← The Digital Marketing Podcast
The Digital Marketing Podcast
Digital Marketing News Update
00:31:46
Daniel and Ciaran are back after a short break with a news roundup of the biggest stories that have us excited in the digital marketing world this November. Under discussion are:- Gmail’s responsive design updates, Linked in Content search,...
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- [00:01]
Kieran Rogers
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and I'm Daniel Rolls. And today, Daniel. Well, we need to give a bit of an explanation because we've been a bit absent from the podcasting waves recently, haven't we?
- [00:28]
Daniel Rolls
That's right. We've both been very busy doing various different things. And I got an email and the email came through and said, I really, really love the podcast. It's absolutely fantastic and just wondering where you've gone and what's going on. Disappeared. And it said, it's obviously now. It's now the beginning of November. If you're listening to this kind of slightly later on. And it said you haven't put anything out since September. So I look back and realize that we hadn't put anything out since September.
- [00:50]
Kieran Rogers
So you really haven't. How time flies.
- [00:53]
Daniel Rolls
I know. So time flies when you're having fun. So thank you very much to Angie Wade for getting in contact and giving me a bit of a kick up the butt. So we're now recording today and we're doing something slightly different, so you might be interested. So normally when we record, we go off to the studio that we use, which is beautifully acoustically dampened and it's a very nice place for recording. But one of the challenges that we have is that we're both very busy people, as we all are, and we live in quite different locations. So I live in Brighton on the south coast of the uk, as many are aware, and Kieran lives on the Isle of Wight, which is not that far away. But getting him on a ferry that he already does twice a day anyway, everything's relevant.
- [01:30]
Kieran Rogers
It's a long way.
- [01:31]
Daniel Rolls
Exactly.
- [01:32]
Kieran Rogers
Mentally, it's a huge.
- [01:33]
Daniel Rolls
Exactly. So what we're doing today, we're recording this remotely. So I am sitting in what I refer to as Narnia, which is a cupboard in our office, which doesn't sound very high tech, but basically what we've got is that we wanted to record in the office and we record a lot of elearning modules really regularly. So we're recording all the time and we need a way of easily just jumping in and getting great sound quality. So this cupboard, if you can imagine it, when you open the doors of this cupboard, the entire inside of the cupboard is full of soundproofing materials. We have a little lid that goes above the doors, and then behind it we have this big double set of curtains that go behind the doors. And you sit inside it and it's basically like an audio booth. And hopefully what you're hearing is very nice quality sound from Narnia in our office. Kieran, I believe, is in his very high tech kitchen.
- [02:20]
Kieran Rogers
Well, it's not a high tech kitchen. I'm sat at a rickety old kitchen table. I've had to. I've had to unplug the battery from the clock because it was ticking and.
- [02:29]
Daniel Rolls
I hope we're not going to have any. Your fridge humming in the background as well.
- [02:32]
Kieran Rogers
You shouldn't hear the fridge humming in the background.
- [02:34]
Daniel Rolls
Marvellous.
- [02:35]
Kieran Rogers
We'll see how this goes. As you know, listeners, we love audio quality, good quality audio. So if it's not up to scratch, you tell us, tell us, tell us. Good. And we won't ever do it again.
- [02:44]
Daniel Rolls
Exactly, yeah. So what we're going to go through in this episode, because it's been a little while, lots has been happening, as it always is in the world of digital. And we thought that we would do a news update because I think there's at least five or six news stories that is really important that everyone's aware of. So let's get going. So let's just start off with some fantastic news from Google and from Gmail. Now, if you have been doing email marketing for a long time, or even if you've been doing it recently, you'll be very aware of the fact that mobile is increasingly important. And all the stats now are indicating that the majority of emails are first opened on a mobile device, not meaning that you're necessarily going to respond on that device, because quite often you will triage your emails on mobile. So you'll read it on the mobile device and then maybe you'll respond on your laptop if it's particularly complicated. But we are basically opening our emails on mobile and what we generally want to do is build responsive or mobile optimized email. So responsive design, as you may or may not be aware, allows you to adjust to different widths of screens and give a slightly different experience based on that. That for websites is great, you've got to take into account the different browsers, but for email it's a problem, or has been for a while. And the reason it's been a problem is that not all email clients deal with responsive emails. And the one that was the big problem was Gmail. Now, as you're aware, Gmail is very, very widely used and it just didn't support responsive emails properly, which was a big surprise really, I guess, considering Google have always been really keen on responsive design and they're very keen.
