YouTube and Facebook Videos, Social Media Links in Ranking Algorithm, More on Social and Search

December 27, 2010 | by | Category:

This week in our blogosphere recap we’ll review six blog posts and news articles from last week that focus on the latest developments in the search and social market. Among them are reports on YouTube celebrating 700 Billion (!) YouTube videos watched in the last year while Facebook becomes the second highest referral source to video destinations. Judging only by the number of blog posts and news articles on the blogosphere in the last week (and keep in mind it’s Christmas Week), I can say that 2011 is going to be the year where search and social might just finally meet…

In this week’s recap we will cover:

Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Facebook/Twitter Links’ Influence on Search Ranking

Google’s Webmaster Help Channel | 12-18-10


In a new video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Help Channel, Google’s Matt Cutts addresses the subject of Google using links from Twitter and Facebook in their organic ranking algorithm.

Highlights:

  • Links from Facebook and Twitter are counted in the ranking algorithm
  • What matters more, though, is the page reputation, and in social media it’s the reputation of the owner
  • Owner’s reputation is not just the number of followers but also their quality
  • Security settings greatly reduce the number of links that will potentially help your search rankings, since they prevent Google from crawling pages and assigning PageRank
  • This feature is used lightly right now – mostly in Google’s Realtime – but will probably be used more in the future

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Facebook has started rolling out a new way to filter your News Feed

Mashable | Stan Schroeder | 12-22-10

Facebook’s News Feed – the homepage for most Facebook users – had so far only two option by which users could filter their news: Top News (Facebook’s algorithmic choice of the most interesting stories from your feed) or Most Recent stories, which merely listed the latest stories from your friends as they appear. Now, the Most Recent option has been turned into a drop-down menu that reveals a slew of options. You can now see only stories related to Games, Status Updates, Photos, Links and Pages. You can also choose to see only stories from a specific Group of yours. Finally, the drop-down menu now gives you access to the Live Feed settings, where you can determine whether you want to see more or fewer stories from a specific user.

Highlights:

  • This new features give users the ability to filter out news and more importantly, specific type of news and users
  • Users will now be able to determine how much they want to be engaged with other users and pages
  • The option is not live for everyone yet, and it’s possible that Facebook is merely testing the feature

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What Facebook Has in Store for Its ‘Places’ and ‘Deals’ Features: an interview with Facebook’s Senior Director of Local

eMarketer | Noah Elkin | 12-21-10
Emily White joined Facebook in September 2010. She leads the company’s product, sales and marketing efforts to engage with local businesses and users. White spoke with eMarketer principal analyst Noah Elkin about Facebook Places, the company’s location-sharing feature, and Deals, its location-based commerce initiative, as well as Facebook’s perspective on the burgeoning geolocation market.

Highlights:

  • 200 million users on mobile devices looking at Facebook on a really frequent basis
  • When asked why this service has no monetary system, White replied:”We felt like having any barrier around payment didn’t make sense if we wanted to drive really fast adoption from merchants.”
  • On the subject of competition and opportunities, White added: “there is certainly a scenario where one of the players is going to successfully and elegantly aggregate this data to make it much easier for the users to figure out exactly what deal they should be looking at on any given day, or where, based on their location. This is really a greenfield area, and there’s a lot we’re going to find out over the next year.”

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YouTube Celebrates 700 Billions Videos While Facebook Becomes Second Highest Referral Source to Video Destinations

Allfacebook | Jackie Cohen | 12-23-10


YouTube announced on Wenesday, December 22, that during the last 12 months more than 700 billion YouTube videos were watched, and more than 13 million hours of content uploaded to the site. The same day, a report by Brightcove and TubeMogul was published stating that Facebook has surpassed Yahoo in the amount of traffic it sends to video destinations, becoming second only to Google in this regard.

Highlights:

  • Facebook accounted for 9.6 percent of all the traffic referrals to video destinations in the study, second only to Google, based on usage data culled from nearly 2,000 sites during the third quarter of this year.
  • The report is based on Brightcove customer data, and by default that means non-YouTube player data, so YouTube traffic or referrals is not at all represented in this sample. The referral data is literally saying that of Brightcove’s sample media customers, more traffic is driven to those videos in Brightcove players from Facebook than from Yahoo now.
  • Based on this research, only Facebook showed gain in the last quarter while Google, Bing and Yahoo fell.

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Based on a Beta Tester, Social Selling with Promoted Tweets Seems Promising

Mongoose Metrics | 12-22-10



Recently, on Dec. 14, Twitter added a form to its website where companies can express interest in purchasing Promoted Tweets as well as Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends. The program will begin rolling out publicly sometime at the end of January or beginning of February 2011. Mongoose Metrics, one of 20 beta testers for this program, published a blog entry detailing its experience.

Highlights:

  • You can run multiple campaigns based on key terms that relate to the content you’re promoting in Tweets.
  • Bidding for most terms starts at 10 cents per engagement, which is defined as a retweet, a favorite, a reply or a click. But not all terms start at that rate. “SEO” for example, started at $1 per engagement. “That was the first kind of weird thing we saw,” says the company, “Bidding was supposed to be 10 cents and all of the sudden it was $1.”
  • Mongoose, which is running 14 distinct campaigns using Promoted Tweets including one for #Mobile and another for #CRM, found the program generated respectable return. For $2,067, Mongoose was able to generate 961,000 Tweet impressions, 18,000 clicks, 220 retweets, 168 replies and 126 conversions. The latter, which the company defines as someone who went to Mongoose’s site and downloaded a contact form, meant the company was paying about $30 per conversion.
  • Tweets must be Tweeted organically before they can be designated in a Promoted Tweets campaign.
  • Tweet fatigue is ambiguous at this point. Twitter tells that a Promoted Tweet will be shown to a user a maximum of five times before it is removed by Twitter from rotation.
  • Analytics and details on this process are non-existent.

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