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Author: Search Influence Alumni

  • Search Influence Joins Forces With Youth Rebuilding New Orleans [VIDEO]

    The whole Search Influence team was thrilled to host a meetup in honor of Mashable’s Social Good Summit at Oak Wine Bar last Monday. In addition to enjoying the delicious drink specials and appetizers by the talented chefs and mixologists, we spent a lot of time talking about social media, the digital global action movement, and how we can start leveraging the Internet for greater good. On that note, we’re proud to announce that Search Influence has adopted the local New Orleans non-profit Youth Rebuilding New Orleans.

    Like many non-profits that have applied for the Google Grants program, YRNO has had difficulty taking full advantage of the program due to lack of knowledge and resources to run campaigns — and we couldn’t be happier to step in to help. Above, you can see our CEO Will Scott giving a brief talk about YRNO and Search Influence’s involvement.

    To read more about our new collaboration with Youth Rebuilding New Orleans, check out our press release on PRWeb!

  • 4 DIY SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner

    martinis for DIY SEO

    My husband and I have some friends who are in town every year at the end of August, without fail, so we know we have a dinner date with this couple at the peak of hurricane season every year.

    Hurricane Isaac 2012This year, we met our friends on the Saturday night after Hurricane Isaac passed through. Our friends had another couple in New Orleans who had been without power going on five days, so they were desperate to get out of their hot, humid house and enjoy good food in the air conditioning and possibly have a drink or three. The more the merrier, so the four of us were meeting the two of them at the bar.

    This restaurant is usually very popular, but was especially hopping that night because they had power. Most of the items on the menu were sold out, but we enjoyed the few things the kitchen still had. So in conversation she asked did I work?… what did I do? … the way these conversations usually go. When I told her, her eyes lit up, and I was her best friend that evening. She had a 2 year old yoga studio that was doing decently, and she wanted the yoga business to be strong and really successful. She recognized that the web was an untapped potential for her, and she was overwhelmed with her known options and with the options she knew probably existed but didn’t know about.

    Search Influence has a mission that simply states “We are here to help small business succeed online.” It is our company goal to help this small business owner who was sitting across from me, and I would love to be able to help her dominate the yoganistas in her city.

    I have had this experience more than a few times, where a very small, very local business has absolutely no marketing budget, but they know they need to do “stuff” online to grow or even just to survive. I’m not talking about businesses local to their city; I’m talking about businesses that serve their neighborhood primarily. Super local.

    A few suggestions for a very small business who has done almost nothing online yet.

    If I met the owner of a very small, very locally-focused business who had done virtually nothing online and had very little time to devote to online marketing, what priorities would I tell that SMB owner for DIY SEO?

    I polled our Account Managers to see how much they agreed/disagreed with me, so these priorities are the collective answer of most of our accounts team. The difficulty is there is so much an SMB owner could be doing, but my intent was to focus on those things that are not technical — i.e. no website edits. A lot of business owners that I meet that offer services to a very specific community don’t know how to edit their websites because they have never had to, and they are busy working on growing the business, taking care of personnel, managing operations, et cetera.

    With that in mind, here is by no means a comprehensive list of all things a business owner can do on his/her own — just a few things that came up in my conversation and then bounced around our accounts team.

    Totally unscientific DIY SEO survey

    Countdown of DIY SEO Tips based on number of responses of my totally unscientific internal survey …

    #4 — with only 1 survey responder considering it as the priority for an SMB’s very limited time and money … monthly newsletters. Monthly newsletters are a great tool for many businesses. However, the business has to build up an email list of recipients first. You can buy a list, but it’s so much better to build the contacts yourself with your customers optioning in to receive your message in their inbox. You also have the challenge of deciding what message makes an impact on your business but also is interesting to your email group.

    You need to grow your email list first, and realize that you are messaging people who are likely already customers. In all I agree that this is a valuable tool, but not for a super small business at such an early phase of operations.

    Facebook fan building#3 – 1 response suggesting an offer made through Facebook. This also is a valuable tool, but again, the business generally has to have some Fans on Facebook before they start offering coupons and contests and all of that jazz. My yoga-diva dinner companion did not have a Facebook Page worth mentioning, so this would not be an option for her yet.

