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Young & Shand is a Digital Marketing Agency based in Auckland, New Zealand. Founded by Ben Young & Duncan Shand we create and deliver remarkable marketing campaigns. With a word of mouth focus, we digitally leverage your marketing strategy to deliver customer engagement and business growth. Everything starts with a story so read ours.


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This Week In Digital Marketing 13-17 Feb: Facebook’s Timeline is Coming For Brands, Introducing Inbound.org, DuckDuckGo Hits 1 Million Daily Searches

February 17, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing search newcomer DuckDuckGo has its first one million search day, Two prominent internet marketers start Inbound.org, Facebook’s Timeline coming for brands and 7 Facebook Sponsored stories ad tactics to help brands.

Facebook’s Timeline Coming For Brand Pages

Mashable logo

Facebook will begin its roll out of timeline for brands at the end of the month if reports from AdAge are true. Initially only a handful of brands will have beta access. One issue that may pop up is the lack of information above the fold on timeline pages, another pointed out by a Mashable commenter is what is to happen to tabs, a hugely important feature for brands which can hold competitions, games, welcome pages and more. The report believes the announcement will be made at Facebook’s fMC event on the 29th of this month. Read the mashable article here.

Introducing Inbound.org

Inbound.org is a new website from two of the internets most prolific inbound marketers, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot. The site’s goal is to provide the best content from inbound marketers on the web, offering content creators a new means of exposure and marketers with new knowledge. The site features a reddit-esque voting system which allows the sites users to determine what content is worthy of being on the front page. Sign ins are currently handled via Twitter, which gives you access to vote and comment on submissions. Read the article here.

DuckDuckGo Has its First Day of One Million Searches

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DuckDuckGo, a search engine you may not have heard of, is experiencing rapid growth in the search market on the back of privacy fears around Google. DuckDuckGo has had its first day of one million searches. This is nothing on the big boys like Google and Yahoo but considering one year ago nearly to the day, they had a mere 176,000 daily searches, their growth becomes quite apparent. You can see thier historical traffic stats here, or read the article here.

7 Facebook Sponsored Story Tactics

All Facebook lolo

AllFacebook have compiled a list with some great uses of the new sponsored stories ads. Promoting a video is ideal with sponsored stories as the user can play the video in the ad itself, increasing views. Sponsored stories can display ads to friends of your fans, these ads show ‘social context’, so the person that sees the ad will be shown ‘John Smith Likes Brand X’ hopefully increasing the like rate. A solution to low engagement is being offered with the ability to include a post in the ad so more users can like/comment on it. Read the rest of the tips here.

On A Lighter Note…

A video showing a fathers rant on his daughters Facebook post went viral this week, as its over the top conclusion made headlines across the web. After a 6 minute rant the man pulls out a .45 calibre hand gun and unleashes a few rounds into his daughters laptop. Check the video out below…

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Sean is a Digital Account Executive at Young & Shand.

Phone: +64 9 282 4680   Mobile: 021 029 35410   Email: sean.lewis@youngshand.com

This Week In Digital Marketing 30-3 Feb: LinkedIn 277% More Effective For Lead Gen, 5 Ways To Take Advantage Of The New YouTube and Facebook Leads In Display Ad Impressions

February 3, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing LinkedIn found to be more the 277% effective in lead gen over Facebook & Twitter, 5 Ways to brand your Youtube channel, Facebook leads in display ad impressions by a significant margin and Google’s latest algorithm update targets pages with too many ads.

LinkedIn 277% More Effective For Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter

Hubspot logo

In a study of over 5000 businesses released by HubSpot, LinkedIn was found to have the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%. This figure is significantly more than Facebooks’ 0.77% and Twitters’ 0.69%. They provide a few tips for leveraging your business’ social, such as growing you network with quality contacts rather than quantitiy. Post content that is quality and has proven results, use what works best in your network. Finally, keep testing, analyzing your data, and increasing your results! Read the article at HubSpot here.

5 Ways To Brand Your New YouTube Channel

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Youtube’s new design brings more than just a new interface, with video and channel customisation key changes in the recent update. These changes introduce a more engaging brand experience on your channel, with some people reporting increased click-through-rates as a result of the changes. 5 tips are provided in the article for branding your channel. Use overlays on your videos to provide people watching your videos a call to action by promoting them. You can prevent other ads from displaying on your videos if you wish, by checking the box: “Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page”. Send users to the feed tab on your channel, in this view they can see your recent activity and have the ability to comment, the goal is to increase user engagement. Read the full article here.

