’s not optimized. Would you create content for Youtube if every video said “Joe’s Youtube videos” or “Joe’s Flickr images”. Just seems odd that they are dealing with massive amounts of data and decided not to make it easily findable by the search engines or basic meta principles.

As it stands, I see no reason to use their internal video system, outside of being a normal user (which is probably a fun feature). From the business side, the pages aren’t going to rank, and the videos are too short to lead to any conversions. It will most likely remain a novelty item for sexting, dog pictures, and random compliations from Youtube (ironic?), but don’t get too excited over mashing up 6 second clips because Youtube and other major players are getting really good at detecting duplicate video and image files.

Welcome to 2013: The year of Social Proof.

This case study sends signals back to a specific website and tracks the rankings. Internet marketing use to just be about getting blog links and creating an email list. Fast forward to today and we see the results of getting all different types of social backlinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing love.

Video to follow along:

The test subject:

 

BookmarkingBeast is a website we own; we decided to invest $ for social signals and for this case study. If you go to the main website: http://bookmarkingbeast.com you can see all the social sharing options in the top left. We had Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, etc for awhile, but just recently ramped up our efforts on Pinterest, Twitter and Youtube to see if we could get results.

The setup:

Create 40 different Twitter messages and have them retweeted approximately 30 times.

Create 40 different Pins and have them repinned approximately 30 times.

Create 40 raw video files and upload to Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion and metacafe.

Proof of work done:

Twitter search is suprisingly ineffective, but you can use the API to see bookmarkingbeast has over 4k retweets:  http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://bookmarkingbeast.com/

Pinterest, on the other hand, is very easy to track. You can simply go here: http://pinterest.com/source/bookmarkingbeast.com/ and see all the pins/repins you have for your website, or use their API (currently not showing correct#) for total: http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?callback=&url=http://bookmarkingbeast.com

Here is snapshot of all the pins/repins going on for BookmarkingBeast. Granted, all use the same one, but this is just to show you how powerful you can spread your message / website across Pinterest. Also notice, each description used a keyword phrase we wanted to rank higher for. We did this same approach for Twitter, i.e. keyword phrase1 http://yourwebsitehere.com, keywordphrase2 http://yourwebsitehere.com

Youtube and vimeo allow clickable backlinks in the videos. This is one of the most known, yet under utilized tactic by online marketers. What good is the knowledge of it’s power if you don’t use it, right? We created 40 videos. Here is one example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxxuXIcMMq0

Notice not only does the video link back to bookmarkingbeast, but it also ranks for: do follow social bookmarking sites

The result (all that matters 😛 ):

BookmarkingBeast had other social signals and a small amount of traditional links before we launched this Pinterest + Twitter + Youtube campaign. At the time it wasn’t ranking for any of the phrases in the Meta title, which the main one is: social bookmarking service. Now we see it cracking the top 10 for not only this phrase, but many related ones as well. We see more search engine traffic and our signups have increased. I don’t know if it’s the 100th monkey principle, but it appears more people are aware of the service and when social bookmarking services are mentioned or software, bookmarkingbeast is usually involved in the conversation.

Actions you can take:

If you don’t have a Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube account you need to create them. Every website and webpage you have should be linked back to through these social sites. You can do this manually, hire someone, or use our quality trusted services (same ones used for this case study). Twitterbacklinks.com , PinterestBacklinks.com , and we are launching our Video marketing / youtube backlinks site soon.

To achieve these results would be the equivalent of an Enterprise plan for Twitterbacklinks $150, Pro PinterestBacklinks $90, and our youtube service (40 videos x $15 for creation, upload, promotion). This represents an investment of around $840, with most being video expenses. Between other social signals and a small amount of blog backlinks, this brings the total investment to around $1000. The reason we feel confident putting money into our own services is because social proof is not a fad, and it’s important to invest capital back into research to understand what works and what doesn’t. This works on a large scale, and I’m assuming it will on a small scale (just harder to gauge). Google is still king of the internet and it wants to be fed social signals. The three listed here should keep it full for awhile 🙂