Survey shows Facebook users are ditching the app, increasing privacy

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in a year full of scandals and congressional inquiries, people appear to be changing how they use Facebook.

A new study from Pew Research Center shows that a huge portion of users has taken steps to reduce their usage and increase their privacy within the past year.

Interestingly, the findings show that users are specifically ditching the Facebook mobile app, with more than a quarter of US adults deleting the app on their phone. Even more have gone on a trial separation by taking a break from the platform entirely.

Among the findings of the study are several notable discoveries, including:

  • 54% of users have adjusted their privacy settings
  • 42% have taken a break from checking Facebook for several weeks or longer
  • 26% have deleted the Facebook app from their phone
  • 74% have done at least one of the above

These numbers on their own are very concerning for Facebook, but they become even more illuminating when broken down by age group. The survey shows that young Facebook users are widely stepping away from the platform or restricting their privacy.

Among users aged 18-29, 44% have deleted the app, compared to just 12% of users over the age of 64. Similar shifts were found among those who have changed their privacy settings.

Notably, there was no significant difference between the ages of those who have taken a break from Facebook.

The survey was conducted between May 29th and June 11th this year, after news broke about Facebook’s involvement in the collection and selling data on millions of users by Cambridge Analytica.

While these trends are certainly eye-raising, it remains unclear exactly how Facebook’s scandals have actually affected the company. The company’s latest quarterly report indicates the average daily users in North America has remained steady throughout the year.

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Facebook is letting a select few test various headlines, images, and more in posts

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Facebook is running an extremely limited test letting just five publishers create and test responsive headlines, images, videos, and copy to see which versions of their posts perform better in real time.

The new tool allows the select few publishers to test up to four unique versions of any organic post, according to Digiday. It also allows these publishers to see data such as interactions and click-through rate, as well as predictions of these metrics as the ads roll out. This way, publishers can actively gauge which version of their content fares best.

While Facebook wasn’t willing to release specific data on the test yet, Facebook product manager Mollie Vandor said that more than half of the time, publishers wound up choosing a different version of the story than they had originally created.

The intention is to help boost organic performance for publishers in a time where organic reach and engagement continues to fall across the platform. According to BuzzFeed News, one of the publishers given access to the test, the tool does improve performance. However, it isn’t enough to mitigate Facebook’s ongoing demotion of organic reach.

“This comes as everyone’s traffic on Facebook has gone down a lot, so it’s good to be able to get the most out of our posts, but we’re still getting a lot less,” said BuzzFeed news deputy director, Fran Berkman.

As a Facebook rep told Marketing Land in a written statement:

Our goal with this test is to provide more visibility into how their organic content is performing on Facebook on a post by post basis. Also to enable publishers in the test to derive learnings and identify their own best practices over time. With this level of insight, publishers are better equipped to drive meaningful engagement around their content and have a stronger sense of control over how their content performs on Facebook.

Vandor echoed this sentiment, saying the tool “is a way to maximize how they pitch their content to people on Facebook.”

“Instead of us saying, ‘Here’s a list of universal best practices,’ we’re trying to give publishers the tools they can use to develop their own best practices.”

When asked if the tool would be available to other publishers and advertisers in the future, Vandor wouldn’t say anything decisively. She did, though, say the company is “actively exploring” expanding the tool to others once it is made easier and less resource-intensive to use.

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Google Introduces New “Veteran-Led” Label For Google My Business Listings

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Google Veterans

Google is releasing a new label for Google My Business listings highlighting when a business is owned or led by a veteran.

Sean O’Keefe, data scientist at Google and a former Staff Sergeant in the US Army announced the new attribute this week while also highlighting the millions of American businesses that are owned by veterans.

“More than 2.5 million businesses in the U.S. are majority-owned by veterans, and one way that I stay connected to the veteran community is by supporting those veteran-owned businesses. It’s something I can do all throughout my day, whether I’m grabbing a coffee or recommending a local restaurant to a friend.”

The tag is easily enabled and will highlight veteran-owned businesses in both Google Search listings and map results.

The label is similar in appearance and function to other attributes like “Has Wifi” or “Outdoor Seating.”

Currently, there is no verification process. All a veteran business owner has to do is follow a couple steps to enable the “Veteran-led” attribute for their own listing:

  • Sign into your Google My Business account
  • Select the location you are managing
  • Select “Info” from the menu
  • Find the “Attributes” section and select the Pencil icon
  • Search or select the “Veteran-led” attribute
  • Select “Apply”.