    #2 – 4 responses voted for regular Facebook updating. Our accounts team sees every day how a well-maintained Facebook Page can work for a small business. It’s exciting to see strong fan building, active commenting, and referral traffic driving to the client’s website. All of this can be very effective (and fun!). It absolutely be a valuable tool when developed at the right time in a business’s growth.

    fantastic Facebook fan buildingOne of our accounts team responded to my internal survey, “Facebook Updates and Newsletters are great, but they are worthless unless they have a following. To me, Facebook could be easier for one person to manage, but significant effort would have to be made to promote the Facebook Page.”

    Just like monthly newsletters and making an offer on Facebook, you have to build to a level where you have an audience to whom you can broadcast your message. Lots of work has to be done for the Facebook Page before it’s going to work for you.

    #1 – Tied for #1 … 5 responses for “Create/edit listings in 10 online directories other than Google+.” If a small business owner had only 1 hour to devote to their online identity, 5 of our accounts team suggested that s/he should review the businesses’ listing in 10 directories other than Google+. My totally unscientific survey didn’t indicate which 10 directories, but it can be assumed that the list would include directories such as Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, YellowPages, and Superpages. There are countless other examples, but you want to devote your time only to those directories that you have seen often enough like Kudzu or Merchant Circle.

    #1 – Tied for #1 … 5 of the accounts team responded that claiming Google+ Local Page is the thing you should spend a few minutes claiming and filling up with your business information, maybe some pictures.

    This was my priority suggestion at dinner that night. She wasn’t sure what a Google+ Local listing was, a lot of business owners don’t, and they should.

    (TIP! If you claim your G+ Local listing, claim it in an email box that you won’t mind sharing with an SEO agency — that is, don’t claim G+ with your personal email account. One day you might hire a website promotion company like Search Influence to help your rank better in Google results, and when you do, you will want your account manager to have the login to your G+ — but if it’s the same account as your personal email, you might not want to share it.)

    There are countless small business DIY SEO tips for the savvy owner out there. What are some of your favorites?

  • Google Glass: The Fierce New Face in Fashion

    This blog post was written so I could make RuPaul’s Drag Race and other pop culture references. The opinions and thoughts stated on the actual topic are of very little consequence.

    Condragulations to the legendary mother of the wrap dress Diane Von Furstenberg, who recently teamed up with Google to unveil Glass at 2012 New York Fashion Week. In case you ain’t in the know, the tea on Google Glass is it’s a hands-free alternative to smart phones. Despite looking like a first-gen VISOR from ST: Next Generation, Glass is designed to use natural movement to navigate the operating system (you can use your eye to make calls… I think?). Glass’s ability to capture life from the wearer’s perspective is nothing short of an Eleganza Extravaganza!

    Squirrelfriends for Life.
    You might be asking yourself: what do jersey knit wrap dresses have to do with smartphones? Nothing, on the surface. However, when you realize the fashion industry generates $20 billion annually, it is obvious why the GOOG chose fashion as its newest squirrelfriend. By making Glass fashionable, Google is ensuring that every fashionista will shill out $1,500 for a pair. On the other hand, I ain’t got a stack and a half to spend on anything but the rent. The price point is the only complaint I have with Glass. While it’s almost guaranteed to be as amazingly fantastical as Google is making it sound, the retail price is too damn high. You gotta be nuts to spend that much on an item you will sit on and break, drunkenly lose at a club, or get jacked while walking down the sidewalk. Let me just run down to Canal Street and haggle on the price of the Chinese knock-off.

    Can You Hear Me Now?
    After the underwhelming reveal of the ultra-thin Apple iPhone 5… actually, hold up. Let’s stop for one moment and address the public’s addiction to anorexic smart phones. We really are living through emaciated electronic epidemic. Not only do our fashion models, TVs, and a menagerie of other things need to be paper thin, but so do our phones? Yes, it is super convenient having light-weight and portable phones, but am I the only one who misses the early 90’s when this was the face of mobile phones?:

    The Zack Morris phone may have been a massive brick that would never fit in your pocket, but I bet you would never lose it. Plus, it was multi-functional! You could lift it like a dumbbell for working out, hammer a loose nail, or even defend your life against a Malaysian sunbear. What can you do with your smart phone? Read War and Peace? Watch the (far superior) British version of Being Human? Listen the newest Nickelback song? How about this — make a phone call? But for real though, if Apple’s big reveal is “faster and thinner,” it stops being about bleeding edge tech and becomes more about making the most with the least. They could have done heaps with the iPhone 5 in ways of innovation; instead they make Minecraft (pocket edition) load faster? Apple: seriously, girl, you better practice “It’s Raining Men,” ‘cause you’ll be lip-synching for your life…

