In The Headlights: September 11, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

While I’ve gently poked fun at press releases which use terms like “we’re excited to announce”, I am genuinely excited to share with you our latest research paper, Social Networks 2020. Over the last month, we’ve been compiling millions of data points about people’s search intent with regard to major social networks, searches like “delete Facebook” or “create Tiktok account”. These searches indicate solid intent, and we took the data and forecasted it forward for all of 2020 to find out what social networks are likely to grown, and what are likely to contract.

The short answer is that private communities (like our Slack group, which you should join, it’s free!) and YouTube will earn the most net growth. This is by no means to say that Facebook is going to vanish overnight; 2 billion people won’t suddenly stop a prime addictive behavior. But it does mean as a marketer that you should be, to quote Gretzsky, skating to where the puck is going.

Download your copy of the full research paper here >>.

It contains all our recommendations for exactly how to leverage these trends for your business and specific actions you should take.

Want to talk about it afterwards? We’re doing a webinar with Talkwalker to review the findings and discuss in depth on September 24 at 1 PM Eastern.

If you’re in the New York City area on September 24, come meet us in person for a live, real-life AMA on the paper at Talkwalker headquarters in the evening. Register here for the in-person event.

This week’s Bright Idea is our full talk from INBOUND19. Watch this talk by Trust Insights CEO Katie Robbert on practical applications of AI and machine learning for inbound marketing, and some of the known challenges you’ll run into.

Watch the session now!

In the rear view this week, we asked our Slack community what they wanted most – more social data, more SEO data, etc. and you voted for noteworthy statistics about the top performing content on the web. Using the AHREFs SEO tool, we pulled the top 76,000 articles by traffic generated to find:

The day of week content earned the most traffic? Surprisingly, Sunday, followed by Saturday, with top posts earning a median 4,628 clicks.
The day of week content earned the least traffic? Tuesdays, with a median of 1,825 clicks.
Of the top articles, the median number of words in an article was 472 words.
The most clicked-on articles were hosted on sites with a median domain authority of 85.
The most clicked-on articles had a median of 76 social shares per article.
The most clicked-on articles had a median of 6 referring domains to the article.
The most clicked-on topics were political news, new seasons of shows on streaming video services, the NFL football season, Hurricane Dorian, and Minecraft.

Methodology: Trust Insights used AHREFs to extract 76,075 unique articles from the web published in the last 30 days that had never been republished, restricted to live URLs in the English language with at least 500 views and a traffic value of $50 or more based on AHREFs internal data. The data was extracted from AHREFs on August 9, 2019.

Fun tip: when relevant, use hashtags in blog post titles. When people lazily auto-share your post with tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, your post uses the hashtag.

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week. It uses machine learning for the automated one-sentence summaries.

Facebook accidentally exposed over 400 million user records, but hey, at least they have a new dating app BGR: The records included Facebooks numerical ID for each account making it trivial to determine which record belongs to which specific user on the social network as well as the phone number associated with them.
Slack’s First Earnings Beat: Cut Them Some Slack?: Security and reliability are the last threats for Slack as the company has had to deal with some baggage regarding threats as well as privacy.
10 Ways You Can Tackle Customer Engagement on LinkedIn in Less Time: In the inbox, you can read, dismiss, like, or respond as necessary or change the display to view comments that are new, that youve already reviewed, or that youve assigned to a team member.

Media and Content

Editorial Content Plan: The Essential Guide: And while certain skill sets like writing, editing, and design are essential for every content marketing operation, others may be nice-to-have additions when you are ready to take your content programs further.
How Digital Retailers Opening Physical Stores Increases Sales: An interesting finding of the paper was that there were a lot of customers who were willing to go to a showroom knowing that they were not going to be able to take home their product that day.
[5 Secrets For Creating More Shareable Content by @lucyrk78](https://trustinsights.news/ok8ja): According to Adweek, user-generated content results in 29% higher web conversions and 92% of consumers turn to people they know for referrals above any other source.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

AI identifies drug candidate in weeks: The researchers trained their algorithm using databases of known DDR1 inhibitors, kinase inhibitors, nonkinase inhibitors, and patent-protected molecules.
Machine learning and its radical application to severe weather prediction: Now that high-resolution satellite images are captured every few minutes and generating enormous volumes of data to analyze, there is a need to develop innovative new ways of extracting practical information from them, says LEcuyer.
Debates Over ZAO and FaceApp Usher in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism: In China, ZAO raised more hardheaded concerns, with the users rightfully suspecting that unattended deep-fakes could be used by swindlers to crack their Face ID protected payment apps or allow for even more sophisticated ploys.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Microsoft introduces XLOOKUP in Excel and it’s a big deal for data reporting: Now, after more than 34 years as a cornerstone lookup function, VLOOKUP is making way for a new successor.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What Does It Mean?: New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained.
College Grads Need These Data Science Skills: Metis also teaches all these skills at our data science bootcamp and bootcamp prep courses, which assign pre-work before the bootcamp starts, Reif says.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

We audited Google Ad recommendations: What we learned will surprise you: Although all of that makes a big impact on paid search performance, Google says this particular recommendation only increases the retailers optimization score by 0.1 percent.
Google adds new movie structured data: 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.
Google’s latest free tools tap into big data without destroying your privacy: Differential privacy combats this with its own mathematical maneuvers, which analyze how easy it would be to identify individuals in a data set and then remove some or all of their data.

Business and Leadership

No Degree Needed: Do These Things to Get a Job in Digital Marketing.: These days, companies are hiring for niche jobs and recruiting people who are specialists in a specific area.
Digital divide will worsen inequalities, without better global cooperation: The United States and China create the vast majority of wealth in the digital economy, the study reveals, and the two countries account for 75% of all patents related to blockchain technologies, 50% of global spending on the Internet of Things (IoT), more than 75% of the cloud computing market, and as much as 90% per cent of the market capitalization value of the worlds 70 largest digital platform companies.
Women in Tech: Frederike Busch, Marketing Director at esome.: A research study by The National Center for Women & Information Technology showed that gender diversity has specific benefits in technology settings, which could explain why tech companies have started to invest in initiatives that aim to boost the number of female applicants, recruit them in a more effective way, retain them for longer, and give them the opportunity to advance.

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free, private Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 500 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

MarTech East, September 2019, Boston, MA
Talkwalker, September 2019, New York City – register here for the in-person event
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington, DC
Social Media Marketing World, March 2020, San Diego, CA

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.