- [04:20]
Kieran Rogers
They have, they've always championed mobile first.
- [04:23]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I mean very, very much so. And I'll come to another bit of news on that in a moment actually. But they've really championed this. But yet Gmail didn't fully support responsive emails. However, they have happily announced that that you will now be able to do responsive emails and Gmail will fully support them. So keep an eye on your email service providers because you shouldn't need to worry about this too much. What it will basically mean is that most email service providers provide templates and those templates are supposed to adjust the different widths of screens. All of the major email service providers that I'm aware of at the moment are developing responsive email templates that will be fully Gmail compatible. So kind of look out for that now. While we're on this story, another quick bit of news, something that I read yesterday is that if we move on to search optimization with Google in that they've been very keen on championing mobile first there was the mobile friendly test. So if you just search mobile friendly test, you'll find it and you can put your website in and it will tell you how mobile friendly your website is. Well, when they had the Google index, this is basically where Google is reading all of our websites. Even though they're championing mobile first, that index was actually looking at the desktop version of the website. So what that really means is that when you search for a word, they were matching that word to your desktop version of your website. The verse that most of us will see on our laptop or desktop devices. But in reality they're saying, well actually the majority of web traffic is now in fact on a mobile device. That doesn't really make any sense. So they're moving to having a mobile first index, which means when you search, the results will be matched based on what's on your mobile website. First of all, they will take into account the desktop content as well. But if you have a very cut down version of your website for mobile, that that's not necessarily going to be a great thing from a search optimization point of view. So I think this is big, big news for a lot of organizations just because they might have built a mobile version of their website that's got basic functionality, doesn't have all the content in there and that could start hitting them quite hard in the search index. Now we're yet to see huge amounts of detail on this, so I would keep an eye on targetinternet.com, keep an eye on our blog and hopefully we'll give you some more news on that. And there's lots of great websites like moz.com, search engine land, that will be talking about this stuff extensively as well. But it is pretty big news for an SEO point of view. Now, I just mentioned our blog. Why should also say just another bit of news? If you ever go to targetinternet.com blog, we have been writing on there very regularly for a long period of time. We also publish the podcasts and videos and things on there. We have got a new member of the team, Pete, and Pete is our journalist. And Pete has been writing lots and lots for us recently, and he's basically really upping the pace at which we're getting content out there. The content hopefully is much improved because it's not just relying on me to write it. So getting Pete's editorial standards into our content is great as well. So if you haven't checked out the blog for a while, get back there. And we're doing a lot of regular news and more feature articles as well.
- [07:37]
Kieran Rogers
So Pete's an actual journalist, Daniel, he.
- [07:39]
Daniel Rolls
Is an actual proper journalist.
- [07:41]
Kieran Rogers
I've not met him yet, but in my mind he wears a trilby and a trench coat and it's attached to a notepad.
- [07:46]
Daniel Rolls
That's pretty much it. That's pretty much what he looks like. What's interesting, I've been discussing this with a few people where they've been struggling to create content internally, getting the experts internally to create content, and they haven't had time to do it, and so on. And actually we've had a similar problem that hopefully I've got a reasonable level of expertise and all this stuff, but actually getting the time to sit down and write is a real challenge. And I'm doing a lot of writing, but actually I'm doing books and things like that at the same time. So what we decided is we really need someone to help us with this. We searched high and low and we were very, very lucky to come across Pete. And Pete is brilliant journalist. He writes for things like the Times newspaper in the uk, but he's actually got some expertise in digital. And like any good journalist, they learn and they get some real insights that you probably wouldn't get from a normal kind of style of writing. So, yeah, so I think it's an interesting approach, taking on a proper journalist to do this stuff. And I think he's doing a fantastic job. But again, we would love to hear people's opinions as well. So let us know what you think of the new content. Now, while we are talking about content, it's probably a good one to jump in about LinkedIn content search.
