Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great week. One of the most talked about news this week undoubtedly comes from Twitter’s “apparent” moves to bring users closer to their own home. Recent announcements include, among other things, Twitter removing the “via stamp” from web clients, and blocking access to find friends on other services such as Instagram , Tumblr, etc. If some of you were using that “via stamp” as a means of improving your online reputation and/or branding, that’s gone.
Twitter.com just stopped displaying app names in tweets; here’s why po.st/OpYchG (Hint: Your apps are going away, dudes.)
— Jolie O’Dell (@jolieodell) August 27, 2012
In addition, they have announced the launch of their “Twitter Certified Products” program. Three certifications are now available, these being, engagement, analytics and data reseller certified partners, respectively. For now, there are only 12 official partners announced, Hootsuite, being the only app certified for sending tweets on dedicated streams. This is really bad news for all those Twitter clients, services, developers, etc., that are relying on Twitter for their business. Anyway, based on all these uncertainties, I will probably steer away from any 3rd party client, free or paid, that are not “certified by Twitter. What do you think about this move?
But its not all about Twitter. Ecommerce store builder Limited Run recently claimed that “80% Of Facebook Ad Clicks Were From Bots“, a scary thought. While there is no “confirmation” (no denying either) about this from FaceBook, this kind of news can not simply be ignored. Anyway, if you run or thinking of running some ads on FaceBook, you might want to read that article first, just in case.
And finally, I am sure that you heard about Google’s announcement to soon “take down” sites that have received repeated copyright notifications, from the SERPs. Just in case, you should know that they are drilling hard on this and will go the extra mile of “banning” AdSense accounts that are equally infringing copyright material. On an official announcement, they say, … “We’d like to take a moment to explain the AdSense policies regarding copyrighted material and provide some tips on how to comply with them.”
BTW, don’t forget to watch SEOMoz’s video below about “Ten Painless Tactics To Earn Attention On Twitter – Whiteboard Friday”.
As usual, in no particular order:
Content Marketing/Small Business Bites
- Guest Blogging – Enough is Enough (the guest blog bubble)
- 4 Pitches That Any Respectable Blogger Will Always Ignore
- What Your Sidebar Actually Needs
- SellFire – Affiliate Data Feeds and Online Store Made Easy
SEO/Inbound Marketing
- The Granola-Munching Hippie’s Guide to All-Natural SEO
- Internet Marketers Top SEO, Keyword and Social Media Tools (shameless promotion – but worth looking at)
- My 10-Step Strategy for Getting 1,000+ Views on EVERY Blog Post
- SEO Basics: When Your Domain & Homepage Are Not The Same
Social Web/Other Cool Stuff
- How to Effectively Create a Google+ Following of 10,000 Engaged Fans
- Facebook To Remove Fake Likes
- Google+ Tools for Business: This Week in Social Media
- What Goldman Sachs joining Twitter tells us about Social Media
Ten Painless Tactics To Earn Attention On Twitter
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.
I have used Facebook Ads in the past with the mixed results. But after reading this post, i will think twice before using them unless until there is clarity on this.
Ah that’s a wonderful link roundup and a wonderful video tutorial. Thanks for sharing this Fran.
By the way, the news with Twitter is really shocking. Does this mean that I should also stay away from Tweetadder? I use it to automatically tweet many blog’s RSS feeds!
Hi Jane. Thanks for stopping by. The news about Twitter is indeed quite shocking and I believe that any 3rd party service that uses Twitter’s API may be subject to them being “bumped”. For now, unless you are paying for your Tweetadder, it should not pose a problem (yet). Just keep on the lookout 🙂
Ah! Tweetadder is a paid software (one time payment) – but I will stay away from using it for a while! Thanks Fran 🙂
Arun
Are you sure that80% of Facebook Ad clicks are from BOTS??? i strongly disagree. Facebook has good algorithms to fight click fraud. They will try their level best to keep the trust of advertisers.
Thanks for sharing this info.
Hi. I would love to, but this is a report from a company who supposedly analyzed their data. I agree with you that FaceBook will never engage on this type of activity, but they do have to “clear” it out.
Who knows for sure about bots. A lot of things are automated by bots. Some for the good, other times they are not so good or nice. It wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook had some bots clicking ads, but I am sure they are not the only ones. I suspect it is tough to keep up with and prevent these kind of things completely.
Kris Costin
I agree with Ray’s comment “if Facebook had some bots clicking ads”. This is not only the case with Facebook. Even Google advertisers at some times have felt the same thing. Surely the percentage was very low in comparison to Facebook.
And many thanks for Twitter news. Don’t know but i missed that. That is surely going to hit a lot of twitter applications and tools.
It doesn’t surprise me that bots were clicking Facebook ads; every ad network has that issue. But 80% of all clicks were from bots? Now that’s a huge number of invalid clicks!
Disappointed in the Twitter update, though.
Aditya
Ads generated from Bots are making thing difficult for those who really adds some value to the Ads campaigning on different social media sites.
And the video is amazing,one point i like the most is having twitter chats.
Twitter changes are going to effect many third party software which auto-follow and unfollow users. Somewhat it is great it can keep away member who just com for advertisement.
erda
After reading this post, i will think twice before using Facebook Ads unless until there is clarity on this.Thanks for sharing this!