SNAPCHAT
Snapchat’s bet that the world will Snap out of it and return to in-person meetups
It’s been so long that even the words “in-person meetup” sound foreign… Those were the days!
Snapchat’s betting on those days coming back. The company recently filed a patent for an Events functionality within its app. Shoutout to Patent Drop for the find.
That’s not all that our favorite white-and-yellow ghost did. Snap also acquired StreetCred, a New York-based startup building a platform for location data.
These two moves show Snapchat is planning for a future where in-person interaction returns to what was normal back in 2019.
Snapchat or not, we’re definitely looking forward to some in-person conferences and meetups in 2021. Fingers crossed!
MARKETING
One more thing about gaming…
Yesterday, we got Facebook’s numbers on gaming and they were impressive. The summary: There’s no avoiding gaming going forward – lean into it in your marketing!
Now, Twitter and Twitch have some news on the topic too…
Let’s start off with Twitter.
- In 2020, there were over 2 billion tweets about gaming. That’s like a tweet for every Facebook user!
- It was the overall 6th most followed topic on Twitter. That’s very high on the list given everything else that happened in 2020.
- There’s no info with regards to people reached, but it must be impressive. Plus, it’s all organic – Twitter is one of the social media platforms where organic reach is still doing well.
- Check out the full report here.
And what’s the news from Twitch?
- There’s a new record for concurrent viewers – 2 million people watched TheGrefg (a Spanish streamer and owner of EU Heretics) unveiling his Fortnite skin. Yes, 2 million people tuned in live at the same time to see an in-game skin… To compare, the NBA Finals in 2020 had an average of 7.5 million viewers across all games.
- There were over 17 billion hours of content watched on Twitch last year, 83 percent higher than 2019. Talk about attention!
So, our conclusion is pretty clear: Gaming content has the attention, and marketers have to figure out how to get a piece of that attention.
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SEO
Fighting the increasing cost of paid social media channels
With advertising costs sharply increasing, more and more marketers are turning to organic search.
That’s exactly what Jason Wong did for his eyelash e-commerce store. As he shows in this thread, you don’t need to over-complicate things.
SEO can look messy to an outsider, but there are ways to simplify it. Jason Wong’s strategy is based on just three points:
- Backlinks: Jason identifies relevant blogs with high domain authority and contributes guest posts there that hyperlink back to his site. This tells Google that they’re a trusted site, since another high-authority site is referring back to them.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): A fast site is important for ranking well, and AMP allows your website’s pages to get opened almost instantaneously.
- Keyword optimized blog posts: Every month, they share blog posts optimized for targeted keywords. They create 1,500 words blog posts revolving around their product, keywords, and link them back to their site and other blog posts.
These three activities combined helped Jason Wong increase the ranking of their website for branded search term terms as well as relevant keywords to their brand. Also allowing them to gain Featured Snippets.
And the best part about this thread is that these three strategies can be implemented almost by anyone.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: The Search Console has a few data improvements we know you’ll be happy to read about.
BIG TECH: After the mess in the past few days, will the EU be the first major player to push for more regulation of big tech (and social media) companies?
SEO: A simple but kind of noteworthy reminder from Kristina Azarenko to setup redirects whenever you change image URLs so you don’t lose image traffic.
YOUTUBE: Post-Roll Ads will be turned on by default on all videos elgible to serve ads.
E-COMMERCE: How do you deal with returns? For Amazon and Walmart it is cheaper to refund the purchase price and let customers keep the products rather than managing the return process.
BRAIN TEASER
The last man on earth sits alone in a room. The phone rings. Who’s calling?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Is your Doodle good enough for Google?
The annual Doodle for Google competition is open.
If you’re a student based in the U.S., Guam, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, you can submit your entry until 26th February 2021.
“Wait a second, what’s a Doodle?”
At this point, you’ve definitely seen a Doodle lurking around the internet somewhere. It’s what Google replaces their logo with on certain occasions. You see a Doodle for New Year’s, Valentine’s Day and many national holidays.
And with this competition, your design could be on Google’s home page for a whole day!
Aside from paying in exposure (we know, every designer’s dream), they are also giving a $30,000 scholarship to the winner and a $50,000 tech grant for their school.
Feeling creative? You can submit your work here.