Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 37 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
ICYMI Tuesday: Find your top-performing organic Google keywords, and a useful trick for Google search.
Contents
I. Twitter’s ‘Top’ Users Start To Go Quiet
II. Americans Under 30 Increasingly Use TikTok To Find News
III. Search Users Make Quick Decisions, Especially on Mobile
IV. LinkedIn Steps Up War on Bots, Scammers
V. YouTube Becomes More ‘Watchable’ Than Ever
VI. TikTok Wants To Help You Get Better at TikTok
VII. Pinterest Partners with the Louvre to Unveil New Video Feature
VIII. Meta Makes it Easier to Take Down Impostors
IX. Promote Your Twitter Community on Your Profile
I. Twitter’s ‘Top’ Users Start To Go Quiet
Reuters broke a story this week about an internal memo circulated at Twitter indicating that its most valuable users are tweeting much less than in the past.
These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
A "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
Also revealed: Crypto and NSFW content are the fastest-growing topics on the platform.
🛠 Why does this matter? Elon Musk completed his deal Thursday night to buy Twitter.
He previously revealed plans to cut about three-quarters of the Twitter workforce once he takes over. (But maybe he won’t). He has already fired some of the top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.
Regardless, Twitter is in decline and there doesn’t seem to be an easy fix. That could make for some painful changes.
Musk also sent a tweet Thursday addressed to Twitter advertisers:
“I didn’t [buy Twitter] to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love,” Musk wrote. “That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!”
And later: “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world.”
On the surface, this seems to be encouraging and level-headed. We shall see if his altruistic ambitions come to fruition.
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II. Americans Under 30 Increasingly Use TikTok To Find News
“In just two years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” a Pew Study shows.
As you can see from the chart, adults under 30 are the most likely to consume news (or what they believe to be news) on TikTok.
Only Twitter, Facebook and Reddit still outrank TikTok as social media news sources among adults.
🛠 Why does this matter? This gives TikTok a hugeresponsibility, especially in the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S.. (Though you could say the same about the war in Ukraine and other important topics.)
But not only does TikTok need to make sure it protects its users from misinformation, but legitimate news outlets (not armchair wannabe journalists) need to step up their game as well.
If it weren’t clear that users seek more important things than dance trends and lip-synching on the vertical video platform, it is now.
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III. Search Users Make Quick Decisions, Especially on Mobile
Semrush did a comprehensive study of thousands of Google search queries to learn more about “zero-click” search sessions.
Some of the highlights:
3–4 keyword (re: query length) searches were the most common on desktop, closely followed by 1–2 keywords
These numbers are very similar for mobile
Nearly half of desktop users make a “decision” on what to click in 0-5 seconds
Only one-third of mobile users fall into that category, with 18 percent more deciding in 5–10 seconds
Nearly half of desktop decisions (45 percent) are organic clicks, while about a quarter leave without clicking anything at all (more on that below)
“We can see that about 55% of the times two searches are performed in a user’s journey contain keywords with a similarity rating of 0.6 (60%) or more.”
Study sample: 609,809 unique search queries from 20,000 unique U.S. users, evenly distributed across desktop and mobile, in May 2022.
🛠 Why does this matter? With nearly half of users clicking something in the first five seconds, we can see how important it is to not only rank on page 1 of SERPs, but high on page 1.
It makes sense that platforms – desktop vs. mobile – don’t change much in the way of keyword query lengths, while at the same time users take longer to decide on mobile. Smaller screens = more time needed to navigate and choose.
“Users are not inherently looking to avoid a click, but they are instead looking to acquire information quicker,” the report concluded.
That is, our attention spans are shorter than ever, and if we can get the answers we need without clicking through to a website, so be it. Whether that be in a link-less Google SERP feature (i.e. “People also asked”) or because a headline, meta description or photo on the SERP contained all the user needed to know.
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