Social Media and Marketing News, 10 October 2019

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Each week we bring you a wrap-up of engaging news, tips and trends from social media and marketing technology. As you prepare or fine tune your social media and digital marketing plan it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in all things SEO, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more.

18 Ways to Diagnose a Decline in Organic Traffic
By Katie Kirchner

Being able to determine the cause of an increase or decrease in traffic is a priceless skill. It allows you to anticipate declines and pivot your SEO strategy to prevent downward shifts, but also helps you identify wins as a result of the fantastic SEO work you’ve done!

We’ve put together a list of potential causes to explain why your traffic may be trending up or down, which tools to use to confirm your hypothesis, and what to do next.

Seasonality

Seasonality refers to anything that may cause a change in the number of users searching for the topics your site covers. There are three main ways to determine if seasonality could be a contributing factor in your traffic performance:

Compare Organic Traffic Year Over Year

Using Google Analytics, you can easily compare the date range where you’ve noticed a traffic fluctuation to the previous year. If you don’t see a similar trend as last year, seasonality may not be a factor and something else is likely at play. However, if you do see a similar fluctuation, then it’s likely you can chalk this traffic change up to seasonal factors.

Compare Search Demand

Using monthly search volume from Keyword Planner and search impressions from Google Search Console, you can determine if there are more or less users searching for topics your site covers for a specified time period.

Google Search Console Search Impressions – Set your comparison date range, navigate to the site section that saw a fluctuation in traffic, then compare impressions pre and post. If impression volume is different, you could be looking at seasonality.

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Email Marketing vs. Social Media: Can They Intersect?
by Kayla Carmicheal

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the act of promoting content on social media channels, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Content should be tailored to the specifications of each channel to boost lead generation and increase brand awareness.

The marketing should also meet the needs of the audience on that medium. For example, you’ll want to have high-quality visuals for Instagram and keep the captions short — inversely, on LinkedIn, storytelling is the way to go.

One benefit of social media marketing in a digital-forward society is that 3.2 billion people around the globe use social media. The challenge? Social media organic reach is getting harder to come by. For example, the amount of people using Facebook to search for new brands is down 11%; not the best odds.

While social media marketers can’t rely on organic reach anymore, it’s still a viable avenue compared to email marketing. Social channels allow businesses to engage with customers directly, thus building brand loyalty.

Email Marketing

Now that we’ve explored how important social media marketing is, what about those emails I scroll through every morning?

Since I willingly signed up to receive emails from these businesses, I’m genuinely interested in newsletters and other promotional materials from these brands — additionally, these brands are able to cultivate a sense of loyalty through email marketing by providing personalized, useful content to my inbox each day.,

Email marketing is the process of leading prospects down the sales funnel by sending marketing materials directly to those who’ve subscribed to that content. For example, a fan of Adobe might sign up for their newsletters to catch promotional offers as they arrive.

3.8 billion people are like me — starting their day by checking their email. Plus, 60% of that three billion prefer to receive marketing materials through email.

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How To Growth Hack Your Content Marketing
By Michael Brenner

“Growth hacking” is one of those buzzwords that’s started popping up in digital marketing circles over the last few years. But what exactly is growth hacking and how can you use it to benefit your content marketing efforts?

The clue is in the name – growth hacking is all about growing your business rapidly with a limited budget. The term came about from start-ups who needed to grow their fledgling businesses as quickly as possible with limited resources. These start-ups typically achieve this growth by taking advantage of low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing that can be extremely effective when done well.

A growth hacker is essentially a marketer who might use a combination of techniques including social media, viral marketing, and SEO to increase brand awareness and conversion rates as quickly as possible.

Your business may not be in the start-up stage, but you can still use growth hacking techniques to grow your business.

When you apply these techniques or “hacks” to your content marketing, you end up doing something that’s come to be known as “content hacking”. A content hacker is someone who achieves massive growth through content.

Quick Takeaways

  • Content hacking can help boost your marketing efforts in a short time, with a limited budget.
  • Good content hackers are data-driven, innovative, and constantly optimizing their content.
  • Analyzing your own successful content and that of your competitors is a great start for driving content growth.

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Most Americans don’t know Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp
By Pew Research

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that Americans’ understanding of technology-related issues varies greatly depending on the topic, term or concept. While a majority of U.S. adults can correctly answer questions about phishing scams or website cookies, other items are more challenging. For example, just 28% of adults can identify an example of two-factor authentication – one of the most important ways experts say people can protect their personal information on sensitive accounts. Additionally, about one-quarter of Americans (24%) know that private browsing only hides browser history from other users of that computer, while roughly half (49%) say they are unsure what private browsing does.

Americans’ understanding of these topics varies drastically across the 10 questions presented in the Center’s survey. To begin with, only three questions were answered correctly by a majority of adults. About two-thirds of U.S. adults (67%) know that phishing scams can occur across multiple platforms, including email, text messages, social media or websites. Some 63% of Americans understand that cookies are text files that allow websites to track users’ site visits and activities.

Similarly, 59% know that advertising is the largest source of revenue for most social media sites, rather than things such as exclusive licensing deals (4%) or corporate consulting (2%).

Additionally, 48% of adults correctly answered that a privacy policy is a contract between websites and users regarding how their data will be used, while 45% know that net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should treat all traffic on their networks equally.

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Instagram may finally add DMs to desktop with Messenger-like interface
By Napier Lopez

People don’t really use Instagram on their PCs. The platform is clearly aimed at mobile users, with a relatively sparse desktop UI and small images given the large amount of desktop real estate. Worse, Instagram tends to add new features to the web version months after it hits the mobile app. Heck, you still can’t even upload images from a PC.

Still, slowly but surely the web app is becoming more useful. Case in point: Instagram appears to be working on adding DM’s to the web UI.

The potential new feature was spotted by developer Jane Manchun Wong who is known for diving deep into code to find hidden upcoming features.

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