If there’s one thing that is constant about social media, it’s change.

So many things influence the way we behave on social media: technology, social changes, economy, and politics. All of them are changing at a rapid speed, so you can imagine how volatile the social media world is.

This makes predicting trends for a year ahead quite difficult. However, there are tendencies that stick around and affect the industry in a major way for a long time. For example, influencer marketing has been winning the hearts of social media marketers and the pockets of consumers for a couple of years now, and the ephemeral content, even though it has been around for a while, got a significant boost with Instagram’s investments put into the Stories feature.

Considering these points, I present to you the eight social media trends of 2019. These are the tendencies that take their roots in the current cultural zeitgeist, technological development, and social platforms’ respective strategies, and are expected to take over social media this year.

1. Social listening

Social listening is not a new thing by any means, but the way we apply social listening is changing right now. In the past years, social listening was a way to manage brand mentions and reputations for big brands like Apple or Hilton. However, two things happened that altered the social media listening industry:

1. Social media monitoring tools have become more evolved, with new sources of data, new features, etc being added constantly.
2. The tools became affordable not just for huge corporations, but for mid-sized and small businesses, local businesses, and startups as well.

How did this affect social listening strategies? Well, nowadays, the new features and data sources allow going beyond basic brand monitoring. You can use social listening for social selling, SEO, and customer care to name a few.

If I’d have to point out one area where social listening could really change the current marketing landscape, I’d go with sales. Social selling is a unique tactic that gives you an opportunity to engage with people who are seeking services and products in your industry directly.

One tool in particular even added a specific feature dedicated to social selling called Awario Leads.

For now, this tactic is extremely underused, but we can expect to see more and more brands taking on social selling this year.

2. Buying on social

Social selling is one thing, but what if you could choose and order a product without even leaving the social media app?

To be fair, it’s not a new thing, Facebook already allows users to buy products from brands’ pages in their ‘Shop‘ section. They also have a Marketplace feature launched way back in 2007 which is an alternative to Craigslist, a platform where individuals can sell or exchange mostly second-hand items.

In 2019 we will see more social media companies opening up their platforms for ecommerce. It would be the next logical step for companies which already offer brands a wide range of features for advertising, like YouTube or Instagram. In fact, one of these might be already working in that direction.

Last September, The Verge reported that Instagram might be working on an ecommerce app. According to the article, the app will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app.

Surely, the app is not an additional feature to Instagram but rather a stand-alone entity. However, this indicates Instagram’s understanding and interest in implementing e-commerce in their product (which is only natural considering that Facebook owns Instagram).

3. Transparency

Social media data has become essential to any marketing strategy, hence social listening is on this list. However, this past year proved just how little knowledge we as a society have of the scope and impact of social media data collected on a daily basis.

Last year was marked by an array of privacy scandals, with Cambridge Analytica being the most prominent one. However, Facebook wasn’t the only one who suffered, Twitter, YouTube, and even Reddit reported at least one security breach last year.

However, let’s not diminish Facebook’s role in this regard, they seemed to have one PR nightmare after another. This probably prompted Mark Zuckerberg to make a special New Year’s resolution for 2019 to organize a series of public discussions dedicated to how Facebook influences society.

That will be only one of the initiatives dedicated to bringing more transparency into the world of social media companies. Data is one of the most important resources in social media marketing, and ethical collection, as well as unbiased evaluation of it, will be a major priority for companies this year.

Our century is marked by brands developing personalities for themselves and building relationships with their audiences. According to this study by Sprout Social, millennials are expecting more transparency from brands than politicians or friends and family. Gaining the trust of the audience will become the focus of social media platforms’ strategies.

4. Live streaming

Powered by social media algorithms, pivoting to video content has been a trend for a while now. This year, however, live streaming is the new black.

Social streaming favors in-the-moment content, another trend that has been taking over social media for a while with Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and, most recently, Facebook stories. According to this Facebook report, daily watch time for Facebook live broadcasts grew four times over the course of a year.

You can use live streaming to present a new product, change the narrative during a PR crisis, or introduce a collaboration with an influencer.

What makes live streaming so special is the ability to create space for an actual dialogue with your customer in real time. Your viewers feel like they are in the middle of a natural conversation, and you’re speaking directly to them. It wins over highly produced video content because of its authenticity, the thing every marketer is trying to accomplish.

5. Private communities

2018 saw a trend of communication migrating to private channels.

More and more interactions occur in Facebook groups and private communities rather than on public pages, which is favored both by algorithms and people (unless these people are social media managers). Moreover, social media platforms keep adding new features to simplify the curation of private groups on top of integrating messaging features in their apps.

On Instagram, turning your growing Instagram account private creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency encourages people to follow, as described in this article by the Atlantic. Private groups and accounts make you feel like a part of an exclusive community, and who doesn’t want that?

