Posts tagged Users
Google Claims SEO is Bad for Users, Then Retracts – Search Engine Marketing (blog)
Feb 10th
 Econsultancy (blog) |
Google Claims SEO is Bad for Users, Then Retracts
Search Engine Marketing (blog) Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large. Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy Is SEO really bad for the internet? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Users Dislike Personalized Search Results [Survey]
Feb 9th
Should Google’s search results be personalized based on past searches and information from social networking sites? Forty-five percent of respondents to a recent Google search survey said no, compared to 15.5 percent who said yes.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
[STUDY] 61% of Social Media Users Feel So Close To You
Feb 9th
Sometimes little things like a sweet comment on Facebook or a Twitter friend calling your tweet a “favorite” can really make a social networker bee’s day.
A new study from Pew finds that for the most part, adults are kind to each other on social media sites. In fact, 85% of adults say that most of the people they come across on social media are rather kind; only 5% say that people are “mostly unkind,” which would imply rude or mean. An additional 5% say that it’s all situational. On the whole, adults have positive experiences on social networking sites. A total 68% of SNS users had an experience that “made them feel good about themselves,” 61% said something on social networks “made them feel closer to another person.” Of the generous and helpful variety, 39% of users said they saw acts of generosity and 36% said they see other user behaving in generous and helpful ways.
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Not everything is peaches and cream, though.
There are some social media users who don’t feel so happy-go-lucky. Not everyone experiences kind, helpful behavior on social networking sites. That would be about 18% of users; another 5% claim to never see any generosity or helpfulness at all.
Sometimes interactions on social networking sites have negative outcomes. Of the people surveyed by Pew, 26% of adults experienced negative outcomes. Of that percentage, 15% said bad experiences ended friendships, 12% resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation, 11% said those interactions caused family-related problems, 3% got into a physical fight with someone based on an interaction, and 3% got into trouble at work. About 13% of adult SNS users say that someone else acted rudely toward them in the past year.
Unless you live in a world that resembles the movie Young Adult, you probably don’t think of yourself as an adolescent. On social networking sites, adults tend to be more positive and less negative than teenagers; 41% of SNS-using teens had at least one bad experiences versus 26% of SNS-using adults.
Dear White Guys, Please Read This
Pew points out that non-white people, women, parents and millennials are more likely to see content that offends them. Of that group, 42% of black SNS users and 33% of Hispanic SNS users frequently saw language, images or humor that they found offensive compared to 22% of white SNS users. Taking a look at this in terms of age, 34% of millennials (ages 18-34) found some material offensive, compared with only 17% of Gen-X users (ages 35-46). The survey doesn’t even give the tiny percentage of Baby Boomers who felt offended by material on SNS sites. Additionally, 29% of women were offended versus 22% of men, and 29% of parents with small children found offensive material versus 24% of nonparents.
Who Did Pew Survey?
Pew surveyed 2,260 adults ages 18-and-up over the period of July 25-August 26, 2011. Of the people surveyed, 1,047 were SNS and Twitter users. The margin of error is plus-or-minus three percentage points. A total 64% of adults surveyed used social networking sites. 87% had a profile on Facebook, 14% on MySpace, 11% on Twitter, 10% on LinkedIn and 13% on other social networking sites.
Images courtesy Shutterstock.
Do your friends on social networks make you feel good about yourself? Share your experiences in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Do Your Users Get You? Test Them With Solidify
Feb 8th
ZURB launched yet another handy design application to help anyone test Web products they’re working on. This one is called Solidify. It takes care of one of the most annoying parts of building an interface: testing clickable prototypes. Solidify lets you build a working test of your design and give it to users to see if it makes sense to them. It also gives you analytics on how your testers performed.
Along with the new app, ZURB opened a new apps page showcasing all the great Web design helpers it has made, many of which we’ve covered on ReadWriteWeb. ZURB’s tools let you make simple mockups, send images of pages for tester feedback, or collaborate on a wireframe with a team. Now, with Solidify, you can build working tests, too.
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Solidify is currently a private release, so you have to sign up to request an invitation. It will be free in this phase, and it will cost money once it’s open to the public. But ZURB has posted a detailed overview of the problem Solidify will solve, as well as a prototype test you can take to see it in action. This is the kind of thing you can make with Solidify, and all you have to do is create mock-ups and use Solidify to draw the click targets.
The example test gives the user a series of actions she or he has to complete on the prototype site. The task is to add a new team member to the application. It presents a screen with the whole Dunder Mifflin Team and their various levels of admin status.
