In the Headlights, January 6, 2021: Clubhouse Review, Pinterest, Content Friction

Posted on January 6, 2021 by cspenn

Clubhouse Review, Pinterest, Content Friction

In The Headlights

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24 Hours on Clubhouse

The social media world is abuzz with the latest new entrant and contestant for our attention, the audio app Clubhouse. What is it? It’s a cross between chat rooms and talk radio, like a never-ending conference where new sessions to listen to pop up all the time. Participants can start new rooms and discuss with their friends and followers pretty much whatever they want.

As with all other social networks, it obeys the basic conventions of following people and having people follow you.

Having been on it for a little more than a day and participated in a variety of conversations, some initial thoughts and questions answered.

  1. Will it be big? Honestly, not in its current form. Clubhouse is appointment media, which means you need to be there at specific times, in specific rooms, if you want to catch the benefit of some of the shows. There are no official recordings of any kind, so you can’t go back and listen later. It’s also Apple/iOS only at the moment, so it’s not even accessible to Android users.

  2. Is it valuable? It depends on what kind of value you want. If you enjoy a social atmosphere and the ability to meet new people in a very conversational way, you’ll probably find value in it. On the other hand, if the sound of people talking over each other makes you grit your teeth, it’s definitely not an experience you’ll enjoy. It’s a series of really long conference calls, when you boil away all the hype.

  3. Should your brand/company be there? Nope. There’s little to no marketing value at the organizational level yet. We’ll see how that changes; right now, there’s also no obvious revenue model but clear costs for the company – lots and lots of bandwidth costs (though no storage costs because nothing is recorded), and accounts are tied to individual device phone numbers – a risky proposition if you have an account tied to an employee’s device.

  4. Why is there so much hype about it among some social media marketers? Like any early social network, the opportunity to connect with people you might not otherwise have access to is part of the appeal. This is true of any high-profile social network and part of the recruiting mechanism – you could talk with X prominent person briefly, whereas you might not even get the time of day from their gatekeepers otherwise. If you recall, in the early days when Instagram rolled out direct messaging, for a brief time you could have actual DM conversations with prominent people you liked and connected with.

  5. Should you try it? Yes, if you’ve received an invite. It’s worth peeking and seeing if it’s something you find valuable, if someone has extended you an invite. For some people, there will great value and enjoyment. For others, not so much. Given that it costs no money presently, there’s no harm in seeing if it’s for you or not.

The Big Picture View of Clubhouse

With any new social network, evaluating it and whether it makes sense to be on it is part and parcel of our jobs as marketers. The key thing to keep in mind is whether the new shiny object offers you something that you can’t get anywhere else, and whether that thing it offers is valuable to you, individually or as an organization. Clubhouse has value to some individuals and almost no value to organizations right now, and for some folks, that has incredible appeal. It will not last long; every app and company has to make money somehow, and that time will soon come for Clubhouse and any new social network entrant.

The Bright Idea

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and I look at content formats and reducing friction. If we want customers to consume our media, how do we make it easier and faster for them to consume it?

Watch/listen to the most recent episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Coming up this week on this week’s episode of So What?, our livestream show at Thursday at 1 PM Eastern Time, we’re starting the first in a series on data cleaning and preparation, how to get ready to analyze your marketing data. Be sure you’re subscribed to our YouTube channel, and we’ll see you Thursday!

Are you subscribed to our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to subscribe!

Rear View Mirror Data

In this week’s Rear View Mirror, we fielded a question about what content works on Pinterest from our Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, so we decided to dig into a sample of some of the top-performing content on Pinterest. Imagine our surprise when we found out it was mostly junk.

Digging through the top results from the AHREFS SEO tool about which content earned the most shares on Pinterest, we found nothing but a sea of garbage, from software piracy sites to adult entertainment to cryptocurrency pyramid schemes. It would seem Pinterest has a content policing/monitoring problem. So, to determine whether anything legitimate on Pinterest gets shared, we looked at the data from our weekly newsletter sources – 1,500 blog posts from around the digital marketing ecosystem, scored by the number of shares on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, as well as inbound links and traffic estimates. What did we find?

