What Is Social Media Marketing?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.

Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.
Social Media Marketing At Marketing Land

Marketing Land is the sister site to Search Engine Land that covers all facets of internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Google+ 
Linkedin
YouTube
Social Media Marketing How To Guides & more!

At Search Engine Land, we occasionally cover social media news with a search angle, you’ll find all of our most recent articles related to ‘social search’ here:

All Social Search Related Stories

More Social Media Marketing Resources

Search Engine Land and Marketing Land produce three conferences dedicated to digital marketing strategies and tactics for professional marketers: SMX, the MarTech Conference and the SocialPro Conference series.

Many of our SMX events have topics that cover social media. There’s also our annual event entirely devoted to social media. Check out the site to learn more: SocialPro Conference.

Subscribe to our weekly Social Media Marketing digest and Marketing Day daily recap newsletters, with the latest articles from Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, as well as the day’s news sources all over the web.


Source: http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-social-media-marketing

Bing Boasts Continuous Updates To Their Search Engine Daily

Bing deploys multiple updates per day in an effort to constantly improve the search results and features.

Dr. Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist, Bing and Information Platform R&D, wrote this morning on theBing blog that Bing is continuously updating their search engine “multiple times per day.”

Some may think that Microsoft is a big company that’s slow to make changes, but the blog post explains that is at least not the case when it comes to Bing, their search engine.

“Four years ago, Bing engineers deployed new features once a month,” they said. But now Bing ships “features to production multiple times per day,” he added. This is based on Bing taking a different approach through what is known as agile development.

Now Bing has 600 engineers, six times the number they had four years ago. They are running 20,000 tests, a 10-fold increase, per submission attempt, and have kept feature submission times below 30 minutes.

In short, Bing is doing a lot, constantly improving, testing, updating and investing in their search technology in order to compete with Google’s incredibly frequent updates.

Microsoft Partners With Hackerrank To Deliver Executable Code In Bing Search

Bing's group engineering manager for UX features and shared tools calls the new feature a Rosetta-stone model for programming languages.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Microsoft has partnered with the programming community website HankerRank to bring code snippets into Bing’s search results.

TechCrunch says the partnership makes it possible not only to locate code quickly via search, but also edit and execute code right from the search results page.

Search for something like “string concat C#” or a similar question and Bing will pop up the editor for you. Using the widget, you can also switch to other languages as well. Depending on the algorithm you’re looking for, the options here include C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Java.

TechCrunch

HackerRanker co-founder Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that Bing search results will return more than 80 code snippets based on the most commonly searched terms. Marcelo De Barros, Bing’s group engineering manager for UX features and shared tools, also spoke to TechCrunch, calling the new search feature a “Rosetta-stone model for programming languages.”

“In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too,” said De Barros.

Here’s an image from the TechCrunch story showing how the code snippet works:

Source: http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-hankerrank-partnership-delivers-executable-code-via-bing-search-results-246908

Google Warns Site Owners Their Site Is Not Mobile-Friendly In Mobile Search Results

A month before the Google mobile-friendly algorithm boost, Google starts issuing new warnings to site owners.

Google is now issuing a new type of warning to site owners if their site is not mobile-friendly. The new warnings show directly in the mobile search results, but only to the site owner, when Google knows that the searcher is the owner of the site.

Jennifer Slegg has an old site that is not mobile-friendly, and she reported that when she views the site in the mobile search results, it says to her in the snippet, “Your page is not mobile-friendly.” That message is a hyperlink to a Google help page about mobile-friendly.

Here is what Jenn sees as the site owner of a non-mobile-friendly website:

This new warning comes a month prior to Google boosting the mobile-friendly algorithm.

John Mueller of Google confirmed this is an experiment they are trying out to see if it helps boost mobile-friendliness.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-warns-site-owner-site-not-mobile-friendly-mobile-search-results-246849

Searchmetrics Now Shows Where Your App Appears In App Packs

Also new: rankings for app ads, unique keywords on a page, and the release of the Visibility Guard to protect against errors affecting ranking

SEO and content marketing analytics service Searchmetrics has announced several new features, including the ability to see where your mobile apps — or those of competitors — appear in the Google App Packs or where your paid app ads show up on a mobile search results page.

The San Mateo, California-based company said this kind of analysis in its Mobile App Rankings is the first of its kind. The new features were made available in Europe in March and are now being rolled out to the US.

For example, Director of Product Helen Shaughnessy told me, if you search for “free music downloads” on a smartphone, you’re “highly likely to find Spotify and SoundCloud apps in the accompanying App Pack.”

A Google App Pack is a group of up to six suggested apps that might be returned in a Google mobile search, appearing as colorful tiles with app names, icons, prices and ratings. They link to the app download pages in the Google or Apple app stores. Searchmetrics reports that about 10 percent of Google mobile searches return an App Pack.

Searchmetrics now shows where the App Pack appears in the results, and where specific apps appear in the Pack. Previously, she pointed out, Searchmetrics did not show App Pack results. Here’s a sample App Pack results screen:

And here’s an App Pack:

There is also a new capability to see where paid ads for your or your competitors’ apps appear in the results. “You may be paying for app ads but your competitor may not be,” she pointed out, so the tool can help a marketer assess whether the cost is worth it. Paid App Rankings are similar to Organic App Rankings, in that it shows the position of the app ad in the cluster of ads in a mobile search results page.

The company is also announcing two other new features. While previously, its Competitive Keyword Discovery tool showed all and shared competitive keywords for a specific web page, now it shows which page-level keywords are unique to you and which to your competitor’s page. For example, if you wanted to know the unique keywords for a page that features a pair of Nike shoes, now you can.

Additionally, the Visibility Guard that Searchmetrics had earlier made available in its beta phase is now out in an updated release version. It sends email or chat alerts about problems affecting ranking that a search engine crawl might encounter. Shaughnessy suggested this might include a “do not index” that was mistakenly left on a site update after it was moved from a staging server to a public location, as well as common errors like 404 “not found.”

Source: http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-now-shows-app-appears-app-packs-246824