    Doesn't Take a Psychic To Know Apple In Trouble

    Far from being a rehash of old technology in an expensive new package, Google Glass represents a brand-new paradigm in the way we think of smartphone capabilities and instantaneous first-person sharing. As a futurist, I’m very excited about Glass and the possibilities it brings to human interaction and social technology — and as a person who has seen every episode of America’s Next Top Model, I think Google’s decision to pair up with the fashion industry is genius. Positioning Google Glass as a fashion accessory will guarantee it to be popular with both the “it” crowd and the “IT” crowd, and ultimately mean more coins into Google’s already-deep pockets.

    That’s it, kids, enough reading for day. The library is closed and it is time for me to sashay… away.

  • The Suite Life of Google Plus Local Address Issues

     

    Google Plus Local Suite Number Showing Before Address

    With Apple in position to steal some of Google’s mobile maps glory, the search giant is starting down a warpath. By boasting to the BBC about the superiority of Google Maps and touting their fancy Ground Truth technology that uses Street View data as an additional factor in verifying Maps data, Google is giving a clear message that they are not taking the replacement lying down.

    While I’m sure the battle will be viciously fun to watch, the point that I find interesting is that Google is actually highlighting their error correction capabilities as a selling point. As someone that has spent more time than they would like reporting errors in G+ Local and editing Map Maker listings, I can assure you this isn’t an area I would necessarily be bragging about.

    While the current “report a problem” system and Map Maker are definite improvements over previous support features, the whole error reporting system, from a business owner’s perspective, is still an overly convoluted experience that often requires repeated attempts for seemingly simple issues. For example, something as simple as a suite number not appearing where it should can take a significant amount of time and effort to fix, causing major headaches for customers trying to find the location in the meantime.

    I’ll elaborate on the suite number issue because it clearly illustrates the struggles that many business owners go through with Google Maps error reporting systems.

    Lately, suite numbers haven’t been properly displaying on live G+ Local listings. This has happened even if they were entered in the second address line field in the Local Business Center as is instructed in the Places quality guidelines.

    One issue in resolving this is that the “report a problem” interface in G+ Local only offers a single line for editing the entire address. So when you attempt to get the suite number corrected using this method, Google automatically reformats your correction to exclude the suite number. You can override this by selecting your original formatting; however, it seems that then the address incorrectly transfers over to Map Maker as only one field rather than separate address and suite number fields, and the problem usually goes uncorrected because the fields are not properly linked between the two error reporting systems.

    Google Plus Local Suite Number Issue

    Map Maker handles suite numbers differently because, as opposed to the U.S., the majority of the world places the suite number at the beginning of the address rather than at the end. This can cause issues when editing suite numbers in Map Maker; if you place the suite number in the correct field in Map Maker, it typically transfers over to G+ Local incorrectly, with the suite number appearing at the front of the address line. One then has to use the “report a problem” feature to get the attention of someone on the G+ Local team to manually place the suite number in the correct location which involves them going against the correct Map Maker format.

    Google Map Maker Suite Number Issues

    Ultimately, Google needs to create uniform address fields that are correctly mapped throughout all of the databases connected to their local ecosystem. To me, this seems like it would be pretty easy to implement for a company that has the capacity to verify traffic directions by analyzing the road signs captured by their nearly world-wide fleet of Street View vehicles, but it seems I am wrong in that assumption. Maybe Apple has the right idea in using third-party providers to deal with these types of issues for them. Sure, relying on another company seems like it would take longer, but if there is any company that can strong-arm its data providers to meet their demands for quickly-updated, accurate and stable local data, it would be Apple. Let’s keep an eye on this story — as the maps giants duke it out, those of us down on the ground will have to adapt.

    Have you had difficulty getting your address to show up properly in G+ Local? How was the process of fixing it?

  • 5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

    I’ll admit it: working in Internet marketing at times feels akin to how popular media has convinced me life in the Wild West was. Here, we navigate a largely unexplored frontier filled with vaguely known dangers, striving for the prospect of lucrative gain. Though there are a considerable amount fewer literal snakes and deaths by dysentery to deal with in SEO or online marketing, the analogy still kind of works.