Consider creating a private community for your brand, for example, a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. This will give your users an opportunity to not just communicate with you but also with each other, which contributes to building a strong community and encouraging brand advocacy.

6. Messaging

The most private communication channel is, of course, direct messaging. And for the last few years, brands have been engaging with customers through DMs and personal messages on social.

For now, brands are mostly using messaging apps and DMs for customer service purposes. But there’s untapped potential to create personalized, automated communication that’s even more effective than email.

This year, messaging will become a meaningful part of every social media strategy. Moreover, brands will finally embrace messenger automation. A study conducted by Relay revealed that out of 1000 trending B2B companies on Crunchbase, only 0.5 percent of the companies had a chatbot.

Chatbots could make messenger marketing the new email marketing, the open rate for messages is much higher than for emails, and messaging itself is seen as a more casual and personal way of communication.

Chatbots aren’t perfect yet, and people still prefer to converse with a human. However, as chatbots become more sophisticated and use more natural language, they will become necessary. You need to figure out which part of your marketing strategy could benefit from them.

Integrating eCommerce functions could also be beneficial for messaging apps. This is not the new idea if we remember WeChat, but it hasn’t been explored yet in the Western part of the world.

7. Personalization

Chatbots and messaging can also be a part of a comprehensive personalization strategy. 2019 will be the year when personalization powered by AI takes over marketing.

Considering the vast amount of personal information currently available to social media companies, it has become extremely easy to obtain insights into all kinds of information about your customers. Content consumed, purchase history, clicked links, social media interactions, and even personal messages. All this and more can be used to create a laser-targeted marketing campaign just for you.

However, some consumers may feel uncomfortable with how personalization is currently implemented in marketing. Brands need to find the fine line between being helpful and outright creepy.

One way to do this would be combining personalization and other types of marketing: influencer marketing, personalizing your messaging communication (beyond using first names), and so on. Take an example from Airbnb, which uses information about your past and upcoming trips to craft personalized traveling recommendations.

8. Augmented reality (AR)

AR can be used in a plethora of ways, from creating filters dedicated to certain events to actually implementing your product in videos or photos to let customers try it on.

At its F8 developer conference last year, Facebook announced that it was testing AR ads. In your timeline, they look like ordinary Facebook Ads but with a ‘Tap to try it on’ button that lets you try products on virtually with the help of camera filters.

AR could be the solution for those who don’t like online shopping and prefer to test a product before buying. If social media platforms successfully implement this technology on a wide scale first, they will become an even more attractive platform for advertising compared to digital space.

What you need to do in 2019

As you can see, none of these trends are coming at you completely out of the blue, most of them are a logical development of social media platforms’ strategies or the way ordinary users behave on social media.

So this year, it’s time to become an early adopter and try something new, be it a social listening tool or a messenger bot. In 2019, make sure you:

• Collect and analyze social media data to guide your marketing decisions
• Apply new technology to your social media strategy
• Stay authentic and personal

You will undoubtedly see a boost in your social media ROI.

Got any unique social media strategies chalked out for 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Related reading

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Scaling social media can be risky because it’s about human connection. Here are 3 pieces of the puzzle you should scale — and two things you shouldn’t.

Facebook has decided to test Search Ads in selected industries in the US and Canada. What does this experiment mean for the search advertising industry?

Key social media trends to consider for a successful marketing strategy in 2019. More focus on ROI, new tech, and trust between brand and customers.

For the first time, more than half (51 percent) of the U.S. population has listened to a podcast, up from 44 percent last year. Put another way, 144 million people, or 20 million more people than just a year ago, have listened to a podcast.

Frequency is on the rise, too. An estimated 90 million, or nearly one-third (32 percent) listen monthly, up from 26 percent.

And 22 percent are weekly listeners, up from 17 percent. That’s an estimated 62 million weekly U.S. podcast listeners. The numbers come from Edison Research and Triton Digital’s latest Infinite Dial survey.

Who’s listening? Numbers are increasing among men and women, but men are more likely to be listeners with 36 percent of male respondents saying they listen to podcasts monthly, compared to 29 percent of women.

Podcasts are reaching roughly 40 percent of people age 12 to 24 and 25 to 54.  While listening among those 55 and older is up from 13 percent last year, just 17 percent of this older demographic are monthly podcast listeners.

Weekly listeners said they heard an average of seven podcasts in the last week. More than half (52 percent) of them had listened to four or more podcasts that week.

Digital audio looks to podcast market. Spotify, which has made significant overtures in podcasting with the acquisitions of podcasting network Gimlet Media and back-end services company Anchor last month, is quickly gaining traction among younger audiences. Among monthly podcast listeners age 12-24, fifty-three percent were Spotify listeners, up from just 32 percent a year ago.

