Daily Minute Master Series – July 18, 2019

Social Media

Instagram’s Test of Removing Like Counts is Being Expanded to More Regions

Instagram this week is expanding its test of removing like and video view counts to six more regions, including Ireland, Australia and Brazil. Instagram has said that it’s removing likes as part of a broader focus on user wellbeing. Individual users can still see their total like counts in the test, but they’re not publicly displayed, which, Mosseri says, reduces social comparison, and its associated negative impacts. It’ll also be interesting to note the overall effect on like counts – will the lack of a total number increase people’s propensity to like a post, or reduce it? If it leads to more likes, you can bet Instagram will be keen to keep the change, regardless of the other impacts. But if it is fully rolled out, it will lead to other challenges. At the moment, brands looking to work with influencers can use post like counts as a measure in their assessment – someone with a million followers, but four likes on each post, is probably not the ‘influencer’ they claim to be. With this change, you won’t be able to see that. You can still use comments as an engagement measure, and you can ask for engagement stats from the influencer his or herself, based on their analytics. But it adds another challenge, which is a subsidiary consideration for marketers, in particular, to keep in mind. 

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Twitter Announces New ‘LiveCut’ Video Editing and Publishing Tool, Which Will Replace SnappyTV

Twitter has this week announced the end of its SnappyTV live video editing tool, and the addition of LiveCut, it’s replacement option, which is fully integrated into Twitter’s Media Studio. SnappyTV is a dedicated tool which live video producers can use to create highlight clips from their broadcasts, in order to share them via tweet and boost engagement. If you’ve seen any sports highlights embedded within a tweet, they likely came via SnappyTV. The new tools enable you to edit clips from live broadcasts, while there are also new scheduling options to help better plan your video content. It’s essentially the same functionality as SnappyTV, but better integrated into Twitter’s existing media management tool. As noted, it’s not for everyone – not all users will have access, and not everyone is obviously broadcasting live video via Twitter in the first place. But for those who are looking to make the most of their live content, it could prove to be a valuable, helpful option in planning and strategy.

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Marketing

Emoji SEO presents opportunities for video

Emoji search has been supported in Bing and Yelp since 2014, and Google has allowed it since 2016. One might assume that searching Google or Bing using emojis would lead to the same results as using the text equivalent (e.g., searching 🍩 would deliver the same results as “donut”), but that isn’t the case. For the most part, emoji-based queries in the search engines yield results that pertain to the emoji itself, but there are interesting opportunities for marketers, particularly with regards to videos in the search results. For emoji-based queries, the website results are typically from emoji resource sites, whereas the video carousel tends to include videos with the emoji itself or the word that matches the emoji in their titles. Those with the queried emojis in the titles often appear ahead of videos without them. Adding an emoji to your video’s title may increase its visibility in the video carousel. Users can search using emojis on both Google and Bing. Including them in your titles, meta description or within your content may increase your organic visibility when emojis are used in search queries. At this point, the optimization opportunity appears to be largest in video search. 

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DuckDuckGo Now Handles 40 Million Searches a Day

DuckDuckGo was recently profiled in the New York Times, where it was revealed the search engine is now handling around 40 million searches a day. At last count, in January 2019, DuckDuckGo was serving around 34 million searches a day. This continues the steady growth of the niche, privacy-focused search engine. This leads to the inevitable comparison of DuckDuckGo versus Google. Though DuckDuckGo is growing, Google still holds a decidedly larger share of the search market. That may always be the case, as DuckDuckGo’s focus on user privacy comes with limitations. The important thing, at least from a business standpoint, is whether DuckDuckGo is turning a profit. DuckDuckGo has been profitable for the past 5 years, according to the Times’ report, and recent growth should help ensure that remains the case for the time being.

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