Instagram launches test of algorithm-free news feed

When social media was introduced nearly 20 years ago, users' newsfeeds were organized by reverse chronological order.

As time passed and the industry evolved, the shift went to setting up newsfeeds based on users' activity and preference, hence algorithims.

Of late, the call to go back to the chronological alignment has grown, and recently Instagram began testing that very option.

In an article posted by socialmediatoday.com, Instagram revealed in a video how it plans to work.

News to share

Excited to share that I have been added to the seminar lineup for the 2022 Wisconsin Association of Community Theatre Conference on April 2.

I will be giving a presentation about website design, analytics and functionality.

http://www.wact.org/

Is your website working?

The answer to this question goes beyond if it’s running or not. To find that out, you need to dive deeper into your website’s functionality. Are visitors to your website finding what they’re looking for? Is there a clear call-to-action on your site such as buying tickets or donating? How are people finding your website? Is your website searchable?

There is a tool to get those questions answered. The tool? Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you better understand the traffic coming to your website, how they’re getting there and what they’re doing on the site. Knowing this information provides valuable insight to help increase awareness of your organization and create better ad spending.

In this seminar, you’ll learn what Google Analytics is, what it offers, what data you should pay attention to and a lot more. Plus, you’ll learn better website structure to help make your website standouts above the others.

What social media users want in 2022

You don't need to look far to realize what kind of growth video on social media has gone through.

TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, are just some of the examples. According to a recent article by Sprout Social, video and social media will likely go hand-in-hand in 2022.

Here are some statistical highlights of Sprout Social's latest report:

• More than half (54%) of marketers say that video is the most valuable content type for achieving social media marketing goals.
• Video is also the most underutilized format across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, comprising 14%, 11% and 5% of each network’s content respectively.
• 93% of companies have acquired new customer(s) via social media video.
• Half of social media users prefer video over other types of content.
• 85% of social media users want more videos from brands.
• People share video content with friends twice as much as any other type of content.
• 58% of viewers will watch the entirety of a business’ video if it’s less than 60 seconds long.

Diving deeper into email marketing

Email marketing is an effective tool as it is direct contact with current or potential customers.

But in recent months, pushes for privacy and transparency have increased the difficulty of email marketing strategy. The most notable was Apple's Mail Privacy Protection tool. In short, when someone a user using Apple Mail as its email provider, they'll be sent an email, but it won't go to that user at first. Instead, it goes to a computer that eliminates identifying characteristics about the receiver. Then, the email is passed on to the intended recipient.

However, that user may not actually be opening the email, while you're analytics will say it was. Frustrating, right?

There have been several arguments for and against this practice. Won't get into that here.

What all that means is email marketers will have to be more creative in order to get engaged and stay engaged with its audience.

Let's dive deeper into email marketing.

To start, let's use Google or Gmail as an example. If you use Gmail you'll be familiar with this. Other email providers use this as well. There are tabs within a person's email inbox. They're primary, social and promotions.

Google/Gmail did this in 2013 as a way for users to sort their inboxes and minimize clutter (learn more here). Gmail tabs uses machine learning to determine where to put email based on a variety of signals. Signals include (but aren’t limited to) who the email comes from, what type of content is in the message and how users have interacted with similar content. 

From there, the messages are sorted within a person's inbox:

• Primary: Emails from people you know (and messages that don’t appear in other tabs)
• Social: Messages from social networks and media-sharing sites
• Promotions: Deals, offers, newsletters and other “call to action” emails
• Updates: Notifications, confirmations, receipts, bills and statements
• Forums: Messages from online groups, discussion boards and mailing lists

While Gmail takes all of these signals into account, the most important one is one's engagement within their email inbox. Those actions or engagements teach Gmail's machine learning how best to sort your email. Here are four things you can do to teach Gmail to sort email from certain senders into specific tabs, so you stay in control of where your email goes.

This elevates the need to make sure you are creating engaging emails people want to open and, more importantly, engage with such as a click.

Several studies show people want more personal interaction on email, social media and etc.

How do you create engaging emails? One way to do that is be aware of trigger words/phrases that filter messages to tabs outside of the primary tab or, even worse, the spam folder.

