Talking everything Social Media, Tech & Online Marketing.  Covering pertinent social media news, and Craig’s weekly Random Resources!

Broadcast Summary:

• 
  
• News Desk – Chey talking about Honda using Twitter to respond to customer Tweets, new Google Maps features, Instagram embedding, Nokia S40-exclusive 4-Square App, Tumblr’s new search and explore, Yahoo shopping expansion, Chrome 28 IOS update and new Gmail functionality and filters;
  
• Random Resources – Craig talking about Google’s upcoming and future development and its effects on Search;
  
• Random Resources – Chey talking about Twitter Analytics opening up for everyone to use and what you can do with them.
  

CRAIG:      Good afternoon. Welcome to Social Media at The Pulse. This is a show where we talk about everything online marketing, tech and social media. My name is Craig McCarthy. I’m here in the studio with Cheyanne Ainsworth. How are you going, Chey?

CHEY:       Very well, Craig. How are you?

CRAIG:      Yes. Good, thanks. Did I hear in the weather there there’s going to be hail tonight in G-town?

CHEY:       Yes. I do have the weather in front of me here, and chance of thunder storms this afternoon, possible hail tonight.

CRAIG:      Wow!

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      I think it’s going to get cold on the weekend too.

CHEY:       It has been unusually warm yesterday and today though, hasn’t it?

CRAIG:      It has been great, yes. I went for a run down in Geelong Grammar along the waterline there in … during my lunch break yesterday.

CHEY:       Really?

CRAIG:      It’s beautiful. It’s like 23 degrees.

CHEY:       It was a bit strange, wasn’t it?

CRAIG:      Yes. It was a little bit strange. And how about having Sue and Belinda back? That’s nice to have the girls back next door.

CHEY:       It is nice to see their smiling faces back here.

CRAIG:      Yes. Welcome back girls! I’ve had a crappy week this week, Chey. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what’s going on but I got too much sleep.

CHEY:       Really?

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       Well I sent a text message this morning, and somebody had asked me something, and I responded with ‘No. I’ll talk to you about it on Saturday’. And then realized that today wasn’t Thursday. So I have been ….

CRAIG:      All over the show.

CHEY:       Exactly.

CRAIG:      That’s pretty normal for you though I think.

CHEY:       Yes. Yes. It can be.

CRAIG:      Especially towards the end of the week. You always seem – you come in here and you just, you know, you’re really just all over the show.

CHEY:       Yes. Getting in here and looking at the clock and going ‘holy cow. I’ve got 15 minutes to get into the studio’. Yes, it does – Fridays are just frantic.

CRAIG:      Yes. Yes. Great part of the week though.

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      Going to winding down.

CHEY:       Except me!

CRAIG:      Except you. Yes. Last week’s show. I enjoyed that. You gave us your best iPad Apps.

CHEY:       Yes. Yes, I’ve had a few comments on that.

CRAIG:      Yes? Yes.

CHEY:       Of people saying ‘oh, I didn’t know about …’. Pocket was the one that they all liked.

CRAIG:      Oh, yes.

CHEY:       Yes. A few comments that that one was their five.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       This week though I’m going to talk about Twitter and Analytics. They’ve opened it up, so I’m looking forward to having a big chat about that.

CRAIG:      Nice. I like that. I like data, so

CHEY:       Lots in the News Desk this week too.

CRAIG:      Right?

CHEY:       As per usual. The online world and technology just forges ahead and there’s always something new.

CRAIG:      That’s great. I love it.

CHEY:       Well it’s great for us. We’ve always got something to talk about.

CRAIG:      Nice. Yes. Absolutely. Go to the website if you want to have a look at Choy’s top iPad Apps from last week. SocialMediaPulse.Com, or if you want to download any of the previous shows, go to the iTunes store or stream straight from the website.

CHEY:       We haven’t had any comments or anything on iTunes for ages.

CRAIG:      Ages. Yes. Go to – do us a real big favor and go to iTunes. Leave us a comment, leave us a rating – that would be fantastic. Always helps.

CHEY:       Yes. That would be lovely.

CRAIG:      I too – I want to talk about one of my favorite subjects. Google.

CHEY:       Yes?

