Banners.  How much can you realistically expect to get from a banner?  Chris Boyles says the answer is more than you used to.  You know how Facebook Instant Articles lets publishers publish direct on that platform?  There’s an ad unit equivalent for you brands called Facebook Canvas.  The new format adds similar bonuses as Instant Articles do, they load really fast, and instead of blah images you can incorporate video, huge photos, interactivity, GIFs and all that fun stuff.  And people like fun stuff.  They tested it with Carnival Cruise Line and people spent almost 3 minutes with their ad and scrolled all the way through to the end.  They tested it with Wendy’s and 39% who clicked on their ad saw the whole thing and engaged with it over a minute.  These are not your grandpappy’s banner ads.  As for luring people into clicking the ads in the first place, Canvas has been getting twice the clicks.

 

I have a degree in journalism, which I mostly use as a placemat.  But with the definition of journalism being something quite different now than it used to be, Brian Ekdale, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, wanted to study a mid-sized Midwestern newspaper to see how the new journalism is being embraced, or not.  Ben DeJarnette of MediaShift reports that for the most part, reporters are down with technology changes.  They no longer feel publishing on their site scoops their paper editions.  Most know you’ve got to do social.  The problem is the duties tech brings just get added onto their existing jobs and they don’t have the time.  They have the audacity to think they should be spending their time, you know, getting stories.  More than half say their companies don’t train them in things like social either.  Also, they don’t mind interacting with and getting info from the general public, but they are not so down with “citizen journalism” or user-generated journalism.  Only 14% think John Q. Public should be reporters like them.  One even said, “Just because you’re a teacher doesn’t mean you can be an education reporter.”

 

If you didn’t mind the algorithm changes to Facebook that sank your organic reach to zero and made it pay to play, then you won’t mind what’s happening to Instagram.  Posts will no longer show up in the order they were posted.  Instagram will sort them for you after figuring out what you’re most likely to be interested in.  CEO Kevin Systrom says, “People miss about 70% of the posts in their feed.  What this is about is making sure the 30% you see is the best 30% possible.”  Well that sounds customer focused and charitable doesn’t it?   But Steve Feiner of A Better Florist thinks it’s about monetization, and small business might not be able to foot the bill.  It’s hard for Facebook to keep its revenue growth up, so the growth potential going forward is sitting there in Instagram.

 

We talk a lot about reaching people so they can consume our content, no matter what device they’re on.  But it might be interesting to know which devices those are, especially now that Apple has rolled out the iPhone SE.  Looking just at iPhones, do most people rush right out and get the latest version?  AppLovin analyzed global iPhone usage to get that answer.  Turns out most of us are using the iPhone 6 at 32%.  The 5S is next at 19%.  When you add all the 6’s together, the 6, 6S, 6 Plus, and 6S Plus, that makes up 63%.  AppLovin’s John Krystynak mulled over 3 reasons people may not want phones with screens any bigger than 4 inches.  They learn they don’t like the mega-phone and go back to the old one.  Or they put off upgrading because they know full well they don’t want a bigger phone.  Or the older models don’t cost as much.  Cheaper AND you aren’t trying to stuff a TV in your pocket.  Localytics analyst Caitlin O’Connell says, “Since the biggest differentiator may be that the iPhone SE has the upgrades of current models but in a compacted form, there’s a big upgrade opportunity for consumers holding onto older models and reluctant to change to a larger device.”

 

There are things we marketers think, or hope, doesn’t bother consumers.  One of those things is when experiences across multiple devices aren’t synced, don’t recognize the user, and are disconnected.  We hope they don’t mind this, that’s why only 28% of marketers polled by Adobe have ever used cross-device identification.  But the study shows 66% notice and get frustrated when that happens.  And if you’re targeting Millennials, you really better stop the wishful thinking.  90% of them switch devices while doing activities, and they expect device 2 to pick up right where device 1 left off.  34% of Millennial consumers switch devices while shopping.  Social Times says Millennials have 7.7 devices, using an average of 3.3 daily.  Ryan Dietzen, analyst at Adobe Digital Index adds digital marketers are challenged knowing a Web visitor who shows up on a smartphone is the same customer 4 hours later on a tablet, or 7 hours later on a desktop.

