In The Headlights: September 18, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

If you missed it earlier this week, we just released a new research paper on what social networks will be popular and worth paying attention to in 2020. Get the paper here.

Building on rented land will bite companies harder than ever in 2020.

You don’t need to be a data scientist to see that Facebook Inc. wants every dollar spent on social media – influencers, ads, promoted posts, you name it – spent only on their platform and they’ll continue to punish marketers like us who don’t pay up or don’t pay them directly.

Look at how they’re taking a bat to the knees of influencer marketing. No more likes, no more public, easily compared metrics. By taking away those simple measures, they make it much more difficult for companies to determine which influencers to hire, and bet that companies will take the simplest, easiest route – spending more on Facebook ads instead.

At the same time, organic engagement on Facebook, organic reach, is pitifully low. In recent issues of this newsletter, we’ve highlighted that on a numbers basis, when 4 out of 10,000 people are reached by your Facebook posts, you’re better off standing outside on a sidewalk handing out brochures to random passersby.

So, what should your game plan be? That’s why we wrote the paper. With new channels like Slack and Discord becoming more popular, and giants like YouTube poised to grow, you’ll want to build your 2020 content strategy around where our audiences are growing.

This week’s Bright Idea is the webinar we’ll be doing with Talkwalker on September 24 about social strategy for 2020, based on our paper and some of the best practices Talkwalker is observing with its customers.

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.

In the rear view this week, our Slack community voted for more YouTube data to see what’s been working lately. When we divide the data set into deciles (brackets of 10%), we note massive powerlaw distribution changes.

The top 10% of YouTube videos earn a median of 128,000 views and 3,800 engagements
The next 10% of YouTube videos earn a median of 23,400 views and 796 engagements – about an 80% decline
The third 10% of YouTube videos earn a median of 7,700 views and 280 engagements – another 66% decline
Across the board, descriptions remain about the same, with a median of 153 characters and 23 words
Engagement rates on Youtube remain high – for the top 10%, it’s about 2.9%, for the next 10% it’s 3.4%, and the third 10% is 3.56% – still about 10x what channels like Instagram generate

Methodology: Trust Insights used Talkwalker to extract the top 63,960 YouTube videos published in the last 14 days based on overall views, with descriptions published in the English language. The date of extraction was September 18, 2019.

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.

6 Best Ways to Attract Your Customers Through Social Media: For your social media ads to be effective, youll need to know your target audience well.
The 3 Ways Your Business Can Utilize Social Media Analytics Data: You’ll also want to know how your business can utilize social media analytics data.
Facebook patches serious Instagram vulnerability that opened door to data theft: Discovered by an Israeli hacker known as ZHacker13 and first reported by Forbes, the vulnerability allowed an attacker to bypass security protections and gain access to information that could be used to build a database of users.

Media and Content

How to Write Excellent Subject Lines for Your Outreach Emails: So put in the effort to write a great subject line that clearly and concisely gives them a headline and gets them excited about your campaign.
Building a Website on a Budget What is the Best Solution?: The user-friendly, drag and drop website builder allows you to design any type of website you want and publish your work in seconds.
How to Build a Personal Brand: 10 Tips to Get You Started: Especially when your brand is so personal, it can be tempting to get stuck in your ways.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Google report assesses how AI can best serve humanity: The assessment is the result of analysis of more than 2,600 applications from 119 countries to the $25 million Google
Coding Canadian values into the future of artificial intelligence: But at the same time, when a majority also say they are concerned they dont understand the technology well enough to know the risks, we know we also have a responsibility to educate.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

4 Key Aspects of a Data Science Project from a Data Science Leader: Getting to a data-driven solution isnt a straight and pre-defined path.
8 Powerful Tricks for Working with Image Data using skimage in Python: This would mean that we remove 100 pixels from the top, bottom, left and right of the image, thus focusing on the object at the center:
You Ask, I Answer: Categorical Prediction Techniques for Google Analytics?: CHAID is also useful for data that is non-parametric, meaning it isnt in a normal distribution, which a lot of marketing data is, but as a technique for marketing analysis, its more for interpretability than prediction.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Google now gives more preference to original reporting in search: Whats the quality raters guidelines have to do with it.
Search & the Emotional Response to Information Seeking: People seek information by reading books, going to the library, reading print newspapers, going to church gatherings, attending parties and talking to friends, listening to the radio, and watching TV.
How Googles recent changes affect higher education websites: The questions in the PAA are typically being answered by websites other than university.

Business and Leadership

Why Most Leadership Skills Are Learned: And Ive gotten a lot of phone calls from people who were completing their MBA programs, who were mid-career, who were aspiring leaders, trying to figure out how do they develop, what do they need to do in order to get to the C-suite?
Is Your Company Socially Responsible?: This is a consumer-driven evolution or revolution, depending on whom you ask.
[How to Access the Untapped Power of Choice by @JThiefels](https://trustinsights.news/yi5rj): Set a specific goal for yourself, like, create my business website by You have the power to get where you want and create an epic life you love, you’re just not leveraging one of the most powerful tools you have to do so: the power of choice.

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?

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.