Marketing Pilgrim

On average, 7.9% of Facebook fans see fan page updates on a daily basis. When you look specifically at Facebook pages with over a million fans, the number drops to 2.79%.

Wow, that’s depressing. And just yesterday we were telling you how Facebook is booming and moms follow lots of brand pages and they’re being influenced to buy. So how can that be?

The numbers come from PageLever, but they’re in a closed beta right now, so we’re getting it second hand from All Facebook. Even without being able to dive deeply into the original report, I believe what I’m seeing.

If you haven’t caught on to Google’s emphasis on local as a large part of their strategy moving forward, I suggest you look for another line of work. Google has put a great amount of effort into making their Google Places ‘product’ the centerpiece of their local and mobile strategy to grab a large slice of the mobile web pie that is currently baking.

This has not been, however, without its bumps and complete train wrecks. The person at Google who has been the most front facing employee who dare interact with the SEO community at conferences regarding this area of search has been Carter Maslan. It looks like Maslan has done his time and is headed for greener pastures.

Greg Sterling fo Search Engine Land reports

Almost by default marketers are being forced to look at the world from the inbound marketing point of view and it is has not been the smoothest transition for many especially at the top levels.

A recent Forbes Insights report (which is free here) states:

In a business environment increasingly dominated by metrics, measurements, and data-driven decision-making, marketing executives find themselves under more scrutiny than ever. Less emphasis is being placed on branding – the traditional realm of the CMO – and more on customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. While top-level marketers agree that the proliferation of customer and campaign data is helping, not hindering, their efforts to produce ROI, many are at risk of falling behind as expectations and tactics are evolving at a breakneck pace.

Brands spend billions of dollars marketing to moms. They make commercials, offer coupons and samples and they run active social media campaigns. According to a new White Paper by SheSpeaks and Mom-entum, all those brands really needed to do was turn out a great product.

In a survey of 800 moms, the majority (31%) said they “like” a brand on Facebook because they like the brand in real life. 23% said they came over from a “like” button on a company webpage. Either way, they came in to Facebook because they were already a fan of the product so finding the brand on Facebook was the next step.

If you need more proof that Facebook is growing faster than Steve McQueen’s The Blob, here it is. eMarketer is reporting that Facebook has moved into third place for total ad sales, passing Microsoft and is closing the gap on Yahoo.

Google is still number one and way out of reach thanks mostly to search, but you have to wonder if someone won’t be able to push past them. . . someday?

What’s truly discouraging about these numbers is the fact that now 67.7% of all ad dollars are being split between the top five companies. That’s up from 63% only two years ago. With AOL and Yahoo trending downward and Microsoft barely hanging on, it’s possible that this could be a three-horse race in the near future, or even worse, a battle between Facebook and Google alone. To keep the monster metaphor alive, that’s like Godzilla vs. Rodan and it’s the little people who will suffer.

Aren’t pandas supposed to be cuddly and cute? My youngest daughter has a stuffed one and she looks so cute holding it and hugging it.

Well, in the world of SEO the panda are mean and angry and it likes to feast on what comes from content farms (which means their diet is pretty terrible).

According to Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land the latest version of Google’s Panda update is in the wild so SEO’s can tighten their seat belts to see if this ride is as scary as the other Panda versions.

Google has given us confirmation that they have ran an update to the Panda filter recently.