CRAIG:      Yes. So I want to talk about Google – the future of search.

CHEY:       Ok?

CRAIG:      Ok. We often come back to Google and what they are doing, because they are forever introducing new things and search is changing. Even been changing so much over the last 6 or 12 months, and also with a lot of work that you do and I do. We’re really interested in Search Engine Optimization and having business websites rank in Google search results.

CHEY:       And not just ranked, but ranked really well.

CRAIG:      Ranked really well. That’s right. Turn ups when people are looking for them.

CHEY:       Well Google’s in the News Desk, and I was having a look at something today with Mail and Google Mail.

CRAIG:      Really?

CHEY:       So Gmail changing. Yes.

CRAIG:      Wow!

CHEY:       Going to affect email marketing seriously.

CRAIG:      Wow. That’s exciting. I’ve got actually 2 things I noticed in Google today that I’ll talk about if you don’t bring them up in your News Desk, but I wonder what Google’s on at the moment. There’s lots going down. There’s lots going on.

CHEY:       Huge. Always.

CRAIG:      Love it. What else is going on?

CHEY:       Well this morning I was in here talking about the Geelong Small Business Festival, and we’re doing interviews for the Geelong Business Lounge and it will be a new show on 94.7 The Pulse. And so I was having a chat this morning and then came into the ‘That’s Life’ show and had a chat with Brett about the Festival. All of our listeners, if you might be listening live or could be listening from the iTunes Store, well there is a small business festival that happens every year. It goes from the 1^st August to the 31^st August. And so we’re going to be chatting to the hosts of all of the events that are happening in Geelong. So I’m really looking forward to the next month.

CRAIG:      That’s going to be exciting.

CHEY:       Certainly will be.

CRAIG:      That’s great. I’ve something fun that I did this week. We – as you know, I’m involved with Give Where You Live and their Loan Executive Program this year. We visited back-to-back theater.

CHEY:       Ok?

CRAIG:      Have you heard of back-to-back theater?

CHEY:       No.

CRAIG:      So it’s a world-renowned theater group based here in Geelong and they’re actors. It’s a small group of actors with people with disabilities.

CHEY:       Ok.

CRAIG:      So I think there’s only 5 or 6 of them, but they travel the world. All over the world to put on their performances and they’re recognized globally as being, you know, doing amazing things. They write all their own stuff. The group of actors write the plays and everything like that.

CHEY:       That’s incredible.

CRAIG:      And they are right here. They’re almost, you know, just 2 blocks away from here, and so we were lucky enough to go in and meet the actors. And we did some – bit of fun exercises and playing around with them.

CHEY:       Yes?

CRAIG:      But yes. It’s amazing what goes on in your own community that often you are not aware of.

CHEY:       Absolutely.

CRAIG:      Back-to-back theater. If you ever get the opportunity to see one of their shows, get along.

CHEY:       Yes, if you can catch them. If they are going all around the world.

CRAIG:      They do perform here in Geelong occasionally, but yes definitely. They perform all over the world.

CHEY:       Have to perform for the home town.

CRAIG:      Exactly. All right. We’ve got lots of fun coming up. Stick around. You are listening to Social Media at The Pulse.

[THEME TUNE MUSIC and pause]

CRAIG:      Welcome back to Social Media Pulse. Friday afternoon.

CHEY:       Nice to be here.

CRAIG:      It’s great to be here. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you are listening live online, or if you are listening …

CHEY:       On iTunes.

CRAIG:      On iTunes …

CHEY:       Or from the site.

CRAIG:      In 3 days. Or from the site in 3 days. Yes.

CHEY:       You ready for the News Desk?

CRAIG:      Yes. Bring it on, Chey.

CHEY:       Ok. Now we were talking before the show started, we were actually talking about cars, and the first thing on our News Desk is that Honda is now going to be responding to customer Tweets with real-time Vine videos.

CRAIG:      Ok.

CHEY:       Ok. So they have started this campaign, and I think it launched a couple of days ago. And when people use the hashtag ‘want new car’, they are going to respond to the Tweets with a little Vine videos. And I saw this on Mashable. Basically just says that the videos will be filmed and uploaded on the same day, and customized to each users feedback. So if a user mentions needing a new car to pick up pizza, the Vine video response may feature a Honda deal offering a great deal with a mouthful of peperoni. I think that that’s pretty cool.