Why you should care. The marketing opportunities in podcasting continue to evolve from host-read ads and branded sponsored series. As companies like Spotify invest in growing their podcast businesses, the marketing opportunities — and measurement and attribution capabilities — will become more sophisticated. This is still early days for podcasting, but growing audiences and investment means it’s an area more brands will consider incorporating into their marketing strategies.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

With all this gushing about PPC and Google Remarketing campaigns, I strongly feel the need to let you know that I am not to be romanticized or this isn’t a sponsored post. I enjoy following remarketing best practices, and I’d like to provide some justifications as to why I think it is the need of the hour. 

Gone are the days when you were required to pay for people just to see your ads. Today, with PPC advertising, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. The only downside is that you still need to pay for traffic that doesn’t buy the first time around. Here’s when remarketing comes into play.

For those who have no idea regarding the term: it is the practice of using ads to target those people who have visited your website or have already shown an interest in your products or services. The method allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website, as they are more likely to click on your ads in comparison to the new ones.

Renowned networks like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads allow you to set up such campaigns easily. All you have to do is install a remarketing pixel on your existing site. This will automatically add a cookie on your visitor’s browser. Your ad network automatically identifies the cookie and lets you display a customized presentation to allure them.

Why consider Google Dynamic Remarketing?

The term allows you to show ads to those who have previously visited your website, but Google Dynamic Remarketing works on another level. Here it will enable you to show previous visitors’ ads that contain products and services they viewed on your site.

So why should you use it? A few reasons.

1. Retain site abandoners

One of the prime reasons is that Google Dynamic Remarketing enables advertisers to display ads to visitors who have abandoned their site, but it is mainly based on prior engagement. Which means ads can be displayed to those who have:

1. Already visited your site
2. Viewed a specific product
3. Added a product to the shopping cart but didn’t purchase
4. Already purchased products

2. Google display network

In layman’s terms, Google’s display network includes web pages or sites where Google ads appear. Right from Google search, YouTube, and Gmail, Google’s display network covers Google’s partner sites across the web. It’s pretty significant and is substantiated where retailers can get the opportunity to reach customers across different sites using different ad formats. In fact, you can choose which sites you want your remarketing ads to appear on, analyze site impressions, clicks, costs, revenue, and so forth.

3. Bid competitively

By using Google’s conversion optimizer, you can use conversion tracking on the Google display network to identify purchase behavior from click to purchase. By doing so, retailers can optimize their spend on remarketing. It may quite interest you to know that with the help of this conversion data you will know who purchased (and from where), the Conversion Optimizer identifies trends to help you avoid over-bidding for ad placements.

Here are five ways to reduce cart abandonment rates

As I said before, cart abandonment is a major concern these days. Like it or not, unless you are a master of remarketing you won’t be able to reach out to your previous visitors and get them back. Fret not! Down below I would like you to get acquainted with a few dynamic techniques that can increase customer retention.

1. Narrow down your audiences

Before you start any campaign, it is essential to segment your audiences. I often find businesses making this terrible mistake of targeting every visitor with the same campaign. No, that’s not how it should work. What’s a better way to split your audiences?

• U-turners – People who leave your site within seconds
• Scrollers – Visitors who spend more and more time on your page before leaving
• Clickers – Users who visit multiple pages and spend minutes on your site
• Easy quitters – Users who start the conversion process but quit before converting

2. There is a way beyond the landing page

Is a landing page everything that your visitors need? Probably not. To make the most of your remarketing efforts, you need to track users beyond the landing page to determine the pages they visit. This includes the landing page, product page, product category page, checkout and what not. Checking all these pages tells you a lot about a visitor’s interest. For example, the products they are interested in or the item they almost bought, and so forth.

If someone is showing a clear interest in your product, it apparently means stop targeting them with ads featuring your brand logo. Instead, target them with ads featuring the product they’re interested in and make it too tempting to resist.

3. Cart abandonment campaigns

Dynamic remarketing can reduce your cart abandonment rates. It all starts with tracking page visits. Try identifying users who tend to make it as far as the checkout but never reach the confirmation page. With the help of event tracking, one can track which products people add to their carts. In case if their products are still waiting for them, you can remind them.

Many people quit halfway through signing up for your webinar, filling out a quote, etc — you can track them as well.

4. Create campaigns for existing customers

In the quest for retaining previous customers, don’t forget to pursue the existing customers. According to several experts, it takes five times more effort to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your existing ones. So what can be done is:

• Cross-selling
• Up-selling
• Renewing
• Rebuying
• Reinventing
• Loyalty campaigns

5. Guide users along the buying process

Making a purchase is a complex journey for the end user as he/she has to make a ton of interactions with brands. The best advertisers tend to create campaigns that guide users along this journey.