According to Litmus, an email marketing specialist company, those phrases include: 

• Enticing phases like “Click here!” or “Buy now!”
• This includes not just in subject lines, but also within the email itself, including call-to-action buttons.
• Multiple special characters in a subject line like “New feature! Come check it out!!!”
• All caps – it can give a high spam score and can seem aggressive.
• Image-only email as these can be marked as spam without real content to scan.
• Links that look like phishing attempts.
• Using link shorteners.
• These are great when posting to social media. But a tip in how to track your clicks is to set up a Urchin Tracking Module or UTM. Google offers a free tool to do just that, which also connects with your Google Analytics (https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/)

Other tips to follow to make sure you're maximizing your potential email reach.

• You're following permission and spam laws.
• Make sure your audience segments are up to date.
• Target specific audiences within your contacts.

A statistic to keep in mind as a parting message (source: Litmus): On average, almost 20% of permission-based emails never reach consumers’ inboxes because they are filtered as spam or junk.

Is your website working?

This is more than is it working from an operational standpoint. The question is: Does your website achieve the goals you're trying to accomplish?

Those goals could include:

• Are users finding the information they're looking for?
• Where do they click?
• What pages do they visit?
• Are they clicking on the calls to action?

There are ways to answer those questions and others pertaining to your website's functionality and its ease of use by the user.

To find those answers, make sure you have a Google Analytics account attached to your website. You can set that up here.

Once you have that set up, there is a world of knowledge for you that'll help you get answers to the aforementioned questions above.

In this tutorial, I'm going to focus on the Universal Analytics, or UA or GA-3, dashboard.

Understanding the Google Analytics dashboard

This is the "home page" for your Google Analytics. It's the hub to where you'll find your information. You can view various reports in the left-hand column (see image below).

• Realtime is just that. What is the user activity on your website at that particular moment, in real time.
• Audience is a breakdown of demographics and psychographics. Data available here includes interest, geography, technology used.
• Acquisition shows how did users get to your site, such as social media.
• Behavior shows the activity of a user on your site, such as what web pages did they go to.
• Conversions shows a breakdown of goals you can set to measure your key performance indicators, such as signing up for a newsletter. (More on this is a separate blog)

What is a Behavior Flow chart?

Just like the name says, it's a flow chart of user activity on a website. It looks at the pages visited through a website journey. There are several data points you can measure such as landing page, source/medium, campaign, social network and many more.

You can find the behavior flow chart under "Behavior" on the left-hand column of your dashboard as seen below.

Diving deeper in the analytics

Now you know where to find data. How do you use it? What data can help you evaluate your website?

If you're looking to understand your website data, ask yourself: What am I trying to find out? If it's how people are getting to your site, you'll want to focus on acquisition. If you want to know a user's journey on your site, you'll want to focus on behavior.

Let's take a look at how to learn more about a user's journey on your website.

Understanding site content data

Under site content data, you'll find the following options: all pages, content drilldown,

landing pages and exit pages.

All pages will give you a full list of all URLs on the site. You can toggle this to by page title for easier organization.

Content drilldown is similar, but it's big difference is you can set it to start with a directory or page.

Landing pages is just that, the landing page. Same thing for exit page.

What you'll notice amongst this data are statistics called bounce rate and exit rate.

The bounce rate is the rate of which users leave the site without navigating to any other page. The exit rate is the rate of which users leave a the site after navigating at least one other previous page. Here you'll learn what pages users start on your website and where you're losing them.

Something to keep in mind. If you're bounce rate is within 35-60%, that's OK. It's outside of those numbers that attention should be paid. Same goes with exit rate. These numbers only offer a scratch of the surface insight. A review of other goals, such as the call-to-action, could be necessary.

What is the Navigation summary?

The navigation summary report in Google Analytics shows not only how often users entered or left the site on a given page, but also what pages they came from and where they went next.

The navigation summary isn’t easily accessible from the main menu. See below.

Now once on Navigation summary, you can learn a lot more in depth about your website's navigation.

Under "current selection" that is where you can set any page on your site as the middle part of the chain. It starts with the home page or "/" by default.

For this example, the middle page will be set to a jobs/volunteer page. See below.

You'll notice that there were 40 or 62.5% of page views of the home page or "/" (the character after your URL), then those users go to the jobs/volunteer page. The next page those users went to are broken down in the right-hand column. So 9 users or 60% of them went back to the home page after viewing the jobs/volunteer page. You'll notice the page views don't add up to the previous page path. That's because the users not in that next page path left the website at that point.

Learn more

If you'd like to learn more about the information available, here is a link to a webinar I hosted in 2020: WEBINAR: Understanding Google Analytics, website design

Consider text messaging in marketing

Next year, 2022, will be the 30th anniversary of the first short message service, or text message. The date was Dec. 3, 1992. Neil Papworth, from his desktop computer sent a SMS or commonly known as a text message. The message? "Merry Christmas."

