Social plugin adoption is rising, though almost half of top websites aren’t yet using any social links or plugins. BrightEdge’s S3 platform aims to help marketers capitalize on search, social and site data to increase engagement, revenue and ROI.
25 percent of the top 1000 websites have adopted Facebook plugins, with over 65 million Likes and home page Shares generated since the last major Facebook update a year ago. As Facebook evolves from social graph to Open Graph, marketers continue to realize the potential of these social signals in driving traffic and social button adoption is increasing.
The most popular Facebook plugin for these top sites is the Like button, according to BrightEdge’s SocialShare report. The Like button shares the page back to the user profile. The second most popular, the Like box, displays a Facebook Page stream on the company website. Other popular plugins are the activity feed, to display likes and comments by friends of the user, and the recommendations box.
In their September Social-Share Analysis, BrightEdge analyzed 4 million randomly selected tweets to compare mentions for sites with a Tweet button vs. those without. The companies in that study ranged from sole proprietors to SMBs to top brands. They found that sites with a Tweet button received seven times more social mentions than those without.
Somewhat surprisingly, they found that just over half of the top 10,000 websites have social links or plugins for one of the four major networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn – on their home page. As companies incorporating social in the marketing mix continue to see measurable results, that number is expected to continue to rise with more brands coming on board.
BrightEdge has unveiled their new SEO platform S3, an application that combines social, site, and search tracking and measurement to support user-driven marketing campaigns. The offering was a hot topic at their Share 11 event in San Francisco last week, where marketers from top global brands came together to discuss the current state of marketing and where it’s headed.
Speakers from Facebook, GAP, SalesForce, Microsoft and other top brands shared their thoughts on the fundamental shift happening in the marketing industry. Search Engine Watch spoke with BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu about this transformation and how marketers can best take advantage of the plethora of signals now available.
“Think back to the 90s, the first decade of the Internet; a lot of that was focused the introduction of site signals. So the very basic site signal was the customer entering the URL into the address bar. We spent a lot of time building campaigns to drive customers to our sites. It set the foundation for something really transformative: the introduction of search signals. We’ve moved to laser-focused signals through search signals, so you can really understand customer interests and intents. We can now meet the customer at the point of intent,” said Yu. “With more fidelity and volume, they can, through search engines, signal to marketers their interests and intents. Now, we’re seeing a big shift with social signals, a whole new transformation. As marketers, it’s exciting to be able to evaluate the signal stream with site, search and social signals.”
The question, he noted, is how marketers can best collect, understand, and manage this huge volume of data and use it to make decisions that increase revenue and ROI.
One component of BrightEdge S3 is the Social Site Audit, built with Facebook’s blessing. Brad Mattick, VP of Marketing at BrightEdge, explained how it works:
“Facebook gave companies an ability to tie their websites to Facebook and allow users to interact directly on the platform. Social Site Audit makes sure the Open Graph tags are set up properly. If it’s not set up correctly, you could have misinformation posting to the user’s wall.”
Imagine a customer visiting an e-commerce store to purchase a pair of boots and having a mislabeled tag relay to Facebook that the customer purchased a lingerie item, causing this to appear on their wall for all to see. Social Site Audit can help companies enter the Open Graph space confidently.
S3’s proprietary algorithm collects social data, such as the volume of Tweets, +1s, Likes, and Shares, and compares this against rankings to find the correlation between social signals and search rankings. The application crawls and audits the website and integrates with several analytics programs including Google, Adobe, and Coremetrics.
The platform makes recommendations to help marketers better leverage consumer engagement, improve search rankings, and increase ROI on paid and organic search efforts. One other marked improvement is its expanded global search marketing support; Yahoo Japan, Yandex, and Baidu are among the 40 search engines supported by BrightEdge S3.
Currently in limited release, S3 is available on a case-by-case basis and will roll out to all marketers in November.