Wrapping it up.

I hope I have made my point pretty clear stating why Google Dynamic Remarketing is apt for your online store. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Charles Richards is a Business Analyst at TatvaSoft UK.

Related reading

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As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

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Twitter has launched a publisher insights tool called “Timing Is Everything” that uses historical data to highlight when users are most often watching and engaging with video on the platform. The tool offers an aggregate look at when Twitter users are generally watching videos on the platform. It does not offer publisher-specific insights on when their own organic followers watch.

Why you should care

While the insights tool is only giving a broad overview of video-consumption on the platform, it can be of service to publishers — helping them optimize video content by posting it when users are most likely to watch a video according to Twitter’s historical data.

“We encourage publishers to continue to post throughout the day in order to maximize reach,” wrote Twitter product manager Ellen Fitzgerald on Twitter’s media blog, “However, consider including posting during the most engaging times of the day and week as part of that strategy.”

More on the news

• The “Timing is Everything” tool can be found within the Twitter Media Studio in the Analytics drop down menu.
• In September, Twitter gave video content a push when it began putting livestreams atop user timelines, giving in-stream video ads prominent placement.
• Last year, Twitter reported more than half of the $575 million it earned in ad revenue during the first quarter of 2018 was from video ads.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

It’s been nearly 3½ years since Google first announced their usage of RankBrain (October 26th 2015, but it had started being rolled out early 2015, in multiple languages).

In that time, there’s been little in the way of details coming from G about what it is or how it works.

The result is that numerous SEOs have stepped up to fill that void with their own speculations and opinions, and in doing that, have caused all sorts of confusion.

This is my attempt to correct and clean up some of that mess.

(There is a TL:DR at the bottom if you want to skip the verbiage :D)

What does RankBrain do?

Though there isn’t much publicly available, what we do have is fairly specific:

“If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines}

Or, if you want it more succinct than that;

“… Lemme try one last time: Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. …”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), on Twitter

Google receives a fair percentage of queries per day that it hasn’t seen before: 15% at last check.

These may include misspellings and typos, elisions/omissions, unusual phrasing/syntactic structures, the wrong word(s) being used, negations (“not x”), things that have only just happened etc. etc. etc.

RB receives these weird, wonderful, and new searches, and attempts to identify existing searches and results that are probably suitable for the searcher’s query.

How does RankBrain work?

Again, we aren’t exactly given a guided tour by G on this, but there are a few bits and pieces.

“… RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. …”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s : Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines

So, rather than looking at words and attempting to parse them and understand the semantics (traditional Natural Language Processing [NLP]), it converts them into numbers and plots them on a chart (with multiple dimensions, not just X and Y).

Items near each other possess some form of relationship. The type of relationship will be reflected by each term’s position and distance from its neighbors.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it sounds very similar to Word2Vector.

So when G receives a query it doesn’t quite recognize, it can find semantically related pieces, and look at the results.

But, what if it’s wrong?

Well, that’s where Gary Illyes’s answer to a question on his recent Reddit AMA may come in:

“…

RankBrain is a PR-sexy machine learning ranking component that uses historical search data to predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query. It is a really cool piece of engineering that saved our butts countless times whenever traditional algos were like, e.g. “oh look a “not” in the query string! let’s ignore the hell out of it!”, but it’s generally just relying on (sometimes) months old data about what happened on the results page itself, not on the landing page. Dwell time, CTR, … those are generally made up crap. Search is much more simple than people think.

…”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), on Reddit

I’ve added the bold to draw your eye to the key part.

G may go back and look at what gets clicked for different searches, and check their performance. This can help the system learn what suggestions are suitable, and which ones are fails.

If you want something with a bit more meat, you may be wanting some patents?

If so, I was lucky enough to get some help from Bill Slawski, who pointed me to two potentially interesting patents:

The first patent (computing numeric…) was worked on by Greg Corrado, from the Bloomberg quote previously referenced.

If you don’t fancy suffering the trauma of reading the patents, Bill has two far nicer bits that get you the insights without the need for painkillers:

Example of what RankBrain may be doing

How about we walk through a simple demo of the type of thing that RB does?

Query: How Nemee 2020

Google receives that query, and has nothing that appears to be a match and little that seems above a weak relevance.

So, it needs to do some work.

• It can identify the type of query by the use of “how”.
• It can identify a time factor by “2020”.
• Or it can identify several potentials for “nemee”, including “meme”.

The query is vectorized, and the nearest neighbors for those vectors are found.

