Wasn’t it great to get past the holiday break and return to normal life? I know I loved having a nice break with the family, but I’m always really happy when it’s all over. Hopefully you all had a nice break, too, and your New Year is off to a good start. As we get back into the swing of things, we came across a lot of interesting happenings from across the interwebs this past week.
Industry
Video Views on Facebook Going Through The Roof
Over the past year, video posts on Facebook are a staggering and 94 percent in the U.S. and 75 percent worldwide according to the company. Facebook said that huge increase has meant the numbers of videos in users’ News Feeds has gone up 3.6 times in the last year.
Video is a huge component of what appears in the Facebook newsfeed, with more than a billion video views every day since June. According to Facebook, half of all users who visit Facebook daily watch at least one video each day. Seventy six percent of Americans who use Facebook “say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.”
With Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all battling to become the online video king, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. For me personally, I watch a bunch of videos on YouTube, but I discover more videos on Facebook than anywhere else. And Twitter? I rarely discover and/or watch video there. What about you?
Email Still King for Online Work
via Marketing Pilgrim
According to a study by Pew Research says, 94% of job holders use the Internet for work. That’s includes everyone from the C-suite to sole proprietors. While they use the Internet for such varied activities as research, shopping, and finance, they all use it to keep it touch via email. No surprises there.
Email, as it turns out, is the most important business tool at 61%. Internet as a whole comes in close second, at 54%, with phones trailing significantly at 35% and 24% for landlines and mobile respectively.
In case you’re wondering, social networks rounded out the list with just a 4% showing. Social networks like LinkedIn can be good for business networking, promoting your business, etc., but for the average worker, they’re mostly seen as a time waster.
While using utilizing social and even reaching for the phone can be good ways to engage with your customers, email is still the king of the hill. At least today.
Technology
Cordcutters Rejoice! Sling TV Poised to Take on the Cable TV
To the delight of cord cutters everywhere, this past week Dish Network announced its highly anticipated web-based streaming service Sling TV as a serious competitor to traditional cable TV.
In a world where many cable TV bills top $100 per month for a bunch of channels you may or may not watch, Sling, by comparison, starts at $20 a month and includes access to 13 channels, including ABC Family, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN, Disney Channel, ESPN, ESPN 2, Food Network, HGTV, Maker Studio, TBS, TNT, and Travel Channel.
The company is also offering additional “channel bundles” in two different genres: A kids’ bundle (Baby TV, Boomerang, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Duck TV) and a “News/Info” bundle (Bloomberg, Cooking Channel, DYI Network, HLN). A sports bundle is also being considered.
And just like Netflix and Hulu, Sling TV is a month-to-month subscription service. The service will be available on various streaming boxes like Roku, Amazon FireTV and Microsoft’s Xbox as well as most web browsers. No word on AppleTV availability. As an Amazon FireTV LOVER, this makes me very excited.
If successful, this could be the first domino to fall in the effort to make Internet based TV a mainstream reality.
via iMore
Scannable From Evernote Your iOS Device into a Handheld
Cloud note taking app Evernote has just released Scannable, a new iOS app that turns your mobile device into a scanner. The new app can scan your paper documents and will automatically crop and enhance your scans for best results.
Scannable can recognize text details that can be used to create new contacts, complete with LinkedIn data and a photo. These contacts can then be added to your device’s contact list.
Along with saving scans to Evernote, Scannable can send your documents to other cloud services, as well as email, text messages, or saving them as photos. Scannable is available on the iTunes App Store. I may be in serious love.
The French Postal Service Testing Drones
While Amazon has generated most of the buzz recently with its drone tests, LaPoste, France’s postal service, announced that its package-delivery subsidiary, GeoPost, has successfully completed initial tests to deliver lightweight mail and packages via drone.
In recent tests, GeoPost and Atechsys said they successfully demonstrated that a drone could carry a package up to 2 kilograms in weight up to 1.2 kilometers.
While there is no official word on when such a service would launch, the initial goal is to create a service to deliver packages in remote areas and possibly for emergency assistance. French laws currently prohibit drones from flying over heavily populated areas, so obviously things would need to change before this could go mainstream.
Social Media
Pinterest Rolling Out Promoted Pins For Everyone
Promoted Pins are Pinterest’s version of Facebook’s Promoted Posts. They look just like regular pins, but they’re actually highly targeted advertisements. As of this week, Pinterest is inviting those with business pages to check it out. According to the results of recent testing, Promoted Pins have been well received.
According to Pinterest, brand advertisers saw about a 30% jump in earned media (yay impressions!) from their campaigns. That’s including people who saw a Promoted Pin and saved it to one of their own boards. Since Pins are evergreen, a 5% bump in earned media in the month following the end of a campaign often resulted.
If you’d like to check it out for yourself and be a part of the Promoted Pins program, you can sign up at: https://business.pinterest.com/en/promoted-pins
Facebook Adds New Video Features For Business Pages
via Search Engine Journal
Recently Facebook has been testing a new design and some new features to enhance the user experience of business pages regarding displaying and consuming video content.
In addition to the revised design, new features such as the ability to display a featured video and create video playlists are being tested. The featured video will be displayed in an extra large format across the top of the video section, similar to how you can currently set featured posts to be displayed.
With reports that Page owners are, for the first time ever, uploading more videos directly to Facebook than sharing links to videos on YouTube, it makes sense that the company would make this a priority.
These features will be available to all Pages in the coming weeks. The new design will appear automatically, and all videos will be displayed with titles, length, Like counts, and view counts. Looks like video is becoming serious business for Facebook in 2015 in a big way!
Miscellaneous
Taylor Swift is Awesome!
Betty White is Awesome Too!
Photo Credit: TaylaLyell1979 via Compfight cc
Things You Need To Know This Week – January 9, 2015 is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency
