This Week’s Top Stories
Report: YouTube Still Trumps Facebook Video For Brands Over The Long Haul
(MarketingLand, 5/1/15)
PNConnect Insight – This is the video equivalent of “content decay” and ties nicely with what we wrote about in this post on going native with social video. In short, it’s not a case of one or the other being better, it’s that Facebook video works well in the short term but that initial spike quickly fades as the post falls down people’s Newsfeeds. Putting the same video on YouTube helps it have a long life beyond the initial announcement window.
Social Media
There Are Now 800,000 Reasons To Share NPR Audio On Your Site
(NPR, 4/29)
PNConnect Insight – Getting other people to handle your distribution for you is the best kind of situation to setup, assuming you’ve first started creating content that people want to share. This is a great example of embracing the embeddable web.
Report: Facebook Pulls In 84% Of Social Shares For Publishers
(MarketingLand, 5/1/15)
PNConnect Insight – This is certainly interesting data and can be directionally accurate, even if it’s not completely representative of the behavioral landscape. The big missing component here is mobile, since any data on sharing that doesn’t include WhatsApp these days is by definition incomplete. But again, this can still be more or less correct, though it needs to be read as being focused primarily on desktop behavior.
Publishing
The Bitly Index Q1 2015
(bitly blog, 4/29)
PNConnect Insight – The trends highlighted here are pretty high-level but they do some some interesting changes in behavior, particularly in how communities are such huge traffic drivers. While it’s not included with Reddit and LiveJournal, Tumblr very much falls into that category since it has a strong sense of community among its active users. Also note how important mobile is for just about everything.
Don’t Sleep on Content Marketing
(WSJ, 5/4/15)
PNConnect Insight – There isn’t a whole lot of new that’s in here since it’s long been accepted conventional wisdom that an on-domain hub-and-spoke content strategy is a good idea. Actually, that’s it…it’s a good idea.
Media/Journalism
Drop in Discover Traffic Poses Questions for Snapchat
(The Information, 4/29)
PNConnect Insight – In short, Snapchat Discover isn’t going to be the end-all-be-all salvation for publishers that the initial buzz made it out to be. That’s not surprising since there was always going to be an initial rush of people trying it out. But, more positively, while the trends may be heading down it’s likely publishers will find them leveling out as long-term users stick around after the gawkers and media analysts leave.
Exclusive: News app Circa is seeking a buyer
(Fortune, 4/30/15)
PNConnect Insight – You can talk all you want about what this means about the future of media and whether or not this sort of “snackable news” business model is sustainable. But what’s most striking is that while so many questionably useful apps suck up VC money, Circa couldn’t make that work. Any news organization that isn’t looking to pick up this product, whether they retain the brand or make it their own, should get out of the news business.
The (very) big fight for the small screen
(Fortune, 5/3/15)
PNConnect Insight – The article says this in about five different ways but the big takeaway is this: Produce something unique. Instead of trying to recreate the TV show model and instead of even using the same tactics as successful innovators like Buzzfeed, find a production type that is true to the brand voice, resonates with the target audience and accomplishes what it needs to.
Facebook Reportedly Nearing Deal With Publishers On “Instant Articles”
(MarketingLand, 5/1/15)
PNConnect Insight – “For now” needs to be appended to Facebook’s appeal to publishers to give them the ad revenue generated by stories they publish natively on the social network. Not only are those terms likely to change over time, but the publishers will still be out all the audience data they haven’t been able to collect on that content.
Tools
Meerkat Update #2
(Medium, 5/3/15)
PNConnect Insight – It’s not hard to believe that Facebook was more than receptive to the idea of integration with Meerkat considering the app had been cut off from a number of Twitter permissions. This significantly expands the potential audience for the videos, but it’s hard to see how “live right now” video will work on Facebook, where the Newsfeed algorithm often gets in the way of breaking, timely updates.
Pinterest launches developer platform to make Pins interactive
(The Next Web, 5/1)
PNConnect Insight – Coming on the heels of last week’s news about Pinterest opening up functionality to CMS vendors, it looks like the company has finally realized that opening up can help keep it from becoming dormant, feature-wise.
Introducing Google+ Collections, a new way to group your posts by topic
(Google+, 5/4/15)
PNConnect Insight – An interesting update, especially considering all the recent rumors and speculation that Google+ was living on borrowed time. This doesn’t necessarily contradict those rumors – Google+ could still be chopped up into individual features without being part of a core social network – but it at least shows there’s some thinking still going on.
Snapchat Tries To Jumpstart Discover By Letting You Send Clips To Friends
(TechCrunch, 5/5/15)
PNConnect Insight – Snapchat appears to be working to overcome the one major hurdle to Discover usage: Awareness. So while the hope is that people will share these stories within the app ecosystem in kind of the same way they’re doing on Twitter and Facebook, though with a more personal twist. But that doesn’t change how this is an intrusion of professionally-created material into a highly personal conversation.
Your old Foursquare badges and mayorships, evolved…
(Foursquare Blog, 5/4/15)
PNConnect Insight – In addition to bringing back mayorships, it’s clear Foursquare/Swarm was feeling the heat from long-time users who had abandoned it because the fun features they loved were gone. Bringing them back has, at the very least, helped bring the app back into the conversation.
Emerging Tech
As Mobile Overtakes Desktop, Google Rethinks the Search Ad
(Adweek – 5/5/15)
PNConnect Insight – Google is, as the story makes clear, is pointing this out because it wants companies to run ads that take advantage of these mobile searches. But that clear monetary motivation doesn’t make the actual consumer behavior changes that are reflected here less real.
B2B
When Going to Market, LinkedIn Is B2Bs’ Social Go-To
(eMarketer, 4/30)
PNConnect Insight – This is just the latest study to come to the conclusion that LinkedIn is the big winner for B2B marketers. If you’re in this market and you’re not going hard in the paint on LinkedIn you may be missing out.