 

Happy birthday dear Twitter, happy birthday to…oh I’m probably out of characters.  Anyway, Twitter just turned 10-years-old.  And to celebrate Kapost’s Director of Content Anne Murphy gathered up some fun Twitter facts for us.  It’s the 2nd most used social platform by B2B after LinkedIn.  Twitter usage appears to be going down, but B2B’s confidence in its effectiveness is actually going up.  Images help a tweet get 150% more retweets.  47% of people who follow brands are more likely to visit the brand’s site.  72% are more likely to buy from them in the future.  Watch out for those weaving drivers, users are 181% more likely to be checking Twitter during their commute.  It’s thought that 1B people tried Twitter, but only 32% of them are still using it.  And finally, 391M Twitter accounts have no followers.

 

You have a lot to say and a really impressive command of the English language.  So you might have been pretty excited when you heard the rumors Twitter was going to abandon its character limitation and let you do posts of up to 10,000 characters.  Those rumors made sense.  Why limit the platform when your social competitors don’t?  Well you’ll have to ask CEO Jack Dorsey that because even though it sounded like he was kind of open to the idea of tweeters doing bigger tweets in January, Justin Lafferty writes that he told the Today Show Twitter is sticking with the 140-character limit, forever.  Dorsey said, “It’s a good constraint for us.  It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”

 

Marketing Tech Blog did a little summing up of Black Ink’s C-level 2016 Marketing Study.  The top MarTech areas US marketers are most likely to buy this year are Business Intelligence, Marketing Automation, and Customer Interaction software.  But when you look at the tools themselves, it’s still pretty much a discombobulated hodgepodge of thousands of tools, all of which say they’re the answer to your dreams.  Marketers say advanced analytics to guide their decision-making is their biggest barrier to success across the board, and relationships between internal silos is critical, but relationship-building is pretty much being ignored as a 2016 priority.  What they are prioritizing is moving the needle on brand relevancy and customer-centricity.  And customer retention and upselling is a bigger part of the focus than customer acquisition.

 

It’s time for me to sit you down and gently, lovingly give you an eye-opening story if you feel like Snapchat isn’t worth paying much attention to in your social marketing.  Edison Research and Triton put out their Infinite Dial research, from which we can learn a few Snapchatty things.  It’s better known than LinkedIn or Pinterest, with awareness from Americans 12+ at 71%.  It has more users than LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Twitter.  Jay Baer says we act like Facebook and Twitter are the big two, but Twitter’s been replaced by Instagram and Snapchat.  Snapchat grew in one year the same as Twitter grew in 4 years combined.  Snapchat is the US’s 2nd-favorite social network based on which they use most often.  And while Facebook is still tops with people 12-24, Snapchat’s the next fave of young folk at 26%, with Instagram 3^rd at 17%.  Jay points out that means in one year, 10% of US social-using 12-24 year-olds changed from Facebook to Snapchat as their main social platform.

 

VentureBeat always keeps their ear pressed to, whatever helps them hear things, and they say Google’s been working on a video livestreaming competitor to Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook live.  People don’t want to wait to see videos of your dog, they want to watch it live!  It’s called YouTube connect and it’s a standalone app available, probably, on Android and iOS.  Ken Yeung reports it’ll do most of the main stuff its competitors do, except there’s not integration with Facebook and Twitter for social sharing.  What it does have going for it is the degree to which YouTube is synonymous with video.  Google’s Manual Bronstein, told Wired, “Live has always been a part of video, and it’s actually always a very exciting part.”  If the rumors are right, there’s chat and tagging and a “news feed,” you can watch live video within the app, and you can record and store your cast so it can be viewed later by you and others.

 

That’s it.  Follows are awesome @mikestiles.