CRAIG:      I like it.

CHEY:       I think that sort of marketing and that sort of campaign would work very well with all sorts of businesses.

CRAIG:      Yes. Absolutely.

CHEY:       Ok. Next on the News Desk – A new Google Maps now open to everybody. There was an invitation only period, but it’s now open to everybody. So the App, when you actually go from desktop or mobile, basically it’s redesigned. So you go to the About page and it will click you – sorry, it will prompt you to click the ‘Try Now’ button. And then it will also send you to a preview of the revamped App. So I’ve had a look at that, and it does look very good.

CRAIG:      Right.

CHEY:       Following on from that, Google Maps have updated the IOS roll-out for the iPad and the iPad Mini. So it’s basically enhanced navigation and indoor mapping. So for the touch screens it wasn’t fantastic, and now it’s been updated it actually does look pretty cool. And there’s an explore function so that you can browse and find restaurants, hotels, bars and other places. And the other feature that’s integrated is with Zagmat ratings and deals via Google Offers. So the latest version, it also includes indoor mapping for shopping malls, transit stations and airports (which I think is fantastic, because when – if somebody wanted to go to a store in Westfield, you know it says where the address is and then plonks a map on Westfield, but there’s no indoor mapping of it, so you don’t know what floor you should go to or, you know, have some sort of visual identity with trying to get to where you need to go). So I think that’s pretty good.

CRAIG:      That’s great. Where are getting their data from?

CHEY:       Oh, again. Data, data, data.

CRAIG:      God.

CHEY:       Instagram has introduced web embeds. So Instagram – web embeds. It basically lets your content be added to – you know, photos, videos and any sort of story you want to tell to be able to be embedded. So when you visit an Instagram photo or video page on your desktop, through your web browser obviously, you will need to – there’s a new Share button and it’s on the right-hand side of the photo, and it’s just underneath the comments button. And if you click that button you will see an embed code, so you can copy the block of text, paste it onto your blog, your website article, hit publish, done! Really, really good. I like that. I very much like that. Now something else that was released this week – a pois – was 4-Square. And it’s specifically to a particular phone, which is the Nokia S40. And it’s called an ‘All New 4-Square App’, and the full range is only available on the Nokia S40. And millions of people around the world use these phones. I don’t even know what it looks like to be quite honest.

CRAIG:      Renowned.

CHEY:       So if you put one in front of me, I wouldn’t know. The basics of it is that they can now use 4-Square to make the most of where they are and what they are doing. So that’s – that was something.

CRAIG:      That’s good for Nokia S80 users.

CHEY:       I know. I’m just wondering if they’ll be introducing different things for different phones. That’ll be – yes. That’s certainly interesting. Another thing – Tumblr has updated its mobile App with improved search and explore tools. So it’s basically bringing a brand-new search and explore, sort of feature, to the App and it’s for the iPhone/iPad and Android. So they’ve gone across the board, which is great, so now you can check out what’s trending on Tumblr and get suggested blogs, anything you search for, that sort of thing. So again search, data, localized, that sort of stuff.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       Oh. I think it was probably about 3 or 5 weeks ago we were talking about how Yahoo has just been on a spending spree and buying up certain companies. Well they’ve been shopping again and they’ve bought a company called ‘Admotivate’ to boost its mobile ad team. We’ve been talking about this for a while too. Now they announced it – the company ‘Admotivate’ is a start-up and it helps advertisers deliver personalized, hyperlocal, targeted offers through the mobile channel. I think we spoke about this 6 months ago really. So there you go. That’s what they’ve done. And something else there was here – something about voice. I’m just trying to find it. That’s right – Chrome 28 for IOS is out. It opens links in other Google Apps and enhances voice search. Full screen on iPad and more. I think I might be checking that one out. That should be good. And the other thing that I was talking about earlier is the new Google Gmail. And if you open up your Gmail account – it’s rolling out, so it happened to us the other day and we sort of went ‘ok’! It’s [coughs]

CRAIG:      Excuse you!