    At Search Influence, we pride ourselves in clean, “White Hat” tactics to achieve our results, but not everyone is so scrupulous. Goodsell offers a few great ideas for dealing with malicious attacks against your site’s authority.

    • US Desktop Search Volume Declines — Blind Five Year Old

    AJ Kohn presents a compelling argument for developers and companies to place focus on developing mobile-accessible content. The chart provided, tied with Kohn’s commentary, gives evidence for the seemingly inevitable rise to prominence of mobile access. Personally, I’m skeptical about this drop in desktop search continuing, but I am wholly supportive of the idea of accessibility to not alienate potential clients visiting from a phone.

    • Will It Ever Be Acceptable to “Bing It”? — Marketing Pilgrim

    It’s no new topic, but many of us are guilty of using “google” as a verb, and mostly, per Google’s wishes, actually use the term accurately. However, could you, with a straight face and a firm conviction, ask someone to “Bing that for me”? Any time I’ve been served that statement, it’s come paired with a heaping bowl of irony, but who knows? Maybe the Hawaii Five-0 reboot has what it takes to topple Google’s dominance in the American mind, but a little bird just flew up and told me a secret: “NO. IT CAN’T. THE GUY FROM LOST WILL, AT BEST, EXERT MINIMAL INFLUENCE OVER YOUR SEARCH HABITS.”

    • GoDaddy Outage: Anonymous Attack Or IT Failure? — Information Week

    For once, I’ll give Garfield credit: this Monday was a dang mess. A number of our clients were affected by the GoDaddy outage on Monday, which proved to be stressful for all parties involved. The groans from our department were echoed out all over the Internet, and one guy claimed responsibility for the attack, but really, even I could’ve claimed responsibility. Here, Schwartz expresses a similar degree of skepticism as I hold for this supposed attack on GoDaddy.

    • ‘Social Voting’ Really Does Rock the Vote — ScienceNOW

    Sources say that the use of social media has compelled users to vote in political elections, armed with the knowledge that their acquaintances have also voted. While we’ve seen online marketing campaigns for mobilization of voters over the years, the use of this “social voting” here shows a marked increase in voter participation, and leads to thoughts of what forms of social media will pop up over the next two months before the presidential election.

  • How To Use Facebook Timeline To Promote Your Business


    While many users have opted to cling to the traditional Facebook design for as long as possible, all users are currently being forced to jump on the Timeline bandwagon — whether they like it or not. At this point in the game, though, the majority of users have been using the revamped page for some time anyway. The layout is familiar and users know what they’re looking for when they visit business Pages. But do you know what you should be doing to effectively reach your fans?

    It’s no secret that you should be promoting your business on Facebook if you want to increase your social media presence. What you may not know, however, is that the way in which you go about it is pretty significant. If you fail to follow the rules outlined on Facebook’s Page Guidelines, you could find yourself suspended and unable to access your Page.

    When Facebook’s Timeline feature was first introduced to Pages, the site was flooded with cover photos of promotional content. It makes sense that the cover photo would seem like the perfect place to tout your business’ latest promotion or encourage visitors to Like your Page. However, this kind of customization is actually against Facebook’s rules.

    Pages cannot include price information whatsoever. That means that any special offers, like percentages off or coupons, cannot be referenced in your cover photo. Telling visitors to Like or Share your Page is also to be avoided.

    It might seem like overkill, but you actually can’t even put your website URL, email, or address in your cover photo. Facebook wants you to utilize the About section of your Page for those purposes. Any calls to action (i.e. Buy Now!!!) also have to be excluded.

    Previously, Page owners could customize their landing pages to include calls for action, special offers, and exclusive content in exchange for a Like — a process called like-gating. But, with the implementation of Timeline for Pages also came a discontinuation of the landing page. Now, your cover photo is what makes the first impression when people visit your Page.

    So, how can you make the most of it?

    Choose something eye-catching. Draw in your Page’s visitors with an image that reflects the heart of your business and/or engages your fanbase. Verizon Wireless’ Page, for example, features photos taken by fans using their products. It’s a smart way to involve users and encourage fan interaction.

    Pick a profile image that compliments (and doesn’t clash with) your cover photo. This is a great spot to feature your logo or a good image of your product.

