Do you currently use any stock photos or imagery on any of your sites? For most companies, it’s a hard thing to avoid. The reality is that you’re going to need images, and you’re not always going to have the time or the money to hire a professional photographer or designer to create them for you. We get a lot of questions asking if stock images are okay to use, or if everything should be completely unique to the site, so here are the answers to help your SEO company get the most bang for the buck.

The short answer:

Stock images do not result in a negative effect on your site. You will never be penalized for using the same images as thousands of other people as long as that image is relevant to your page and is providing some value to the user. Matt Cutts recently released a video that confirmed this, saying Google’s algorithm doesn’t take stock images into account in any way, positive or negative.

The longer answer:

Using stock images won’t hurt your site, but not using them CAN help it. As you may have noticed when you use Google’s image search function, you very rarely see duplicate images in the results. What this means is that if you use stock images, your version of the image likely won’t show up in search results no matter how well you optimize it, because you are competing with thousands of other sites. If you use original images and optimize them well, you are more likely to show up in search results because you’re brining something new (and therefore valuable) to the table.

To sum it up:

You’re going to have to use stock images a lot of the time, especially if you are blogging daily and using the photos that go along with the story, it’s just reality. The best thing you can do is keep your eyes open for opportunities to use original imagery whenever they arise.

Original post can be found on Wikimotive’s blog.

I was consulting with a potential client yesterday and started looking at their Facebook and Twitter pages. Once a day, every day, they would post a question that had very little to do with anything at all. “What was the last movie you watched?”

Once a day, every day, they wouldn’t get a response from anyone. It was awkward in a social media way. There was no engagement. The reason was easy to find – their 3000+ Facebook fans had not been engaged with their page for a long time (meaning that nobody was seeing their posts in their news feeds) and their Twitter profile had 40 followers.

“I’ve heard you say that questions drive engagement,” she told me as I started pointing out the challenges. She was correct – I have said that many times before and it’s true. The problem is that questions do not work if nobody is listening and they’re not the right way to get people to listen.

I don’t envy her. She took over a Facebook page that had been getting updated by RSS feeds for over a year and a Twitter account that was autoposted from Facebook. The remaining followers and fans were spam bots. Nobody was listening. It was an empty room.

There’s an old saying that says, “fake it ’til you make it” and that applies in this type of situation. There are still people who will visit the profiles because they show up in search and are linked from the website, so one still has to post quality content during the rebuilding period (stage one in our three stage process), but questions aren’t the answer (pun intended). At this stage, it’s important to show those who do visit the pages that you’re posting quality content, but you don’t want to highlight the fact that nobody is paying attention at that point.

Statements, facts, pictures, videos, and occasional links work best at this point. Through ads and engagement-driving posts, you’ll be able to get your following back up and engaged. Once that happens and you’re on to stage two, it’s time to start asking questions again. Until then, avoid them.

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Since the notorious ‘Red Wedding’ episode of Game of Thrones, social media has been awash with chatter about the HBO’s swords and sorcery series. Those who were not up to date as new episodes were aired had a hard time avoiding spoilers on Facebook and Twitter.

Videos of fan’s reactions to the penultimate episode went viral on YouTube, and Maisie Williams, one of the show’s stars, gained a huge Vine following after posting her own humourous take on the shocking plot twist.

Now that the show has ended, the next big event for fantasy fans to look forward to is the release of The Hobbit part 2: Desolation of Smaug. Until then it may be a good idea to give imaginary worlds a break in favour of some fresh air. Thomson have designed this fun series of maps that will motivate the legions fans missing their weekly dose of GoT drama to experience their own real life adventures among Europe’s mythical lakes and mountains.

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As with so many things in the digital age, there’s good and bad that comes with social media. To ask the question of whether or not it’s good or bad is actually pretty foolish; a meal given to a homeless person is a good act but if it’s loaded with poison it’s a bad act. There are more than 50 shades of gray when it comes to social media.

The real question is whether or not social media has had a positive or negative effect on the world in general. There are those using it to send out spam, illegal images, immoral thoughts, and attacks on others. There are those using it to spread positive messages, to communicate with people around the world or down the block, and to expose some of the wonderful things and people of the world.

For you, as social media been positive?

Did it help you find your spouse? Did it help to cause a divorce?

