Your alternative source for digital marketing news

Good evening and welcome to another 5:5 round-up of our hand picked digital marketing news stories. It has yet again been another interesting week in the world of digital marketing and we’ll be covering an array of stories from Snapchat triples video traffic to looking at how Yahoo Image Search adds personalised photos from Flickr.

Snapchat Triples Video Traffic And Is Now Getting Close To Facebook

According to a recent article from the Financial Times, Snapchat is closing the gap with Facebook on the number of video views. The numbers of views has tripled since May to 6 billion according to sources who are close to the company.

Facebook last week revealed their video views which had 8 billion daily views. Their daily video views has doubled since April this year, their viewing figures include both desktop and mobile.

As we all know, video is dominating social and video clips have therefore become an important source of revenue as FT have quite rightly put it that advertising rates tend to be higher for video compared with image and text based ads.

Do you use videos for your campaigns? Have they been a success?

Selling Watches In the Social Age – An Instagram Case Study

I stumbled across this story over the weekend via the Esquire site and thought this was worth sharing.

Like most businesses, you want to tell people about your product so you set up an advertising campaign (using billboards, magazines, etc), or if you own a shop you would create a display so potential customers could see your new product first hand.

Today that has changed and social now is a key driver for pushing sales and the watch businesses in particular have been using Instagram to get their message across.

A small group of watch obsessives on Instagram who have secured exclusives from an array of watch companies, post the latest images of new watches to their large audience of followers. More and more watch companies have caught on to this approach simply because it is a great tool for talking to their customers directly.

Instagram profiles such as @watchmania has nearly half a million followers and is known for posting about high quality close up shots of the latest watch models. A watch blogger from Switzerland known as @thehorophile has over 120k followers and focus his Instagram page on the internal mechanics of complicated timepieces.

Personal endorsement has today become the most powerful marketing tool in the luxury industry. Brands are now constantly using young and social savvy users to promote their products. As a result, more brands now have an Instagram budget as they have realised the importance of using it to communicate with their audience and promote their latest products.

Do you have an Instagram budget for your client or brand? Has it been a major tool for increasing engagement?

Image Source : Esquire UK

The latest Google News of The Week

As I normally say in the majority of the 5:5 posts I write that there never is a dull moment (whether that’s in marketing or tech), Google has been very active in the past seven days from bug seeking, anti-trust fine slating, and cable criticising.

Starting with the bug seeking. Google’s Project Zero experts uncovered 11 major flaws in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, the most serious one allowed file directories to be traversed.

“There is a process running a system on the device that scans for a zip file in /sdcard/Download/cred.zip and unzips the file,” said Project Zero’s Natalie Silvanovich. “Unfortunately, the API used to unzip the file does not verify the file path, so it can be written in unexpected locations.” (V3, November 2015)

Moving onto the anti-trust story, Google recently described the EU’s anti-trust fine as inappropriate as the search giant does not believe that is behaves in anti-competitively in the European market.

Google have mentioned that their search services are free and that is doesn’t have a trading agreement with users and therefore should be not be accused of having anti-trust activities in Europe.

Tech news site The INQUIRER reported that an engineer at Google warned that cheap USB Type C cables are set to become the standard for future smartphones can cause damage and errors.

So what’s the issue? Using the USB Type C as a power source in the main problem. According to V3 and the Google engineer, the standard requires a 3A supply with a specific resistor value to limit the current. An incorrect resistor could therefore severely damage the device.

Do Google+ Hashtags Increase Visibility?

Sticking with more Google based news and one for all you die hard G+ fans out there (yes really!) that there are theories that the way Google Plus showcases content by using hashtags can result in a much higher visibility as mentioned in Brent Csutoras‘ article for Search Engine Journal.

As an avid user of Google Plus and totally agree what Brent mentions in his article that Google Plus is arguably the most interesting when it comes to using hashtags in posts.

If you don’t know already, it is far from just a social network (although Google has stripped it from certain features) it connects with the likes of Hangouts and Gmail for example and Google’s search algorithms can use social sharing as an indicator to determine the trustworthiness of the content.

U.S. company Stone Temple Consulting conducted a Google Plus hashtag experiment for 63 days. Below are their results :

Total Posts : 72

Total Posts with hashtags : 360

Total Posts without hashtags : 360

Stats with all hashtags

+1s : 21693

comments : 944

shares : 3574

Stats with all posts without hashtags

+1s : 17600

comments : 1063

shares : 3708

So what did the experiment reveal? The test was inconclusive, however, using hashtags can be more of an efficient method of gaining exposure on Google Plus, although it was worth noting that in your posts you will have to go further. Make sure you are connecting with the right target audience you want to connect with and join relevant communities, most importantly connect with influencers on G Plus. If you are interested in this study click here.

Image Source : Search Engine Journal

Yahoo Image Search Adds Personalised Photos From A User’s Flickr Collection

Search engine giant Yahoo announced recently that they have integrated Flickr images with Yahoo Search so when a user is logged into their Yahoo account, Yahoo will personalise image search with their personal and friend’s photos (as seen below).

Yahoo said, “if you’re signed in, your search will display personalized results from Flickr, including a selection of your own photos, images from people you follow and top public photos on Flickr.” (Search Engine Land, November 2015)

Image Source : Search Engine Land

Have you tried this personalised feature with your Yahoo account?

What Are Your Thoughts?

Which of our hand picked stories has interested you the most? As usual we’d love to hear from you feel free to leave a comment on our Facebook and Google Plus pages. If you prefer to tweet us, again feel free to tweet James, Mark, and myself (David Dhannoo).