Social Local Mobile and Google+ Local Search

It’s no secret that here in Rocktime’s Search Marketing Team; Flashlight, when it comes to Search, we do love Local and it’s not just us; Google loves local too! With the Google Venice update this year, which updated search results to give greater weighting to local search results, it's a great time for large organisations and even smaller businesses aimed at purely local audiences, to take another look at their local search marketing strategy.

Hand in hand with local search is mobile usage; it’s estimated that as much as 50% of mobile queries have local intent, therefore, ranking positions on both Google Places and Google's main search results are something that any business with a localised target market will want to consider.
Since 30 May, Google Places pages are being integrated with Google+ Business Pages and morphed into the new Google+ Local pages. This is all part of Google’s progress in becoming a leading social network for businesses, a way for customers to leave reviews, enhance the user experience and engage with brands and for businesses to improve their chances of being found in the blended and mixed media results.

So when you think of local and mobile it is natural to consider creating relationships with people and building trust and this is where social comes in to the equation, through the convergence of the social web, local-business with mobile; sometimes referred to as SoLoMo

Google Plus Business Pages combined with Google+ Local and being found easily on a mobile is a foremost method of getting better ranking on Google.
It is recommended to still give the same importance to local campaign strategies as would be given to a national or Global digital campaign. Investing time in the all important stages of keyword research, keyphrase positioning and competitor analysis, to determine the most competitive keywords to use in a local targeted campaign, pays off. A complimentary campaign to develop quality organic in bound links, press coverage, reviews and buzz is also worth considering. Content that people want to share is still the best way to get and keep visitors interested; it can now be advantageous to write about local knowledge, about a community neighbourhood and social customer services.

Local can be global and personal, including hyperlocal which is the search for businesses in a neighbourhood: Where shall we have lunch, which hotel shall we stay in, where is the best plumber, who can fix my car, where is a local garden centre, best value transport company in the area etc.

People are used to having their images stored on an external server and now more businesses are using cloud computing which allows them to access content when not specifically in an office, from a fixed location, or from a desktop. Mobile and tablets are adding to that virtualised approach where there is less often the need for a dedicated physical server.

The mobile phone is more like a computer connecting users to the internet and always at hand. Some businesses wisely let their employees use Twitter and Facebook and more often this is performed on a mobile. 40% of social media users access social media content using their mobile phone. Digital maps and geo tagging of images has been greatly improved with map APIs from Yahoo!, Google, Nokia, Bing, Picasa, Panoramio etc and businesses are encouraged to claim and optimise a business listing in a local directory, or niche directory, with geo tagged images, linked to a map and often user reviews.

The surge in location deals and location based social networks that are optimised for multiple touch data devices like tablets and smartphones can capitalise on traffic, brand engagement and product conversations. Businesses are recognising the 'benefits versus cost and effort' involved in maintaining a mobile presence.


There are a few simple tips to follow for local optimisation like:

• Using the local terms in HTML tags and page content. 
• Plan to include local focused content on the website as well as in the social and local pages. 
• Add simple geo tagging to images, micro-formatting and microdata tag improvements that identify the different parts of the address page, map markers and geo located content. 
• Links to the website that use the local search term in the text link, still remains an important factor to get good local rankings. 
• Businesses get listed at the top because they fit the geographical area of the search query; usually within 5 miles proximity radius to the area you are trying to target. 
• Other ranking factors in the local and blended search results are proper categorisation and matching keywords that show local results relevant to your business, have good relevant content and good relevant organic backlinks. 

We would encourage businesses to think of each web page, or directory listing, as a landing page, with relevant content, a simple layout and call to action and a well researched keyword strategy. By doing this on the website and in local directories it makes it easier for businesses to prepare themselves for mobile website content, that can be socially shared, found in the local search results and define their brand values.

Mobile is becoming the primary way for visitors to search and purchase online in the UK, with 95% of smartphone users having searched for local information, Google is responding to the changing way visitors search by making local mobile search more relevant and appealing to advertisers with the 'Google + Local', integrating the business listings across the channels of search, mobile, Google+ and Maps.
Visitors see this as all one channel rather than individual channels, with 70% of UK mobile users being happy to compare prices on their phone. Product reviews form a really important part of the decision making process and 65% of users have checked out product reviews. Last month, PayPal introduced their mobile payments to the high street, so the whole buying process can be completed on a mobile device.
According to Google, 50% of mobile searches lead to a purchase, which is a great incentive for businesses and brands to make it easier for their customers to be better connected through social, local and mobile channels.