Text messaging has come a long way since then. So much so that as 2022 arrives, text messaging can be a key marketing tool as digital marketing, and ways to communicate and engage with consumers continues to evolve.

Statistics have shown that 98% of all text messages are opened, and 95% of SMS messages are opened and responded to within three minutes of being delivered.

When taking those statistics and comparing them to emails, the difference is more than noticeable. Email open rates are, on average, in the neighborhood of 15-25%. And, with the latest changes in privacy and privacy protection, email open rates will be harder to measure.

Here are some other statistics to consider when looking at text messaging in marketing:

• 9 out of 10 consumers would like to communicate with businesses through text message, whether this be through sending alerts, appointment reminders, back and forth communication, etc.
• 48% of customers would like special offers sent to them via text message, and the click-through-rate (CTR) for these sorts of text messages are much higher (19%), compared to other marketing channels such as Email marketing (4%) and Facebook (1%).
• 74% of consumers prefer texting with businesses if a real person is texting back.

In other words, text messaging is worth the effort and investment.

Google confirms local search update

Per BrightLocal.com, Google confirmed its biggest local search algorithm update in five years.

"Many local businesses have noticed huge fluctuations in their local search rankings over the last few weeks, with Google now confirming an important update to the local algorithm," the article says. "Rolling out between (Nov. 30) and (Dec. 8), this update has been named ‘Vicinity’ by Sterling Sky. This is the largest change to the local algorithm since Possum in 2016 and has caused widespread ranking disruption.

"Google confirmed the update in a tweet on December 16th."

Google, via BrightLocal.com, said the update "is named after the fact that it seems to primarily target proximity as a ranking factor.

"Although proximity has long been an important signal for local search results, it’s also been the case that businesses can optimize to successfully rank far from their actual business location. 

"Through the Vicinity update, Google now appears to be clamping down on this, which will naturally make local search results more relevant to the user. In terms of the benefit to businesses, this gives them a greater chance to rank well in relevant local searches, as they’ll be competing less with businesses that are further away."

Read more about this update, which also includes a local pack update, here.

New podcast available: Getting set up for 2022

LISTEN TO NEW PODCAST HERE

It's almost 2022. That means it's time to take a look at what 2022 might have in store for social media marketers.

Among those tips is Sprout Social's recently released guide: "Unlock Social Media Success in 2022." What does it say?

Plus:

• Instagram makes tweak to links within Stories
• Guide to social media holidays
• Tips on social media ROI

How to structure your social media for 2022

Sprout Social has released a guide for marketers to consider heading into 2022: "Unlock Social Media Success in 2022."

It's a free download at https://sproutsocial.com/insights/templates/free-social-media-templates/

One of the guides available is "Find the ideal social media content mix for your brand."

One of the biggest challenges in social media marketing is what content to post. Among the other challenges is when to post and where to post? For the latter two, there's no exact science for it because every industry is different. The goals for each business are different. But one of the easiest ways to understand that is utilizing social listening. That is continuously evaluate what visitors to your social media pages are doing and saying.

Thankfully, there are a handful of analytics tools on each social media platform that helps you put 2 and 2 together.

Content falls into the same idea and thought process. But, that's where Sprout Social's latest report tries to help with that. I'll highlight one of those points.

The top five reasons people visit a business' social media page: to learn about new products/services, to stay up to date on company news, to be entertained, to read other people's reviews/experiences with the brand, and to be inspired.

A separate stat from Sprout Social shows more than 70 percent of consumers will buy from a brand they follow on social media.

It's been said often and it bears repeating: consumers are on social media. You need to be too.

Instagram makes tweak to links within Stories

In October, Instagram announced that that links are now being made available in Instagram Stories for all users, instead of just those accounts with 10k followers or are verified accounts.

Also at that time, it was announced the company was working on a model to be able for users to modify the link sticker. That time has arrived.

Users who use the link click sticker with IG stories can now modify the text for the sticker.

The initial implementation was a huge victory for Instagram business users, especially those with less than 10,000 followers. Up until then, the only clickable link on Instagram was in the profile bio if you had less than 10,000 followers.

As Reels and Stories, as well as overall short-form video continues to grow, creating content for those tools will have a greater emphasis with a greater possibility of generating website leads.

Read more about the initial implementation here: Instagram finally gives website click to all users