- [08:58]
Kieran Rogers
That was beautifully segued.
- [08:59]
Daniel Rolls
It was good, wasn't it? Have you come across this yet, Kieran?
- [09:05]
Kieran Rogers
I haven't, no. Do you know what? I've been a bit off the ball on LinkedIn. I tend to, I don't feel like everybody else. I get hundreds and hundreds of requests to, to join people and I'm always worried that maybe it's a listener to the podcast, I should reach out and say hello. But more often than not it's just people trying to sell me stuff, which I love, which has kind of turned me off LinkedIn. So tell me something good about it.
- [09:29]
Daniel Rolls
Well, I think this is a reaction to, to some extent is that at the moment, if you search for anything in LinkedIn, you put a search in the search box and the first thing it comes up with is people and companies. So generally recruitment or finding other companies and that's okay. I think LinkedIn is a fantastic sales tool. Still, if you're prospecting for leads in a kind of business to business situation, there's loads of good stuff about it. But you will notice there is more and more content in LinkedIn because people are publishing updates and they're doing all sorts of different company posts and things like that. I think LinkedIn have cottoned onto the fact they need to provide more value than just on a kind of recruitment and sales point of view. And what they're adding is that when you do a search now for any particular topic, the first thing that will show up in the search results is content. So instead of it being the people and the companies, it's going to be content that people have published. They're trying to become a bit more of the place to go for business. If you want to stay up to date on business news, that's great. I think it means that when you're doing content, there is an opportunity for getting out there in LinkedIn like there has never been before. And so I definitely would look at that. If you're not sure where to really publish your content in LinkedIn, you've got company pages and you can publish content to your company pages. You've obviously got your groups. But the most important is if you go through to your profile, just the LinkedIn homepage, you will see write an article and it used to be called write a post, it's the same thing, but it's basically the opportunity to publish blog posts within LinkedIn. You can add images, you can add presentations, there's a load of stuff that you can do with it. But actually if you're publishing stuff there, it's likely it's going to get a lot more visibility over the coming months because of this content search. So we're taking a look at. The other thing that we do is when we write anything on our website, we then go and create an article within LinkedIn that's got a kind of introductory section, two or three paragraphs of the article, and then we link through to the full article and then it just signposts our content a little bit more as well. So worth taking a look at. And actually there's going to be a bit of an opportunity for getting more visibility with that content as well.
- [11:36]
Kieran Rogers
So a bit like Twitter's microblogging, only with less micro.
- [11:40]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, that's the thing. It's just built in a blogging platform within to LinkedIn, basically.
- [11:44]
Kieran Rogers
Fab. Yeah, I'll check that out. That sounds interesting.
- [11:47]
Daniel Rolls
Now what you also get, obviously some insights that tell you how many people have engaged with that content. And that's great because when people actually like the content or leave you a comment, you can see exactly who it is that's done that. And if you're trying to open up some relationships, that can be a good way of doing things. Segueing in again, in terms of insights, let's talk about automatic insights from Google Analytics. Yeah.
- [12:07]
Kieran Rogers
What is this? What does it do? It sounds good.
- [12:10]
Daniel Rolls
So if you're, if you're not familiar and I wasn't, there is a Google Analytics app for Google Analytics. So if you've got Google Analytics running on your website and you want to keep an eye on it on the go, or you just want to keep an eye using your mobile device, there is an app for doing that so you can drill into all the data and it's just optimized for different size screens on mobile. Now to me, I thought, well, I'm not really sure I want to do that because I like having a big screen I like doing on my desktop or my laptop, maybe I'll use my tablet, but I think on my smartphone it's not going to be so great. But what it's great for is they now have a machine learning kind of interface with it that allows you to get automatic insights. So what it does is analyze your data and try and work out what that data is actually telling you. Now, you kind of had some of these features in the desktop version where it would try and tell you what was statistically significant. But this is trying to actually kind of add some more stuff together and look at different reports in combination and then give you some insights. So if you haven't looked at it, install the app, have a look and have a look at these automatic insights and actually I found it phenomenally useful because it ties together a number of different reports.
