Who's winning the race for "future of television"?
My recommendation to you? Save this newsletter for a slow day during the winter holidays. The Internet will still be around when you've recharged your batteries.
Snapchat is currently winning the race for the "future of television"
Everyone is trying to win the war over video. Instagram launched its IGTV experience in June this year, and Facebook Watch arrived about a year earlier. Both are trying to create a more "YouTube-like" experience, organising content by channel and allowing longer-form content.
And sure, IGTV makes strategic sense as the next step for Instagram. The platforms' 1 billion users have watched 60% more video in 2018 than they did a year ago. Still, the feature is so far mostly a venue for brands to distribute odd-sized commercials.
At the same time, Snapchat is nailing how to create TV shows for the mobile age. All of their Snap Originals incorporate the smartphone into their storytelling, both in the narrative and in the visuals. They produce shows in different genres; most are eight or twelve episodes long and are successfully written, shot, and distributed for the platform. You can take a look at some of the original shows here.
A glimpse into the future of voice
No matter if you like it or not, voice interfaces will most likely become increasingly used and vital in 2019. HubSpot asked over 3,400 people in the U.S., UK, and Canada about their relationship to voice interfaces and got some interesting findings.
When asked, "Do you use a voice assistant, like Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri?" the race was close between those who said they do (52%) and those who don't (45%). 4% said they didn’t know what a voice assistant is.
Among people not using voice assistants, most (18%) were concerned about privacy, but others said they needed to learn more (16%) or didn’t find them useful (15%).
Top three behaviours are 1. Checking the weather, 2. Shopping, 3. Listening to music. Almost a quarter of the users said they have bought something online with the help of their voice assistant.
While half of the recipients don’t plan to buy a smart speaker, more than a quarter plan to do so within the following year.
21 and counting – the biggest Facebook scandals of 2018
It all began in February when special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment described exactly how 13 employees of Russia's Internet Research Agency created fake US personas on Instagram and Facebook to make Americans turn against each other before the election.
Only a month after, Cambridge Analytica became front page news, and the scandals have just kept on coming over the year. Three major incidents have happened in December alone, and the month isn’t even over yet.
With more and more people considering leaving the platform or already removing their accounts, the big question hovering over the internet is: What will happen now? The safest answer is probably: no one knows.
Tool of the Week: Tailwind
Tailwind is a nifty tool for visual marketing, focusing on Pinterest, which is quickly becoming increasingly relevant for marketers.
As Facebook loses ground, other platforms are gaining importance for content creators and influencers. Pinterest is one of those platforms. Over the next year, we will probably see more types of businesses on Pinterest, using it to drive traffic or sell products directly. Pinterest is no longer a platform only for food photos, pretty shoes, and interior design (although those categories still make up a large share).
But Pinterest hasn't been a priority for most social media tools. And if you need to do everything manually, naturally, you won't prioritise it. Therefore, creating value for your business on Pinterest has been hard. Tailwind is bridging this gap.
The tool has four main features:
- It makes it possible to schedule pins and spread out what you usually pin all at once over days or weeks
- It can create loops of evergreen content, taking the oldest pins on your board and pinning them back on top
- It lets you participate in and create tribes, where users collaborate to get their content more exposure on the platform.
- It gives you easy access to analyse your pins, helping you learn and improve over time.
It's not a pretty tool. But it's functional, and it's a great way to step up (or start) a Pinterest presence.
