Social Media

TikTok Updates Efforts to Counter Misinformation and Election Interference on its Platform

As the US tech giants weigh a possible takeover offer for the rising video app, TikTok has this week announced a new set of measures to better detect and remove misinformation on its platform, while it’s also, interestingly, working with experts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to protect against foreign influence. Interesting, in this sense, because TikTok has been identified by some experts as a distribution platform for pro-China propaganda – which, of course, TikTok is very keen to pushback against.

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Instagram is Reels Complicated Now

Instagram has something valuable that Facebook doesn’t: a young, trendsetting audience. That makes it an irresistible venue for striking blows against competitors. For Snapchat, Instagram has Stories. For YouTube, there’s IGTV, and for TikTok, there’s now Reels, which works almost exactly the same way as the popular but controversial video app. Through a lot of copycatting trial and error, the company has found that any new product that isn’t wrapped into either Facebook or Instagram’s network usually fails to get traction. That’s right. (Did you use Poke? Bolt? Slingshot? Lasso? Exactly.) Wrapping Reels within Instagram is the only way to guarantee at least a few hundred million people will use it fast enough to weaken TikTok at vulnerable moment.

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Snapchat Adds In-App Voter Registration Targeted at Young People

Snapchat is rolling out a slew of new tools and features to help prepare young people to vote in the November election. Snapchat has unparalleled reach into Gen Z and Millennial demographics. The tools it’s building are meant to guide those specific populations to more resources to help them register to vote and form a voting plan. Other platforms focusing on voter registration are doing so with a much wider user population in mind.

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Marketing

Can PageRank Predict the NHL Playoffs?

The 2020 NHL playoffs are (finally) underway. So in the spirit of debate, let’s find out if it’s possible to measure sports using SEO techniques – and ultimately predict the next NHL Stanley Cup champion.

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Search Console API Announcements

Over the past year, we have been working to upgrade the infrastructure of the Search Console API, and we are happy to let you know that we’re almost there. You might have already noticed some minor changes, but in general, our goal was to make the migration as invisible as possible. This change will help Google to improve the performance of the API as demand grows.

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Should You Ignore 2020 In Your 2021 Marketing Plan?

“How do I think about 2020 when building my 2021 marketing plan?” To be sure, 2020 has been a year. And it’s barely half over. So many related questions are still unanswered:

Will the continued spread of Covid-19 lead to renewed shutdowns?
Will we see a second wave of the pandemic during this winter’s cold and flu season?
Will consumers maintain their new online shopping habits even if the pandemic wanes?

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