News and Blog

Here’s another very good reason for your business to be more active on social media.
A new study of over 1,000 U.S. consumers by Sumo Heavy Industries, a digital commerce strategy firm, has found a 198 percent increase in social media referral traffic to eCommerce sites between 2014 and 2015.

The report revealed that Facebook still has the largest number of social media users (56 percent) who follow businesses online to learn more about their products. It’s followed by Twitter (47 percent) and Pinterest (47 percent).
It’s worth noting that 500 million people watched a collective 100 million hours of video on Facebook. This clearly reflects the social media giant’s power to connect more consumers and businesses.
Significantly, Facebook has undertaken several steps to make its platform more business-friendly. Earlier this year, it launched a new video tool to let businesses make a short introductory video about their company.

There are numerous types of content: blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks, listicles, videos, photographs, case studies and more.

But not all types of content are link-worthy.

It makes sense — different content should serve different purposes (awareness, education, conversion and so on). Therefore, if links are a goal in your marketing strategy, you should have content planned to secure links.

Creating content alone isn’t enough. You can’t build it and expect the links to come. You need a link strategy.

The first step to creating linkable content is to understand why people link on the web. Then, when you’re planning your next piece of content, ask yourself the question, “Why would anyone link to this content?”

People typically link to content because they find the content useful, entertaining, unique, insightful or valuable.

After a nearly two year wait, Google’s Penguin algorithm has finally been updated again. It’s the fourth major release, making this Penguin 4.0. It’s also the last release of this type, as Google now says Penguin is a real-time signal processed within its core search algorithm.

Penguin goes real-time

Penguin is a filter designed to capture sites that are spamming Google’s search results in ways that Google’s regular spamming systems might not detect. Introduced in 2012, it has operated on a periodic basis.

In other words, the Penguin filter would run and catch sites deemed spammy. Those sites would remain penalized even if they improved and changed until the next time the filter ran, which could take months.

The last Penguin update, Penguin 3.0, happened on October 17, 2014. Any sites hit by it have waited nearly two years for the chance to be free.

72% of millennials will shop online this year, and 58% will make purchases via their mobile devices, a new study finds

The official end of summer isn’t until later this week, but consumers are already scouting holiday deals online, a new study finds.

According to an online survey of 1,003 U.S. consumers conducted by online advertising technology firm The Rubicon Project, roughly 22% of Americans have started researching Cyber Monday deals as of August, up 10 percentage points from Rubicon’s study conducted this time last year.

About 47% of consumers said they plan to shop online on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving (Nov. 28), versus 42% for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving (Nov. 25), the company says.