CHEY:       Can’t get rid of this darned cough.

CRAIG:      You’ve had that for like a month now …

CHEY:       I know. I know it’s winter.

CRAIG:      Voodoo!

CHEY:       So when you go into your Gmail, don’t be surprised. You’ll find, again, little prompts to show you that the new stuff that they are doing. And there are 3 little buttons at the top. It’s a new email design and it has basically put things into 3 tabs. So underneath your emails that are sitting there, you will see (I think) a button that says ‘social’ and another one that says ‘promoted’ or ‘promotion’ and then just your usual inbox. And anything that is found by Google to have a subscribe or unsubscribe button or link on it will now go into the ‘promotions’ tab. So you won’t actually see a newsletter that you’ve subscribed to unless you go to that tab. So I did hear a bit about and look and see a bit on Facebook and Twitter about people whingeing and whining and moaning and complaining, but when I looked at it it actually looked very user friendly. And I went ‘ok. I get this’. And you do have the ability to drag and drop a certain email. Just say it’s a newsletter from Social Media Pulse that you want to see and you want it in your usual …

CRAIG:      Inbox.

CHEY:       Inbox. Then you can drag and drop it, and Google remembers that that’s where it goes. So it doesn’t put it there – back into the ‘promotions’ tab. I can see that there’s a lot of spam. People have, since day dot, complained about spam in their email boxes. And the Google recognition of that is going to be interesting to see how well it is filtered and how much of that goes into the ‘promotions’ tab. So I actually didn’t mind it. I looked at it and went ‘it is user friendly’. It’s logical. It’s practical. And it keeps, you know, the separation of your inbox quite smoothly, so I don’t have any issues with it. I can see that a lot of email marketers are going to have issues with it, purely because they like their emails to hit your inbox and do everything in their power to make sure you see it. Google shifting it to the ‘promotional’ tab has got them a little bit upset. But I sort of think about it and the fact that if your content is worth viewing and it is quality, then people are going to go searching for it, and they are going to go into their Gmail search and search Social Media Pulse, just to see (you know). Where if they haven’t seen your stuff, they are going to say ‘well, where is it? What’s going on?’. So yes. There you go.

CRAIG:      Yes. I’ve had that for nearly a week I suppose.

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      That new inbox structure. And I quite like it too. It’s clean, it’s tidy, it’s splits things up into the 3 different categories. I think it’s interesting that everything from Google goes straight to your inbox.

CHEY:       Of course it would!

CRAIG:      Nothing from Google with an unsubscribe button on the bottom goes into your ‘promotionals’ tab. But yes, I like it. I think it’s good.

CHEY:       Well most of the stuff that Google sends me I actually want to read.

CRAIG:      Yes. Yes, that’s right. Yes.

CHEY:       So there you go. There’s the News Desk.

CRAIG:      Excellent. Good News Desk. Thanks for that, Chey. Lots of good stuff.

CHEY:       Pleasure!

CRAIG:      You are listening to Social Media Pulse.

[THEME TUNE MUSIC and pause]

CRAIG:      And take a deep breath, and relax! You are listening to Social Media Pulse. Friday afternoon. And in news this week, Chey?

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      Monster.com have released their 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors. Yes, which for anyone who loves data (like you and me) we – they’ve given us lots of good stuff and still number 1 is Authority Links.

CHEY:       Absolutely. Always will be.

CRAIG:      Yes. Authority Links back to your website is the Number 1 Search Engine Ranking Factor. So the number 1 thing that will get you up on Google Results.

CHEY:       Exactly. And it’s quality. That’s what it’s all about. I think people – somebody came to me a while ago and said ‘oh, I can buy 1K backlinks for this much’, and I sort of went ‘that’s great, but they’re not worth anything’.

CRAIG:      And not only are they not worth anything but they are going to do more harm than good.

CHEY:       Absolutely. It’s like getting a testimonial. It’s like getting a hand-written testimonial. A quality back-link is very much like that.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       You know! I shouldn’t say Layman’s Terms. But you know. Take out the techy sort of stuff about it.

CRAIG:      Yes. Absolutely. Ok. Now. I want to go deep into talking about Search.

CHEY:       Oh.