Businesses can follow a few established social media steps to harness the best of local and mobile:

1. Conduct a Social Media landscape review to determine whether the business should create business pages in Facebook, Google + or other leading social networks and where their competitors are being found. 
2. Social Planning for all members of the business to encourage the correct tone of voice 
3. Writing strategy for the channels 
4. Setting up channels 
5. Social Share Audit 
6. Incorporate social share icons on relevant content 
7. Plan blogger engagement; find networks of interactions, Twitter list management 
8. Add social media badges to the website 
9. Community page 
10. Set up a social hub page 
11. Create compelling content that people will want to share. Provide fresh, updated, local content. 
12. Develop email marketing campaigns with social share 
13. Think of customer services with real time responses and embrace the philosophy that customers are not transactions 
14. Investigate social commerce and social buying trends in social search 
15. Become a social business and project your social business personality 
16. Track social media monitoring and social crm 
17. Review the social analytics and traffic trends.

Google offers numerous free products to businesses and is always endeavouring to refine ways for businesses to be found in the search results, so it is certainly worth utilising these useful products for tracking site traffic in Google Analytics and diagnosing the site’s performance in Webmaster Tools for instance. We recommend conducting a full SEO site audit to be run at the same time as planning a local mobile social strategy. That way, a business can determine if the website is performing well in terms of SEO, structure, technology and business delivery to raise their online visibility.

Some benefits of the convergence of social networking, mobile shopping and local search for consumers:
• helps consumers save time
• location based deals
• mobile payments
• meetups
• valuable information
• user friendly maps

Some benefits of the convergence of social networking, mobile shopping and local search for consumers:
• availability of consumer data which can be gathered by businesses
• create brand advocates and peer influencers for products and services
• tailored geo targeted advertising is more cost effective

Therefore, careful localised optimisation is the key for 'local business marketing' through search and  is certainly becoming increasingly important at levelling the playing field between national and local businesses.

If you're interested in finding how Rocktime can help you with your website and local targeted search marketing strategy, then why not check out the work Flashlight does and get in contact with our Sales team.


Author: Fiona Anderson

Photosharing: Flickr versus Picasa

Introduction

We continue to discuss channel optimisation this month, on the Rocktime blog. This week Fiona discusses her experience in using both photo sharing tools, Flickr and Picasa. She highlights which channel she prefers to use and which she would recommend to Rocktime clients.

In her estimation, Picasa is better than Flickr for certain clients, find out why below, and feel free to send in a comment to let us know which photo sharing service you prefer.

My experience in using Picasa

• Editing and organising

I initially chose Picasa back in 2008, as an editing program because it allowed me to view RAW format image files that I had photographed using a Canon and a Nikon digital SLR camera.

In my leisure time, I promote an acoustic musician through images, social networks and at live events and the photography is mostly shot at these live music events; shooting musicians in limited light and nearly always in a moody environment. I don’t use flash and most of my images are ‘in-camera’.

Picasa allows some basic editing of photos; I mostly do quick adjustments to highlights, cropping, adding some effects, and reducing or increasing the warmth of images. More exacting photo editing would be done in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.
Picasa has a good desktop app for organising my pictures into folders, easily tagged for searching and uploading and costs less to upgrade than Flickr.

• Adding text

Picasa allows for adding text to images, which is useful for quick flyers, cards and posters. One feature I really enjoy in Picasa is the collage feature, which is simple and effective for both random selections of images, or quite structured collections of images.

• Social

Picasa has great social share features and allows me to upload the images directly to a blog, share a link to the album, or mark them as private. This is useful for viewing a whole album, or individual images in discussion and then deciding which ones to further edit, or use in a promotional campaign. I just choose the level at which I want to share the images and email the link directly from the desktop.

Did I mention that the basic storage on Picasa is FREE!  There are upgrades available for 80GB and up to 200GB.

• Video

You can also upload videos to Picasa, you could if you wanted, upload one giant 1GB video to fill up your storage quota. You can pay for more storage additions, which can be spread across Gmail, Google Docs as you see fit.