Does it fill your time with worthwhile activities? Does it distract you from what you really need to do?

Did it help the needed revolutions in the Middle East? Did it cause even worse regimes to be put into place?

What has social media done for you? Has it been a blessing or a curse? Are you glad that it’s here or angry that you’re stuck with it? Is it something that you use to stay connected every day or is it something you avoid because of government spying and businesses collecting your data?

What’s your sentiment towards social media as a whole?

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Look, I get it. I understand that it’s hard for vendors and OEMs to produce a social media solution for their dealers that scales properly while still bringing in good content. I do not, however, understand the concept of not even trying to mix things up. There’s an easy road and a hard road for automotive social media, but there’s also the right road, the one that scales properly while still maintaining individuality and creativity at the core of the service.

I know this for a fact. I’ve developed it.

It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t hard, either. It took some time, plenty of planning, a ton of testing, and an unyielding principle to do for clients what I would want done if I were at a dealership, but the results have been astounding (beyond my own expectations) and the effort is exactly as it should be – enough to make a strategy that helps dealers sell more cars but not so much that it become cost prohibitive. Every dealer and vendor should examine what they’re doing in social media and decide whether or not it’s worth risking your dealership’s reputation by reposting content from someone else.

Keep in mind, sharing is perfectly acceptable. If you see something on a different Facebook page that your audience will enjoy, share it! Don’t do it too often – it’s not algorithmically viable to have shared content filling your page – but it’s better than grabbing it and reposting it. What’s worse is to grab it and repost it on a bunch of other dealers’ pages as well.

I first noticed this during the Toyota Corolla launch a couple of weeks ago. We posted an image of the new Corolla and it did very well for our client. Minutes later, it was posted again. And again. And again. There’s no telling how many Toyota dealers had the same content posted almost simultaneously, but it wasn’t a case of imitation being the best for of flattery. It was ridiculous, but I let it go. Maybe someone was in a hurry. Maybe our post was just that compelling and needed to be shared. I didn’t think it was a standard practice, but now I know differently.

You deserve better. Your content should be unique regardless of how widespread your marketing company is. Again, and I cannot stress this enough, it’s scalable and extremely effective to post 100% unique content on Facebook for hundreds, even thousands of clients. It’s not acceptable to take shortcuts for the sake of a vendor’s bottom line. It shouldn’t be this way. There’s way too much potential with social media done the right way to allow laziness or cost savings to supersede a client’s needs.

That’s it. Sorry for the rant. This stuff gets me riled up.

I’m “that guy.” You know, the one who thinks that 4-stars is an amazing review coming from me, the one who hasn’t rated anything a 10 out of 10 since my wife’s Mediterranean pasta, the guy who wonders why his kid only got an “A” and not an “A+” on a test. There are more of us out there than you think, but there’s a benefit to what I call the “conscientious reviewer”. You might only get 4 out of 5 stars from us, but we’ll write a book and sing your praises.

That’s the real key to reviews. It’s the words. It’s the sentiment. The stars are only important if you don’t have them already.

I get discouraged when I see dealers sitting there squeezing every possible five-star review they can get. If you have 300 reviews and a 4.9 average score, you don’t need more 5-star reviews. You need more quality reviews. On the surface, most dealers would say that they would want the bottom review more than the top one because it’s 5-stars rather than 4. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective, they will read and get more out of the top review than the bottom one. It wouldn’t even be close.

Some dealers are pushing their sales team to get 5-star reviews. They are even offering spiffs to make it happen. In the example above, the person who acquired the 3-word 5-star review would get the bonus and the person who acquired the well-written, conscientious 4-star review would likely get rebuked for not prompting their customer appropriately. This is a mistake.

Reviews with less than 5 stars get read more than the others. People are waking up to the idea that these review sites are often gamed. They know. They’ve probably been asked at one time or another to leave a positive review for a business. They do not believe that any business can accumulate 300+ reviews and have them be almost 100% positive. That’s not how the world works. As a result, when they visit a review site that’s listed on the search under “ABC Motors Reviews” or whatever they type in, they’re looking for the reviews that have less than 5-stars.

