Social media marketing has been around for quite some time, and most companies have some appreciation of the benefits of connecting to customers through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Major brands often put significant resources into developing and fine tuning their social network marketing.

This post looks specifically at how the world’s Top 100 Brands use Twitter for marketing – something that many other companies may want to learn from.
more»

With annual advertising revenues approaching US $60 billion, we all know that Google serves a lot of ads each year.

But along with this huge volume of legitimate advertising, there are a lot of “bad ads” that Google has to deal with. For example, “bad ads” might be ads for counterfeit products, ads that lead to malware sites, ads for phishing, etc.

Last year Google blocked 524 million bad ads. This post and infographic give some further detail into this very interesting part of Google’s business. more»

Mobile search marketing enjoyed a very good Christmas season this year. The numbers are impressive.

According to the Digital Marketing Report Q4 2014 , mobile organic search traffic grew 54% from a year earlier, and now represents over 40% of all organic search across the three main search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).

And more impressive, on Christmas day mobile plus tablet click share was over 50%!
more»

Over the past couple of years, there have been a number of companies who thought that delivering targeted information to mobile users based on their current location could be a very lucrative business, e.g. companies such FourSquare or Yelp.

Now Facebook has also entered this business with a new service called Place Tips.

The service will initially be based on bluetooth “Beacons” and is being trialled in New York. more»

As mobile becomes an increasingly popular channel for purchasing all sorts of goods and services, unfortunately mobile fraud is also rapidly rising.

In 2014, the fraud rate for mobile purchases rose 70% from 2013, reaching a level of 1.36%. And this is despite the fact that more than half of all fraudulent attempts are blocked.

According to the study from LexisNexis, one of the contributing factors is the complexity and variety of alternate payment methods used for mobile commerce. more»