- [13:19]
Kieran Rogers
They are really good. The other thing I. I've been playing around with this a lot on my. I now commute to haven't from the Isle of Wire every day. It's perfect to log in whilst I'm on the hovercraft flying over the Solent. It's about, about 10, 15 minutes and you're just able to grab a quick snapshot of what's going on on the website without getting too detailed. And the insights it gives you, they're not always right but they do give you a heads up on things rocks you might want to have a look at underneath and sort of check out. It's really good. It's like having an analyst exactly do the legwork for you. I'm quite a big fan of some of these sort of machine learning reports that sort of analyze you your data and put them into, you know, natural English that we would all speak and give you a heads up on where you need to take a look.
- [14:08]
Daniel Rolls
I'd also like to add the fact that the fact you get a hovercraft to work is the most James Bond sounding thing I've ever.
- [14:13]
Kieran Rogers
Brand new one as well. Yeah, they're just British made, all very proud. They don't always work, they've had a few teething problems.
- [14:20]
Daniel Rolls
Thanks for adding that.
- [14:21]
Kieran Rogers
But they do have leather seats and air conditioning which we love.
- [14:24]
Daniel Rolls
So if anyone else gets to work in a sexier way than getting on a hovercraft, let me know. I'm quite intrigued to know. But anyway, moving swiftly on, we're talking about kind of Google products and just to talk about AdWords and they've got some new location features. So just to explain what these are all about. So two things that you can do. This is more for targeting display ads. So rather than the pay per click ads, the text ads, this is all about the kind of display network ads and they've got two new things. They've got location extensions for Google display network which basically means you can add your business address, your phone number and other information to the ad and then you can use it when you're targeting people that are browsing the Web near your business premises. So basically you're able to add some details to your ad about physical location when someone is searching and seeing ads near your physical location. So perfect for shop owners, but potentially for businesses as well. The other one that I think's really interesting is this store visit conversion tracking. So do you just want to tell us a little bit about that too?
- [15:30]
Kieran Rogers
What they do and it doesn't give you, I think they sort of give you a bit of a sample of data, but what they do is they're trying to tie together that age old problem of, well, you know, I sort of need to rewind a little bit because one of the big things with display, if you're doing display in any volume, you'll know that just because you put, you know, click here or buy now calls to action on your display adverts doesn't necessarily mean that's what people do. And more often than not they don't. There's some really interesting research done by Rocket Fuel who found that actually it tends to be only the very young and the very old or basically the more impressionable. I suppose I'm probably going to get a few complaints about saying that, but basically people are a bit more disposed to doing what they're told to do, tend to follow calls to action, whereas the rest of us tend to be a little bit shy of them and just tend to sort of ignore them. So when you're looking at actual calls to action and how much your display adverts have actually got people to take action, you can be very sorely disappointed. However, what a lot of research has also shown is that when you've been exposed to a message a few times, you're far more inclined. Whether you even clocked receiving that message or not might just been in the background. You're more inclined to actually follow up with the brand or the imagery that was sort of working away in the background of your head somewhere. And actually what this does is it attempts to see, well, if people have been shown adverts, how many of them then result in being shown. That advert results in you actually wandering into a particular store. And what Google are doing is making use of the location tracking on mobile devices and giving a sense of how many users actually go into store. Now, as I understand, it's sample data. So not all users are being tracked obviously because not everybody gives their permission. But if they can get a large enough sample of those people, then they're able to give you an indication of what percentage of people actually went through. And to Store how much you sort of read between lines of data like that. I think there's a lot of ifs, buts and maybes in there. But the real world and the digital world are one step closer as a result. And I think that's quite exciting.
