Latest Social Media Trends for 2014

What's going in Social Media Platforms this year in 2014 - let's check out  

Vine  has gradually crawled its way into the world of social media. When Instagram introduced video, it looked like Vine didn’t stand a chance. Instead, the 6-second looping videos pulled inmillions of users to the application available on App Store, Google Play and Windows. Brands such as Dunkin Donuts has produced various advertisements about its products. Owing to the wittiness of Viners and short attention span of users, the app has become an effective marketing method. Five tweets every second include a Vine link. Vine also recently made browsing videos available to the public (even for those without an account).

Google Plus is now in full stride as a social media platform. The majority agrees that now is the time to leap into the fray, if for no other reason than to garner the extra SEO advantages that Google gives to their own Google Plus-based traffic.

Video Content on Instagram and Twitter : Vine’s popularity has not vanquished Instavideo.One can upload longer edited videos on Instagram which enablesbrands to create advertisements and lifestyle videos for their pages. Instagram is already competing with the leading social media giants in marketing and is a preferable platform for sharing video content. Even Twitter has now introduced GIFs which are more like VIFs (Mp4 videos playing in a loop).

  

Visual-Based Content : Making your content visual-based is another significant step, you could take to drive social networking engagement. Truth be told, photos make up 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook. If you are content is not visual based, you should start doing that. A lot of brands and people solely depend on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook for showcasing their product through visual imagery. This mother of 2 daughters has rocketed to fame with her articles on various websites like  The Huffington Post,  Daily Mail and Way out of World with her Instagram pictures of Edible Art.

Hashtags are everywhere. With integration across Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Google Plus, and now Facebook, hashtags have become an excellent way to express feelings and search for content. Brands create their own catchy tags that users can use, without creating a feeling of being too marketing-heavy. New tags spike every day, and this summer will be no different.

Social Searches : Both Facebook and Google + have increased the importance placed on social search. Facebook’s “grid” feature is being launched; allowing users to search with specific terms

Why has Twitter introduced GIF images on its platform?

In a recent Update to its features Twitter gave its users a surprise with the introduction of GIFs on on 18^th June’14. Twitter announced that GIFs - a moving image or animated images will now be shared and viewed on Twitter's version of iPhone, Android and web.  

It is to be noted that Google has been the first to start with GIF Images on its Social platform – Google+, whereas Pinterst was the second one to introduce Gif Support in January 2014.  There are speculations that even Facebook plans to roll out GIF support by August 2014.

Talking about Twitter which as of now doesn’t allow sharing a Video unless it has been shared on Vine, GIF inclusion will fill this gap as it is the first Video-type content that can be shared directly on twitter for regular users.  

Why GIF is extremely important

GIF also known as Animated Images is used to tell stories, news or express emotions, and they have been there since 25 years with invent of internet. Initially they were in the form Clipart. The year 2013 saw an increase in the use of GIFs, specially on Google+. This has made other Social Media platforms to roll out their support to GIF. The popularity of the same is expected to go even higher as animated images drive more traffic than any regular images in jpeg / png formats. 

Also Read  : Why Social Media is Important 

15 Dont's for Search Engine Optimization

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit ‘enter’, you get myriads of results for the query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others, then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Here’s a list of what Google tells you to avoid in SEO and for better ranking you should not these few steps listed below:

1.  Choose related Title which relevant to the content on the page.

2.  Never use default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″ for your website.

3.  Never use a single title tag on all of your website pages.

4.  Never use lengthy title beyond 60 characters as it is unhelpful to users and Google didn't read them.

5.  Don’t stuff useless keywords in your Meta tags.

6.  Description Meta tag should be sum up of content on the particular page.

7.  Always use generic descriptions for Meta description tags.

8.  Never fill the Meta description with only keywords, always fill with content 

9.  Never use lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters

10. Avoiding duplicity in content is first and foremost task while updating and maintaining a website because Google likes content, but it *usually* needs to be well linked with unique and original content to get you to the top!

11.  If you hide text on your website. Google will defiantly remove your website from the SERPS (search engine results pages).

12. Never relay on buying links because thinking that they will work better and get you on the top is a myth. Google likes only natural link growth and often on mass link buying.

13. Never use same “anchor text” or link phrase because this could flag you as a SEO.

14. Keeping in mind for Google PR - chasing 100′s of links. Think quality of links….not quantity.

15. Never purchase many keyword rich domains and filling them with similar content as at your site and linking them to your site is totally a bad SEO practice and can lead you banned from Google. It might have worked yesterday but will not work tomorrow.

SEO Don’t by Matt Cutts (Google Spam Head) in 2014

•  Spammy Guest Blogging : In it's recent video by Matt Cutts on his blog mentioned why Guest Blogging is loosing it's pace with Google 2014 updates.  Google now treating much of guest Blogging as spam   

• Optimized Anchors : Never Over Optimize your Anchors Text with Keyword Stuffing or irrelevant Phrases . 

•  Quantity of links over quality :  Always relay on Quality of relevant links that match to your website content instead of quantity of unnecessary links because this could not help you out in Google SERPs . 

•  Keyword Heavy Content :  Google always focus on informative content instead of Keyword rich content as it seems to much more fake than any original content.  

Conclusion : As we have discussed all the points that we have to avoid in SEO - Search engine optimization to bring a website in top of Google SERP(Search Engine Result Pages) , these are very necessary steps to follow. 

Also Read: 3 pillars of Search engine optimization