Foursquare Reinvents Its Application - Swarm Is Created

Foursquare has split its application (app) into two entities: the redesign of Foursquare and the original creation of Swarm. Foursquare is seeking to monopolize the market, making Foursquare, and now Swarm, the most popular check-in apps currently available on the market.

Some things such as mayorships and badges have been eliminated completely. The app on Swarm will still track your ‘streak’ of how many weeks in a row you have been to the gym for instance. However, Swarm is geared more towards togetherness (finding out where groups of people are, hence the name “Swarm”).

In regards to mayorships, if you were formerly a mayor, the user will hold this position and move towards mayors 2.0 version.  This is a 60-day window where all previous mayors coexist and fight for spot to be the superior mayor against other mayors in the 2.0 version. What Swarm should do is just make this mayor competition a contest with a hierarchy that mirrors our political system now … we will call this Swarm Government Competition.

Badges have also been replaced in Swarm with stickers that can be attached to any place where you check-in helping to describe the mood or thoughts regarding a particular place. All of these stickers are indeed free!

The main focus of the newly redesigned Foursquare is to replace the geolocation-based social attributes of the New York City start-up’s original app. Since Foursquare will be focusing on discovering new places and Swarm for social and tracking aspects, this will dominate the market for this category of apps.

With Foursquare, a user can search a place, person, or even a type of place and then Swarm will showcase relevant results. User reviews are not so appreciative that the user must use two different apps to manage all actions. This proposes the question why is Foursquare trying to help users find places when the Yelp app exists to do exactly this?

Swarm is featuring a new feature called “Neighborhood sharing”. When you turn this feature on, your friends that also have this feature turned on can see when you enter his or her neighborhood and the same goes for when your friends enter your neighborhood. This was enabled to create more meet-ups between friends. To turn this feature off, tap on either of the two left hand tabs located at the bottom of the navigation bar and then swipe right at the top of the screen.

Foursquare and Swarm might increase in popularity once again if people can get a handle on the separation of the app’s features. At least checking in is still available.

Falling Rocks Ahead!

The Perseus constellation showers down upon us. Have your umbrella up and ready to take on falling rocks from the sky! Another meteor shower strikes again!

Best time to see the meteor shower is at 2 a.m. August 13th. This meteor shower is the result of space debris coming off the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet striking.

The great part about seeing this shower is you don’t need a telescope! Simple binoculars will do the trick but your eyes will also work just fine.

#meteorshower #perseuscluster #meteor #stars #space #starwars #startrek #thinkagency #robinwilliams #PerseidMeteorShower  

How Not to Do SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concepts are pertinent to the success of businesses in today’s technology forefront. Even though technology has such a huge influence, it is important to still be recognized as a human being.  Make things personable. Here’s what you shouldn’t be doing instead:

1.     Tons of spammy backlinks.

If you are still paying for links then you are doing more harm than good. Google assesses penalties for this kind of system gaming, and they don’t take to kindly to it. Instead of asking for bogus links, following our suggestions in our last blog detailing how to get mutually beneficial links with relevant sites that will help both your audience and you!

2.     Write for Google and not for people.

Keyword stuffed content just isn’t going to cut it anymore. If you are writing for Google’s bots instead of your target audience then you are missing the mark. Write interesting and engaging content that will hook your readers. If your readers like it then Google will catch on and reward you accordingly.

3.     Shamelessly self-promote on social media.

Blasting out self-promotion on social media is a good way to alienate your audience and get flagged for spam. Social media is for connection and conversation. Do it the right way or not at all!

4.     Quit early.

Good SEO isn’t a one-stop shop. It is a continual practice that needs to be adjusted, tweaked, and continually grown. Reputation and a captive audience won’t happen over night. If you don’t dedicate the right amount of time you will waste money and see little results!

Remember, keep you subject light; relate to the topic and then expand using personal stories and relations that would intrigue the reader. If the reader isn’t interested then why would Google be?

Link Building For Small Business

Building quality links takes time, patience, and relationship building skills. You need to be able to develop content that will be interesting to those you pitch, and pitch it in an engaging way. It’s also a time saver to be able to identify which sites will be the most relevant and willing to engage you. When considering a possible site, you will want to consider the following criteria:

• Relevancy
• Your Resources
• Feasibility

Is Their Site Relevant To Your Site?

You will want to look for non-competitive domains that link to content and resources similar to yours. Not only will this allow you access to your target audience, but Google looks for relevancy as one of the prime ways to differentiate between spammy and legitimate links. Furthermore, a quality site won’t have much of an incentive to link to or publish content from your site if it won’t be interesting to their readers.

Start by sharing the content of your target site, and working to build a relationship via social media or their blog. Once a relationship has been established, offer to write a relevant piece of content for them or help develop a resource guide. Ensuring that the link will be mutually beneficial is the best way to go.

Do You Have The Resources and Prominence to Attract Quality Sites?

If you are a brand new site with just a couple of pages and only a few social media followers, you may not have the clout to attract a site like, say, CNN. As previously mentioned, quality links are built when said link is beneficial to both parties. They will need to know that you are interesting and engaging to your own audience before they will want to introduce you to theirs.

Work hard on building you own site, adding quality content, and building your social media following and engagement. When you have a lot to offer, it will be hard to turn you down.