- [17:49]
Daniel Rolls
Absolutely, yeah. What they said at the moment is at present this feature is only available to high volume AdWords clients with multiple locations. But I've been assured that that will change fairly quickly as well. Just to go back onto Kiran's point about what happens when you see display ads as well, we've had a really interesting one. We've been running a lot of display network ads and a lot of Facebook ads recently and we've certainly seen our traffic from both of those sources go up very significantly. So we have seen people clicking and following the call to action. But when I then dig into my analytics and I look at my multi channel funnels, which is that report that basically tells you what steps are people taking on the journey to actually completing your goals. We've got two channels that have increased massively. One is search, which is basically as far as we can see, people are seeing the banner ads a number of times and then just going searching for a brand name because we've seen our branded searches going up because they've remembered who we are. But the other one that's reasonably surprising is we've seen our direct traffic go through the roof as well. So people remembering the domain name and then going through and just tapping that straight into their browser. Now I was kind of surprised by that because being a Google Chrome user, if you tap anything into your address bar, if I just put a Target Internet into the address bar, it's going to search that for me in Google, not all browsers do that. So I was surprised by the amount of people who are actually remembering www.targetinternet.com and actually bothering to type that into their browsers. So it certainly does have an impact on people's behavior and it's not just about getting that direct click as well. So interesting.
- [19:21]
Kieran Rogers
I think when you're looking at display ads, you should see them as an awareness driver. I think it's interesting when you look at the conversion funnel actually with display, what you're trying to do is take passive users who are consuming other people's content actually and sort of up the game a little bit and turn them into active users that are searching for what you might have to offer. So it is that sort of general broadcast layering and if you can get that right, actually you can see some really good growth in the number of brand searches which will inevitably get picked up by your organic and your PPC campaigns. But that's how these things kind of go hand in hand. It's a little bit like a relay race really.
- [20:01]
Daniel Rolls
I think that's it. And I think what's also interesting as well is that we've been finding similar results in Facebook ads. So that when you're browsing around in Facebook, you're not necessarily in the mood for buying something or for jumping into another website. If you're in the Facebook app, you don't necessarily want to leave it to go through to the browser. So we've seen our traffic from Facebook go up with Facebook ads and we're only paying per click, which is great, but actually they're having quite a big impact from a display point of view as well, which is obviously cost effective when you're only paying for a click. So it's interesting to see what impact it's having. Now mentioned Facebook there, let's move on to Facebook Workplace.
- [20:34]
Kieran Rogers
Oh, another brilliant segue.
- [20:36]
Daniel Rolls
I know it's going well today. This is purely lucky. This isn't planned at all, I should point out.
- [20:39]
Kieran Rogers
Seamless, seamless.
- [20:40]
Daniel Rolls
If you're not familiar, Facebook have launched up Facebook Workplace and the idea that it is a kind of communications app for businesses. So the idea is that you've got your Facebook profile that you might use personally, but actually you can use Workplace to connect up people within your business and it sits separately from any personal Facebook accounts and it's an ad free space. So when you go in there you have got groups where people can discuss things within your organization. You can have subgroups and so on. There's a news feed so you can see what anybody organization is posting they're up to. There's live chat kind of messenger interface, you've got live video and you've got search. Now for a company like ours where we are fully distributed and what I mean by that is that we don't have any central offices where anyone works. Everyone is distributed around the world and around the country then this kind of makes a lot of sense. Now we use Asana at the moment as a kind of task management system. And this isn't quite that. This is much more about the kind of informal communication. So we've got Asana, we've got Skype, so we do Skype chats and things like that as well. But it's nice to be able to bring things in one place. So we're going to Run a trial and we're going to set up a place for our organization here. We're going to see how we get on with things using the live video, the live chat, and we're going to see how we get on without using Skype and things like that for a little while as well. Now, I'm still a big fan of Skype because it still tends to be one of the better connections, although it can go horribly wrong. But it does seem to be working. So for example, right now we're recording Kieran's recording at his end, I'm recording at this end. And we've got Skype in our ears so we can hear what each other are saying as well. So I'm a big fan of Skype still. But Facebook Workplace is quite interesting, particularly for distributed companies and even companies who've got multiple offices. It kind of makes a lot of sense. What you need to make sure though is it actually adds value because as many of you have intranets and things like that are probably aware, it's great creating these things and then no one uses them because it's just yet another thing to log into. So we're just going to try and set some rules. So this is the place that we use. And the idea is that everyone will just have it open all the time in the background. And then, you know, if you're, if you're available for a live chat, you can do that if you want to just type things in. But you have to develop a culture around these tools. So for example, if you're doing Skype chat or you do messenger or anything like that, the idea that it's non linear is really important. The idea that you're going to type a bit, someone will reply and they might just disappear for a bit and that's fine. You can't just sit there waiting for the person to reply the whole time. So I think developing the culture around these tools becomes really important. And actually if we're going to use it, it has to actually add some value as well.