Included in the results are vectors that represent:

• “How to”
• “how do I”
• “how do people”
• “create a meme”
• “pronounce meme”
• “say meme”

So we have two probable query types:

1. A question of how to say …
2. A question of how to make …

But we have a 3rd factor, the “2020”. When we look at the result groups, there are barely any pre-existing queries or results that include time with pronunciation, where are there are a moderate number of “how to” queries and results that do.

RB decides that the most likely results that match this query are those from the “how to make” queries, and so the results you would receive would match;

“how to make a meme 2020”.

Does RankBrain use user experience signals?

No.

And that’s what this post is about — clearing up all the baloney some people have been pushing about “Dwell Time” and “Click Through Rate” and “Bounces” etc.

RankBrain doesn’t use UX signals from your pages.

For quick confirmation;

“… Dwell time, CTR, … those are generally made up crap …”

That’s from Gary’s AMA response I quoted above.

But, you can use a little common sense yourself at this point.

Ask yourself the following question:

Why would a system that is built to try to encapsulate relationships between text-strings be looking at how long someone spent on a page, or how fast they left?

When you stop and look at it that way, and consider the example above, you can see how site based UX signals have no relevance for RankBrain.

The only such metric we know they may use are SERP-based clicks to identify what type of results appeared relevant to that type of query.

Can you optimize for RankBrain?

Yes.

Google has even told us that we can 😀

“…
Optimizing for RankBrain is actually super easy, and it is something we’ve probably been saying for fifteen years now, is – and the recommendation is – to write in natural language. Try to write content that sounds human. If you try to write like a machine then RankBrain will just get confused and probably just pushes you back. But if you have a content site, try to read out some of your articles or whatever you wrote, and ask people whether it sounds natural. If it sounds conversational, if it sounds like natural language that we would use in your day to day life, then sure, you are optimized for RankBrain. If it doesn’t, then you are “un-optimize
…”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), talking to TheSEMPost

I know — it’s a bit lame.

But, if you roll back a bit, G have actually spelled out how to optimize for RankBrain!

• “… If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with …”
• “… making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries …”
• “… predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query …”

All you have to do is fly in the face of standard SEO practices, and aim for the exact opposite of what you would normally go for — high search volume.

Instead, look at all the queries, and then generate variants that aren’t in the lists.

I know, that’s even lamer!

(But, be honest, you did want to know :D)

But there is more — particularly for those that deal with time-relevant content; events and occurrences.

As these are “new”, the queries likely will be too (at least partially). To gain an advantage here, you might be able to look at similar searches yourself, and look at the patterns they possess. Once you have some samples and associated search volume data, you can pick and choose the ones you feel are most advantageous and relevant, and then weave them into your content.

If you want a little more insight into RB, and things like Association Rule Learning (delving deeper into the computing side of things), Dan Taylor has a previous article that may be of interest: Here’s how RankBrain does (and doesn’t) impact SEO

Does RankBrain influence rankings?

No — it’s a matter of inclusion.

Though Google has stated that RB is one of the most influential Ranking Factors, it’s not a typical SEO factor.

Unlike Titles or Link Text, it’s not a gradient or variable — it’s Boolean.

Either you are perceived as relevant, and included in the SERPs for a query — or you aren’t.

So you can optimize for RankBrain — but it isn’t a matter of ranking influence, it’s a matter of index inclusion.

TL;DR

What does RB do?

It attempts to answer unknown queries by looking at previous search data and the relationship of the terms used in those searches.

How does RB do that?

By converting words into numbers and plotting them into vector-space.  

It can then break a query into parts and look for similar terms in the vector space to try to understand the relationship and potential intent of the search.

Example:

Query : “how nemee 2020”

Convert query to vectors, find closest vectors, try to calculate probable matches.

Two distinct query types are surfaced; “create” and “say”.

“2020” associates more strongly with “create” than “say”.

RB will return SERPs for “how to make a meme 2020”.

Does RB use UX?

No.

It handles words and vectors.  

Things like Bounce Rate, Long Clicks etc. aren’t used.

Can you optimize for RB?

Yes.

By writing naturally and ensuring your content contains variations.

For some types of content (occurrences/events/news) you may be able to check similar searches and get ahead of the pack.

Does RankBrain influence rankings?

Not in the traditional SEO sense. It’s not about “position”, it’s about whether you show for that query or not.

Related reading

A few weeks ago, Google published a blog post on its webmaster blog sharing some tips on how to get more success in Google News search in 2019. 

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Last week, we shared with you 10 great reasons why you should attend SMX® Advanced, June 3-5 in Seattle — and I could sling another ten at you today. But instead, I’m going to let some of your peers do the talking…

So there you have it. If you want expert-led discussions on the SEO and SEM topics that matter most to your company, advanced techniques that will help drive awareness and conversions, and a chance to connect with the best and brightest search marketers on the planet, come to SMX Advanced.

