Facebook.com hit the news this week for declining traffic in the UK and Canada. Rises in Twitter activity, talk of an IPO in early 2012, and negative PR surrounding data protection have Statistically Facebook have more ‘traffic’ (social media usage is so different to traditional websites and search engines) than Google in the US and are gradually heading toward 700 million users. However if you take a look at Hitwise UK stats Google has about 2% more market share than Facebook in total traffic terms. Starbucks reported increasing levels of traffic to its Facebook, which now dwarfs its brand website internet usage.
Joey Barton hit the Twitter with a great tweet about his sadness in ex-teammate Kevin Nolan moving on from Newcastle United to West Ham United. iOS 5 has been previewed which has a bias towards Twitter usage. It is listed on apple’s site as an official feature of the exciting new update. ‘Tweet this photo’ joins ’email’ assumes a nice position within your camera roll and has app integration on Youtube and Safari.
In San Francisco this week Google, launched Voice search for desktop, instant pages and search by image. Some nice updates, my favourite and in my view the most important is instant pages. This is where Google Chrome speeds up the access to the Google #1 result when you click on it – great demo to show the staggering benefit that this can give the browser.
In the daily offer email world, Google Offers beta has created some noise after launching a fiercely competitive model, undercutting Groupon who resisted the Google acqusition approach. Instead of a 50:50 revenue share, Google give you 80% of the income generated on your daily offer.
Bing launched some updates to Bing Webmaster tools allowing users to increase crawling options, the helpful Index Tracker has been transformed into ‘Index Explorer’ and adding admins/users to any said account. Whilst 2 of the 3 updates are merely following in the footsteps of the Google Webmasters tech I really like the Index Explorer as many 10 year old plus .coms have all sorts of pages floating about from layered development set ups that digital marketing managers need to know about from a housekeeping point of view.