Clicking on the profiles works and opens their bios.
Not all of the interface elements in here are active, but the ‘save’ and ‘cancel’ buttons work, so you can get back to the main screen.
Remember, the test is to add a new team member, so you click the ‘New Team Member +’ button, and it opens a new form. When you click on the text area to add an email address, Notable just adds them in for you, showing you that you did it right.
When you save that form, you get a success message, and then Notable asks for your feedback on your experience testing the prototype.
The creator of the test gets some statistical feedback about how well users were able to perform the task, as well as the comments they left at the end.
If you build Web interfaces, ZURB offers all kinds of ways to test your ideas in the early stages. Solidify helps with one of the hardest, since building clickable prototypes is often much more trouble than it’s worth. Sign up for Solidify if you want to try it out.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Smartphone Penetration: Japan Users Lead Way When Adapting To Mobile Technologies [INFOGRAPHIC]
Feb 7th
While the smartphones market in Japan has only reached a 6% penetration rate compared to 31% in the United States and 30% in the United Kingdom the countries users are far more engaged with the devices they do own. The infographic shown below demonstrates the true impact smartphones have had on Japanese consumers. Among the [...]
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Apsalar’s Daily Cohorts Gives Mobile Developers Real-Time Analytics to Engage Users
Feb 7th
When a person downloads an app to a smartphone, the first interactions the user has with the app will determine its overall success ands potential longevity. If a user likes an app, its long-term potential greatly increases. If not, well, it is destined to the black hole of app oblivion.
That is why the ability to track the first few sessions a user has with an app in real-time is critical. Mobile marketing and analytics startup Apsalar is releasing an update to its platform called Daily Cohorts that allows publishers to track app analytics in real-time the day it is published. Developers can then make determinations on how best to market and monetize the app while it is still fresh in the users’ mind.
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Oiknine describes the results of updating Xco’s app after the first batch of analytics:
“After the update is released, Xco looks at the cohorts of users who first launched the app for the 3 days after the update. Both revenue and retention is up for each cohort – not quite yet reaching the benchmarks, but a significant overall improvement can be seen. In addition, more users are now completing the tutorial, with the rate up to 75% of new users. Xco is pleased with the results but knows it needs to do more and so it will begin the iteration process over again.”
“After the update is released, Xco looks at the cohorts of users who first launched the app for the 3 days after the update. Both revenue and retention is up for each cohort – not quite yet reaching the benchmarks, but a significant overall improvement can be seen. In addition, more users are now completing the tutorial, with the rate up to 75% of new users. Xco is pleased with the results but knows it needs to do more and so it will begin the iteration process over again.”
The ability to retain users after the launch of an app is critical. All the best plans for marketing, engagement and monetization will go for naught if a user has stopped using the app after the first few days.
Apsalar CEO Michael Oiknine describes the scenario of a mobile game from a theoretical mobile gaming company called “Xco.” The company set up several cohorts to track the retention of users and finds that after three days the app is not living up to expectations and revenues are falling short. Xco finds that users that completed the app tutorial are more likely to keep using the app while those that do not are letting it slide into app oblivion.
“As Xco takes a closer look at the data they realize that by looking at the segment of users who completed the tutorial, retention and revenue are slightly ahead of their benchmarks and those users are leveling up more frequently than other users,” Oiknine said in an email to ReadWriteMobile. “However, only 65% of users are completing the tutorial. Based on this data, Xco goes into action and decides to make the tutorial more prominent in the UX after first launch of the app.”
This is a familiar scenario for many mobile games. The ability to track early sessions is extremely important. In this case, a quick tweak to the app to push more people towards the tutorial would benefit the longevity of the app.
The cohort method of analytics differs from just tracking sessions or daily average users. It provides a level of detail that other metrics (what Oiknine calls “vanity metrics”) do not.
“With daily cohorts, app developers can make critical changes fast enough so that they don’t lose the valuable users they’ve acquired,” Oiknine said.
Apsalar’s Daily Cohorts allows publishers to group users together in a single segment by the day they launched the app. For instance, users that downloaded the app the first day it was available can be grouped as “Day 1″ users and their history can be tracked as a single segment. Same with Day 2 users etc.
Apsalar’s platform focuses on engagement and monetization. Daily Cohorts is a change for the company as it used to provide weekly cohort analysis, which means that the information gained from initial users could not be acted upon immediately. A week is a long time for a newly-downloaded app and can cost the publisher thousands of dollars (and a plethora of poor reviews) if the app is subpar or users are not sticking with it.