Don’t wait. Super Early Bird rates (up to $900 off on-site prices) expire March 16. Register now!

Psst… Attend with your team for an unforgettable team-building opportunity and even more savings!

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Marketing Land is a daily publication covering digital marketing industry news, trends, strategies and tactics for digital marketers. Special content features, site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Marketing Land.

It’s tempting to go after broad, high-volume keywords with huge audiences (and equally huge competition). But there’s an equally large — albeit more distributed audience — to be reached by targeting lower-competition, long tail keywords.

Imagine comets flying through the SEO solar system, if the most popular keywords make up the head of the comets (‘running shoes’, for example), each comet is trailed by a tail of more specific keywords like ‘long distance trail running shoes 2018’ and ‘best running shoes for flat feet’, that are useful in niche marketing.

Strategically pursuing the right long tail keywords as part of your SEO strategy can deliver several advantages.

As they have lower search volumes, they are usually much less competitive, making it easier for your brand to rank highly in search engine results.

Also, the specificity of long tail keywords generally indicates that those web searchers are nearer to the action part of their customers’ journeys. As a result, these keywords tend to have higher conversion rates.

Therefore, long tail keywords offer the opportunity to be discovered by your target audience when they are near their crucial decision points.

If you deeply understand and satisfy their specific search intent by providing compelling information or offers, even large competitors might not stand in your way.

But knowing that you need a long tail SEO strategy is only half the battle won, you need to find those keywords which are not always obvious.

Here are eight simple techniques that will help you target and find long tail keywords that align with your business’ goals:

1. Let Google autofill suggest long tail keywords for you

This is as simple as it seems, type a broad search term into the Google search bar and you’ll see a list of long tail keywords tuned to fit popular searches by users.

For further suggestions, you can then enter these phrases (or variations that they inspire) and view more long tail keywords to target with your SEO campaigns. For example, inputting ‘running shoes for women’ will generate a fresh list of Google auto-filled suggestions based around that (longer) keyword that get even longer tail still.

2. Leverage Google’s related searches

Similar to autofill, another completely free technique that leverages Google’s search engine is to look at Google’s related searches. Simply type any keyword and scroll to the bottom of the search results page to view useful long tail keyword suggestions.

3. Take suggestions from Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tool you can use to find long tail keywords. Simply enter a term to receive a list of top suggestions.

4. Generate suggestions with the LSIGraph keyword generator

While the LSIGraph keyword generator helps you discover latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords for semantic SEO, most LSI keywords can double as long tail keywords once you know how to recognize them.

5. Find long tail keywords in question forms with Answer The Public

Answer The Public aggregates results from Google and Bing to provide the most commonly searched questions related to a given term, and in a rather compelling visual format. Because valuable long tail keywords often happen to be in the form of a question, your SEO can benefit by utilizing these targets and providing content that directly answers questions pertaining to your brand.

6. Search for relevant users’ questions on Quora

Another way to source long tail keywords in question formats is to take a look at what people are asking on Quora. For example, searching for the topic ‘running shoes’ will show questions that might be smart to target as long tail keywords (and answer with your content).

7. Check out user discussions in online forums

Forums can also prove informative by offering yet another window into the questions and interests that potential customers are focused on. You can leverage these more specific topics as long tail keywords, and choose those that spark the most active conversations. To locate forums that cover a particular topic, search for ‘[your broad search term] + forum’.

8. Use a Keyword Difficulty Tool

Inputting a targeted generic term into a Keyword Difficulty tool can yield numerous related-keyword opportunities, many of which will be long tail options.

Tools tracking keyword difficulty usually also provide useful metrics to help you decide which long tail keywords make the most sense to target.

These include relevance to the original keyword, the popularity of the search term, the level of competition you’ll need to overcome in order to rank for your new long tail terms, and whether that keyword competition is within your site’s competitive power.

How to turn long tail keywords into SEO success?

Once you have a solid list of long tail keywords that are appropriate candidates to consider centering (or expanding) your SEO efforts around, you’ll need to vet them with research to ensure they possess the potential to deliver value. Ultimately, they must meet the two criteria that you need to keep top of mind:

• Competition on the keywords must be low enough that you have a good chance to compete and succeed.
• They must be popular and searched for frequently enough to be worth your time.

Once you’re sure the long tail keywords you’ve selected are the right ones, follow SEO best practices to include the targeted terms in your content, and help maximize the likelihood for each page to rank in search engine results for the respective terms.

