A recent study by Adobe has revealed that tablet traffic has grown 10 times faster than smartphone traffic, highlighting the two as distinct mediums with different benefits and ever changing levels of popularity.

The information came from Adobe’s Digital Index report, which emphasised the switch in consumer preference from smartphones to tablets.  The data showed that the share of website visits from tablets grew more than 300% over the last twelve months, and it is expected to continue to increase.

It is estimated that the percentage of traffic coming from tablets will exceed that of smartphones by early 2013, and will account for 10% of total website traffic by 2014.

Findings from the initial Adobe Digital Index report, conducted in 2011, showed that tablet users spent more per purchase than any other online customers. This data demonstrates the growing importance of tablets as a channel of engagement, through which businesses can connect with their consumers.

It is becoming increasingly important for companies to optimise their web pages for tablet technology, to ensure that their site is accessible to the increasingly high proportion of the target market using them.

As Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Marketing Business at Adobe, commented, “As businesses rethink their digital experiences to include mobile strategies, tablets are emerging as the consumer device of choice”.

Many companies currently employ Facebook as part of their digital marketing and social media strategies, and so far, the networking platform has proved to be a useful business and advertising tool.

It is therefore surprising to hear that Facebook Inc. has reported a reduction in advertising growth in its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The figures are said to be indicative of the fact that that their advertising business is struggling to keep up with the shift to mobile devices.

Many people now access Facebook on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Recent statistics issued by comScore show that consumers spent an average of 7 hours and 21 minutes   using Facebook on their mobile devices in March 2012, compared with 6 hours and 31 minutes on their personal computers.

In light of this increased usage of mobile devices for social networking, it is of huge importance that Facebook brings its mobile ad facilities up to scratch. Although the company announced plans to sell mobile ads in February, fewer ads are being shown on mobile pages, as the company has said it does not want to sacrifice user experience for short term sales growth.

However, Facebook do appear to be dedicating time and money to improving their mobile service; a commitment reflected in its recent acquisition of photo sharing mobile app Instagram, which at $1 billion, was a hugely significant investment.

Facebook has more than 900 million monthly users, an enormous available market. If they manage to update their mobile advertising strategy, the marketing possibilities will be immense.

HTML has come a long way since its invention in the 1990s, but until recently has not supported video content. This is the reason that its newest incarnation, HTML5, is being received with huge enthusiasm by many business and web designers, as this is no longer the case, and video is now supported natively by HTML code.

There will therefore be much less chance of coming across empty black holes in the middle of webpages, and the requirement to download a plug-in when trying to access embedded video will be reduced. According to application develops like Kevin Sweeney, who works for video hosting site Vimeo, the need for these applications could potentially be eliminated altogether.

“We’ve needed to rely on third parties like Adobe Flash or Quicktime and had to embed this inside web pages. What HTML5 will do is remove them from the equation so this stuff is supported natively”, he explains.

Users of devices such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch will be principle benefiters of HTML5’s video hosting functions, as Flash is not enabled on any of the iOS platforms.

It seems like HTML5 is already quickly becoming integrated into web design on a huge scale, with a lot of companies choosing not wait for the HTML5 specs to be finalised and accepted. Many web designers are now using early “unofficial” versions of the code to deliver a webpage with complete video content to all of their visitors.

Apple’s latest iPad is truly a revolutionary product, and one of things that make it so is its ability to connect to the superfast 4G mobile network.

However, the claims that the tablet is compatible with 4G are now being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority, on the grounds that they are misleading. Not only is the 4G network not yet available in Britain, when it does eventually arrive, the iPad’s current setup will be incompatible with the signal, as it will be on a different frequency to the US and Canadian networks that the iPad connection is modelled on.

As a result of the investigation, Apple have already agreed to remove references to 4G on their UK website and re-edit a promotional video which sparked 40 complaints about its ‘potentially misleading’ claims. However, more complaints are still being generated by consumers, who say that the claims are still appearing.

In a statement, the ASA confirmed: “We are currently assessing these new complaints. If it appears that the problem claims we asked Apple to remove are still appearing, we will investigate these new complaints.”

This news comes following a recent, similar dispute with iPad users in Australia, who also felt they had been misled by advertising suggesting that they could connect to a 4G network. Apple, which has refused so far to comment on the ASA investigation, offered refunds to Australian customers who felt that the claims were deceptive.

Recent figures from the Advertising Association have demonstrated that digital marketing now has a 28% share of the UK’s advertising spend – meaning that it now accounts for more marketing spending than any other advertising medium.

The research, compiled by marketing information service Warc, exposed the significant rise in the amount of money spent on digital marketing over the last year. The statistics revealed that Internet marketing budgets rose by 16.8% in 2011, with online video and social media highlighted as two areas which have shown particularly significant growth – for instance, banner ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn have increased by 75%.

Although the information showed that the UK advertising industry as a whole outstripped the rest of the UK economy, other advertising areas have fared less well than the online sector over the last twelve months. Television and radio marketing increased by only 1.9% and 1.6% respectively, and national newspapers actually experienced a decline of 7.1%.

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) director of research and strategy, Tim Elkington, reiterated the importance of internet marketing: “The growth of online advertising in 2011 illustrates the high value that advertisers place on digital media – whether it’s using paid for search to deliver site traffic or online sales or the new, growing areas of mobile, social and video to engage with people online as never before”.