To a certain extent, Apsalar’s Daily Cohorts falls into the realm of “predictive analytics” but with real-time data. The ability to track and group user sessions from the earliest possible moment will give developers a better understanding of how future users will interact with the app. The idea is to get actionable data as soon as possinle. Apsalar can then engage the user across apps with its Mobile Engagement Management (MEM) system that segments the user base on a common criteria.
Apsalar’s puts up its Daily Cohorts against a variety of other services that offer similar functions. Mobile analytics company Flurry, what Apsalar considers its chief competitor, tracks user sessions and has a “Re-Engagement” model to monetize user behavior. PlayHaven has the ability to track user behavior in real-time in mobile games and update an app accordingly.
Developers: What do you think of Apsalar’s Daily Cohorts? Is there anything similar on the market that you prefer to use? How important are early-stage analytics to the success of your app? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Hulu Users Rate Best Super Bowl Ads & The Bark Side Takes Top Honors – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 6th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Hulu Users Rate Best Super Bowl Ads & The Bark Side Takes Top Honors
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Video Service Tout Claims It Boosts Users’ Facebook, Twitter Followers
Jan 30th
Tout got a big boost when Shaquille O’Neal announced his NBA retirement in one of the service’s 15-second video clips. Before then, few people had herad of the service, which allows users to easily link the videos to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Prior to O’Neal’s unsolicited endorsement, few people had heard of Tout, which just launched in April. After Shaq’s quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. “We got lucky with him being so involved with it,” said Melissa Breen of Tout.
But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.
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The ex-NBA big man has seen his number of Twitter followers grow to 4.9 million since he started using the service eight months ago. Prior to that, Breen said, he had been “stuck at about 3.5 million for quite some time.”
Breen claims other Tout users are seeing a boost in followers as a result of the service. A sizzle reel she played on Saturday at Columbia University’s social media weekend in New York big increases from average users to Ryan Seacrest. Traffic on the site is growing at about 25 percent per month.
It’s hard to attribute how much of the growth is organic and how much can be attributed to Tout. But the company likes to point to CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who gained 10,000 new Twitter followers within 10 days after she started using the service.
“We don’t want to take credit…[but] the only answer is that it’s more immersive. People want to connect,” Tout’s Gardner Loulan told CNET.
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Bing Out Of “Betaphase” In Germany, Claims 10 Million Users
Jan 27th
Bing is reportedly now out of betaphase in Deutschland. According to Microsoft, Bing has 10 million users or 20 percent of active internet users in Germany: Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande….
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
[UPDATED] Is Twitter Helping Users Get Around Its New Censorship Rules?
Jan 27th
Some of the messages Twitter is sending about its new policy on censoring tweets in certain countries seem ambiguous at best.
Perhaps the biggest piece of confusion for people trying to make sense of yesterday’s announcement is Twitter’s inclusion of a link with instructions on how to change your country setting. The change would appear to at least temporarily allow some users to read messages banned in their country by overriding the IP-address detection mechanism Twitter uses to assign a country to a user.
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“We also offer the option to set your country to ‘worldwide’ – which will show all public Tweets.”
According to the policy, users in countries where tweets are blocked will be notified when they have been denied access. That presumably means if I were in Germany, where posts about pro-Nazi content is banned by law, I could change my country in Twitter settings to the United States and be able to view the blocked content. The page notes that the manual override is there for users whose country has been misidentified.
But as one commenter noted last night, it seems as if “Twitter is trying to pull of a weird balancing act here. I don’t know if they can.”
We’ve asked Twitter for clarification and will update as soon as we hear back from them.
Update: “We use the IP address to identify a user’s country, and give the user the option to correct his or her country in settings if our system has misidentified it,” said Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson. “We also offer the option to set your country to ‘worldwide’ – which will show all public Tweets.”
Twitter is trying to make it clear that it will only censor tweets if it receives “a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity.”
There are other questions about the policy as well. For example, even though a blog post and support pages say these rules are being enacted so Twitter can continue to “make our services available to users everywhere,” but Olson told us in an email Thursday “there are still countries to which we will not go.”
Update: “We want to reach every person on the planet, and to make Twitter available to people everywhere as a service,” Olson clarified on Friday. “The distinction is there are still countries to which Twitter will not operate in as a business.”
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