What has been happening in the marketing world this week? Let The Zen Media Group fill you in on the latest and greatest of online marketing news in our MZ Weekly News Round-Up, published every Friday!
Social Media:
Facebook’s purchase of the popular mobile messaging startup WhatsApp for a mind-blowing 16 billion US Dollars has dominated the news in social media. This tops what Facebook had bid on Snapchat last year by over 13 billion dollars. WhatsApp’s growth has by far exceeded that of every other social network to date. Referring to WhatsApp’s soaring growth, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call, “No one in the history of the world has done anything like that.”
While Facebook and WhatsApp have not released future plans as to what the buy could mean for social media, our CEO Shama Kabani took to Facebook with this quote: “Facebook + WhatsApp = FaceApp – the next in mobile chat. Please note time and date.” For now, both companies will keep their own headquarters and not intermingle staff.
LinkedIn made headlines by opening up their publishing platform to 25,000 members, and soon will expand to everyone else on the network. This is great news for content marketers and influencers on LinkedIn. Shameless self-promotion is discouraged as stated by LinkedIn: “LinkedIn discourages and may disable posts that self-servingly advertise a service, business, political cause or other organization or cause that does not benefit the broader LinkedIn community.”
Don’t fret though! LinkedIn also states: “LinkedIn may distribute your content, annotate your content (e.g., to highlight that your views may not be the views of LinkedIn), and sell advertising on pages where your content appears.”
SEO:
Typos and spelling errors can lower your search rankings in Bing. Bing posted a blog suggesting that their algorithms used to crawl the web do in fact take poor grammar and spelling into consideration. Duane Forrester from Bing said, “just as you’re judging others’ writing, so the engines judge yours.” That means even if you have quality insights, you may never see the front page of search results as long as it is grammatically incorrect or spelled incorrectly.
Google, on the other hand, seems to only care about quality content, and no comments can be found on proper spelling and grammar having an impact (yet). For now the Panda algorithm seems to focus on high-quality content. Matt Cutts answered the following question this week: “Does the big G have a version of the search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevancy? I’m wondering what search would look like and am curious to try it out.”
According to Cutts, excluding backlink relevancy resulted in “much worse” search quality. “It turns out backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results,” says Cutts.
Content:
Danny Wong at Shareaholic announced this week that the startup is moving beyond free tools and is looking at “promoted content offering” that would end up generating revenue for Shareaholic and publishers alike. “We are providing the platform, but at the same time the publisher will want to make good money from their page views, and hopefully we can find a way where our interests align,” said Danny Wong, Shareaholic’s marketing manager.
Speaking of Danny Wong and Shareaholic – Don’t miss our first interview with him in our Marketing Stars Series on Monday, February 24th, 2014!
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Sources:
Brian Solomon. Stunner: Facebook To Buy WhatsApp For $19 Billion In Cash, Stock Forbes.
Avtar Singh. Ready to Be a LinkedIn Influencer Yet? Social Media Today.
Duane Forrester. Quality: Do You Have It, or Just Think You Have It? Bing Webmaster Blog.
Amy Gesenhues. Google’s Matt Cutts: Backlink Relevancy Is A Big Win In Terms Of Search Quality Search Engine Land.
Sara Castellanos. Shareaholic aims to generate revenue by helping promote websites Bizjournals.