CRAIG:      And it’s not search engines anymore. It’s just called Search.

CHEY:       Correct.

CRAIG:      And my background – I’m a software engineer, so I’ve been coding since I was 16. I’ve been working on, you know, software engineering for mostly in automotive – 20-odd years, I suppose, now. And since just recently I’ve moved into more search engine stuff and website software stuff. But I love this sort of stuff. Talking about Google and changes and what’s going on. So Google are about to introduce a third pillar to their search engine system (let’s call it). Possibly not a pillar that we will see, but something that will hopefully give us better search results. So one thing – one problem – Google has with giving you what you are looking for when you make a search is that they don’t understand you fundamentally. I mean, you know, we don’t understand ourselves. I think. Too well most of the time. But fundamentally, Google doesn’t understand you, so Google doesn’t – Google – I’ve heard a quote saying ‘Google is like the Thai Champion Scrabble players who memorize the entire list of acceptable words without actually knowing what any of them mean’. So when we go to Google, for example, and type in Cats, Google doesn’t know if you are looking for Geelong Cats, or cats on YouTube or a vet or Cats The Musical. So what they did back in 2010 was they bought a start-up company called ‘Metaweb’. And then the knowledge graph was born, and what Metaweb were doing and then what Google continued to do was to build a catalogue of everything you might want to know about. So on football, so I heard this being called the ‘Catalogue of Nouns’. So – and what they did to get that data, they went around and bought databases from different – from all different people, so for example at Berkeley there’s an expert in bees. He’s got a database of 40K species which they’ve tapped into. There are also websites that catalogue rollercoaster rides with specs about G-force and how many curves and when it was built and that sort of stuff. So they’ve gone around and they’ve got together all this data about all this information. So now when we go to Google, they are not just serving us a dozen links. They are now serving us up information. And what they’ve done is they’ve brought all this information together and they’ve built a semantic graph. So it’s important when they are building this database of information that the information is all linked where it’s relevant. For example they need to – if you go in and type in ‘Mick Malthouse’ into the search, they need to link up Mick Malthouse’s daughter, Christie, and they need to link up the team that he coaches for and all different stuff. So they’ve built this web of all these vertical slices of databases and information. And now they serve that up to us in the knowledge graph. So this is helping Google understand what we are looking for and not just giving us a bunch of links. But they are also giving us the information we are looking for. But they are now taking a step further, and now they are getting into artificial intelligence.

CHEY:       Oh, I like this.

CRAIG:      Which sounds pretty good. So what they are doing is they are setting up systems – let me see – it’s systems of unsupervised learning where the – this has been produced by Google Systems Infrastructure Group and they are creating a neural network of systems that recognize things. So they are recognizing images such as faces that weren’t previously tagged. So they’ve done some testing. They say it’s like what happens when a newborn baby opens their eyes and starts looking around. So the baby is getting a lot of optical stimuli and trying to make sense of that stimuli and soon enough they start to look for patterns and start to recognize things like faces. So what they did was they launched their system on 10M still images from random YouTube videos and they found, as they were running the algorithm through the detection algorithm through those images, it was able to pick up things. It was able to faces. So it saw enough faces and it was able to pick up eyes, mouth, nose and the round face. So it had detection capability and it also, interesting, found out – worked out that it was able to recognize cats.

CHEY:       What? Cats faces? And cats expressions?

CRAIG:      Cats. It was able to recognize a cat basically because there’s lots of cats on YouTube, so – and the system obviously learns to optimize itself so it looks for patterns and recognition and then starts to understand things. I guess what they are looking for is they are trying to link things and they are trying to – so not just …

CHEY:       Gather …

CRAIG:      Gather information. Link it all up. It’s all, I guess, artificial intelligence. Right?

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      They are trying to create artificial intelligence so they can serve you up exactly what you are looking for. So these – and what they’ve also done was they’ve started to test a similar system on words. So what they’ll do is they’ll start to link up words that are closely related. And they worked out that they are putting these words into 100 dimensional space, and they’re spacing out the words based on their relationship to each other. So they are starting to build up 100-dimensional space of words to try and understand what words are related to other words.