The new attribute is just one of many steps Google is taking to provide support for veterans, including curating search results for veterans looking for jobs and encouraging IT training. You can find out more about the initiative here.

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Facebook removes the ability to cross-post from Twitter, other apps

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For years, Facebook has made it easy to integrate your other social media accounts from across the web, by allowing users to cross-post content from one platform onto Facebook. For instance, Twitter users were able to share their Tweets on Facebook without ever leaving Twitter’s platform.

That all changed last week, however, when Facebook officially deprecated its Publish actions permissions from its API, effectively making it impossible for other social networks to include built-in cross-posting.

According to Facebook, this move affects approximately 60,000 apps – including some big hitters like Twitter.

Twitter’s support team confirmed the change, though they explain there are still other ways to share Tweets across the web:

Facebook announced it would be deprecating Publish action permissions back in April, saying a few categories of apps with long product life cycles would be given extra time to update their software.

Facebook confirmed to Marketing Land’s Amy Gesenhues it had rolled out the change last week. The company also stated Facebook users could still share content using Facebook’s Share dialogs.

Essentially, this boils down to Facebook staking its territory and trying to keep users within its platform as much as possible. Unfortunately, that means users and businesses who had been using Twitter’s integration to share content on both platforms at the same time will now have to go through more tedious methods.

At the same time Facebook removed the ability to automatically publish content to the site, the company says it also removed access to its API platform for hundreds of thousands of inactive apps. Both actions are part of a recent effort from Facebook to clean up its app landscape after recent controversies of what user information apps were able to access.

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YouTube introduces a new way to explore and discover videos with hashtags

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Hashtag YouTube

Hashtags are coming to YouTube. The video platform has begun displaying hashtags on videos to help users search and discover other videos on similar topics.

The hashtags appear on any video that has been optimized with the tags in web browsers and the YouTube Android app. So far, the hashtags are not being shown in the iOS app.

Up to three hashtags can be shown in blue text above videos’ titles and can be clicked on to open a search containing related videos.

Hashtags can be used to conduct manual searches for any video containing that hashtag, even if it is just in the video description. Hashtags can also be included in video titles.

There are a few restrictions on how hashtags can be used on YouTube, most of which are common sense. YouTube’s policies explicitly prohibit using hashtags to promote harassment or hate speech, as well as to mislead people about content.

Additionally, the platform discourages users from over-tagging their videos, which would be defined as using 15 or more tags on a single video.

Breaking these rules could lead to a variety of punishments depending on how severe the infraction is or whether someone has committed a previous offense. These could include having your hashtags be ignored, videos being removed from search results, or a video being removed from YouTube altogether.

For now, using hashtags to search provides pretty limited search results. But, I expect that will change as creators begin to optimize their channels.

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See how people find your Google My Business listing with Search Query Insights

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Business owners can now see exactly what search terms people are using to find their Google My Business listings with Search Query Insights, giving you an opportunity to see where your listing is succeeding and what areas may need to be better optimized.

The search query information is being added to the Insights tab and includes the most common terms and search trends that helped people find your business.

In the help page for the new feature, Google suggested: “these queries should help you create better Posts with Google and even Ads to engage your customers.”

However, the data won’t be a comprehensive list of every search term that led to your listing. It will just contain the terms used most often.

“Search queries focus on the terms that your customers used to find your business on Local Search and Maps.”

Business owners or page managers can also filter the queries based on those used within the last week or the past 28 days.

The feature will be available to all Google My Business listings soon, but Google has not provided an estimate of how long the rollout will take. Currently, some are reporting seeing search query data in their Insights tab, while it is absent for others. I would expect most will have access to the information by the end of the week, if not sooner.

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Instagram launches IGTV for hour long videos

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Instagram is betting big on long-form videos with a new video platform called “IGTV” which will show off videos up to an hour long. Until now, users were only allowed to upload videos up to one-minute-long, so this is a big upgrade for users.

While the feature is entirely accessible within Instagram’s app and web platform, Instagram is also launching a stand-alone app available on both iOS and Android devices today.

“We made it a dedicated app so you can tap on it and enjoy video without all the distraction,” CEO Kevin Systrom explained.

