Daily Minute Master Series – May 28, 2019
Social Media
Instagram Adds Alternate Stories Color Notifier for Pride Month
To mark Pride Month 2019, Instagram is adding a new rainbow color ring for Stories which include a Pride-related hashtag. The new option, as noted, will be activated by relevant hashtags, turning your Stories activation border in a multi-colored circle, as opposed to the generic Instagram color tone one. The new Stories ring hasn’t officially been announced as yet, so it may be part of a larger feature release coming this week. It’s an interesting addition though, and one that could open the door to alternate color options for the Stories ring to make them stand out. It could, for example, be used to help users understand what different stories are about – a story about a breaking news event, which uses the relevant hashtag, could be given a different color, helping users find more relevant content in their Stories list.
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Marketing
Starting July 1, all new sites will be indexed using Google’s mobile-first indexing
Google has announced that all new websites “previously unknown to Google Search” will be indexed using mobile-first indexing starting on July 1. Older websites that are still not being indexed using mobile-first indexing will not be switched yet to mobile-first indexing on July 1st but be moved when those web sites are ready to be moved to mobile-first indexing. Unlike old web sites that get notifications when they are moved over, Google won’t send notifications to new web sites because that will be the default state. Mobile-first indexing is simply how Google crawls and indexes the web. Instead of looking at the desktop version of the page, Google looks at the mobile version of the page. In more simple terms, Google is crawling and indexing your web page based on how it renders on a mobile phone versus a desktop computer. Now over 50% of what Google indexes is indexed over mobile-first indexing. If you launch a new website that doesn’t work well in mobile, then you may have issues with indexing and ranking in Google. Make sure to test your site and build them in a mobile-first manner.
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People Are Spending More Time on Instagram, at the Expense of Facebook and Snapchat
Adults in the U.S. will spend the same number of average minutes per day on Facebook and Snapchat this year as they did in 2018, but they will devote more time to Instagram, according to the latest figures from eMarketer. The consultancy principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a release, “Features like Stories, influencer content and video are all contributing to more engagement and a slow but steady uptick in time spent on Instagram”. Williamson said of Facebook, “Facebook’s continued loss of younger adult users, along with its focus on downranking clickbait posts and videos in favor of those that create ‘time well spent,’ resulted in less daily time spent on the platform in 2018 than we had previously expected. Less time spent on Facebook translates into fewer chances for marketers to reach the network’s users.” She added, “Gains in digital video viewing are putting pressure on social time and gaming is also creating new competition for user attention.
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23% of Small Businesses Say Visual Content is Most Effective
A recent study shows that nearly a quarter of small business owners believe visual content is highly effective. This data comes from a survey featured on Visual Objects, a sister website of Clutch and The Manifest, that shows how businesses publish website content in 2019. A recurring theme throughout the study is the emphasis on publishing new content regularly. Currently, almost three-quarters of small businesses (74%) publish website content monthly. When small business owners were asked what types of content they publish, these said: Company information – 67%, Visuals – 58% and Product descriptions – 51%.
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