- [23:22]
Kieran Rogers
So I have to confess, this one was completely new to me. Obviously I've been too busy finding interesting and sexy ways to get to work.
- [23:28]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, exact, exactly.
- [23:29]
Kieran Rogers
And this has passed me by completely. But I don't quite get it. Facebook and Workplace, do those two things go together, is it not?
- [23:38]
Daniel Rolls
They don't and that's why they've separated it.
- [23:40]
Kieran Rogers
It's Facebook, not a really big like distraction. So does it when you're using this, does it, you know, does it mix the two or is it. Is it quite separate?
- [23:48]
Daniel Rolls
No, it's separate. It is quite separate. So your business account and your personal account are quite separate. It's free for three months and. And then you pay $3 per user for up to a thousand users. And then when you go beyond that, it gets a bit cheaper as well. It's free for nonprofit, it's free for educational institutes. And you can do file photo and video storage as well. So you can upload files to share files, and that's unlimited. You have project groups, video streaming, there's some monitoring tools with it. So there's all sorts of different kind of things in there. There's also single sign on an active directory support. Now, for those of you that doesn't mean anything, but for those of you that do, what it means is that you can essentially use your kind of login in your office to automatically sign you into this stuff if you do a bit of an IT setup. So it should mean you don't need yet another login. So if you set this as your kind of homepage, it means that people logged in and see what other people are up to. So it's kind of a replacement for an intranet. To some extent. It does log into various Windows technology and other technologies as well as I can see a use in our organization because as I say, we are distributed around the world. If you've got an office, I think that might be less so. And I think it's really about working out how much of a value is there because it might just be a distraction as well, because everyone's in the office and they're also then sitting there looking at what each other's saying and uploading files and things like that.
- [25:10]
Kieran Rogers
Interesting. Interesting one to watch. Personally, I think there are too many of these services now and everybody's trying to jump on that bandwagon to be the one size fits all thing at work.
- [25:23]
Daniel Rolls
That's right. I mean, if you look at, I don't know, tools like Slack have brought other tools together.
- [25:28]
Kieran Rogers
You're just going to create wars between various IT departments and what they love.
