Weekly Finds - Week 37, 2020
Weekly Finds - Week 37, 2020
All Weekly Finds and Key lessons summarized in a comfortable audio version (for members only):
Hootsuite - More Than Half of the People on Earth Now Use Social Media
2/3 of the world’s eligible population, meaning those older than 13, is on social media now. Most people seem to use social media to stay up to date and get news.
The distribution is heavily geo-skewed: low in Africa, for example, and high in the Western world + Asia.
The average user is on 9 different platforms with Facebook still ranking at the top (2.6b users).
According to the report, younger people (16-24y) claim to use social media over search engines when conducting research. I’m sure Google doesn’t like that.
Key lesson
TikTok already has 800m users (Instagram: 1.08b). That could change with India’s restriction and the possible breakup enforced by the US government. Either way, it's very interesting to watch a new social network coming up in the Facebook/Google duopoly.
Moz - Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate
Cyrus Shepard tested some common title tag SEO assumptions with Search Pilot on moz.com and found interesting results. Removing the brand, for example, yielded a negative result but removing boilerplate text had a very positive outcome.
Key lesson
Adding or removing boilerplate text and the brand from titles can be better or worse depending on brand familiarity and value-add.
At the end of the day, there are no universal recommendations. Tests and experiments yield the best answers.
Medium - Toward a more relational Medium
I like Ev’s article not because it’s an update on where Medium is going - that’s also interesting - but because it explains the difference between relational and transactional content consumption.
Relational reading = reading from people
Transactional reading = reading about specific topics
Key lesson
The web taught us to select via headlines but there’s another way: selecting via people a.k.a. Authors. We used to
The relationship model got lost a bit in the last couple of years but seems to celebrate a comeback due to the flood of content.
The social content model is based on following people over topics/content.
Threadling - How to Launch A SaaS Startup to $7,000/month
This case study tells the story of Drip, a marketing automation tool for e-commerce, and how its founder Rob Walling scaled it to $7,000/month by solving a core pain point of his customers.
Key lesson
The cause for churn isn’t always the product itself, sometimes it’s a pain related to it. That’s why it’s so important to stay in touch with customers. The biggest issues come to light when talking to churned and retained accounts.
G docs - 25 ways to sign someone up for your newsletter
If email is a viable channel for your company or client, you want to check this deck out. It hands us 25 nice tips for driving newsletter sign-ups at scale.
Key lesson
Fancy isn’t always the best way to drive subscribers. Sometimes, simple does it. How you sign-up customers and how much information you need to provide them beforehand depends on your audience's preferences. It's not always the same.