11 Myths About Driving Traffic in a Mobile, Social World: A Deck-Form Debunking Listicle
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If you're a digital editor, a content strategist, or really anyone whose job is to drive traffic, you've probably heard a lot of tired advice. This deck lists some of these debunkable ideas, hopefully as a way to start a conversation about better ways to build audiences.
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11 Myths About Driving Traffic in a Mobile, Social World: A Deck-Form Debunking Listicle
- 1. 11 Myths About Driving Traffic in a Mobile, Social World A Deck-Form Debunking Listicle Senior Manager, Owned Media @dgodsall David Godsall
- 2. • 58% of the entire global adult population is on Facebook • 19% of entire global adult population is on Twitter • 21% of the entire global adult population is on Instagram • Globally, Snapchat has the most users aged 16-24 (57%) • Facebook has the most users aged 55-64 (10.6%) Facebook is just for old people Myth #1
- 3. Facebook is sooo over Myth #2
- 4. Instagram isn’t really for publishers Myth #3 • It’s not about CTs and referral traffic • Build your audience and extend the reach of your brand • Leverage your strengths, repurpose content, work with your photographers
- 5. LinkedIn is just for networking (and spamming your friends) Myth #4 • Columns and opinion pieces perform well on LinkedIn • Pulse posts can be an effective link- building tool • Writers can re-publish after the exclusivity period, extending the shelf-life of the piece • Incentivize columnists by encouraging them to build their bylines on LI (and showing them how)
- 6. Pinterest is just for shopping and weddings Myth #5 Well, it’s not just shopping and weddings… • The average Pin 100x more shareable than the average Tweet • The half-life of a pin is 1,6000x longer than a Facebook post
- 7. E-mail Reading News Watching Videos Online Shopping Messaging Learning Banking Social Media Work Most popular mobile internet activities worldwide as of June 2015 Relying on its email newsletter as its primary growth channel, Quartz built an audience of 5 million in just 20 months. That’s a faster growth rate than BuzzFeed. Email is dead Myth #6
- 8. • 65% of Facebook’s ~4 billion daily video views come from mobile • In Q2 of 2015, the average YouTube session on mobile was 40 minutes • 36% of people watch long-form videos via mobile every day Mobile content is short-form Myth #7
- 9. You need to know your audience Myth #8 Forget about knowing your audience. Start listening to your audience. How? Three ways: 1. Search research (SEM Rush related keywords, GA queries) 2. Social listening (HS Insights, Brandwatch) 3. Competitive research (Buzzsumo)
- 10. Be consistent or risk losing your audience Myth #9 Buffer published no net new content for the whole month of July last year and lost 4% of their audience… But they didn’t exactly do nothing that month.
- 11. People share click-bait Myth #10 Good news everyone: quality content is shareable! Your audience will reward your investment in detail, original insight, data, nuance, and comprehensiveness with higher OSS rates.
Editor's Notes
- Let’s start with demographics. Some of the things you think about the demographic distribution across the networks are true: Facebook has the most users over 55. Snapchat has the most users under 25. But that’s not really the point. Almost 60% of the world is on Facebook, young and old, rich an poor, east and west. (except china.)
- This is sort of a follow-up to the last slide. Not only is Facebook for old people, the story goes, but because the kids are elsewhere, Facebook is dying. Well, look at the top four apps by usage in 2015. They’re all Facebook. The lesson here isn’t so much that publishers need a WhatsApp strategy, but more that publishers need to pay attention to what Zuck’s up to. For instance: Facebook will formally throw open the doors to its Instant Articles format in April at its F8 developers conference and start hosting content from publishers all over the world.
- Vanmag has 11k followers on instagram. Scout has 25k, covering a lot of the same stuff if we’re honest. Vanmag has access to the best photographers in the province; Scout has Andrew Morrison with an iPhone. It’s hard to compare an upstart with the established incumbent, but two things you know you have to do if you’re Scout are: a) build an audience, and b) build a brand. Instagram is clearly helping them do that.
- As organic reach on Facebook declines, Twitter clickthroughs stagnate, and the newer platforms prove slow to drive traffic, one neglected channel might be hiding in plain sight. This example is from my boss. We typically use LinkedIn for this [QUOTE] thought leadership, rather than the more substantive stuff we prefer to run on our owned channels. And LinkedIn’s Pulse algorithm is friendly to publishers, particularly click-y opinion content. Plus, if you’re looking for a way to bolster your search performance for more evergreen content, consider LinkedIn publisher a stealth link-building opportunity.
- It’s true that Pinterest is strongest as a sort of social catalog, favoring lifestyle content. But the kind of service and product content we often put in the front of book, is exactly what performs well on Pinterest. And when it does, it can be a huge traffic driver. Include a pin button on the images in your next holiday gift guide roundup or whatever and you can dramatically increase the social reach of the page. Sources: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/pinterest_categories.jpg http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pinterest-stats/6/
- Many of us probably wish email were dead, but sadly not even Slack seems able to keep us out of our inboxes. That’s bad news for our sanity and productivity, but it’s an opportunity for our publications. Email is the backdoor to mobile. It’s the most common single activity we do on our devices. That’s why so many publishers are investing in newsletters. They’re a low-friction conversion point that can really boost your engagement with your audience. Basically, if you ask your audience to do nothing else, ask them to sign up for your newsletter and you’ll go from desktop to mobile, one-time to recurring. http://www.statista.com/statistics/249761/most-popular-activities-carried-out-on-mobile-internet-devices/
- Show of hands: how many of you have read more than 1000 words at a time on your phone? Next time you’re on the skytrain, look around at the people on their phones. They’re deeply engaged in content. We used to assume mobile equals short. Not true. More accurately, mobile equals social and email. People will read and watch the long-form text and video content they discover via their feeds and their inboxes on their smartphones. Average session durations on most sites are increasingly the same on mobile and desktop.
- This one is a bit of a head-fake: of course knowing your audience is important. What I’m getting at here is that, if you’re not listening to your audience, you don’t know them as well as you think you do. As I see it, there are three key ways to listen and understand what kind of content they’re looking for. The first is search research. This one could be its own myth: the notion that SEO is dead. Although I’m not sure any good editor actually believes that…
- Here’s what they did do: Update older blog posts with new information, graphics Create SlideShares Republish content to Medium Republish content to LinkedIn Pulse or a LinkedIn group Republish content to Quora Create video content from blog posts Create audio content from blog posts Create ebooks based on Buffer blog posts Create new email drip campaigns based on Buffer blog posts Create infographics Create Pinterest images Experiment with email communication with our RSS list
- This chart is from Buzzsumo. We use them both for competitive analysis and for our own content analysis. So you’re looking at organic social shares across the five major networks for one of the channels I manage in one month last year. We typically see a high correlation between the time and effort we invest in research and the share rate.
- Ok, first thing: I needed an 11th myth. Everyone knows you’ve gotta go with odd numbers for your listicles. We try to follow the mcnugget numbers rule. I was hoping to open this one up to the floor for a brief debate on the merits of listicles. This myth may be proven or disproven.