I’m not suggesting that you should be promoting the concept of getting 4-star reviews. I’m not saying that a 3-star review from a happy customer is better than a 4-star review. All I’m saying is that you should be encouraging your customers to write full reviews. You don’t need more 5-star ratings with 3-word reviews. You need more reviews that actually tell the story about their experience. In the example above, the 4-star review will have more of an impact on a buyer’s decision than the 5-star review below it. Keep that in mind as we continue the never-ending quest of review acquisition. Focus less on the stars than the sentiment.

When I was asked last year to develop a social media marketing service, the first question they asked was whether I already had software in mind or if it needed to be built. I told them that the software had already been developed and it was free. This didn’t go over well at first; they’d always used premium social media software in the past.

“How good could it be if it’s free?” they asked.

I told them that it’s not only free, but it was also the best software available. I took the computer, typed in f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k-dot-c-o-m, and proceeded to explain why it wasn’t just about me being cheap, but that it’s also better to post to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest from facebook.com, twitter.com, plus.google.com, and pinterest.com.

Here’s why:

You Don’t Need a Shell on Top

With search engine marketing, there’s an argument that can be made that pulling in third-party data is a benefit. The sheer amounts of data available through the search engines and from outside sources makes it conceivable that there are benefits to using software to manage campaigns, track keywords (particularly for SEO reasons), and monitor results. Then again, the Google Adwords UI has become pretty darn slick in recent months, so I don’t think I’d even use software for that.

At least it’s debatable with search and other marketing arenas. On social, there’s simply no debate necessary. There is no software out there that makes posting, monitoring, and reporting results easier than the actual websites and mobile apps themselves. Are there benefits? Sure. There are also major drawbacks and too much room for error that makes them worthless.

A couple of years ago, they were effective because Facebook and Twitter hadn’t matured. Today, they’re doing just fine handling their own data, controlling their own posts, and making it easier to monitor.

It almost sorta kinda makes sense with a taco.

Don’t get me wrong. I use tools. I love Buffer for scheduling posts on Twitter to keep them spread out and on Facebook when I won’t be available to post myself. I like the multiple views available through software like Hootsuite. However, there are too many high-dollar shells being put on top of the interfaces that do nothing more than make the reports look pretty. What’s worse is that many of them attempt to prove their value by offering features such as content suggestions and automated posting. Scheduling and automation are two different things and there’s simply no need to take content suggestions from software (more on that later).

Social Plugins Hurt Websites

This one might make some software companies really upset with me, but it has to be said. You should never, ever, ever, ever, ever add plugins or wigdets to your website without two things: a really good reason and the backing of a major software company. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – their plugins and widgets aren’t perfect, but at least they’re safe. Everything else – dump them.

The native widgets are all you need. It always amazes me when I see Facebook plugins, for example, that weren’t built by Facebook. There was a rise in popularity of the little ribbon at the bottom of pages for a while. Thankfully, most realized that they slow the page load times down and can cause errors on certain browsers. They also realized that they didn’t do anything useful other than give the marketing manager at the company something to show the boss and put unearned cash into the pockets of the company that sold it to them.

They don’t work. They aren’t effective. They do much more harm than good. Unfortunately, those are the best-case scenarios. In some cases, they can actually do true harm to a site as can be seen in the image to the right.

There’s a reason that social media companies develop software. It’s less expensive for them to support software than to employ the people necessary to make social media actually work for their clients. It’s sexy because it’s visual, tangible, and seems to be sophisticated. In other marketing arenas, software is often all that’s needed. In social media, it does nothing other than make people feel good.

Social Media is Creative. Software is Not.

As I hinted at before, when software is used to find content or determine what to post, the battle is already lost.

I’d put my team of specialists up against IBM’s Watson if it did social media management. Until a piece of software is able to craft a Facebook post or Tweet that has the ability to reach the minds of the audience rather than just reaching their feeds for the sake of reaching their feeds, software is not the solution for this.

Some would argue that it saves time from having to look for content to post. I would argue that the technology to do that has been around for a while. It’s called Google. There’s also RSS feed readers (NOT to post automatically, of course) that gives any industry plenty of content in just the same manner as the social software provides. This isn’t new technology.

The biggest challenge with this is that it takes the human eye out of the equation in many circumstances. Software, for all the good that it can do, does tend to make us lazy. It’s laziness that turns good pages mediocre. Manual vetting of content and inspiration that only comes to humans can turn a good page into a fantastic one.

“But, it saves time!”

