This Week’s Top Stories
Introducing Instant Articles
(Facebook Media Blog, 5/13/15)
PNConnect Insight – This has been talked about and speculated over for a while now and is finally a reality, with a number of publishers including Buzzfeed, The New York Times and others. The sales pitch from Facebook has been that load times between it and news sites has been painfully slow and has lead to a bad user experience, so this can help that. But the tradeoff for publishers may not be worth the convenience, convenience that could be gained by simply optimizing those destination sites for a mobile experience.
By signing on, publishers may be getting a percentage of the ad revenue sells, but it’s a percentage of the whole, not the whole, whatever that number is. And it’s a percentage that Facebook can – and likely will – change in the future. Also, those publishers are forgoing the audience insights that come with capturing traffic, insights that Facebook will now own. While it may be short-term salve to publishers who are hurting, it undermines the “hub” part of the “hub and spoke” model that leads to long-term brand value and audience retention.
Social Media
Report: Social Share Buttons Are Useless and Unused
(SocialTimes, 5/12/15)
PNConnect Insight – Take the results here with a grain of salt, as there are plenty of studies showing these social sharing buttons produce decent traffic. Independent of these findings, though, studies like this always serve as a good reminder to check your own program metrics to see if tactical elements – including things like these buttons – are producing results.
Exposure to Diverse Information on Facebook
(Facebook Newsroom, 5/7/15)
PNConnect Insight – There’s some good information here on how people’s interactions on Facebook impact what they see. But while yes, the effect of a self-selected network is very real, the role of the Newsfeed algorithm in showing what’s displayed in the first place cannot be understated. This is something that is important not just when it comes to diversity of opinion but also more generally in how much and what kind of updates are shown.
Publishing
How to build audiences with single-subject news products
(American Press Institute, 5/7/15)
PNConnect Insight – When you think about it in these terms, almost every corporate blog is a “single-subject news” outlet. From that point of view, there are some interesting and applicable insights in this study.
Report: Facebook Engagement Surges Year Over Year For Top Brands
(MarketingLand, 5/12/15)
PNConnect Insight – With all the changes Facebook has made to how they suggest they post to the network, it’s not surprising that brand publishers are striving to be smarter about what they post. Results, as always, will vary from one program to the next, but this SimplyMeasured study provides a good idea of how various kinds of posts are performing and is useful as, if nothing else, a measuring stick to compare your own program results to.
Media/Journalism
Do Student Newsrooms Still Need Physical Space for Newsrooms?
(PBS MediaShift, 5/5/15)
PNConnect Insight – While everyone agrees that much of the job *can* be done by a remote workforce they also all agree there needs to be a single, unified space for people to gather in. That helps with team communication, management coordination and more. The lessons here go beyond college newspapers and have implications for brand newsrooms and other editorial teams as well.
Tools
New Analytics for Publishing on LinkedIn: See Who’s Viewed Your Published Post
(LinkedIn Blog, 5/7/15)
PNConnect Insight – While this update seems to be primarily aimed at individuals and not brands, these expanded analytics can be of use for any kind of thought leadership you may be running that involves a C-level exec (or anyone else) publishing directly on LinkedIn. Metrics are always a good thing so see what is being rolled out and watch for them to be available in the near future.
Flickr Now Compelling With Free Terabyte Of Photo Storage And Redesign
(Forbes, 5/11/15)
PNConnect insight – The importance of storing your photos in the cloud can’t be overstated. This is an extremely impressive upgrade. Probably the biggest in Flickr’s history making the tired old photo service up-to-date and ahead of the competition.
Advertising/Promotion
Snapchat Debuts Video Ads For 2 Cents Per View
(Adweek, 5/7/15)
PNConnect Insight – This is a big shift for Snapchat after the company put the breaks on its existing ad product a couple weeks ago. Now it’s just time to sit back and wait for the first case studies – anecdotal or otherwise – to come in.
Twitter Taking a Different Approach to Advertising on Vine and Periscope
(AdAge, 5/8/15)
PNConnect Insight – Interesting to see Twitter eschew traditional advertising forms and instead lean on this kind of superstar-driven model, where they make money acting as the middle-man between popular personalities and the brands who want to activate them.