So far, indications are that Instagram “celebrities” will get most of the attention within the IGTV section on the Instagram app, but businesses can still get some use out of the ability to upload longer, more in-depth videos.

Businesses may also benefit from being able to curate their own Channels of content that users can subscribe to within IGTV. This way, they will be notified anytime you post a new video.

For now, Systrom said that IGTV is entirely-ad free, but it likely won’t last forever. Once it has established itself on Instagram’s platform, I’d expect ads to start appearing.

How to start your own IGTV Channel

Creating a channel is easy and can be done within the Instagram app.

Step 1: Tap the IGTV logo near the top-right corner of your Instagram home screen.

Step 2: Tap the gear icon on the bottom right of the screen.

Step 3: Select “Create Channel” at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4: After a brief introduction to IGTV, select “Next” on the following two screens. Then, tap “Create Channel.”

Step 5: Congratulations, your channel is officially active and you can start uploading videos to IGTV.

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Instagram becomes the fastest growing social network

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Instagram logo

Instagram is coming up in the world. This week the social network revealed it has reached more than 1 billion monthly active users, jumping from 800 million in September of last year.

The extra 200 million users also make the site the fastest growing social network around right now by a fair amount.

For context, while Facebook remains the biggest social network overall, its growth in monthly users has fallen to just 3.14%. Snapchat, trapped by its own niche market of younger users, is growing even slower at 2.13%.

Instagram, however, continues to grow by almost 5% from quarter-to-quarter.

There is certainly some irony in the latest numbers. While Snapchat continues to stall, Instagram is largely making its gains on the back of similar features like Stories and image stickers.

Stories, in particular, have taken off to surprising popularity. According to the latest numbers, there are more people posting Stories on Instagram than Snapchat’s entire userbase.

The continued growth of Instagram also hints at Facebook’s gradual disconnect with younger users. Teens and other young social media users are adopting Instagram, rather than signing into Facebook.

The social network still has plenty of hurdles in its path, but their user growth shows it may be worthwhile to establish a business presence on the platform sooner rather than later.

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Typos may not matter to Google (but here’s why they still matter)

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Are you afraid typos or grammatical errors in your blogs might be hurting your Google ranking? According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, worry no more.

The good news is typos won’t hurt your search rankings. The bad news is they may still hurt you in other ways.

Responding to a Twitter user who believed that errors in content can hurt your Google presence by getting content marked as low quality, Mueller explained that Google doesn’t actually care that much.

“It’s always good to fix known issues with a site, but Google’s not going to count your typsos (sic),” Mueller wrote.

While that might be a relief for many, there is still the obvious issue of how actual people perceive content with typos. People are prone to forgive a mistake here and there, but error-filled or poorly written content is going to be dismissed by most.

Poorly written content comes off as unprofessional and won’t help build your authority like well-edited, well-composed content. So, while you might be able to get away with some typos on Google, it always pays to take the time to edit and revise anything you are going to publish under your company name before the public ever gets to see it.

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Google Chrome gives its final warning about switching to HTTPS

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Google has given webmasters their final warning to convert their sites to HTTPS or be branded as “Not Secure” with a prominent message in the browser bar of all Chrome and all Chrome-based browsers after October of this year.

Why is Google doing this?

Google has been urging webmasters to switch their sites to the more secure HTTPS security protocol for years, using increasingly drastic measures. Currently, Google is denoting sites that are secure using a green icon in the browser bar. Since so many sites have now adopted the protocol, Google is taking this a step further with a prominent red warning for sites that are not secure.

What does this mean for you?

Internet users don’t give up their information easily. They have to trust that you won’t let their data be breached or misuse their information. If they see that your site is specifically “Not Secure”, they simply aren’t going to trust you with anything.

That could mean increasing bounce-rates for your website, fewer e-commerce sales, fewer newsletter sign-ups, or fewer internet-driven leads for your business.

Two-Stage Roll Out

Rather than “switching on” the security warnings all at once, Google will be rolling out the change in two steps.

First, Chrome will remove the green icon signifying safe websites from browser bars. In its place, they will temporarily leave the small lock icon in its place.

Then, beginning in October, Google will introduce the official red icon identifying sites that are “Not Secure.”

This latest warning from Google gives webmasters plenty of time to make the switch, but I advise taking action sooner rather than later. You can get started right now with Google’s HTTPS set-up guides here.

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