Facebook Introduces Universal Search, Indexing All Public Posts

Facebook has made its entire index of public posts searchable, according toan announcement by the company today. Previously, conducting a search on Facebook would return results from friends, family, Pages you like, and other sources you had some affiliation with.  Now, just like Twitter and other social networks, conducting a search on Facebook will return results from everyone who published a post containing that keyword.

 Facebook’s index now includes over 2 trillion posts, with over 1.5 billion searches being conducted each day.

• In addition to expanding its search index to include posts throughout the network, Facebook has also made the following improvements to its search engine:
• Better suggestions: Typing in the search box will return better, more personalized results on the fly. Facebook will also highlight topics that are going on right now.
• Filter Friends/Public: When search results are returned you can toggle between results from your friends, and public posts from those you may or may not be connected to.
• Find Active Conversations: Jump right into active public conversations around links shared to Facebook.

The company adds that search results are unique to each person, which more or less rules out the possibility of devising a strategy to rank in Facebook search.

 However, these new features will be useful for finding popular content on Facebook, learning what people are saying about a topic, and engaging with current events on Facebook in real time.

These updates are rolling out now in US English on iPhone, Android and desktop

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5 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand on Twitter

  In today’s very digital world, giving out your card during networking events isn’t enough. Creating a social media following is the ultimate branding tool. To get you started, I wanted to give you a starter pack to personal branding on Twitter.

  So, without further ado, here are the first five steps to start your Twitter empire:
1. Choose Your Twitter Handle Carefully

  You may be a great chef and a fun comic book fanatic, but handles like @Cooking4Life or @GimmeComics123 won’t fly.

  However, if you started a cooking blog and you want your brand to revolve around that, something like @JeffTheChef is both straightforward and memorable. It’s ok to play around with something funky, but it’s not okay to create a cryptic handle of a middle schooler.

  This is a great solution for bloggers. For inspiration, here are two bloggers that took their URL and made it their handle:

   In today’s very digital world, giving out your card during networking events isn’t enough. Creating a social media following is the ultimate branding tool. To get you started, I wanted to give you a starter pack to personal branding on Twitter.

  So, without further ado, here are the first five steps to start your Twitter empire:
1. Choose Your Twitter Handle Carefully

  You may be a great chef and a fun comic book fanatic, but handles like @Cooking4Life or @GimmeComics123 won’t fly.

  However, if you started a cooking blog and you want your brand to revolve around that, something like @JeffTheChef is both straightforward and memorable. It’s ok to play around with something funky, but it’s not okay to create a cryptic handle of a middle schooler.

  This is a great solution for bloggers. For inspiration, here are two bloggers that took their URL and made it their handle:

   In today’s very digital world, giving out your card during networking events isn’t enough. Creating a social media following is the ultimate branding tool. To get you started, I wanted to give you a starter pack to personal branding on Twitter.

  So, without further ado, here are the first five steps to start your Twitter empire:
1. Choose Your Twitter Handle Carefully

  You may be a great chef and a fun comic book fanatic, but handles like @Cooking4Life or @GimmeComics123 won’t fly.

  However, if you started a cooking blog and you want your brand to revolve around that, something like @JeffTheChef is both straightforward and memorable. It’s ok to play around with something funky, but it’s not okay to create a cryptic handle of a middle schooler.

  This is a great solution for bloggers. For inspiration, here are two bloggers that took their URL and made it their handle:

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Facebook to Replace ‘Other’ Inbox With More Visible ‘Message Requests’

Facebook’s ‘Other’ inbox, an often forgotten about section of Messenger, is being replaced with more noticeable Message Requests. The Other inbox used to contain messages from people you have no connection with on Facebook. Most often these would end up being spam accounts, but occasionally a message from someone you know would end up there. The problem with the Other inbox is that, unless you check it regularly, messages could go unnoticed for weeks, months, or whenever you remember to check it again.

 In an effort to better notify people of the messages that end up in the Other inbox, Facebook is rolling out Message Requests. Message Requests will be hard to miss, as they’re going to be displayed right at the top of the Messenger app.

  The idea behind this feature is to let non-connections make it known to you that they want to connect with you. You can deny the request if it looks like spam, or accept it if it’s someone you recognize.

  When a Message Request comes through you’ll receive some basic information about the person sending it — such as name, location, and mutual friends.

  This update is a double-edged sword in the sense that it will help you notice more messages from non-connections, but it will also make it easier for non-connection to attempt to get in touch with you.

  In order to find someone and send a message, all you need is their name. When you take into account that you don’t need a Facebook account to use Messenger, it’s almost like names are the new phone numbers.

 David Marcus of the messaging team at Facebook summed this up in a post today:

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How to Make People Stay and Read Your Blog Posts

  When you succeed in getting visitors to one of your blog posts, you want them to stay and read your work. Readers (and especially first time visiting readers) are bored quickly. You should grab their attention fast and help them understand the main message of your blog. In this post, I give five tips on getting people to stay on your site and read your post.
Limit the Length of Your Posts

  You should limit the length of your text as people tend to stop reading (or don’t even start) if web text is too long. However, for SEO purposes, your blogs or articles shouldn’t be too short either (minimum of 300 words). A lengthy article has more chances to rank in search engines. We advise writing blog posts between 300-400 words for inexperienced bloggers and 700-800 for more advanced bloggers. Also make sure you write short paragraphs. A bunch of short paragraphs is much more pleasant to read than one big lump of copy.