    Optimize your About section. While you can’t include your website on your cover photo, you can display it here. The first 155 characters of this section are visible to your Page’s visitors, and they should be chosen wisely. Include a short, solid statement about your business, along with your URL.

    Lastly, Like the Facebook Marketing Page for tips on how to improve other aspects of your Page. When fans search for or stumble upon your business on Facebook, you want them to stick around. If your Page is aesthetically pleasing, informative, and engaging, you’re more likely to capture those all-important Likes.

  • Write It Like Letterman: Finding Your Voice by Copying Others

    RNC Viral Piece
    Graphic by Kate Voisin

    So a couple of weeks ago we had a little thing called Pat Sugrue needed to punch up a few jokes in a viral piece about the Republican National Convention that he was working on for a client. Usually, we would convene a meeting of a few writers and creative people to bounce ideas off the walls of a conference room until something stuck, but we couldn’t do that thanks to Isaac.

    Instead, Pat and I went back and forth over Google Chat until the jokes had been appropriately sharpened. Since I actually have a record of that conversation in the chat transcripts, I thought I’d shine a light on a process that has always seemed to help me in situations like this.

    What it boils down to is this: sometimes you have to try to write like someone else to find your voice.

    Convention Without Walls

    Pat was working with one of the themes of the RNC, that it was a “convention without walls.” The first idea that popped into his head was the cognitive dissonance between wanting a convention without walls while simultaneously wanting to build bigger and increasingly more fortified walls between Mexico and the United States. My brain went a different direction.

    My first thought was “what would David Letterman say?” Now, I know he is a creepy old man who has been on television so long that his relevancy waxes and wanes on the lunar cycle, but the man can tell a joke. Earlier in the week, he had said that Isaac heading toward the RNC was “further proof that God is a woman.”

    That, my friends, is a well-crafted joke.

    So, hearing Letterman’s voice in my head the entire time, I sent Pat this: “Delegates at the Republican National Convention say they want to have a ‘convention without walls.’ And of course by walls they mean uteruses.”

    BOOM.

    Pat said he was looking for more of an Onion headline, so this came next: “RNC’s ‘Convention Without Walls’ Disrupted as Al Gore Sends Hurricane Isaac to Knock Down Actual Walls.” Next I did Jay Leno: “This whole ‘convention without walls’ idea was great. Yeah. Really great. Yeah. Until the real walls blew in.”

    Notice how I withheld all actual humor from the Leno joke to mimic his actual complete lack of humor. Next came Conan O’Brien: “Anthony Weiner tried to crash the RNC. Did you hear about that? He thought their motto was ‘A Convention Without Pants.’”

    And that fourth one was the one we ran with.

    Mature Poets Steal

    Now, I know you may not often find yourself in situations where you will need to emulate late night talk show hosts, but the concept can be applied to anyone. If you are looking for something clear, concise, and with a dose of 1950s nostalgia and an edge of horror, try to think about how Stephen King would approach the subject.

    Want brainy and so impossibly complex that no one can finish the book without needing another book of footnotes to explain what was going on? Try David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, or Robert Browning. (Personally, I think everyone should always try to write like Joyce in Dubliners, but pick your poison)

    This kind of writing exercise may not produce the exact results you are looking for every time, but it will definitely start you off on the right track if you give it an honest try.

    What are your favorite writing tricks when you get stuck?

  • Read This! — September 2012

    Hey there, Influencers! Have a back-to-school edition of Read This!, our monthly series exploring the best of the web’s DIY articles that you can use to succeed online today.

    • Ultimate WordPress Guide for Small Business [Infographic] — Search Engine Journal

    If you run a small-scale website for your business, chances are WordPress has everything you need for content updating, blogging and presentation. Learn more about it with this newbies’ guide to the powerful and intuitive system over at Search Engine Journal!

    • Common Technical SEO Problems and How to Solve Them — SEOMoz

    If you’ve done any work on your own site, you know that the best SEO policies aren’t always particularly easy to implement. SEOMoz’s Paddy Moogan takes us through some of the most common issues he sees during site audits, along with concise explanations on how to remedy them.

    • Readability and SEO — Blind 5 Year Old

    With all the emphasis on on-page SEO and link rankings, it’s easy to forget that you need to make your website accessible to humans as well as Google robots. Creating content for your site that’s not only well-optimized but well-written means that you’ll see a boost in your rankings and an increased chance of social sharing.

