Delving into Digital Marketing?: Online Marketing News: Twitter Crime, Google Redesign, Facebook Free Fading, Social Media Wave

Facebook Announces News Feed Redesign To Mirror Mobile - In the coming weeks, Facebook will roll out an update to the News Feed design it introduced last year. More users will be switched from the old News Feed design, with a white background, to a mobile-inspired News Feed with bigger images and a darker background. There is no change to the News Feed algorithm; this is just for aesthetics. InsideFacebook

Study: Twitter Crime Has Risen 390% Since 2011 - Crimes linked to Twitter have risen almost four-fold over the past three years, reveals new figures from 25 police forces across the United Kingdom. Since 2011, cases where Twitter has in someway played a role have increased by 390 percent – up from 174 in 2011 to 852 in 2013. AllTwitter

Millennials Spend 18 Hours A Day Consuming Media – And It’s Mostly Content Created By Peers - How many hours a day do you spend on Facebook? How about texting friends? Reading magazines? If you’re a millennial, it may be more time than you think. New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media. Entrepreneur

Stats: More Than 40% Of Online Adults Are Multi-Device Users - This comes from a new multi-device study, conducted by Facebook in collaboration with GfK, revealing people’s behavior when it comes to moving across devices (smartphone, tablet and desktop) on a day-to-day basis. Econsultancy

Facebook Launches Public Content Solutions To Help Media Partners With Trend Data - As more and more people talk about current events on Facebook, developers within the media industry are looking for some way to join the conversation. So to offer companies a solution into the data behind trending topics on the social network, Facebook announced Friday the launch of Public Content Solutions. InsideFacebook

Facebook Free Reach Drops To 6%, Per Agency Study. 4 Reasons Your Brand Posts Are Fading - The Facebook news feed is highly coveted real estate with finite space, so something had to give — and it’s brand posts. The social network wants to keep its 757 million daily users active while cranking up its ad business, so brand posts with no spending behind them are getting the squeeze. The posts are less interesting to users and don’t drive any revenue for Facebook, and since late 2012, there has been less and less room for them. AdAge

18-24 Year Olds on Facebook Report An Average Of 649 Friends, Up From 510 Last Year - Roughly two-thirds of Americans aged 12 and older have a social networking profile, up from 62% last year, according to [pdf] a report from Edison Research and Triton Digital. Facebook remains the most popular site, used by 58% of survey respondents of that age, but was the only platform other than MySpace not to see an increase in penetration year-over-year. Marketing Charts

URL Shortening Giant Bitly Will Provide Click Data to Moz - Bitly, the Internet’s URL shortening leader, announced today that it will provide data and click-tracking technology to Moz. Moz’s optimization software previously used link data from Twitter to rank web pages’ social media relevance but it is turning to Bitly to get a more complete picture of user behavior. Marketing Land

Millennials More Willing Than Boomers to Share Data With Marketers - 6 in 10 US Millennials claim that they would be willing to share personal information with marketers, while Baby Boomers would be much less likely to do so, according to results from a Mintel study. That gap even extends to those unwilling to share information: at least 30% of Millennials who would not provide private information said they would be swayed by an incentive offer, while only 13% of reluctant Baby Boomers agreed. Marketing Charts

Report: Only 6% Of Buyers Claim Social Media Impacts B2B Buying Process - According to a recently published B2B Website Usability Report surveying buyers, social media and blogging have little influence on the B2B buying process. Marketing Land

Smartphone Penetration Now Two-Thirds Of US Mobile Market - Smartphone penetration continues to grow with every passing month, and the latest tally from comScore indicates that during the 3-month average ending in January 2014, some 66.8% of mobile subscribers in the US owned a smartphone. That translates to almost 160 million Americans, and is up from 55% market penetration during the year-earlier period. Marketing Charts

Google Introduces Consumer Ratings Annotations - Google announced its plans to introduce consumer ratings annotations to Google AdWords in an official company blog post. The search engine giant says consumer rating annotations bring to light industry-specific ratings—such as an airline’s reward program—based on Google Consumer Surveys. Direct Marketing News