Pinterest corrplot

We found… nothing. Well, nothing in terms of Pinterest having a statistical association or correlation to anything else. In terms of inbound links, we see there’s a moderately strong correlation with Twitter shares; we see Twitter and Facebook shares have a strong correlation. We see Facebook shares correlate with page views in a moderately strong relationship.

And we see Pinterest having no mathematical relationship whatsoever to these outcomes. Now, in terms of limitations, most of the content we share is either scientific or marketing, with a leaning towards B2B marketing, and that’s what made it into the Pinterest analysis above. We don’t share, for example, a ton of content on home decor or cooking or other more consumer-focused content that probably performs better on Pinterest. But between the numbers from our systems and the glance at the top-performing content on Pinterest overall, it’s safe to say there’s a content problem at Pinterest, and you may want to run a detailed attribution analysis to determine whether it’s actually doing anything for your marketing or not.

Methodology: Trust Insights used AHREFS data about top shared posts on Pinterest for the last 30 days, published in the last 30 days, in the English language. The timeframe of the data is December 1 – December 30, 2020. The date of study is January 6, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

In Case You Missed It
Partner Spotlight

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In this 90-minute on-demand workshop, learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey. You’ll learn:

  • How to build a KPI map
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  • Basics of centrality, distribution, regression, and clustering
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The course comes with the video, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcript, example KPI map, and sample workbook with data.

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Shiny Objects

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Data Science and AI

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing

Get Back To Work

We’ve changed things up in Get Back To Work, and we’re looking at the top 310 metro areas in the United States by population. This will give you a much better sense of what the overall market looks like, and will cover companies hiring in multiple locations. Want the entire, raw list? Join our Slack group!

What do you do with this information?

By looking at this data, you’ll see what the most popular titles are; use any of the major job/career sites to ensure your resume/CV/LinkedIn profile matches keywords and phrases for those titles. For companies, search job sites for those companies specifically to see all the open positions and apply for them.

You can also hit up LinkedIn and see who you know at companies listed, and see if your connections have any inside tips on hiring.

Top Marketing Positions by Count, Manager and Above

  • Marketing Manager : 802 open positions
  • Digital Marketing Manager : 402 open positions
  • Social Media Manager : 368 open positions
  • Account Manager : 255 open positions
  • Marketing Director : 236 open positions
  • Director of Marketing : 228 open positions
  • Project Manager : 181 open positions
  • Product Marketing Manager : 167 open positions
  • Product Manager : 163 open positions
  • SEO Manager : 135 open positions

Top Marketing Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

  • Deloitte : 336 open positions
  • Pearson : 268 open positions
  • Amazon.com Services LLC : 220 open positions
  • Google : 151 open positions
  • Amazon Web Services, Inc. : 108 open positions
  • JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. : 102 open positions
  • Facebook : 99 open positions
  • Thermo Fisher Scientific : 84 open positions
  • Walmart : 78 open positions
  • The Coca-Cola Company : 73 open positions

Top Locations of Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

  • New York, NY : 1092 open positions
  • San Francisco, CA : 672 open positions
  • Austin, TX : 641 open positions
  • Chicago, IL : 625 open positions
  • Atlanta, GA : 536 open positions
  • Seattle, WA : 518 open positions
  • Remote, NA : 492 open positions
  • Boston, MA : 482 open positions
  • Los Angeles, CA : 412 open positions
  • San Diego, CA : 383 open positions

Methodology: Trust Insights uses the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from a geographic area focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations, with a filter to screen out the most junior positions.

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

  • MarketingProfs Friday Forum, January 2021, virtual
  • MarketingProfs B2B Forum, March 2021, virtual

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

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Stay In Touch

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Required FTC Disclosures

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

Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. All Featured Partners are affiliate links for which we receive financial compensation. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.

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2 thoughts on “In the Headlights, January 6, 2021: Clubhouse Review, Pinterest, Content Friction”

  1. Pingback: Twenty Four Hours on Clubhouse - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting
  2. Pingback: What content works on Pinterest - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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