Is This A Site That Will Feasibly Show Interest?

If you have found a site that is relevant and you have built up your own website to be interesting and engaging, you should still ask if this site is worth spending time on? Is this a site that is frequently pitched? Do you have what it takes to stand out from the crowd? Do they have already established rules about links? Are they known for being open or closed?

Your time is best spent on building relationships with sites that you have a strong chance of connecting with. Instead of shooting out a pre-packaged pitch to anyone with an inbox, be strategic and make a plan. Save time, and increase your success!

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Keeping Up With Google: The New Adword Policies

Recently Google announced that they will be updating the AdWords Policy Center for the ever-familiar motivation of enhancing user experience and ease-of-use for advertisers. The changes are set to take place around September, so now is the time to start ramping up your best practices to match the new guidelines. Here’s what you will need to know.

Many Businesses Won’t Need to Worry

According to Google, "Almost all advertisers who comply with our current policies will also comply with the new policies." The main differences will be in restrictions on certain types of products and advertisers such as alcoholic beverages, weapons, etc. Just make sure to read the new restrictions to ensure you are still in compliance.

Ramp Up Your Content Quality

We all know that Google is huge on content quality. Almost every major adjustment is aimed at weeding out spammy content. Now they are cracking down on paid content as well. For those of us who are not marketing dangerous weapons or alcohol, this is the most important update. The are adding a new “Abuse of the Ad Network Policy” section that includes the following prohibitions:

• malicious ads, sites, or apps
• ads promoting sites that offer little unique value to users and are focused primarily on traffic generation
• businesses that attempt to gain an unfair advantage in the ad auction
• businesses that attempt to bypass our review processes
• Content that is designed for the primary purpose of showing ads, i.e. Driving traffic (whether through "arbitrage" or otherwise) to destinations with more ads than original content, little or no original content, or excessive advertising.
• Content that is replicated from another source without adding value in the form of original content or additional functionality, i.e. mirroring, framing or scraping.
• Landing pages that are solely designed to send users elsewhere, i.e. doorway pages, gateways.

Familiarize yourself with the new policies, keep your ads free of user deception and spammy links and you will be fine. For assistance with your AdWords campaigns, you can always call Think Agency, Inc. and make use of our expertise.

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How Taco Bell Won Social Media

With the advent of social media as a marketing tool, there have been a lot of wins and losses from various companies. Never has a gaffe been able to become so public so quickly. Never before have companies been able to develop such clear personalities. Among those companies who are doing it right, a few stand out above the rest. One of those companies is Taco Bell. That’s right, Taco Bell!

Taco Bell’s Social Media Approach

Nick Tran, the head of social media, claims that they use a three-pronged approach.

“You can break down the type of content we share into three categories: The first is anything Taco Bell creates internally. The other type of content we share is whatever we co-create. This is when we collaborate with influencers and give them the tools to create their own content. The last is content curation, which is basically us amplifying interesting content from our social community,” Tran said.

Essentially, Taco Bell is behaving like a person and creating a personality. One of the most popular tweets of all time was a response that they sent to Old Spice via Twitter. Old spice accused them of not using fire in their fire sauce. They accused Old Spice of not using old spices in their deodorant.

Not only that, but they frequently engage their users and provide them with opportunities to promote their brand in a fun way. Their “breakfast phone” promotion had Taco Bell calling and interacting with customers and having them perform special tasks.

Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously

Even for more traditional companies, social media needs to be a fun endeavor. Using humor, even more elegant humor, is one of the best ways to grab interest and get people engaged. Humanizing your brand is the number one best way that you can improve your social media presence, no matter who you are.

Challenge yourself this week to try a new approach. Engage your user in conversation, make some jokes, and use your business page in a more personal way. You might be surprised at the results.

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Consistent Content Always Wins The Day

Content is king, blah blah blah. In the marketing world, pithy concepts and trite phrases can make their way around like wild-fire. Sure, content marketing is what everyone is doing. But what can you do to make your efforts stand out from “everyone”? As it turns out, that answer is pretty simple. Pick a niche, write some interesting, and do it again. And again. And again. Frequent, consistent content is one of the top indicators of good search rankings. 

One Case Study On Consistency

Search Engine Journal recently published a case study in which the author set out to prove that you could build a site from scratch, and get at least 100 unique views a day within just a few months. He signed up to teach a university class, and then asked the students to start a new domain and write quality, frequent, consistent content. They set up Google Analytics, and tracked the results. As you can see, they were pretty impressive. These kids did basic WordPress hosting, no keyword research, no long-form articles, and no social signals. They just picked a topic they were passionate about, and wrote articles that they would want to read. 

Just think what you could accomplish if you combined those efforts with high level web-development, SEO, PPC campaigns, social media, etc. 

Consistency Isn’t Hard To Achieve

As the case study author suggested, consistency isn’t really a lofty goal. As he said, “Go back to that website you want to beat and look back over a few months in their archives. Add up the number of posts and calculate how often their site is updated. Once a day? Twice a week? More? Less? Doesn’t matter. Once you determine how often your competitor updates his/her site, update yours more often.” And then stick with it over the long term. There are no quick fixes. Your competitor isn’t likely to let up, so neither can you. 

A little work and a little commitment can have you outpacing your competition in short order. Have you been putting consistent content to work for your brand? 

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