My experience in using Flickr


I do have an account on Flickr, I don’t use it for photo sharing or photo storing. However, I do use it as a content seeding tool for flyers, which promote gigs and events. I still use Picasa for the basic editing of these flyers and Photoshop for more serious editing. As an enthusiastic photographer, I do like to peruse Flickr from time to time, as I like to find the beautiful, interesting and arty photographs that other users have loving uploaded over the years.

You can also upload videos to Flickr and allows users to upload a 90-second video (150 MB) or 500 MB of video with a pro account. Idea: you can, of course, upload a longer video elsewhere and then link to it from a photo page.

The main concern with Flickr is the fact that they have a low monthly upload limit, unless of course you pay for a PRO account. This can slow you down when you are only able to upload 100MB of photos and 2 videos a month. Also, although the audience on Flickr is far greater than Picasa, we have found that the active community members are mainly photographers. Flickr has no significant desktop application. If appropriate, there are ways to migrate from Flickr to Picasa using an application like PhotoGrabbr.

• Social

Flickr is a more socially driven website than Picasa. Flickr is integrated with Facebook. The best use of uploads is in sets, which can be considered a campaign or an event. When you have a series of events then it gets stored as an album. The images can belong in multiple collections. Tags are searcheable in your photostream and highly recommended.

Flickr offers all the same security benefits of Picassa, when you mark the set/collection/photo as viewable to all public, or private and inaccessible. For the professional photographer having the ability to add Rights Reserved to protect their copyright is very important.


Rocktime clients and Picasa

For Rocktime clients I have found much more interesting uses for Picasa, such as the ability to upload to the Panoramio community, which is great for finding locations on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Search. Picasa also allows the use of RSS feeds, slideshows, post to Buzz, Blogger, Google Talk and Twitter as part of a social media campaign. Our Leisure and Tourism clients, who enjoy beautiful locations, as well as being a viable business, benefit from Picasa.


Further reasons why I sometimes favour Picasa

I found the Google Picasa experience is faster than Flickr, more up to date. The library of images within Picasa are all easily catalogued by date, location and people in the images. The geotags for mapping, text and tags make searches more refined and easily found easily on location searches. Public photos allow users to comment, building a community. Photos can be uploaded Facebook directly from Picasa.

I would recommend that you edit in Picasa and then do a bulk upload to Facebook of the chosen images. The images can be bulk resized for quick upload. The photo gallery template aids the individualisation of albums. The software is uploaded on a regular basis, is very simple to update and has easy to read instructions, plenty of support and question and answer forums.


Conclusion

In my estimation, Picasa is better than Flickr. Read my concluding points below:

Flickr is a great channel for photosharing, however, it can often slow a social media strategy down, unless you have a paid for (Pro) account, due to their low monthly upload limit. Additionally the audience on Flickr is mainly Photographers, so you will find that the professional looking photos will be viewed more.

The big benefit of Picasa is its excellent desktop tool, plus it links with Google GEO targeting features (Google Maps, Google Earth). Also unlike Flickr, Picasa does not have a monthly upload limit, only a limit of 1GB for lifetime (As with Flickr you pay for more storage). There are additional benefits for Picasa including the ability to upload to Panoramio community, which is great for finding locations on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Search. Picasa allows the use of RSS feeds, slideshows, post to Buzz, Blogger, Google Talk and Twitter as part of a social media strategy.

If I was an art gallery I would choose Flickr, If I was a boutique hotel chain I would choose Picasa, if I was a musician I would use both. Making a decision on which photo sharing tool to use depends on a number of factors including your resources and social sharing requirements.

Similar photosharing programs

There are many other photosharing options like Photobucket, which has been around for years and was used extensively when we all needed to grab HTML code for our images.
Picnik is an online photo editing service, which has grown in popularity since its integration with Flickr and smugsmug. Also note: Google bought Picnik and this is now integrated into Picasa.

Windows Live Photo Gallery, Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram, picpiz, SmugMug, Path, Imageshack, Snapfish, Zooomr and more.

Even Twitter recently launched a photosharing offer partnering with Firefox, to integrate hashtag and username searching directly into the browser’s address bar.
Based on the reviews, Virgin Media still needs to refine their newly launched TiVo photosharing app, if they are to compete but it does go to show that photosharing is a massive market and everyone wants to be part of it.

I would love to hear which photo sharing / editing service you prefer.

Should you require assistance in determining which photo sharing service will suit your business / brand, then please give Rocktime’s Search Marketing team a call.


Author: Fiona Anderson