Your Alternative Source For Digital Marketing News

Hi guys and welcome to another 5:5 digital marketing news stories in 5 minutes. Once again, it has been another fascinating week in the world of digital marketing, this week we look at an array of stories from female celebs dominate Yahoo search this year to looking at the Google Penguin Update (looks like you webmasters will have to be patient with the latest update!). Hope you enjoy!

Females dominate Yahoo Search in 2015

Yahoo recently published its top searches for 2015 and from looking at the results, 2015 was very female dominated in search.

The top search results was on the tragic death Bobbi Christina Brown, the daughter of the late singer Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.

Other female celebs that were featured included Jennifer Anniston, Katy Perry, Caitlyn Jenner, and UFC fighter Ronda Rousey (pictured). The only non-celeb searches were iPhone and Minecraft based (as seen below).

Yahoo’s Top Searches of 2015

Bobbi Kristina Brown iPhone Caitlyn Jenner Kendall Jenner Minecraft Jennifer Aniston Kim Kardashian Katy Perry Ronda Rousey Farrah Abraham

(Search Engine Land, December, 2015)

The search engine giant also put together a list of categories such as top images on Flicker and top solo artists on Tumblr. It was interesting to see that in the search query category, that the top search query was “How do you tie a tie?”

If you would like to know more about Yahoo’s top searches in 2015 click here.

Image Source : Fox Sports

Facebook introduces Live Video

Facebook has started to test live video, so far, this has only been available to a small amount of people who live in the U.S. and also some global celebs.

Live allows you to write a quick description and choose your desired audience that you wish to share your video with. During the broadcast, you will be able to see the amount of live viewers, the names of friends watching, and also view comments in real time. I recently saw a Facebook Live broadcast with Inter Milan midfielder Felipe Melo, and have to say I real like the concept of watching a real time video via Facebook. You can watch Felipe get to grips with Live here.

It has been reported that Facebook is also introducing a new way to share experiences captured with a phone’s camera by grouping photos and videos that were taken together into a scrolling, moving collage. (Advanced Television, December 2015).

What are your thoughts on using Facebook live video? Will you be trialling the video feature when it launches?

Image Source : BBC

Twitter Sharing Drops 11% After Twitter Kills Share Counts

Shareaholic reported at the end of the last week that it’s seeing 11.28 percent less sharing using the Twitter button on its network since Twitter turned off tweet count totals on Nov. 20. (Marketing Land, December 2015).

The stats indicate that the reduction is linked to “share of voice,” before the 20th of November, stats from shareaholic show that Twitter had a 12.39 percent Shareaholic share of voice average before they turned off tweet count totals. After that period, the number dropped by 11%.

As Marketing Land writer Martin Beck quite rightly points out, that turning off the tweet count totals will have a lot of critics, particularly from the likes of publishers who strongly believe that by having a large number of article shares indicates an important signal of the article’s popularity. Trust and authority are definitely key drivers for readers to share and amplify created content.

Image Source : Marketing Land

A Fascinating Insight On Snapchat’s Move Into Real-Time News

An app that you would primarily associate with teens, Snapchat has now moved into another area, the world of real-time, crowdsourced news. As Fortune have put it, the results have been fascinating and disturbing, depending on your take.

Snapchat has previously experimented with news aggregation in the past, however, the latest example and most powerful was shown last week when a mass shooting occurred in San Bernardino, California.

This “Snapchat Story” as it seems to have been dubbed was pulled together from various Snapchat users who were near the horrific ordeal when it occurred creating a live stream of pictures and clips from people who were near the shooting location.

For those of you who don’t use the app, Snapchat creates stories based around geographic locations with random content uploaded by users in a specific area. Snapchat usually employs GPS location tools to show that kind of story only to those who are in that specific location. Because of the severity of the ordeal in San Bernardino, the stream was available to everyone in the U.S. .

The way that these images have been collected in real time, there’s something very compelling about the way these images were broadcasted as Mathew Igram mentions in his Fortune article. It is powerful in the way that these users are taking these images live and we are the spectators as the incident unfolds and nothing that we are viewing has been toned down or edited as we normally see on the 6’o clock news.

What are your thoughts of using Snapchat for real time news coverage?

Image Source : Fortune

Google Penguin Algorithm Update Not Happening Until Next Year

Our last digital marketing news story of the day and one in particular for the SEO community, it looks like the Google Penguin algorithm won’t be waddling around until March next year.

According to Search Engine Land, the next Penguin update is expected to be real-time, meaning as soon as Google discovers the links to your site, be they bad or good links, the Penguin algorithm will analyze those links in real time, and ranking changes should happen in almost real time.

So for the time being it looks like webmasters will have to be very patient. If you would like to know more about Google’s algorithms, we recommend reading this handy article by Moz.

Image Source : Social Media Examiner

What Are Your Thoughts?

Which story interested you the most in today’s 5:5 digital marketing news round-up? Feel free to comment via our Facebook and Google Plus pages. Alternatively, if you prefer to tweet us, feel free to to tweet James, Mark, and myself (David Dhannoo).