Facebook Updates Company Pages Design and Introduces “Pages to Watch” - One of the most annoying things about working with Facebook Company Pages is that each type of post appeared different when viewed on your Page versus in the News Feed. Because of the way it was all laid out, you were never sure that your posts would look great across the platform. HubSpot

Google: Keep URL Length Shorter Than 2000 Characters - SEOs obsess about the smallest things, even how long is too long for a URL. A Google Webmaster Help thread has SEOs and webmasters asking how long can they go for a URL. Google actually answered the question. Search Engine Roundtable

61% Of Brands Using Influencer Marketing Have Trouble Identifying The Right Influencers - According to a recent study from Augure, a reputation management software, the biggest problems marketers have are identifying the right influencers, engaging with them and quantifying the influence. Celebrity doesn’t always equate to influence anymore. In fact, less than 25 percent of those surveyed consider a well-known celebrity an influencer. SocialTimes

LinkedIn Announces Sponsored InMail For Mobile - LinkedIn announced yesterday that it was expanding its mobile advertising platform to include Sponsored InMail. According to the blog post, the goal is to give marketers an opportunity to reach consumers where they’ll engage most: on their mobile devices. SocialTimes

Twitter Can Tell You When Your Customers Are Happy, Sad, or Hungover - On Monday, Twitter released the results of its research on the usage of different words and phrases on the platform in 2013, broken down by days of the week and by month. Finding patterns across millions of 140-character posts, the company unearthed some useful information for business owners. Inc.

Twitter Testing Click-To-Call Ad Feature - Twitter is testing a click-to-call button that would enable mobile users to call advertisers directly. The news was first reported by Digiday. ClickZ confirmed the comments in the story made by Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s vice president of global online sales, with a source close to the company. The source did not provide any additional details. ClickZ

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Infinite Scroll Search-Friendly Recommendations - Your site’s news feed or pinboard might use infinite scroll—much to your users’ delight! When it comes to delighting Googlebot, however, that can be another story. With infinite scroll, crawlers cannot always emulate manual user behavior–like scrolling or clicking a button to load more items–so they don’t always access all individual items in the feed or gallery. If crawlers can’t access your content, it’s unlikely to surface in search results. Google Webmaster Central Blog

Google Makes It Official: New Search Results Design Goes Live For All - A day after Google said the new look was still an experiment, it has decided that the experiment was good enough to make for an official change. Now everyone should be getting the new design. Search Engine Land

Study: Which of Twitter’s “Hard Features” Can Drive The Most ReTweets? - Looking for more retweets? Twitter has released some data based on an analysis of millions of tweets sent by verified users in the US. The study looked at tweets that contained Twitter’s “hard features” – photos, #hashtags, links, videos, and tweets containing a number of a digit (such as a sports score) – comparing retweets from that dataset against average retweets from the same collection of accounts (most of which had thousands of followers). Overall, tweets containing photos got the biggest bump – but the results differed by area. Marketing Charts

From our Online Marketing Community:

From our post, What’s the One Most Important Skill for a Content Marketer?, Barbara Mckinney said, “I cannot agree more, Lee. Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally and will allow you to become happier the more you practice.”

KevinBall added, “With all the emphasis on creating content about trending topics, keyword ranking, social media promotion, repurposing content, branding, etc., it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we’re supposed to be creating content that our prospects, influencers, and customers find useful and interesting. All noise aside, having empathy for the pain points, struggles, and yes, even victories of our customers is the question to which we must always return.”

Chelsei Henderson shared a related article and this though, “Putting this in a marketing perspective, we can become much more productive in our efforts by showing this level of empathy. Putting ourselves in the same place as our audience makes for good marketing. That’s why people who develop products solving a common pain they, too, felt at one point are able to market it so well. Truly, one of the most important skills for content marketers.”

What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

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