Tag Archives: online marketing

One million users isn’t cool.  You know what’s cool? A billion users.

Social network, Facebook, just exceeded 1 billion users. The announcement came today from Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” said Zuckerberg of reaching the milestone.

According to CNN, it took Facebook six years to get 500 million users. Less than two years later, the company has hit the 1 billion mark; not too bad for a company that got its start in a college dorm room.

What does Facebook have in store for the future? According to Zuckerberg, the company is focusing on improving the mobile experience of its users. Half of Facebook’s users access the site at least once a month from their mobile device and over 100 million users only log into Facebook from their mobile device. Zuckerberg says that mobile “is the future,” which is why they are focusing on perfecting the mobile Facebook application.

Are you one of Facebook’s billion users?

Yahoo! just announced Marissa Mayer has been named the company’s new CEO. Mayer’s previous experience includes 13 years at Google, where she was the VP of Search Product and most recently responsible for Local, Maps and location services.

According to Business Insider, Mayer was Google’s first female engineer. She helped launch over 100 new products and features including toolbar, iGoogle, Google Instant, Gmail, Google News and image, book and product search. She was also responsible for integrating Google Local into Google Everything search results.

Mayer, the fifth Yahoo! CEO in five years, follows Scott Thompson who resigned from his position after a scandal involving false credentials on his resume. According to LA Times, Yahoo! made the announcement after the markets closed. During the trading hours, shares fell $.09. However, in after hours trading, after the announcement was made, shares were up over 2%.

According to an article from MarketingProfs.com, a study by Balihoo stated that 66% of national brands invest in local marketing but only 42% measure the return on investment. However, 56% of national brands track the ROI of their national marketing campaigns.

Other interesting findings from the study include:

  1. Large national brands with annual revenues of $1 billion of more are 49% more likely than small national brands to invest in local marketing.
  2. When looking for marketing information, most brands seek industry research (57.7%) followed by marketing and ad publications (48.2%) then national industry organizations (37.9%).
  3. The top 3 marketing challenges among national brands for 2012 are lack of marketing budget, measurement and metrics and lead generation

It can be hard to measure the ROI of a local SEO campaign. That is why it’s important to always ask your new customers how they found you. If they say they found you online, you know your Internet marketing campaign is working and you can continue by building a well rounded campaign that includes local SEO, traditional SEO, social media, mobile marketing and pay-per-click (PPC).

How do you measure the ROI of your marketing efforts?