- [25:33]
Daniel Rolls
And I think we're lucky in the fact that because we're such a small organization, we can try things out and throw them out. Whereas if you've got a big investment, then it's obviously going to be a bit more challenging as well. One more last piece of news just for this episode, just to talk about Twitter for a second. So what happens? We recorded a couple of months ago a big long episode about Twitter and where Twitter was going and some of the challenges it was facing. And we were about to release that and realized actually, so much has changed in the last couple of months that actually it's probably a little bit out of date. So we thought we'd give you a bit of an update now. So, quick news. First of all, there were lots of rumors about who was going to be buying Twitter and the share price went absolutely crazy on the back of it. So there are a couple of discussions on the table. Salesforce was one of the companies that were looking to buy it. Google was potentially another. And there are lots of other different rumors, but it looks like all of those people have currently pulled out of that process. I am not 100% sure. I've heard a few rumors. There is discussion about Google still being interested, but there's nothing I can kind of back that up with, really. So who would buy Twitter? Well, it would kind of make sense for Google because of the problems they had with social networks previously. But there are some other challenges. Twitter is reasonably static in growth at the moment in terms of if you look at all the platforms, the other social platforms, they're growing a lot more quickly. Those people that use Twitter love it and are using it really actively still. So I don't think there's any challenge there. But obviously because Twitter isn't growing, they need to try and keep their costs at a reasonable level. And the startup world has created a bit of a challenge. And the challenge is we expect ridiculous levels of growth to go on forever and. And that's what the shareholders kind of want. So when a company gets mature to a certain extent and has reached a certain level of profitability, but isn't growing phenomenally quickly, that's not really what the shareholders want to hear. However, in the normal business world, if you had a nicely profitable worldwide brand, you'd be quite pleased with yourself. So it is challenging in the kind of startup and the social world. So what I think it looks like they're trying to is cut their cost base a little bit. You might notice vine, which was the video sharing service where you could do little looping videos that's actually being shut down. So Twitter have announced they're closing vine down because Twitter owned Vine. But they've said they're not going to delete any of the vines and things that are on there at the moment. But they are shutting that down because they've built video support into Twitter already and you can do various different video formats within Twitter. There's been talk of them cutting their staff kind of overhead, and I've seen various figures around that as well. But they're having to go into a bit of a consolidation phase. And the problem with Twitter still is that a lot of people just don't get it. If I so I teach at Imperial College in London a couple of times a year and all the students are 21. And I literally about 10 days ago we've got 200 students and I asked them on this master's program, how many of you are using Twitter? And literally I think four or five hands went up out of the 200. So in the youth market there are some real struggles because everyone's living on Instagram and Snapchat at the moment. So I think there's huge opportunity with Twitter still. It's still actually my favorite social platform. I absolutely love it. Still, they are facing some challenges in terms of cutting the cost, consolidating things a little bit. We've mentioned the news previously, all about the fact that at the moment when you put a link into your tweets, it takes up 23 characters that will be disappearing. When you add images, that takes up characters that will be disappearing as well. They're trying to give you a bit more space to play with, simplify things. I don't think anything quite replaces Twitter in terms of real time news coverage and those kind of things. The US election, it's been an amazing place to see some of monitor some of the things that are going on. So we'll keep an eye on it very closely and we will report back with more news when we have it. Great.
- [29:24]
Kieran Rogers
Well, that's quite a roundup there, Daniel, and a good way to get back into the saddle. So over the next couple of weeks, Daniel and I are going to commit to making sure we do one episode every fortnight, absolute.
- [29:35]
Daniel Rolls
So we shot episodes out every two weeks and we'll keep you updated. The latest news in between, go to targetinternet.com blog and you will find all the show notes there. But you will also find all of the latest news and all the feature articles that we're publishing. And we're getting at least four or five bits of content out a week now. So go and have take a look if you haven't been back in a while.
- [29:54]
Kieran Rogers
And please, please, please, if you haven't already, do log into itunes and leave us a review. It's a really great way of us finding new audience listeners and we also love to read your feedback and get your thoughts and comments on the content that we're putting out kind of keeps us going, doesn't it?
- [30:11]
Daniel Rolls
It does. Really appreciate that. So the any emails you want to send us, absolutely fine. You can do that via the website targetinternet.com but also reviews help us push up into the itunes chart and it just gets us a bit more visibility and then we can grow the audience.
- [30:31]
Kieran Rogers
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mention, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to. Right, we'll end that there.
- [31:12]
Daniel Rolls
Then you disappeared. Kieran, I was thinking what to did you lose interest? Maybe drifted off?
- [31:19]
Kieran Rogers
No, no, I'm slightly distracted because although I've taken the battery out of my clock, I realized that because it's cold outside, I am actually sharing this room with four guinea pigs. I see they're munching away in the back. Mrs. Nibbles was having a kinky moment with puzzles a second ago, which, sorry, just slightly distracted me. Fair enough, we'll edit it out. Fair enough, we'll edit it.