The Mother of All End-of-Year Posts for Marketers
Audience: SEOs and Internet marketers
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
It’s the end of the year, and you can count on one thing. Or maybe ten things. Or possibly five things. You know, the list of top X – trends, memes, lessons of the past year or year to come.
Yes, content of this variety is entertaining link bait, luring us to laugh, scratch our heads and pass it along. But more importantly, these posts give us pause to evaluate our successes of the past and opportunities for the future, knowledge that ensures next year will be even better than the last.
It’s with that perspective that we bring you the top of the top lists. Just like mom was always teaching you new things, here is the mother of all end-of-the-year posts of interest to online marketers.
Organic Facebook marketing has thus far been tricky, as the standard for post quality is high on a network people consider very personal. Some of the more blatant appeals for attention often fall flat as they’re perceived as too hard-sell. However, 2011 brought on a meme that makes self-promotion on the platform more acceptable. In the spirit of ask and you shall receive, “lms,” short for “like my status,” got people comfortable with requests for like love. Other Facebook memes of the year included planking and DJ Skrillex, and trendy topics on the network included Osama Bin Laden’s death, Charlie Sheen’s wild winning wizardry, and the making of a new princess.
Twitter’s Top Tweets Per Second
Staying on the pulse of trending topics is a time-tested strategy for putting out content that’s already proven to interest an audience. On Twitter, trends by location and across the globe feature prominently on a user’s home page. Hashtags allow users to classify their comments and are a staple of the vernacular. Both of these characteristics make Twitter an easy service in which to identify and jump on the bandwagon of trending topics. As Twitter looked back on its year, it saw the highest spike of tweets per second in its history, as 9,000 TPS were reporting Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement. Another top TPS-getter was Steve Jobs’ resignation.
If your organization produces video or is thinking of doing some digital dabbling in the coming year, get familiar with the most-watched videos and channels on YouTube. I don’t know that I’d want to admit to taking advice from top video views winner Rebecca Black, but marketers can be proud that an ad made the top 10 list. Volkswagen’s “The Force” commercial has all the makings of viral video gold. A top channel of the year wasExpertVillage, all informative videos answering everyday questions. By sharing your expertise you can build a reputation as helpful and gain leadership standing in online communities.
If you ever hang out in forums, you’ve likely stumbled across some unintentional humor. On Search Engine Roundtable, we find a 2011 roundup of funny forum threads. It’s nice to end the year on a light note, so enjoy the story of a poor kid who can’t get his dad to stop spamming his site. Dads do the darndest things.
Finally, we can close 2011 by looking ahead to the bright, exciting promise of 2012. Bruce’s annual SEO industry predictions will be coming to the SEO Newsletter in the new year, and with his track record, I’m very interested to peer through his crystal ball. For the broader tech industry, we turn to Mashable monarch Pete Cashmore, whose constant contact with digital culture makes him just the man to call out next year’s top tech trends. Of special note to marketers and online business are click-free social sharing, or social gestures, and HTML5. However, all the trends in the list point to a more personal and life-integrated tech experience, with seamless sharing and device interaction.
Bring it on, 2012.
Postscript: All next week we’ll be doing our own end-of-year evaluation of our liveblogging coverage from the eight search and social media marketing conferences the Bruce Clay team attended in 2011. Tuesday through Thursday here on the blog you’ll find the distilled wisdom experts shared across the country on topics including SEO, paid search, local search, social media marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, branding, apps, conversion.
4 Replies to “The Mother of All End-of-Year Posts for Marketers”
SEO is always changing and we need to change our methods and approach constantly, if we want our methods to remain relevant and still have effect. Good luck to everybody in 2012!