Digital Now Accounts for 57% of Daily Media Consumption
Consumers now spend more time each day consuming digital than traditional media, according to the most recent GlobalWebIndex. Overall, consumers now spend an average of 10.7 hours a day with all forms of media and 5.6 hours of that on digital. People are turning to online channels for radio, TV, social and other forms of content consumption in record numbers, especially in China and UAE. Social increasingly dominates the time that consumers spend online; globally, social accounts for 48% of total digital time.
Digital 2013 – A Global Analysis of How Consumers Spend Their Media Time is based on more than 32,000 internet users from 31 countries, with surveys answered in the final quarter of 2012.
Brand Videos Increasingly Valuable to Decision Making Consumers
Online video isn’t just a trend; it’s become the way many consumers choose to consume information as they make purchasing decisions. Approximately 57% of consumer respondents to a recent survey by e-commerce services company Invodo said that product videos make them more confident in a purchase and less likely to return an item. This new finding marks a 5% increase over one year ago. Brands will also be interested to know that 41% of consumers are more likely to share product videos than other product content.
LinkedIn & Twitter Increasingly Effective for SMB Marketers
LinkedIn and Twitter have enjoyed the greatest surge in the proportion of SMB marketers who find the social networks effective as marketing tools. LinkedIn is effective for 29% of Constant Contact survey respondents, an increase of 19% over May 2012. Meanwhile, 25% say Twitter is effective, up from the 7% positive response in May.
Facebook still rules the social media marketing kingdom, with 82% of respondents saying it’s an effective tool for their brand.
Google News Doesn’t Want Your Sponsored Content
Consider this a warning to publications of all sizes: you’re free to do what you want within your own editorial guidelines, but Google doesn’t want to see sponsored content in Google News search results. In fact, adding paid content to the mix could get your site removed from Google News. In a post on the Google News blog, Sr. Director of News & Social Products Richard Gingras warns:
“Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.
Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines. Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.”
What can you do ensure you don’t color outside the lines? Gingras explains:
“If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.”
Mobile & Tablet PPC Ad Growth Strong
Marketers continue to invest heavily in mobile and tablet PPC ads, though overall paid search spend was static this quarter, according to IgnitionOne’s Q1 2013 Digital Marketing Report. According to researchers, overall spending on paid search ads from brands rose 2% in Q1 2013. The Yahoo Bing Network showed the greatest gains at 11%. Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost explains, search engine marketers spent more on advertising in Q1 to run ads on smartphone and tablet devices, even while total search spend flatlined. Spending on both devices rose nearly equal amounts, with tablets up 112% and smartphones up 113% YoY. The growth cannibalized PC budgets, she claimed.
LinkedIn Makes Social Search Smarter
Last year, LinkedIn processed over 5.7 billion internal searches on their platform. This week, the professional social network announced a streamlined search experience that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies to display on one results page. Other new features are standard in web search but certainly welcome in social search, including autocomplete, suggested searches, more personalization in their algorithm, and automated alerts to changing search results.
Did you see an interesting search, social or content story this week? Share your favorite in the comments!
