Daily Minute Master Series – September 6, 2019

Social Media

LinkedIn Adds Auto-Generated Alt-Text Tags to Uploaded Images

LinkedIn has expanded its alt text capacity with its new automatic alt text generation process. With LinkedIn adding alt text for all images, whether you’ve added them in or not, will give the platform more data points to refer to when displaying relevant content. How accurate those auto captions are, and how exactly LinkedIn is looking to use that data, are both obviously significant factors here, but it would make sense for LinkedIn to use the alt text field as an extra qualifier for search matches where possible. We don’t know for sure if LinkedIn is looking to use these tags beyond improving user experience, but there are some pretty good reasons why you should be checking in on your LinkedIn image tags, and ensuring the automated notes match the context of your updates. 

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Twitter’s Testing New Tabs for Lists and Bookmarks, New ‘Topics’ Shortcut

Social media expert Matt Navarra spotted two new Twitter tabs in testing – one which links straight through to your tweet bookmarks, and another to make it easier to view your lists.  There are two new tabs added onto the end of the display, which, if rolled out, would be a major update, given that Twitter has maintained its simple, four tab display since basically its inception. The fact that Twitter’s testing a 50% increase in those tabs underlines just how much it’s looking to improve tweet discovery, and raise awareness of the real-time discussions flowing through its app. In addition to this, Navarra has also noted that Twitter’s testing out a quicklink to list creation within the Lists tab, and a new ‘Topics’ sidebar, another way to connect you through to more tweet content.

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Google’s Assistant-everywhere strategy reminiscent of old site search playbook

Google’s current effort to distribute the Assistant across an ecosystem of third party devices is reminiscent of the Google site search strategy. At CES this year, Google announced a range of third party appliance and electronics manufacturers that are adding the Assistant into their devices as a voice-enabled controller and UI. Thursday it added to that growing list of manufacturers incorporating the Google Assistant (e.g., TVs, smart displays and headphones). Google has struggled to gain market share in the U.S. against Alexa with direct device sales. Alexa still maintains a dominant share of about 70% in the smart speaker/display market. But third party device and appliance integration can and will increase Google Assistant’s reach and ubiquity. The drive for Google Assistant ubiquity gives the company more reach and an arguably broader array of options to generate revenue, beyond direct device sales, including audio ads, sponsorships and transactions.

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Marketing

Google adds new movie structured data

Google now officially has new developer documentation for structured data around movie markup. The new documentation shows you how to markup your movie lists with structured data so users can explore movies through Google Search. This new documentation outlines that title of the movie, director of the movie, and an image of the movie are the item properties supported in this markup. Image and name are required, whereas aggregate rating, dateCreated, director and review are recommended but not required. If your web site has details about movies, you may want to consider adding this markup to your movie listings. You should review this documentation and add the relevant markup.

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