SEO best practices include using the long tail keyword across the following page locations:

• The post title and meta title
• The page’s SEO meta description
• The first paragraph of the content
• Naturally throughout the content (Aim for a keyword density of around two percent)
• In at least one subheading
• Near the end of the content
• As an image alt tag for one image on the page

It’s also a best practice to use three or four LSI keywords related to the long tail keyword within your content and to create links on other pages within your site that point to each new content page.

With generic search terms ever-more-competitive and less apt for driving targeted traffic, it’s wise to pursue a diversified strategy that also utilizes long tail keywords, offering focused content to reach an audience that knows more about what it wants and is ready to be converted into customers.

Kim Kosaka is the Director of Marketing at Alexa.com. 

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Marketing executives today are in charge of dozens of martech applications to manage, analyze and act on a growing volume of first-party customer data. But instead of increasing efficiency, the emerging martech ecosystem has created problems with data redundancy, accuracy and integration. Automating customer data accuracy and integration through a customer data platform (CDP) can provide numerous benefits.

MarTech Today’s “Enterprise Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the current market for enterprise customer data platforms (CDPs) and the considerations involved in implementing the software. This report answers the following questions:

• What features do CDPs provide?
• What trends are driving the adoption of CDPs?
• Does my company need a CDP?

Also included in the report are profiles of 22 CDP vendors, pricing information, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to get your copy.

About The Author

Digital Marketing Depot is a resource center for digital marketing strategies and tactics. We feature hosted white papers and E-Books, original research, and webcasts on digital marketing topics — from advertising to analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management tools to social media management software, e-commerce to e-mail marketing, and much more about internet marketing. Digital Marketing Depot is a division of Third Door Media, publisher of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and producer of the conference series Search Marketing Expo and MarTech. Visit us at http://digitalmarketingdepot.com.

A few weeks ago, Google published a blog post on its webmaster blog sharing some tips on how to get more success in Google News search in 2019. 

2019 will be a hard fight against fake news as fake news outlets are increasing with time. Along with some social media platforms, Google is also responsible for the spreading of fake and misleading news. If you are running a clickbait rich site with a lot of crappy content, you may encounter Google’s punishment this year.

Generally, Google looks at these five factors when ranking news articles:

• Freshness
• Diversity
• Rich textual content
• Originality of content
• User preferences for topics or publishers

To succeed in 2019 your news content should be original, authoritative, and should provide timely news information.

Six important tips for news content

1. Articles’ headlines should be clear. Keep it in the H1 tag. Headlines should be a minimum of 10 characters, between two and 22 words.
2. Use proper time and date. Show clear and visible time and date below the title and above the article. Use structured data.
3. Be transparent in your content. Fake news is a major problem on the internet, especially from the last American presidential election. Google will try to scan out fake news content in 2019. Best practice for this time is to create a very user-friendly site, not something crappy with lots of pop-ups and ads. Add detailed information, mention sources, make it authoritative.
4. Don’t be deceptive in your content. Don’t mislead. Misleading information in the content can ban you from Google.
5. Secure your website’s every page with HTTPS. A website that uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)  confirms a secure connection between the browser and user. It protects users‘ sensitive information. For a news site, it is a very good search signal.
6. Don’t participate in link spam to increase your ranking. Don’t buy links.

The five ‘w’s

To write your news content, you can use this popular news writing formula. Ask yourself the five ‘w’ questions and answer them all in your first paragraph of news content. The main aim is to provide a lot of information in the first paragraph.

Internet readers have a small attention span and most people scan the content, instead of line by line reading. This is especially true for news.

Write your first paragraph answering these questions.

1. Who?
2. What?
3. Where?
4. When?
5. Why?

Use proper nouns in the headline

Generic nouns will not get as much attention as proper nouns in Google search. Use proper names of brands, organizations or of people related to your news in the headlines. If you can creatively use proper names where other news outlets are not, you will get a huge advantage in the Google News search.

Graphics, images and video content

Use graphics, images, and videos on your news content to explain your news or to provide more information. Google loves this. With engaging videos and graphics, you can attract more readers, and make your content more shareable.

But before sharing your multimedia follow the guidelines of Google.

Beware the sensational, exceptional, negative, and current (SENC)

SENC is sensational, exceptional, negative, and current events, which is a general definition of current news. But, if you follow this definition to produce your news, they will not be authentic or convey real helpful information.

Shocking, scandalous things can be viral, but these types of sensational news should not be your priority.

If you prioritize only exceptional things, your content will become misleading.

Current news is full of recency bias. The present most recent things, without much in-depth and background information. But every recent event has a root in something old and slow systematic change. In your news content, you should present the actual root cause as much as possible to make the content more authoritative. It will earn you good links and build your brand.

Your news should be foundational not sensational.

On publishing breaking news, you should not be in a hurry to publish it faster than your competitors. Instead, before publishing the content, ask yourself what new information your article will provide that is not found elsewhere.