  (At Yoast we tend to break the do-not-write-lengthy-posts rule every now and then, producing blog posts which are much longer. If you choose to write a lengthy article, you should focus even more on style and structure!)

Make Sure Your Post is Readable

   Make sure people can read your text properly. Reading from screens is hard, so make sure you don’t make it any harder. Use a decent font size: at least 14 px and preferably 16 px, with an appropriate white space (1.5em for the larger font sizes, more toward 2em for smaller font sizes). Using more white space (to a degree, obviously) has been found to actually increase comprehension of the text. Make sure the lines of your text aren’t too long. Try to keep it limited to 50 or 75 characters per line. The longer the lines, the harder it is for people to understand your message. And last but not least, choose contrasting colors for your text and your background. Green text on a yellow background tends to read quite hard.
 

 

Write About One Topic

 
  Your blog post should have one subject. It should have one main message, or point, you want to make. Every blog and piece of content on your website has some kind of a message. This message is the purpose of that piece of writing: what do you want to tell your readers? You should be able to put the message of your post in one sentence. That sentence should contain one topic, not two. If you have a message containing two topics, use that second topic for your next blog post!

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How to Find (and Push) the Right Reputation Review Sites

  For most people, the word “Yelp” is synonymous with “reputation review”. And that’s no surprise. This one site contains reviews of almost every type of business you can think of, from restaurants to hotels to tailors to dog walkers. If someone makes money in some kind of business, that business likely has a Yelp review. And since Yelp gathers about 83 million unique mobile visitors per day, it’s easy to assume that anyone looking at a glowing phone screen while in a business is probably either reading or writing on Yelp.

But so no fast.

Yelp might very well be powerful, and it certainly gets a great deal of traffic. But it isn’t the only review site out there. In fact, it might not even be the most popular site within your market. There are dozens of other sites that do the same sorts of things that Yelp can do, and if you can pinpoint one strong contender within your market, you could boost your local influence, and your local reputation. Yelp Reputation Alternates Let’s start with a look at just a few of the websites knocking on Yelp’s door at the moment.

Google My Business.

 This website has been through a few name changes in recent years (from Google to Google Places and now Google My Business), but its underlying structure has remained much the same. People can use Google My Businessto get information about your business, such as your hours of operation and your location.

 

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7 Strategies to Optimize B2C Lead Generation Paid Search Accounts

  Does your business use paid search for its B2C lead generation? Online lead generation using paid search options like Google Adwords can be a tricky business. Getting a website visitor interested enough to click on your ad and then fill out a form on your website requires a highly-strategized paid search campaign. Below, you will find seven strategies to optimize B2C lead generation accounts—strategies which will help your business capture qualified, quality leads.

  If you’re running search advertising to collect leads, these tips will help take you to the next level.
1. Apply RLSAs to Your Campaigns

  Is your business using RSLAs? Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) is a powerful feature which uses your website’ remarketing lists to effectively drive leads to your website. Using RLSA bid adjustments allows you to tell Google you are willing to pay some percentage more for the click of a former site visitor.

  Here’s how you can get started with RSLAs. Get Started With This RSLA Strategy

  Start your RSLA campaign by going broad. First, build an audience of all site visitors that have not converted. Then, apply this to some of your high-traffic ad groups with a bid adjustment of +15%. Typically, you’ll clearly see the increased conversion rate and lower cost per lead in this audience. If you’re finding success, test this out across your whole account.

  If you have low site traffic, try setting the duration of your remarketing window to more than 90 days. And remember, set your ad group’s Flexible Reach setting for Interests and Audiences to “Bid Only” to still allow your ads to serve to both former visitors and new visitors.

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Google Warns Deceptive Mobile Redirects Result in Manual Actions

  Google is getting more aggressive in its fight against deceptive mobile-only redirects. In most cases mobile-only redirects are perfectly fine, as long as they help people access the content they requested in a mobile-friendly format. Mobile-only redirects become a problem when they direct smartphone traffic to unwanted content — such as a page or website they didn’t intend to visit.

  Not only is that activity frowned upon, it goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines and can result in a manual action penalty if the search giant finds out. Google is giving Webmasters yet another warning because now it has become known that deceptive redirects sometimes occur without the Webmaster even knowing about it.

How can this happen? Google gives two possible explanations:

• Advertising: A script installed to display ads might end up redirecting mobile users to a different site, unbeknownst to the webmaster.
• Hacking: If your site gets hacked, attackers could set up redirects to spammy domains for mobile users only.

  The only way to know for sure if there are deceptive mobile redirects on your site is to search for it in Google on your phone and click on the results. In addition, Google also recommends you keep an eye on this by listening to user complaints of redirects, and monitoring analytics data for unusual activity — like a sudden drop in mobile traffic.

  If deceptive mobile redirects are in place on your site, Google recommends checking Search Console for any warnings about site hacks.

  If there’s no sign of a site hack, there could be a problem with third-party scripts/elements on your site. You can narrow down which one is causing the problem by disabling them one at a time and testing to see if the redirect issue has been fixed.

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