Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Mobile

Facebook Sponsored Stories in the News Feed

turan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:55:54 +0000

Facebook has begun rolling out Sponsored Stories in the news feed. The ads started rolling out gradually from the beginning of January, allowing brands to reach users whose friends have interacted with their pages – for instance with a like, a comment, or another action.

“You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson confirmed. She added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”

The new ad placement could lay the foundation for Facebook to finally begin advertising in mobile.

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Series of Fun Facts: Part V

rainelda — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:37:41 +0000

It is 2012 with many promises, predictions and wishes. Naturally with the new year new features, stories and discoveries appear:

Are you a complete coffee addict? I tried to limit my love for coffee and was successful for a month, but getting back to work makes you sleepy in the mornings, so coffee is back in my life again. Anyway, when you are getting to work, you usually stop at the near by coffee shop just to grab that life saving cup, right? Do you get late to work sometimes because of that? Well, now there is a solution! If you love Starbuck’s coffee, live in the UK and you are an owner of an iPhone, from the 5th January you are able to use the unique Starbucks App on your iPhone. This app will help to locate your closest Starbucks coffee shop, choose a drink, manage your Starbucks Card balance, top-up direct from your iPhone or iPod Touch AND pay for your drink using the virtual Starbucks

Card just by swiping the barcode at the till. Isn’t that super convenient? Did I mention that the app is available for free from the Apple App Store? They say that an Android app will follow later in the year. The app is well placed to take advantage of Starbucks’ loyal customers – one in five UK customers already pays using a Starbucks Card, so if the app will save a lot of time to Starbucks customers, no doubt it may become a hit as well in the UK.

The app proved to be a success in the United States with 26m purchases made since it was launched in January 2011.

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Wishing you a Mobile Christmas

Ben Romberg — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:43:18 +0000

Figures out from Google suggest that people are going to be using their mobile phones a lot more this Yuletide for Christmas shopping, inquires, recipes etc. (you name it!) According to Google’s stats 24% of UK consumers use their mobiles for in-store comparison.

An analysis of UK search volumes on desktop versus mobile has found that in November 2011 mobile searches on popular Christmas gifts represented 14.60% of the online total – a jump from 1.83% in 2008 and still growing steadily.

Google’s research also shows a “triple peak opportunity” on mobile. Data from the past two years from the search-giant shows that UK mobile queries for top retail brand terms spike three times in the season of giving.

The first peak pops up around the end of November and the last payday before Christmas. The second is in the final days before the actual holiday itself, and the third happens when the January sales kick off.

This opportunity is growing fast for e-commerce brands and these kinds of search queries demonstrate a 166% year-on-year growth, which is staggering given that estimates are for it to rise, rather than fall!

For more on this and other stuff, follow me on Twitter @benromberg

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Series of Fun Facts: Part ll

rainelda — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:42:47 +0000

I don’t know about you, but this was a crazy week for all people here at Tug. However, we managed it, as well as we won GOLD at the DMA Awards 2011 for Best Use of Search. Overall an exciting week.

But it is Friday – the best day to learn something new and fun. When you see a little, green robot, what is the first thing that comes up your mind? Personally my brain generates two words and connects them together – Android and Google. Once again I did a little research and here are my personal discoveries about this operating system:

Originally Android wasn’t Google’s product. Android Inc. was founded in October 2003 (Palo Alto, California) by four men – Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White.
Andy Rubin was the co-founder of Danger (a company specializing in platforms, software, design and services for mobile computing devices), Rich Miner was the co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Nick Sears once was the VP at T-Mobile and Chris White was head of design and interface development at WebTV. So all four lads had a background on software engineering. At the beginning Android Inc. was operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.
In August 2005 Google acquired Android Inc. making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Not much was known about Android at the time of the acquisition, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile market with it.
A lot of you definitely noticed that all Android versions are named after desserts and go in an alphabetical order – Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. I strongly believe that I’m not the only one asking the eternal question “Why?” After browsing around and searching, I came up to this CNN article, where the same question was asked. It appears that Google doesn’t want to explain the reason for these names. A spokesman from Google said to CNN that it is an internal thing and that Google prefer’s to be a little bit inscrutable in the matter. So here we are with The Mystery of Android version names.

But wait, there’s more. I made a little survey online and spammed a lot of people to fill it in. Here are the questions and results of the survey:

Question: Which of these (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, Gmail) you use on a daily basis? (multiple answers were available) – No surprise that most of the respondents use Facebook (75%) and in second place it’s Gmail (45%) followed by Twitter (37%). WordPress and Flickr received 2% each – Yes, I use them both, but I didn’t complete the survey. Honest.
Question: Do you retweet offers of brands that you follow on Twitter? – 54% said that they do not retweet offers, while 16% said that sometimes they do. Only 2% said that they retweet offers of brands.
Question: Do you share offers, stories, music etc. on Facebook? – Now this question’s results surprised me a bit. Only 40% of the respondents said that they share things on Facebook and a whopping 32% said that they don’t share anything on Facebook. Why did this surprise me? To be honest, I was expecting that about 80% to 90% would say “Yes”, as every time I log into Facebook, it’s never empty and a new post comes up every 2 minutes (majority being video, news article, blog post etc. sharing).
Question: Which mobile OS you find visually attractive, convenient and quickly manageable? – People were offered 3 options: iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android. 67% voted for Android, 19% voted for iOS and 5% voted for WP7.

Have great weekend all!

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Retail Search Volume Increases in Q3/2011 (But So Does Bargaining)

janina — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:15:17 +0000

Recent figures of the BRC (British Retail Consortium) and Google show, that in Q3 retail search volume in the UK has increased 35 % compared to the previous year. A main factor behind this is the continuing rise in mobile searches, which had already increased 216% in Q2 compared to 2010 and were up another 168 % in Q3 (year on year).

