JB’s Digital Update 29th Nov 2022

This is a very interesting report which you need to spend a while reading and digesting. The Widely Viewed Content Report covers organic content viewed in the feeds of US users over the most recent quarter. It has a few really interesting mini-facts and a number of items you can draw a reasonable marketing conclusions from. 

The factettes:

• The most viewed posts make up 0.05% of posts viewed. Even going super-viral will show your post to 1:2000 users.
• 30% of content is still “friend original”, and 20% is friend reshares. Your friends are still important, and still active.
• 90% of content viewed was a post without a link. Perhaps self-fulfilling, but posts with links do not get seen.
• The biggest overall domains are social video sites, followed by news sites, with a couple of ecommerce sites thrown in. Video content gets shown on Facebook.
• The biggest links tend to be celeb, or TikTok focused.
• The biggest pages are pretty varied in tone, content and audience. 

So. With that in mind, one post if not likely to make you FB famous, but some may, especially if you are a TikTokking celeb who gets their YouTube content reshared to a wide group of friends. There are a lot of nuggets in there to digest for how to approach Facebook in the next little while. 

Contact me if you want to talk about building audience and revenue from social media.

Google has released an excellent in-depth documentation library covering almost every aspect of its various search activities. Like a lot of Google documentation it comes from a technocratic background which means if you speak the language, it’s straightforward to grasp and understand (mainly), but if you don’t it can be a mish-mash of jargon and mysterious concepts. ‘

Given how large and complex Google’s system’s are, so of this is likely to be out of date at any one time, or slightly inaccurate as Google runs UI, UX and systems tests constantly. 

Overall though, this is a really good detailed resource which explains an awful lot – especially about the various ways you can now appear in search. 

Contact me to discuss all the ways you can be found on Google search and where you’re missing out.

There was a small kerfuffle when Gary Ilyes’s comments that “60% of the internet is duplicate” were taken by some to mean that 60% of the internet was content scraped and regurgitated by ne’er-do-wells (some is). The short answer is it’s not, but this headline doesn’t give much room for context.

There is an awful lot of duplication from unredirected domain variants: http / https / www / non-www – Google counts those as 4 separate URLs. There is also an awful lot from query string / UserID URLs which make it into the crawl list and need to be de-duplicated. There is still some more from country variants which don’t use href.lang and yet more from content aggregators. 

Google uses checksums, or hashes to spot duplicate content, as a very crude example: how many bytes, multiplied by how many href tags, multiplied by how many heading tags would give a fairly unique number, even with billions of documents. Google’s hash will be more complex than that, but it is a very simple and effective way of identifying content which is likely to be the same. And when you drill down into excluding headers, footers, sidebars etc and use the same methodology, it becomes very straight-forward to spot duplicated content across different sites. 

So, the learning from this is that sometimes an attention-grabbing statistic in a presentation might get a little out of hand, unless you add a dab of context to the shoutline. Always remember that when creating your presentations. 

Contact me to discuss duplicated content issues and how Google works.

Remember Bing? That little-known search engine that does about 15 searches a month? Well now it seems to be promoting / working with TikTok to send traffic their way from the Bing search results.

This isn’t the first time a search engine has worked hand-in-hand with a social engine (Google and the Twitter “firehose” spring to mind), but it is a bit of a surprise to see Bing (small) and TikTok (massive) working together. 

If you are showing keyword / topic related vids on TikTok, there is a chance your video will surface in Bing search and get a few more views. As a freebie, that’s nothing to be sneezed at.

Contact JB to talk about creating great content for social media (and search).

Google Discover has updated a key bit of UI to change More Recommendations on its results interface to More Products – making it slightly clearer this is a pseudo shopping app and you should buy now via Google. 

I’m struggling to get my head around whether Google Discover has users after the demise of its earlier iterations like Google Now and the old, old, personalised homepage. It’s possible that it does, but with Google’s history of killing  products and interfaces, you have to wonder how long it will be around.

Contact me to discover how to make more revenue from ecommerce operations.