Every day, when I log into Twitter, open up LinkedIn, read my email, browse Trending or HN or Pocket, I’m in a perpetual statement of harsh, unrelenting judgement. To amplify or not to amplify? That is the question. Is it better to consume the content, extract my own value, and then move on, or is
Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?
By In the last handful of years, I’ve had a creeping sense that blog readership is dropping across the web, even as the quantity of organizations and people producing posts has grown. Stats, unfortunately, are hard to come by. Most all of the readership data is from blogging’s golden era — 2001-2012 (or so) — when
10 Problems Plaguing Influencer Marketing
By Last week, I spoke at SMXL Milano on a panel about where social media and influencer marketing are headed. The moderator, Paolo Zanzottera, did (in my opinion) a superb job, but the questions he posed and those from the audience, reminded me of the big challenges influencer marketing faces in 2018 and beyond. Photo credit:
Google CTR in 2018: Paid, Organic, & No-Click Searches
By When Google’s search results look like this, content creators, web searchers, and Google all win. When they look like this (or this, or this, or this), it’s mostly just Google and searchers who benefit. Content creators? Not so much. Some clicks might still flow through to the folks who created the content Google’s scraping and
2018 Search Market Share: Myths vs. Realities of Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, & More
By For many years, there have been pervasive myths about where Americans search on the web, whether search is dying, whether Amazon (or Facebook, or Bing) is taking Google’s market share, and plenty more. Thanks to new data generously compiled for SparkToro from Jumpshot, a clickstream data provider that monitors more than 10 million desktop and
We Analyzed Every Twitter Account Following Donald Trump: 61% Are Bots, Spam, Inactive, or Propaganda
By Last week, SparkToro launched our third free tool, a service that analyzes Twitter accounts to estimate what percent of their followers are bots, spam, propaganda, or inactive accounts. By far the account that’s been most checked by users of the tool is @realdonaldtrump. Since there’s great interest in that account, we decided to expand our
On SERP SEO – The Infuriating Reality of Search’s Future
By Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel. My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over
SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter
By On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts
The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites
By Perhaps this was inevitable. In a system that encourages monopolies, and demands those monopolies increase growth rate and extract ever more revenue (sans caveats or exceptions), we probably shouldn’t be surprised. But, we should be prepared. Google is referring less outgoing traffic to websites for the first time in its 17 year history (at least
You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?
By You’ve just been asked to take over the marketing strategy for a new company that makes innovative, high end restaurant equipment. They need their brand and message to reach chefs and owners of independent restaurants. What’s your process? If you’re a smart, responsible, thoughtful marketer, you’ll do something like this: Step One: Figure out what