Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 15 of my weekly digital strategy newsletter, providing practical analysis of the latest in the world of content creation.
ICYMI Tuesday: The Secret Power of an Instagram DM
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Contents
I. TWITTER’S NEW ‘CRISIS MISINFORMATION POLICY’
II. NEWS AND MEDIA MERGE AT META
III. YOUTUBE ADDS ‘MOST REPLAYED’ FEATURE TO VIDEOS
IV. THE REAL WAY TO WIN ‘NEAR ME’ SEARCHES ON GOOGLE
V. AGRAWAL STRIKES BACK
VI. INSTAGRAM’S NEW LOGO
I. TWITTER’S NEW ‘CRISIS MISINFORMATION POLICY’
Today, we’re introducing our crisis misinformation policy – a global policy that will guide our efforts to elevate credible, authoritative information, and will help to ensure viral misinformation isn’t amplified or recommended by us during crises.
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For the purposes of this policy, we define crises as situations in which there is a widespread threat to life, physical safety, health, or basic subsistence.
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To determine whether claims are misleading, we require verification from multiple credible, publicly available sources, including evidence from conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more.
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Tweets with content that violate the crisis misinformation policy will be placed behind a warning notice that looks like this:
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While this first iteration is focused on international armed conflict, starting with the war in Ukraine, we plan to update and expand the policy to include additional forms of crisis. The policy will supplement our existing work deployed during other global crises, such as in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and India.
🛠 Why does this matter? This sounds like exactly the type of thing Elon Musk would like to eliminate if his Twitter purchase goes through.
But in the meantime, this is a win for citizens who truly want to be informed as well as legitimate news outlets whose information will presumably have less competition with actual fake news masked as “free speech.” (As opposed to the real news that’s sometimes called fake news.)
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II. NEWS AND MEDIA MERGE AT META
Campbell Brown has been promoted to oversee Meta’s global media partnerships.
🛠 Why does this matter? It’s the latest development of the bad news we talked about for editorial companies last week.
In 2017, Brown was hired as a VP of news partnerships. With news now being folded into global media, support for publishers will likely be diluted.
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III. YOUTUBE ADDS ‘MOST REPLAYED’ FEATURE TO VIDEOS
You’ll be able to identify the most popular parts of a video from a graph that appears behind its progress bar. Says YouTube: “If the graph is high, then that part of the video has been replayed often. You can use the graph to quickly find and watch those moments.”
🛠 Why does this matter? The good: You’ll be able to see which parts of your videos resonate most with viewers and build future content around those aspects.
The bad: Users will more easily than ever be able to skip over the majority of a video you spent hours shooting and editing.
Is this analysis useful? Help spread the word.
IV. THE REAL WAY TO WIN ‘NEAR ME’ SEARCHES ON GOOGLE
Years ago, you could rake in some serious Google search impressions by creating content with the phrase “near me” in important places on your page, such as your H1 header or within the first few sentences of the paragraph tag. (Some companies even went so far as to put “near me” in their official names.)
The idea being that if you search for “pizza near me” and a local pizza shop has that phrase strategically placed on its website, it would be more likely to show up in your SERP, and you would therefore be more likely to order from them. (Pineapple on pizza is delicious, BTW.)
But Google began to see through this tactic, as it often does when we try to game its algorithm.
This in-depth look from Search Engine Journal at “near me” searches explains how Google’s ability to match your location to your query makes all this “near me”-in-your-text strategy obsolete.
🛠 Why does this matter? This reinforces that if you focus on creating quality content relative to your audience, the algorithms will distribute it.
While tactics like stuffing your website with “near me” worked at first, can you imagine being stuck with the business name “Pizza Near Me” when the original reason you chose it no longer serves its purpose?
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V. AGRAWAL STRIKES BACK
Elon Musk appears to be 1) getting cold feed about buying Twitter or 2) wants to negotiate a lower price.
Why else would he say last week that the deal is “temporarily on hold” due to a fear of excessive spam/fake accounts?
(He maintained in another tweet that he is “Still committed to acquisition.” Meanwhile, Twitter executives told employees there’s “no such thing” as putting a deal on hold.)
This prompted a wonderful tweet storm Monday from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal:
If you open the tweet, you’ll see an in-depth explanation of how exactly Twitter arrived at the conclusion that less than 5 percent of daily active users are in fact spam.
Before some highlights from Agrawal’s tweet storm, here are some other gems from this saga:
“…spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.”
🛠 Shots fired. Also, if/when Musk finalizes his purchase, I would be surprised if Agrawal keeps his job.
“…spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation.
🛠 There’s a difference between an account primarily powered by a computer vs. a spam account that could be powered by a computer, a bot, or both working together.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges
Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5% – based on the methodology outlined above.*
*Above meaning in the rest of his tweet storm
🛠 Twitter is in fact even “cleaner” than publicly reported.
We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.
🛠 Purchased or not, Twitter’s team won’t let its product be passively dragged through the mud in the process.
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VI. INSTAGRAM CHANGED ITS LOGO
New:
Previous:
🛠 Why does this matter? I have no idea. (No offense to any designers. It looks great.)
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Did I miss any other important updates? Let me know below in the comments.
See you Tuesday for a practical tip and an in-depth analysis in the world of digital content strategy.