Social Media:
Brand names are about to inherit some serious power on Facebook, thanks to the social media platform’s update to their News Feed algorithm. Now, when a brand’s Page tags another brand, or even a celebrity in a post, followers of either the publishing Page or the tagged Page may see that content appear on their News Feeds. As a consequence, brands will be able to reach out to wider audiences. Facebook’s algorithm will be able to consider which users are engaging with brand content, which then will determine if the content is relevant for followers of both the posting Page and the tagged Page.
Why just stop at Facebook, though? According to new data at Sumpto, Snapchat may be the way to go when marketing to college-aged consumers.
Not only do over 77 percent of college students use Snapchat at least once every day, but 45 percent of students say that they would open a snap from a brand they don’t know. A striking 73 percent would open one from a familiar brand. Should Snapchat allow brands access to user data, companies could begin advertising to users of the app based on a variety of demographics. 67 percent of respondents to Sumpto claim that they would be interested in receiving discounts or promotions through Snapchat, and 58 percent say that they would be likely to purchase products using a Snapchat coupon.
SEO:
Google is cracking down on “scrapers,” or websites with reposted content that earn higher rankings than websites that host original content. In response to complaints about scraping, Google revealed their new tool, the Google Scraper Report, which was announced by Matt Cutts on Twitter. While the tool doesn’t make any promise about providing a fix, it does ask for people to share the original content URL, the URL of the scraped content, and the search results that trigger the outranking.
Implementing the scraper tool can allow Google’s spam team to act against infringing content by considering it as a spam offense, rather than a copyright issue, which may speed up the time in which scraped content is removed.
Semantic search is the future of Google’s search algorithms.
What does this mean? In short, the search engine will eventually become more able to take context into consideration when returning results. Semantic searches will take user location, past searches, time of day, and many other factors into account to serve up increasingly-relevant search results. Some of these features are already implemented—for example, simply searching for “restaurants” now will bring up a list of the restaurants closest to your current location.
So, while we may be currently able to enjoy some of the benefits of semantic searches, the full implementation is still a long way off. Learning about how semantics work now, rather than later, will be important for staying in the SEO game.
Content:
Sustainability is a hot topic for a lot of reasons these days, and it is even becoming important for envisioning a solid content marketing strategy. There is a yearly exponential increase in online content, which has the potential to exceed consumer demand. Consequently, the secret to successful content marketing is about more than just creating high-quality, engaging content. Rather, companies must use excellent content to build communities and social capital—thereby achieving sustainability. If customers aren’t interacting with content, the content will not maintain relevance.
Sources:
- Wagner, Kurt. Facebook News Feed Update Gives Brands More Reach Mashable.
- Crook, Jordan. How Could Snapchat Make Money? College Kids TechCrunch
- Sullivan, Danny. Someone Outranking you With Your Own Content? Use The New Google Scraper ReportSearchEngineLand
- Enge, Eric. Google Semantic Search Social Media today
- Stark, Loni. 3 Strides to a Sustainable Content Marketing Strategy Content Marketing Institute