Pay less attention to CTR, dwell time, and other UX signals on the landing page

According to recent AMA of Gary Illyes, Google webmaster trends analyst:

“RankBrain is a PR-sexy machine learning ranking component that uses historical search data to predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query. It is a really cool piece of engineering that saved our butts countless times whenever traditional algos were like, e.g. “Oh look a ‘not’ in the query string! Let’s ignore the hell out of it!”, but it’s generally just relying on (sometimes) months’ old data about what happened on the results page itself, not on the landing page. Dwell time, CTR, whatever Fishkin’s new theory is, those are generally made up crap. Search is much more simple than people think.”

This thread from a couple weeks ago caused quite a stir. Perhaps we distract ourselves too much from the “simplicity” of what is actually search?

Ps — what are your thoughts on RankBrain and UX? Leave a comment below!

Muradul Islam is a Business Analyst at WeDevs. He can be found on Twitter .

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Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM) systems are designed to deliver users the best offer or next action, based on the current context and their particular needs.

In other words, RTIM solutions are meant to power the anticipated customer experiences that users increasingly expect.

But relatively few systems can smoothly integrate the massive data, broad functionality and quick intelligence needed to provide this split-second delivery of the right thing at the right time. To help marketers sort the players, Forrester Research is out with this quarter’s Forrester Wave report. (Available for free from Pegasystems, which is mentioned in the report, although registration is required.)

Now, four Leaders. Forrester has a lot of skin in this game, having covered Real-Time Interaction Management for years — first in 2012, in the context of computational decision engines, and then in a series of reports in 2015, including the first Wave on this topic, which featured this definition:

“Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints.”

In that initial report, only two of the profiled 11 vendors achieved the top Leader category — Pegasystems and Teradata. That’s not surprising, since this kind of platform — essentially a state machine that has to immediately deliver the right offer or action on the most appropriate channel and based on many datapoints — is a high bar to clear.

But in this new report, SAS and Salesforce join Teradata and Pegasystems as Leaders. FICO, Kitewheel, Pitney Bowes, Adobe and IBM are characterized in the second-highest category of Strong Performers, while Certona and Emarsys land in Contenders. Infor is the only vendor in the bottom group of Challengers.

Pegasystems, Teradata, Salesforce. The report notes that RTIM platforms cover five segments: next best experience, cross-channel marketing, personalization, loyalty marketing and cross-channel communications. Each of the five represents a variation on the scope and timing of communication with customers, but Forrester’s report is focused primarily on next-best-experience solutions that deliver across channels.

Among the Leaders, Pegasystems is praised for its integration of digital decisioning, process automation, case management, advanced analytics, AI and support for contact centers, chatbots, mobile devices and integrated voice response.

The report points to Teradata’s Customer Journey solution, which includes real-time decisioning, and its Customer Interaction Manager for cross-channel orchestration, all based on the company’s large-scale customer data management platform.

Salesforce gets a shout-out for now positioning its RTIM around its Interaction Studio, part of its Marketing Cloud and launched in the middle of last year, instead of its past practice of embedding RTIM in its email, mobile and web modules. Interaction Studio was developed with customer engagement platform Thunderhead, which Forrester considers a Leader in journey orchestration and visioning. But the research firm notes that Interaction Studio is still rules-based, instead of relying on Salesforce’s Einstein layer of advanced AI to make decisions.

SAS, Kitewheel, Pitney Bowes, Adobe. SAS is cited for its advanced analytics for decision arbitration, measurement and optimization. The report says the platform works well for enterprises looking to make analytics a core requirement, although it notes the need to enhance digital intelligence and channel integration.

Among the others, several stand out for specific emphases. Kitewheel, for instance, is mentioned for its integration with other systems, such as marketing automation tools, and cited as “a good choice for B2C marketers (and their agency partners) whose RTIM efforts center on customer experience design and optimization.”

Pitney Bowes leverages its customer services expertise, Forrester said, with a RTIM emphasis on contact centers, face-to-face channels and outbound marketing. And Adobe, with its huge portfolio of modules in Experience Cloud, has a strength in personalizing customer experience across channels, although it doesn’t offer the centralized decisioning of the other providers.

Why you should care. RTIM is, essentially, the delivered maximal vision of digital marketing, where a brand gives you what you really want, when you want it, on the best channel and in real time.

With such a large vision of customer experience, the category encompasses a wide range of platforms and integrations. Forrester’s emphasis on next-best-offer or action gives the report a focus so that it can only address a dozen vendors, but the range of solutions is potentially much larger.

Like Customer Data Platforms, Real-Time Interaction Management is a developing solution that addresses the real-time, personalized delivery needs of modern marketing, but has emerged as its own category only in recent years.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.