Our Top Three Digital Marketing Articles | December 11

In this week’s round-up, I’m sharing three articles focused on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each of these articles highlights some great ways to think about engagement, especially as you’re building your content strategy for 2019.

Majority of Publishers See Much Lower Facebook Traffic Now vs. Last Year [POLL] by Angel Niñofranco

You’ve likely heard something along the lines of “Facebook organic reach is dying” or “Facebook organic reach is dead”. This has been due, in part, to increased competition, more click-bait, and Facebook putting more emphasis on showing people updates from their families and friends. Search Engine Journal did a poll to inquire how other businesses were affected by Facebook changes. 37% said that their traffic from Facebook is much lower now compared to this time last year. 27% said it was somewhat lower. SEJ proposes a few tips to overcome these challenges: prioritizing engagement, keeping yourself updated on Facebook’s changes, thinking about your overall strategy and how it might need to change, and not overlooking your SEO.

My reflections: It’s no surprise that Facebook’s algorithm is consistently changing. At Meredith Communications, we’ve also noticed organic reach trending downwards. This is part of the marketing industry and is another great example that trends and platforms change, so we need to be vigilant about staying up to date and not putting all our eggs in one basket.

Can Twitter Threads Increase Reach, Engagement, and Referral Traffic? An Experiment by Alfred Lua

Did you hear about Aytekin Tank’s (founder of Jotform) 17-million-impression tweet? He repurposed one of his Medium posts into a Twitter thread. He promoted it with Twitter ads to see if he could increase the reach. Eventually, he had 17 million impressions and the original Medium post had over 35,000 visits. Buffer ran an experiment to see if Twitter threads were a good strategy for increasing views and interactions. For each of their blog posts, they published both a simple tweet with a link and a Twitter thread. They found that Twitter threads were performing better than simple tweets with links. One hypothesis is that tweets without links perform better and in general when sharing a thread, the link is in the last tweet. However, their experiment also showed that the Twitter threads had fewer click-throughs.

My reflections: As mentioned above, it’s always a good idea to play around with different strategies and see how to maximize your return. There are lots of different ways to present your content even on the same platform. Doing a combination of simple tweets and Twitter threads can help you maximize impressions and click-throughs.

3 viewer behaviors we saw play out on YouTube in 2018 by Gina Shalavi

Google highlighted three of the most interesting trends from YouTube in 2018. The first trend noted was that between July 2017 and June 2018, the number of videos related to “relaxing” rose by more than 70%. Google mentions the takeaway from this should be that people are valuing experiences over possessions. People are choosing to watch more videos on minimalist lifestyles, primitive technology, and videos like Ikea’s series on how to turn cluttered bedrooms into relaxing areas of the home. Another trend were searches for inspiration. They reported that the time spent on videos for “which product to buy” doubled in the past year. And finally, people were looking for a connection. There was an increase in videos that were encouraging viewers to do something at the same time as watching the video – like a bookathon via video. Or YouTube series where brands show behind the scenes processes and new products and answer questions live.

My reflections: Video is becoming increasingly huge. It’s meeting a need for sharing connect but also establishing connections. YouTube is a great platform for that. Understanding what people are looking for when on YouTube is great insight into the types of content you might want to consider posting on this platform.

Categorised in: Digital Marketing