That’s what some will say. I would argue that the five minutes it saves a day isn’t worth being half as effective.

Dashboards are Completely Overrated

The data is there. Facebook Insights aren’t perfect, but they present the data in an acceptable manner. Dashboards definitely do make things prettier. They also speed up the reporting process for marketing companies. However, they don’t understand nuance.

I’ve seen both sides. I’ve seen gorgeous automated reports and dashboards that didn’t tell the whole picture and I’ve seen manually-created reports and native dashboards that deliver the real results. A dashboard doesn’t know that the picture of a local attraction that received 50 likes, 15 shares, and 10 comments is less successful of a post than an inventory item that received 20 likes, 10 shares, and 5 comments, particularly if that inventory item was sold the day after it was posted.

The information provided by the social sites themselves manually gathered and analyzed by humans gives a much more accurate picture of the effectiveness of a campaign than any dashboard or report. It doesn’t matter how pretty the graphs are. It’s still only numbers being provided in a different format. Reports need to say more than just the numbers. They need to demonstrate success.

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A recent Fox News article reported that social media causes people stress and researchers have actually developed the term “social media anxiety.” Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, and Reddit all are great social media sites if used properly, but are people too dependent on them?

Finding a balance between the online world and the real world is the most important thing.  Cell phones support social media apps and people feel the urge to check them every few minutes.  Do you ever feel that mini heart attack you get when you misplace your cell phone?

People can share pictures, music, videos, and other content with their friends on social media.  Face to face interaction is becoming a thing of the past.  Why visit your grandparents when you can talk to them via Skype?  There’s not much reason to enter the real world when you have 24-hour access to your friends on your computer.

Do you find yourself up late at night browsing Pinterest looking for the perfect piece of fashion to share with your friends?  Are you browsing the dozens of pictures of delicious food on Instagram?  Doesn’t it suck that you are stuck at home in your pajamas browsing through pictures of your friends on vacation and you feel as if you’re missing out? These are some of the telltale signs that you could be suffering from social media anxiety.

Social media sites have caused me a bit of anxiety in the past. I spent too much time on Facebook comparing myself to others.  Using Facebook to keep up with others is tiring and does not help you with you social media anxiety.  Now, I rarely spend time on Facebook, but when I do, I use it to connect to friends or check out important events.  Reducing the amount of time I spent on these social media sites relieved me of anxiety.

I think we all need a break from social media sometimes. Here are some ways to prevent social media anxiety:

• Fox News suggests limiting use to only a few sites, instead of all of them. “Step back and consider which sites are most satisfying. You don’t have to use them all,” the article says.
• Integrate your social media sites.  Twitter and Instagram can be connected to Facebook. You will still be able to update your profiles, without spending time scanning though separate newsfeeds.
• Limit the amount of friends on your social media sites. Only add your close friends.
• You can use time blockers such as StayFocused to increase your productivity online.
• Keep the details of your love life off social media!
• Take time to do things in the physical world. Be active!
• Decrease the frequency of your updates
• Steer clear of arguing on social media and share positive updates instead
• Use Facebook to connect with friends, don’t use it to compare yourself with others

Social media is great tool if used in a productive manner, if you spend too much time on social media, you will isolate yourself.  Give yourself time to unplug and stop worrying about what is going on in the social media world!

As it is announced this week that Facebook is following in the footsteps of Twitter and introducing a hashtag system to its multi-billion pound social network, it begs the question, where does one start and the other begin?

Barely a fortnight after news of its Verified Pages broke (a feature not dissimilar to Twitter which allows users to establish the real accounts of brands and celebrities from duplicate profiles), the firm has decided to take advantage of the tried and trusted hashtagging idea. Made famous by Twitter and already incorporated by Google Plus, Pinterest and Linkedin, it appears that Mark Zuckerburg’s creation might be the last big name to jump on the bandwagon. Designed to allow people to group comments by topic, it is expected to hold benefits for both users and advertisers.

It enables users to join in with online conversations as events unfold in real time. For advertisers and brands on Facebook, this could have real potential. Marketers can enter their preferred subject, preceded by the # key into the search bar. For example a company specialising in tennis clothing and equipment could type #Wimbledon to find enthusiasts of the sports discussing the latest match, predicting outcomes and analysing play. This provides not only a list of highly relevant users but also the opportunity to interact directly with your target audience on a topic of mutual interest.

