Daily Minute Master Series – August 12, 2019

Social Media

Facebook Takes First Steps Towards Building a Dedicated, ‘Trusted’ News Section

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is now offering news outlets “millions of dollars” for the rights to put their content in a dedicated news section, which Facebook is looking to launch before the end of the year. The proposed new News section – essentially Facebook Watch for News – would serve as a means to fill this need, while it would also enable Facebook to maintain some level of control over the content displayed by choosing the partners it works with, and highlights within the stream. That, in itself, could still cause Facebook headaches – just this week, reports suggested that The White House is considering an Executive Order which would task the FCC with developing new regulations that would determine when and how social media companies filter posts, videos or articles on their platforms. If Facebook were to create a whole news section of vetted partners, that could lead to more accusations of bias. Through Facebook Watch, the company is actually already showcasing selected news sources, with Facebook working with several news publishers on Watch-exclusive programming. If more people are looking for news content, and Facebook can find a way to give it to them in a format that they like, Facebook wins through increased engagement and ad exposure.

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Twitter’s Testing a New DM Search Option Among Various Other Tweaks

Twitter is currently testing out a new option which would enable users to search through their DMs. The functionality is not amazing at this stage, you would be able to search via profile name, and likely by Twitter handle. Which is better than nothing, but a lot of the time when you do want to go searching through your DMs, its because you’re looking for something that someone has sent to you, so it would be more helpful to be able to search by message content. That doesn’t appear to be an option in this current phase of testing, though you would imagine its something that Twitter is also looking into, in order to make it a truly valuable addition. Twitter’s also now testing an option which would enable you to subscribe to a tweet discussion in order to get notified of any replies, while it’s also been refining smaller elements within its redesign – including its text sizing options, which have been a key pain point for many. None of these updates, in itself, is a major functional shift – like, say, editing tweets would be – but it’s clear that Twitter’s exploring a range of options aimed at improving the on-platform experience, and boosting engagement. 

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Marketing

Google’s Mueller Asked About Increasing E-A-T with Structured Data

In a Google Webmaster Hangout, someone asked Google’s Webmaster Trends Analysis John Mueller about schema structured data and Expertise, Authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Structured data is simply a way to communicate information. It doesn’t communicate signals of quality. Mueller answered that using structured data was up to the publisher and that authorship information was gathered by Google “through a number of ways.” It must be pointed out that putting information in the structured data that does not exist in the web page itself can be viewed as spam and result in a manual action. Structured data is not a piñata filled with candy, waiting for Google to come along.  It is just a way to communicate information that is visible to users on the web page itself. John Mueller himself said that Google tries to identify E-A-T “partially through the content directly.”

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Alexa devices maintain 70% market share in U.S. according to survey

Based on its newest survey, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners said “the US installed base of smart speaker devices is 76 million units, up from 70 million units in the March 2019 quarter and 50 million units in the June 2018 quarter.” Amazon has consistently and aggressively discounted its Echo Dot to maintain and grow its share of the smart speaker market – most recently, during Prime Day. Indeed, the company said that Echo Dot was its top-selling device during the sales event. Google has largely matched Amazon’s pricing to keep pace. In the broader virtual assistant market, a recent survey by Microsoft found that consumers were using Siri and Google Assistant equally (36%), followed by Alexa (25%) and then Cortana (19%). Unfortunately, the survey didn’t distinguish carefully between virtual assistant usage on smartphones and smart speakers.The realization of the full potential of virtual assistant powered devices depends on greater adoption of smart displays or the tighter integration of smartphones with smart speakers, which Google is trying to do. The first generation Echo was introduced in 2014. It will probably take another five years for these devices to mature and become viable marketing, commerce or customer service tools – if they ever will. 

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