CHEY:       And everybody thinks that they just go into Google and Google gives them sort of results. This is the really in-depth sort of stuff.

CRAIG:      This is the behind the scenes, really techy stuff.

CHEY:       I love it.

CRAIG:      Yes. Love it. Absolutely.

CHEY:       I like to know how things work.

CRAIG:      Yes. Absolutely. So what they are doing. Summary – what they are doing there, they have 3 pillars of search. They have their vast knowledge of user behavior and intent (which it already has based on people have been typing things into Google now for so long – they’ve been …

CHEY:       They sort of do know you.

CRAIG:      They’ve …

CHEY:       If you’ve got a home computer though, with like different – like 5 or 6 different people using it, they may think you are bit – you know – in the head because they can’t sort of work you out. But on a single computer that you only use, they will know so much about you already. So I think linking that with what you are talking about is just incredible.

CRAIG:      Yes. Yes. I wonder how this all – you know – relates to SEO. To Search Engine Optimization. You know? It’s really taken it all to another level now. Another dimension because search results are pretty much different for every people. Everyone’s likely to get different research results.

CHEY:       An example. There was 5 of us sitting in the office today – not today. This week. And we had 4 laptops and an iPad and we did a search. We made sure all of our GEO locations were in the right place and we got different results on each page.

CRAIG:      Really?

CHEY:       Yes. Out of 5 of us.

CRAIG:      And you were all sitting in the same office?

CHEY:       Correct.

CRAIG:      On the same Wi-Fi connection?

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      All logged out of your Gmail accounts?

CHEY:       No. Logged into our Gmail accounts, but in location to Geelong.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       So we made sure – yes. So we were all sitting there …

CRAIG:      You all had local.

CHEY:       We all had local.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       But we were served different results for every single one of us.

CRAIG:      Really?

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      Yes. So I guess they are looking at things like social signals …

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      So they are looking at your Google+ account and who you are friends with, and what they like.

CHEY:       Yes. It’s so different.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       Like, you know, 2 years ago that wouldn’t have happened. We would have had exactly the same results. We would have said ‘yes. Go down to the third one, click on …’ No. Not now!

CRAIG:      Yes. It makes SEO 2 years ago look easy, doesn’t it?

CHEY:       Oh. Easy!

CRAIG:      Was so much more predictable.

CHEY:       Well yes. And I actually like the fact that it is so personalized now.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       I think that that is the way to go. I think that localization and personalization is, you know, the future.

CRAIG:      Yes. Absolutely. And also, now, mobile. You know? Is just the other dimension, because really people now, when they are in search often they are not just looking for a set of links. They are looking for – you know – they want to book a ticket or a restaurant or, you know …

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      They actually want some sort of action.

CHEY:       Well I think that one thing that hasn’t changed from Google is that I can always Google when I write in a where-do or what-do or I start to type and just the predictiveness of it. And I looked at it and go ‘wow!’. People are actually searching that?

CRAIG:      I wonder if people are searching that, or if it’s Google’s little way of having fun because there’s some really obscure stuff that comes up.

CHEY:       I should do some examples. I was going to take a screen shot the other day, and I thought ‘no, that’s probably not appropriate’.

CRAIG:      Yes. I’m sure there’s a website that – you know – if you typed in a website ‘show me examples of odd things Google has served up in their predictive text’.

CHEY:       I’m sure they have. You know! A good old laugh in the offices too.

CRAIG:      I reckon they do. Yes. So yes. That’s another dimension to search that’s coming. So that will hopefully give us better search results for what we are looking for.

CHEY:       Yes. Absolutely like that idea.

CRAIG:      Oh.

CHEY:       These sorts of things. It’s strange how when you are used to seeing things change so quickly, that we accept it and we find a workaround or we – you know, we don’t complain about it, but there is such a majority of people that go ‘err’. You know? And they start to whinge and they have a – you know – a big rant about these sorts of things. And, you know, I just sort of look at these and go ‘well it’s been done for a reason and Google wouldn’t be doing it just to peeve people’. You know? That’s it. It’s for a reason. You will like it. You just need to get used to it.

CRAIG:      Used to it. That’s right.

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      You’ve got to be flexible these days.