It also presents the average user with the chance to join debates and discussions on breaking news, political elections and entertainment news.

The only downside is that users can still limit who can view their hashtagged posts. This could prevent a number of potential customers being reached by brands on Facebook. However, it is likely that many people will leave this open, and that many more will likely not be aware of the option to change their settings.

Somewhat inevitably however, Facebook has already received criticism for adopting an approach so synonymous with Twitter. It comes as comments gather over Facebook’s increasingly chronologically based newsfeed. Less like the old algorithm based feed and more like Twitter’s timely posts, Facebook is now more likely to post updates in order of submission.

It will be interesting to see how far advertisers go to take advantage of these new hashtag and the reception it receives from its 693 million active users.

Raise your hand if you remember looking to web site analytics to decide if you needed a “mobile strategy”.  Honestly, that ship has sailed.

If your consumers are (and if they aren’t, just blink and they will be) deeply engaged in social media, you have no choice about your brand’s mobile strategy.  Your consumers have decided for you.  Consider that Facebook has more than 157 million mobile-only users today. This number is growing by 25 million a quarter. At this rate, they will surpass a quarter billion by the end of 2013. That’s more than the total number of mobile-only people who use Twitter.

Sixty-five percent of monthly users on Facebook and 71 percent on Twitter are mobile. And, according to Nielsen, 30 percent of all the time spent on mobile devices last year was on social networks.

So, let me ask: Are your social media efforts optimized for social+mobile consumers?   If not, why not?  And, more pertinently, are your programs even working for your social+mobile consumers?

Facebook has smartly declared itself a mobile company; Twitter doesn’t need to declare it, it already is. Consumer trends aren’t the only reason the big guys are now mobile-first. Mobile stream advertising is simply more effective. Facebook has shared that sponsored posts in the mobile news feed are exponentially more effective than right rail ads. And these ads improve another 120% when they include photos, video or interactivity.

The success of mobile as a right rail-free advertising platform is only one of many reasons why Facebook has very clearly stated that the future of advertising on its platform is in the news feed (the Facebook stream).  Despite all these sign posts, the lion share of today’s Facebook media dollars are spent on right rail advertising.   While that is beginning to change, brands taking a mobile first, news feed-centric approach to Facebook are still too sparse in number.

While social streams may feel like they are constantly moving faster and in unpredictable directions, as an industry we shouldn’t wait to jump in. Facebook and Twitter iterate so quickly, always learning and applying insights, mostly from mobile, to both their customer experience and marketing tools. We now see the social desktop experience as secondary to mobile for both consumers and platforms.

This mobile/social shift forces marketers to rethink their approach yet again. To borrow from Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter, in social, all media must “converge”. These platforms force us to think about how our “owned” media and content will drive “earned” impressions through sharing and then how we will use “paid” media tactics to scale reach, engagement and outcomes. Every campaign requires we consider at least two and often we must plan for all three. When we add mobile to the mix it makes us, ah, weepy.

Here’s a tissue. It’s actually not so bad. The constraints of mobile, especially smartphones, make things simpler in some ways and surprisingly more effective. Mobile posts, especially rich ones, capture more attention and have a bigger impact on both consumers and on brand outcomes as they take over the full mobile screen. Mobile streams force us to simplify. These are not microsites or mobile apps, these are little snacks of content and a path to explore deeper. Thoughtful, rich in-stream content has been proven to drive higher engagement (especially among fans), increase reach through more People Talking About This (PTAT) and achieve higher Reach per Talker rates. And, surprisingly, consumers seem to prefer a mobile in-stream approach to social media advertising.  As Facebook has enabled more and more advertising directly in the news feed, we’ve all feared consumer backlash. But we’ve found that rich in-stream media consistently receives exponentially less negative feedback than native posts

All social media marketing begins in the stream, even if you’re ultimately driving out. Just remember that your brand has been invited in and you must earn the right to stay. Mobile devices are themselves very personal and as a result, social streams are sacred real estate and should be respected as such. While consumers won’t tolerate blatant or irrelevant marketing, if you are strategic about fan acquisition and media buying strategies, your fans will have a level of affinity making them open to a wide range of posts from you, and making a mobile-first social approach the girl you should be taking to the dance.