Month: October 2016

Social Media Roundup: October

Posted on by Helen Hargreave

Throughout October, we have seen a range of developments in the world of social media. One of the most intriguing of these has been the addition of a series of features on Facebook which encourage the eliciting and sharing of recommendations. Now, when users ask for advice, a prominent request on the News Feed is shown, which lets friends know that users are looking for suggestions and respond accordingly.

Furthermore, Facebook is rolling out methods to book appointments, get quotes and even purchase items immediately through businesses’ pages. This feature may become vital for companies, as the buying process is streamlined and the entire purchase journey can now be made entirely through Facebook. These options are available due to partnerships with third party firms like Ticketmaster, so local businesses will need to be connected and integrated with the relevant company in order to profit from this opportunity.

As word of mouth is widely considered the most persuasive of advertising, these updates could become incredibly important for businesses. Consumers are much more likely to act on the advice of a friend, so local businesses should look into capitalising on any attention gained through these new features.

In video news, Facebook is improving its Live API service, allowing verified Pages to schedule live video events in a more engaging manner. Users are also given a reminder of these streams in advance, and can connect and interact with other viewers, helping to build a sense of community around the video provider. On a related note, Twitter is expanding its Periscope app, allowing users to stream from a greater range of devices, including professional cameras, apps and even virtual reality devices, providing the opportunity for more professional and polished content through live video.

These live video updates should reinforce the burgeoning importance of this platform for businesses, as they provide a novel way of interacting with users and customers on an increasingly personal level. Through streaming live events or providing behind the scenes access, businesses are able to give a more personal and inclusive experience. Live video could also be used for demonstrations and tutorials, allowing the promotion of products whilst providing unique and helpful information to consumers.

In Instagram news, the Stories feature is expanding to the explore tab. As mentioned in August, Instagram Stories has presented an opportunity for businesses to post more ‘authentic’ and live content, and according to Instagram over 100 million users use this tab every day to find content from creators that they are not currently following. This expansion of Stories presents an opportunity for businesses to widen the benefits of Stories to reach a whole new audience, and by providing well curated and engaging content on this platform, this could be a way to draw more users to their social media channels and hopefully through to being customers.

Finally, Vine – RIP. In the wake of a recent announcement that hundreds of layoffs were coming, Twitter has announced that it will be shutting Vine, the 6-second video app. Although it has proved an attractive platform for younger generations, Vine has struggled to keep its user base up when competing against the likes of Instagram and Snapchat, and Twitter has since shown greater interest in its integrated video and Periscope developments. For businesses, however, there will not be too much to mourn. Although Vine had some unique features, it was these very features that made it difficult to deliver engagement-driving content.

Social Media Roundup: September

Posted on by Jenny Connelly

The biggest social media news of the month is that Twitter is looking for prospective buyers – and it looks like a bidding war might be hotting up. Current potential suitors include; Disney, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Verizon. Whispers of a buyout could be good news for the company, which this month reported UK revenue growth had fallen to 31%. However, not all the news is gloomy. Twitter’s market value has been estimated at £15.5 billion – hardly an insignificant amount – and a new buyer could bring a new lease of life to the platform which has struggled to expand growth in the recent past.

In lighter Twitter news, the 140 character count has been loosened, with users now able to add images or handles without eating into the precious character limit. This is great news for brands, as they are able to post enticing and vivid content without the necessity to restrict the amount of copy used.

Facebook this month has announced plans to develop a ‘Messenger Light’ app which will see the platform being able to be used on slower mobile phones. This is an important development for Facebook, as it reinforces its comment to making Messenger a key social media standalone platform. New Messenger Light will allow users access to messages on the go, on mobiles previously unable to maintain the app. Specifically, this will particularly effect emerging markets, where Facebook has made big in roads in the last few years.

It also came to light in September that Facebook has been overestimating video views on the platform. Facebook has admitted inflating the average time people spend watching videos for two years by failing to count people who watched for less than 3 seconds. This admission is important, because typically a user watching a video for less than 3 seconds will have not absorbed much (if any) of the meaning behind the video. Marketers would therefore be wise to note this trend, and make sure even the opening seconds of a video are eye-catching and memorable. As video views are often a key metric that marketers use to decide where to push posts further, this is shaky territory for Facebook and a backlash could be possible.

Instagram this month has reported more strong growth, impressively doubling the amount of advertisers on the platform over the last six months. Instagram has announced that the majority of advertisers on the platform are now smaller or local businesses. Brands, big or small, would be wise to advertise on Instagram to build up a presence on this ever-growing platform.

SEO Market Updates: September 2016

Posted on by Joshua Carter

Google’s Penguin Algorithm now runs in Real-time

On September 23, Google announced that it’s Penguin filter, designed to devalue sites using link spam as a way to skew results in their favour, will be updating in real time. Previously this filter was only updated periodically, and sites penalised by it would remain penalised even if their status improved.

With real-time updates, however, Penguin is more granular, affecting only spammy areas of a given site, rather than the entire thing. It also releases pages upon the next crawl of the site if they have changed for the better.

Google Begins to show more AMP results

Google will now begin to show AMP-supported results inside of the standard organic results, as well as in the top stories, which have been displayed since February.

Large non-news companies including eBay and Shopify are now beginning to adopt the technology, which aims to provide content with 4x the speed and 10x less data usage.

While there has been no confirmation of a ranking boost for using AMP, Google is showing a label next to pages that support AMP technology.

Google adds new “science Datasets” Rich Data Schema

Last month Google introduced a new schema for marking up scientific data to be used to in rich snippets within search results. The schema can be used to display the additional metadata about the scientific information, including the author, source and license.

The types of format relevant to this markup could be:

  • a table or a CSV file with some data;
  • a file in a proprietary format that contains data;
  • a collection of files that together constitute some meaningful dataset;
  • a structured object with data in some other format that you might want to load into a special tool for processing;
  • images capturing the data