    • How to Build a Content Strategy for Your Blog — Practical SEO

    Hand-in-hand with the previous readability link, here’s a guide to creating a cohesive plan for your blog (you are blogging, right?) that will help you develop a strong, unified message across all of your efforts.

    • Promoting a Local Business Website — SEOchat

    So you have your website all set up, but the visitors aren’t coming. What are some good ways to draw in potential customers and promote your flagship website? Find out how to get your name out in front of the right demographic!

  • 5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

    It’s that time of the week again — this week’s 5 for Friday is by Caleb Albritton, one of our development team members, so step right up for a mix of tech tips and SEO news you can use!

    Cross Compiling Node.js v0.8.x — N8.io

    In this blog post by Nathan Rajlich, we’re given some examples for how to compile the Node.js engine for the ARM architecture. This would be a beneficial read to anyone wanting to run Node.js on their new Raspberry Pi or Android device.

    Ten Bets You Will Never Lose — LifeHacker

    Originally published by LifeHacker.com, this article features a Youtube video showing you how to amaze your friends or win a few bar bets. Not only is it a pretty nifty video in general, it’s a great example of virality in action — check out those viewing numbers!

    Speed Hashing — Coding Horror

    Here Jeff Atwood expounds upon the way hashing works, rainbow tables, salts, and why secure hashes will always be inherently slow.

    How to Craft a Killer Elevator Pitch — Dumb Little Man

    Ever wanted to be able to pitch your brand, your company, or your product in a clean and concise manner? Reading this should give you a good idea for how to get started in the right direction for building your 30 second pitch.

    Startups: This is how design works — Wells Riley

    This site gives a great run-down about how companies should handle design for their brand, and how important it is to have an amazing designer be on your founding team from the very beginning.

    Have any tech tips or useful links? Let us see them in the comments!

  • Linkedin and Twitter Post Split: The Best Decision for Both

    From the time Twitter uttered those dreaded words to Linkedin — “I want my (API) keys back” — fast forward one month. In its wake, the separation has left the intended higher ad revenues for both, as well as better user engagement for Linkedin.

    An odd couple indeed.

    It was an odd pairing to begin with, a one-off that was a bit out of left field even when Linkedin and Twitter joined forces in late 2009. It was much like that couple in your friends group with different values and nothing in common, but who work… for a time. Linkedin is a B2B paradise with a focus on member engagement, lead generation and advertising. Twitter, on the other hand, is B2C utopia due to the brand awareness and engagement-driving “promoted tweets” feature.

    Linkedin is now being used for what it was initially intended: to build engagement, drive leads and sell their advertising product for companies and job openings. Twitter is now “working on themselves” — and no, this doesn’t mean a yoga membership and a few dates to get over Linkedin. They’re back to the lab and focused on growing their applications.

    All Linkedin posts that were synced to Twitter in the past automatically optimized each post specifically for Twitter. Now, they are completely standard if you share to Twitter. These changes come from Twitter creating more uniform guidelines around API sharing and a more in-depth focus on their own applications and tools. Raven Tool’s Courtney Sieter (who was one of the most engaging and educational speakers of Search Exchange this year) came out with 10 Linkedin Shortcuts for a Post-Twitter World which I found extremely helpful.

    You can still share your Linkedin updates on Twitter, but not the other way around. For some, this is a tragic loss; for other tweeple whose feed represents a birds-eye view of Texts From Last Night’s “Best Ever” category, it’s a hidden blessing (seriously, just un-link your accounts at that point). This severance has also greatly reduced the amount of frivolous and ill-suited posts that used to clog the Linkedin feed.

     

    Pre-breakup Linkedin Engagement Level:

    Now: Chock-full of Goodness!

    Like that one mismatched couple who had their good years, this split seemed sudden at the time; however, they’re just better off doing their own thing. Both companies made the best move possible to not only grow their own revenue and product, but to separately work on custom initiatives important to their users. Since the split Linkedin has had a facelift, redesigning their look and feel to engage users by keeping them on the page longer. Conversely, Twitter makes 90 percent of its revenue in advertising, and it’s time to focus on themselves. Historically, they were giving too much of themselves through third party applications and at the end they had a smaller piece of the pie. For Twitter, it’s time to stop self-sacrificing and be a little selfish for more lucrative results.