According to the organization Home and Garden related searches in July, Back To School related searches in August and Christmas related searches in September (no, I am not that organised neither but apparently people are) were the main factors that fuelled the increase over the past quarter.

And 10% of all retail searches were carried out on mobile devices.

However despite rising retail search volume actual online spending has dropped by 10%, which suggests that people put more time and effort into their research in order to find the best deals.

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Yandex Adds Search for Mobile Apps

turan — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:59:03 +0000

Finding smart phone games and apps in Russian has just gotten easier. Russian search giant Yandex launched a new search engine for mobile apps yesterday at apps.yandex.ru.

In a market that is dominated by Symbian, the Yandex.AppSearch returns results for all platforms. However, it doesn’t require the exact name of an app in order to deliver relevant results. In addition to various keywords and other ranking factors, the search algorithm also takes app ratings into account when returning results.

All results are returned in Russian, even if the initial query was in English. However, if a particular app is not written in Russian, the app will still be returned. For example, people searching for ‘Monopoly’ will be able to download the mobile version of the popular board game from the App Store even though it isn’t featured there in Russian.

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Bing Updates Mobile Search Experience

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:53:52 +0000

Bing has updated their mobile search experience on HTML5 enabled mobile smartphone browsers. Some of the key features include:

- Transit Directions and Real-Time Transit
- Image Search with sliders and orientation support
- Shopping improves access to shopping questions answered, comparison shop, and discover product details and user reviews
- Added Weather Autosuggest and Instant Answers to the search bar
- iPhone apps search added when you search using an iPhone
- Movie search includes time and nearest theatre, along with reviews, synopsis, trailers and additional information

Watch the below video for a demo of the Bing mobile feature:

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HP Announce Pre 3, Veer & TouchPad

David — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:53:23 +0000

Last night HP released their highly anticipated new phones and tablet with WebOS, the 3 products announced were the HP Pre 3, HP Veer and HP TouchPad.

The Pre 3 has the same form factor as the previous Pre phones but it has a larger screen (3.6″), it also features a Qualcomm MSM 8×55 CPU running at 1.4GHz and other marked improvements such as a new 5 megapixel camera which can record at 720p and a front facing camera. The Pre 3 will run on HP’s WebOS 2.2.

The new HP Veer is a smaller version of the Pre’s form factor with a 2.6″ screen and features a slower Qualcomm Snapdragon 7230 processor which runs at 800MHz. Like the Pre 3 the Veer features a 5 megapixel camera. The Veer will also run in HP’s WebOS 2.2.

The new tablet from HP known as the HP TouchPad; packs a 9.6″ screen with a 1.2 GhZ Snapdragon duel core processor which is sure to keep the tablet running at a high speed. The tablet will also run a new version of WebOS 3.0. Other features of the tablet include a front facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling, two options of either 16gb or 32gb of inbuilt storage and a set of stereo features. One of the stand out features of the new tablet is it’s operating system, webOS was designed for tablets so it was bound to look gorgeous on a tablet. One feature of the tablet which other’s don’t have is it’s ability to communicate with the Pre 3 by simply touching each other; once the two devices touch they can share data such as URL’s, text messages and more.

Check out the official HP website for more information on the 3 devices.

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Looks Like the Normal 9 to 5 Working Hours are a thing of the Past!

admin — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:30:45 +0000

Over the past few years, Mainly due to the introduction of Social Media and the ever increasing/ever popular Mobile Technology/Smart Phones, the normal office working hours of 9am to 5pm seem to be coming to an end.

Before we were taken over by the social media websites Facebook, Myspace, etc and having the internet on your phone… we lived in more basic times, where the only functionalities your mobile phone had were calling, texting, playing snake and making custom ringtones (awwwhhh, those were the days!), and the only social media website available was SixDegrees.com.

Now there is the constant demand to be connected all the time, whoever and wherever you are. With mobile technology advancing all the time, the modern day Joe Bloggs is walking around with a super computer in his/her pocket. Giving us all the ability to stay constantly in touch with work emails, social updates, work schedules & calendar appointments.

I think there are many pro’s to having a smart phone and having the ability to actually work without being at your desk, but it also increases the demand from the client, because they know that you no longer leave everything behind you when the clock hits 5!

So there is no question of the convenience and overall accessibility the smartphone gives us, and you all know what the offerings are from Social Media by now. But what effect is all this having on the modern day office worker? Well, although some office’s still stick by the 9 to 5 regime, there are a lot of savvy, new age online companies out there that are looking at changing to a more 2011 style of life… Does this mean we can look forward to coming in to work at 11am every morning? Possibly. But as I have discussed throughout this post, the ability to work 24/7 is there for everyone and many workers are obliging, work is creeping in to our social life and our recharge time, let’s just hope our brains can handle it!

9 to 5…. more like 12 to 12!

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LinkedIn Launches Android Application

David — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:55:53 +0000

The largest business social network, LinkedIn have announced the launch of a new long awaited Android Application. The new app allows users to:

View updates from your professional network
Search for people to discover things you have in common and establish new connections
Respond to invitations sent from people in your professional life
Keep in touch with your own connections on LinkedIn

This is only the first beta of the application and LinkedIn have promised to continue to introduce new features including the “people you may know” feature. The app also uses Android’s unique search capabilities, offering the ability to search for contacts and people from the app. LinkedIn says that it is the fastest search experience it offers across all mobile platforms. Read more and find out how to download the app at the official LinkedIn Blog.

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