Facebook Leads In Display Ad Impressions

Mashable logo

Facebook’s share of display advertising impressions has reached 28%, reported ComScore, extending the lead as the top display network. ComScore has regarded Facebook as the leader in display impressions since 2009. Yahoo is some way behind in second place holding an 11% share, with Google, Microsoft, and AOL share sitting at 5% apiece. Read the details at Mashable here.

Google’s Newest Algorithm

Search Engine Watch logo

Google’s latest algorithm update, which Google Engineer Matt Cutts calls, “Page Layout algorithmic improvement” will affect 1 percent of searches globally, targeting websites that have too many ads visible when the user arrives at the page. This update aimed at providing searchers with results that have a better user experience, websites splattered with ads are ugly and their layout is generally poor. Read the article at Search Engine Watch here.

On A Lighter Note…

This cool interactive billboard comes from BMW. Set up in major South African cities, users could interact using their iPads. Check out the video…

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Sean is a Digital Account Executive at Young & Shand.

Phone: +64 9 282 4680   Mobile: 021 029 35410   Email: sean.lewis@youngshand.com

This Week In Digital Marketing 23-27 Jan: Social Media Giants Team Up Against Google, Paid Search Ads Bring In-Store Results and 9 Ways To Reduce Email Unsubscribes

January 26, 2012 by

This week in digital marketing Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other unnamed social media engineers came together to produce a bookmarklet protesting Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ algorithm change, Paid Search Ads Bring In-Store Results In Two Year Study, HubSpot provide 9 Ways To Reduce Email Unsubscribes and Reddit Hits 100,000 Concurrent Users without the use of a SEO or Marketing Plan.

Facebook, Twitter And Others Team Up To Release Anti-Google Bookmarklet

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In an aggressive move to turn public opinion against Google’s new ‘Search Plus Your World’ algorithm change, Facebook, Twitter and other social media engineers teamed up to produce a browser add-on that changes the Google’s SERPs to include results from other social networks. The bookmarklet, named ‘Don’t Be Evil”, is Facebook and Twitters response to Googles corporate code of conduct that states they must focus on doing what’s best for the user, rather than what is best for the company. The ‘Search Plus Your World’ change is a blatant push towards increased engagement with Google+, and it will be interesting to see if Google look to incorporate other soical networks at some stage. Read the article here or try the bookmarklet for yourself.

Paid Search Ads Bring Big In-store Results For Retailers

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In a two year study conducted by Revtrax, a marketing analytics platform, results have shown that for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from the ads, retailers could expect another $6 of instore revenue. The study analyzed consumer purchases from a paid search ad. Consumers were presented with an advertisement that, when clicked, led to a printable or mobile landing page displaying a coupon with a unique barcode and online coupon code. Each unique barcode was tracked back to the search activity that drove the conversion. You can read the article in full here or the study here.

9 Ways To Reduce Email Unsubscribes

Hubspot logo

HubSpot has a number of tips to keep unsubscribes low, here’s 3 of my favourites. Segment your list into similar groups and send emails to subscribers which the email pertains to, people will likely unsubscribe when bombarded with information that doesn’t relate to them. Offer your subscribers alternatives to email. Not everyone enjoys emails filling up their inbox, so offer an RSS feed, link to your blog or your social networking sites, let them choose how to recieve information. Make sure your emails load quickly, people don’t have time to sit and wait for a large email to load, they’ll simply delete yours and move on, or worse they’ll get sick of waiting and unsubscribe. You can read the rest of their tips on their blog here.

Reddit Hits 100,000 Concurrent Users, Without An SEO Or Marketing Plan

Mashable logo

Increasingly popular social bookmarking site, Reddit, has topped 100,000 concurrent users. This comes a couple of weeks after achieving 2 billion pageviews from 35 million users in a month. What is interesting to note is this quote from Masahable: “Reddit’s growth is especially remarkable given the site’s lack of reliance on SEO, Facebook and Twitter. In a blog post celebrating its 2 billion pageviews, the site claimed it “doesn’t know anything” about SEO”. The site credits all it’s growth to word of mouth stemming from their passionate community.

On A Lighter Note…

Here’s a look at another of Google’s milestones, YouTube now has one hour of video uploaded every second. You can check out other stats at the specially made site, onehourpersecond.com.

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Ben is the Marketing Director at Young & Shand. Connect with me on Google+.

Phone: +64 9 282 4680   Email: ben.young@youngshand.com

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