CHEY:       I can’t say that there’s been anything that Google has done that I have, you know, gone ‘oh, why did you do that?’. Actually, I tell a lie. One thing has just come to mind. I think it was probably about 3 or 4 years ago where we had the search wheel.

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       And from a keyword perspective, we used to go in and look at our wheels. And that was awesome. I used to love that. So that was …

CRAIG:      And they took it away from you.

CHEY:       Yes, they did. But now we have, you know, certain tools and platforms that we use that give us that information anyway. So yes. There’s always a word for it.

CRAIG:      You are listening to Social Media Pulse.

[THEME TUNE MUSIC and pause]

CHEY:       And welcome back to 94.7 The Pulse. You are listening to Craig and Chey on Social Media Pulse. And we’re just in the last 10 minutes of the show.

CRAIG:      And I want to hear some Twitter stuff, Chey.

CHEY:       Ok. I’ve – you know how much I love Twitter.

CRAIG:      Yes. I know. Give it to me.

CHEY:       Well basically, Twitter has Analytics and unless you’ve been part of the Twitter Ad Network, then you haven’t been able to get really good metrics. So Twitter has opened it up to anybody that has a Twitter login, so you can – it’s being rolled out. So if you can’t now, you will be able to have a look at it shortly. But it’s incredible, the stuff that you can actually see about your Twitter account and other Twitter accounts and things like that. So I’ve got here – is from Social Fresh. Now I love Social Fresh. Go to SocialFresh.com just to have a look at this article. It’s called ‘New Twitter Analytics – 10 quick metrics you can use today’. Ok? Now the first one is ‘Are your links getting clicked?’, so you can actually look into the recent Tweets sections of the timeline activity and you will see and, you know, click counts beside any Tweet with a link in it. So it’s a little hidden, but probably one of the more valuable pieces of data that you will want to have a look at. And Twitter has grown over the years from mostly conversational forum to more of a link-sharing and news aggregation tool, as we all know. So for better or for worse, that’s what it is. As a result, there is more competition to actually get clicks on links – obviously. So I would suggest you take a good look at the links and see what’s getting clicked and that’s a pretty big one.

CRAIG:      That’s good to know.

CHEY:       Yes. There’s also most engagement. So under a – on the dashboard, basically it says recent Tweets – is a show button. So you click that and the section lets you sort by best, good and all, but the default is just on all. So click on the best, and you will see a top 15% most engaging Tweets. So they rank these by showing messages that got above average favorites or reTweets or replies. It really, really would be good if they could sort a click-through count, but not yet. I’m tipping they’ll probably think about it. The other really useful option would be to sort by one of the 3 engagement metrics, and it’s a mash-up of all of the 3. So a message high in replies tells you something completely different than a message high in reTweets. I don’t like soaping and lumping them all together as engagement, but there’s – you can separate it there. Now there’s number 3 is ‘Best time of day to Tweet’. Now this is pretty low-tech, but the timestamps are in your recent Tweet section so you can gain some sort of intel in where posts are getting the most clicks on timestamps and things like that.

CRAIG:      So that’s out of your posts that you’ve post.

CHEY:       Correct.

CRAIG:      Which ones – yes.

CHEY:       Yes. Follows versus unfollows. The nature of Twitter connections is that, you know, it fluctuates widely. Ok? The growth we saw last week – like 20 followers – is more likely a gain of 50 and a loss of 30. Ok? So if you look for peaks and valleys in both your followers and unfollows and try and match major events to learn what is gaining you the most audience, and loosing you the least. So it could be Tweets that you are putting out. It could be you’ve gone off track and you are usually talking about tech, but suddenly you start talking about cat videos and people just go ‘oh, I don’t want to hear about your cat videos. I hear about that from somebody else’. Whatever it be. So at least then you can sort of have a look at what’s happening there. Number 5. Total mentions. So mentions are a really great metric for tracking what’s successful and what’s not. And generating new followers – obviously, that’s what you’d like. A large bump in mentions related to reTweets will often correlate with follower growth. Now just to but in there, Alicia Edgar, who is from Bizz3228, and her company is Business Performance HQ. She sent out a – she did a guest blog post this week, and low and behold I opened her Twitter account the next day and there was over 100 reTweets of the blog post that she’d written. So she went ‘Wow!’. So I’m tipping her follower growth would be a lot higher this week.