Internet marketing budgets are expected to continue to rise in 2012, forecast by the study to expand by a further 8.9%.

Social media marketing is a popular strategy in the digital industry, and one which has been proven to be very successful. It is easy to see why it works – millions of consumers log on to sites like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, providing a large and easily accessible market for companies to interact with. Businesses are doing more than ever to keep up with social media, particularly as new forums, such as Google+ and Pinterest, are constantly becoming available.

But are businesses measuring the return on this investment of time and resources? A recent survey by software provider EpiServer showed that only 10% of UK businesses measure their social media ROI at all, despite spending an average of an hour a day managing their social media. 77% of marketers are running an online community or looking to do so in the next 12 months, but only 22% of companies have a dedicated social media or community manager. It is interesting that over three quarters of businesses are actively using social media, but far fewer have methods in place to measure its success.

In light of this information, businesses should certainly consider not only investing in social media, but implementing methods to measure its success, in order to deduce the most effective channels to invest time and money into. This could be extremely beneficial long term, in a society where social media is playing an increasingly large part in the corporate field.

Web giant Google is expected to officially announce its new storage service, known as Google Drive, in the very near future. The service will provide users with remote storage for their pictures, notes and any other documents on the Internet, thus making their files available for access from any web-connected device, including smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.

Google Drive will offer free storage of up to 5 Gigabytes (GB), or the option to pay on a monthly basis for premium versions, which will offer incrementally more storage capacity up to 100 GB. It is not yet known how much consumers will be charged for this premium service.

The cloud storage system will combine search capabilities and advanced image search technology to allow users to access a wide range of document types, which could include Adobe PDF files and photographs. It will appear as an icon on Windows and Mac desktops, into which users can simply ‘drop’ their files. The service will advance on the already popular Google Documents, which already allows users to store 1 GB of files online.

Competitors such as Skydrive and Dropbox, which also offer cloud storage services, are sure to be affected by Google’s new offering, and it seems that they are upgrading their services accordingly. Dropbox recently altered its service so that users can share simply by sending an emailed link, rather than sharing folders, allowing for easier access.

Social Media Examiner’s fourth Social Media Marketing Report was released recently, and highlighted a number of important statistics with regards to social media marketing in 2012. Here are the top 5 findings:

1.     92% of survey respondents are using Facebook as part of their online marketing strategies with Twitter and LinkedIn coming in second and third with 82% and 73% of users respectively. However, interest is growing in Google+ – 40% of participants use it, but 70% said they want to learn more about it, and 67% plan to increase their activities on the site.

2.    Video marketing is a big part of future marketing strategies – 76% of respondents plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing in general, and therefore it is likely to become the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.

3.    Time invested in social media is still important – the majority of marketers (59%) are using social media for 6 hours or more weekly, and a third of participants invest 11 or more hours each week.

4.    Social media outsourcing is being underutilised, with a mere 30% of businesses outsourcing someof their social media marketing.

5.    The top three benefits of social media marketing are specified to be generating greater business exposure, increased traffic to web pages, and additional marketplace insight; all hugely positive results which demonstrate the importance of effective social media as part of an online marketing strategy.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about an announcement by Google’s Matt Cutts that sites would, in future, be penalised for over optimisation. This move is part of a systematic effort by Google to eliminate sites with low quality content ranking highly on SERPS (search engine results pages) through massive back linking campaigns. While many have applauded this move to improve the quality of search results, a number of people within the industry have expressed concerns about negative SEO; sometimes referred to as ‘Google bombing’.

The theory behind the nefarious practice of negative SEO is simple; companies can harm their competitor’s website rankings by creating large numbers of low value, artificial and farmed links that Google will penalise by downgrading the site’s ranking. Although it is not the first time the fear of negative SEO has raised its head, it is one that is causing fresh concern for some businesses. A year ago Matt Cutts addressed this issue in a video claiming that Google did consider negative SEO when building their algorithm. At the time he said Google did not consider it necessary to provide webmasters with a forum for reporting negative SEO by competitors, however in the future that may have to change.

My advice to businesses who are concerned about this issue is to monitor the numbers of backlinks to their sites on a regular basis to see if their competitors are taking part in any unethical practice. If you need assistance with this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Well it’s been out for a few weeks now and I have had enough time to put the new iPad 3 through its paces and most importantly, look at whether it can replace my trusty laptop.

Let me start by saying that the third generation of the iPad is an extremely impressive piece of technological kit. The new iPad’s visual impact offers stunning clarity which really lifts images and videos to a new level. The user interface, always good before, is even better. It really is a delight to use.

The additional processing power is another big plus. The 1 GHz Apple A5X driving the iPad3 means everything responds at a good rate and improves the user experience – certainly an advantage over the original iPad, although iPad 2 users probably won’t notice much difference.

To address the big question at hand: ‘can it replace the laptop?’ I think it all comes down to how much you type. If you are going to use your machine primarily for surfing the web and posting on social media, then the iPad 3 will certainly do the job. However if you spend a lot of time at the keyboard, it may not fit so well into your working life. I often have to do a lot of typing and need a full size keyboard, so it is very much a case of horses for courses. A lot of time when I am meeting clients or leading a training session, the iPad 3 will do just fine, but there are other times when I still cannot see how I will able to work efficiently without my trusty laptop.