CRAIG:      That’s great.

CHEY:       Yes. Now number 6 I have here is measuring reach, and Twitter Analytic labels which Tweets have a larger audience because of reTweets with a multiple (ie 2 x 3, 5, 10). Your normal reach, etc. So this is going to be more valuable if we knew what the real numbers were. We can value our reTweets and the extending the – and the extension of engagements of a message on Twitter. So look to the click-through numbers as well for these, and look for patterns of which messages are breaking through with high reach and high click-throughs. Did I get a bit too techy then?

CRAIG:      A little bit, yes.

CHEY:       Ok. I’ll go – It actually could go on forever about this, but I’ll get to it. Number 7 – you can back up your last 500 Tweets, so not all of the data in your timeline activity is available for download, but you do get the full text of your Twitter messages, a timestamp and all engagement counts for each post. So that’s something you can do too.

CRAIG:      Very good. Yes.

CHEY:       Similar Twitter accounts is number 8, and it’s basically under the Followers sections for your Twitter Analytics. There’s a section devoted to what other Twitter accounts your followers are following. Audience-wise, these accounts have the most similar audience to yours. So this can be pretty valuable if you are looking to run Twitter promoted account ads, targeting some of your promoted account ads to follows of these similar accounts and test which ones produce the best results. So we always like doing that split testing stuff.

CRAIG:      Yes. That’s pretty good.

CHEY:       Number 9 is Twitter Follower Demographics. So discovering the countries, states and cities where your followers are focused can be pretty useful for your marketing, especially from time zone targeting and content relevance. So you can also review the gender breakdown of your audience for similar insights. I like that one too. Number 10 is Twitter Follower Psychographics.

CRAIG:      Right.

CHEY:       The topics that your followers are interested in can give you lots of insights. So the 2 best uses for this information is helping with your content strategy and giving you potential targeting data for Twitter Ads. Ok?

CRAIG:      Yes.

CHEY:       So there you go. That’s my little bit on Twitter this week. I love Analytics and I love Twitter. So yes.

CRAIG:      She could play with that all day.

CHEY:       Combining 2 of my favorite things.

CRAIG:      Yes. You’re loving it. All right. We’ve got just over a minute left in the show. I just want to throw a couple of quick Google things in here as well. Google things I noticed when I was on Google today. Unlimited music.

CHEY:       What?

CRAIG:      Yes. They’ve got like – I just went to Google, searched they – you know it’s a little thing under the Google that said ‘get your music from Google’.

CHEY:       Nice.

CRAIG:      It seems to be an iTunes-type thing. You can buy …

CHEY:       Oh, competition coming up.

CRAIG:      Yes. We like that. For $10 a month. $10 a month unlimited music. You can, you know, get new songs or albums I think.

CHEY:       Can you link it to your Pandora?

CRAIG:      Well you can’t link it to your Pandora, because they are trying to beat Pandora and have their own sort of radio shows. But quickly, one more thing I noticed today. Google Now – have you?

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      Yes? You’ve – have you spoken about that in the News Desk?

CHEY:       No, I haven’t.

CRAIG:      No. Google Now. I don’t know what it is. I just saw it on my iPhone today.

CHEY:       I saw it the other day, and no. Not in the News Desk.

CRAIG:      They seem to be – they want you to use Google for traffic, to get you traffic alerts, to get you home, and also they are going to link up to your Gmail and your calendar and this sort of stuff. And give you …

CHEY:       I think when I did look at it and tried …

CRAIG:      They have flight information. All sort of stuff.

CHEY:       I tried to use it and it didn’t work. Like I was trying to get traffic when I was heading up to Deacon Advisory Board meeting this week, and couldn’t get the traffic details. And so I went ‘oh, it doesn’t work’ or ‘it’s not fully in my system’.

CRAIG:      Not fully in there. Yes.

CHEY:       Yes.

CRAIG:      Ok. Thanks for listening, people. Hope you have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you next week.

CHEY:       Fantastic. See you later.

CRAIG:      See you!

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End of Transcription: 00:37:13

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