Tags containing: "instant messaging"

The snack is back: How messaging will satisfy audience appetite for bite-sized content

January 9, 2020 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

A decade ago, The Power Of Pull described the amazing outcomes possible when we have the tools to find and access the people, content, information, and resources we need. Pull was seen as the mechanism that would put people in control. It would give them more choices and more information to make those choices.

Today, pull has been turbo-charged by mobile, a transformative technology (the impact of which the authors could not address in their book, so I will here). Mobile has become our collective default state. It eclipses all other digital technology and enables us to do exactly what the authors hoped we would: “collaborate in a complete re-imagination” of our experiences. From content to commerce, and from advertising to advocacy, mobile has left an indelible mark.

You could even say that, thanks to mobile, the Power of Pull has finally arrived. But it’s the advance of messaging apps and platforms that takes this to a new level. Pull brought us the toolset and the mindset to take charge of our content and experiences. Mobile amplified this ability exponentially. And messaging is giving us a new environment to experience both.

A new wave

The first wave of messaging saw the emergence of what I will call pull content, delivered primarily via app notifications. In this scenario, individuals granted permission and volunteered preferences (the choice of news categories, the frequency of alerts and notifications, the level of personalization). And that they opt-in is a must for audiences increasingly concerned about personal privacy. For this reason, content companies that delivered pull content could build trust and brand. In retrospect, it was this reach and impact that allowed the first wave to deliver scalable efficiency.

The second wave of pull, powered by mobile messaging apps and platforms, is destined to be even more transformative because it promises scalable connectivity. Messaging is a platform where companies can deliver interactive, personalized, and conversational experiences. And they can do it affordably at scale.

Messaging is also free to consumers. It also vastly reduces the blight of unsolicited communication. That’s because, as a rule, messaging platforms do not permit companies to send bulk messages as they can via SMS. And it’s growing in popularity. Analysts forecast that the volume of messages sent via the major messaging platforms is expected to exceed the number of SMS text messages by as much as 10x in 2020.

Pull and pictures

Messaging apps and platforms provide an ideal space for companies to forge relationships with audiences and drive connection with brand fans. They have also become the epicenter of our most frequent digital activity: messaging. In August 2018, app market intelligence provider Apptopia reported users globally spent a whopping 85 billion hours in WhatsApp over a period of just three months. (Compare that to 31 billion hours spent on Facebook).

Messaging platforms have experienced explosive growth in users and usage, outpacing some of the biggest social media channels. Together, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger alone have nearly three billion daily active users– that’s almost half the planet. In 2018 the Big Four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Viber) had 4.1 billion combined users. A whopping 72 trillion messages were sent across these platforms (compared to 1.6 trillion searches on Google).

However, people aren’t just messaging more or more often. Empowered by pull, are using the universal language of pictures. People share more than 4.5 billion photos, 1 billion videos, and 80 million GIFs per day on WhatsApp alone. A comprehensive analysis of people’s messaging behaviors on Facebook Messenger (conducted by Facebook) reveals that nearly 60% of respondents have sent emoji-only messages to communicate a concept. What’s more, over half indicated that messaging has replaced all other forms of communication.

United by their passions and interests (supported by a shared visual language), this audience craves instant access to what matters. There’s no room for trial and error. Content must be hyper-personalized, highly visual, and always to the point. Against this backdrop, messaging platforms offer the perfect petri dish to experiment with new approaches around content design and distribution.

Bite-size is back

Messaging platforms also unlock the potential of content companies to satisfy our appetite for bite-sized content. That means short videos, short-form content, graphics, and memes. Content that might feel out-of-place in-app or online is at home on messaging platforms. Media companies and publishers need no convincing. In fact, some new organizations are encouraging audiences to visually enhance the conversation.

The Washington Post’s news stickers on Viber.

The Washington Post, which distributes snackable news content via Viber, a messaging app used by more than one billion people worldwide, has had remarkable success with a series of news-related stickers. The packs count more than 2 million downloads since they were first launched in 2016. “The stickers we’ve created allow users to say what they want about news without having to type a complete thought and simply add delight and character to their conversation,” Amy King, Design Director of Emerging News Products at The Washington Post said in a recent interview.

The Washington Post is just one of a long line of news organizations — including the BBC, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and Financial Times — that are experimenting with messaging apps as an additional distribution channel. For many, the primary focus has been on providing short news updates and links to related and relevant content. However, some companies have zeroed in on the interactive nature of messaging platforms. They’re adding a new dimension to bite-sized news and leveraging yet another aspect of pull: two-way conversation.

Micro-newsletters for mass audiences

Bloomberg has harnessed WhatsApp to send messages every day and hear back from users directly, Katie Boyce, Managing Editor, Digital, Bloomberg, stated in an email interview. “After big news would break, we started to ask our WhatsApp audience what they want to know. We would get such thoughtful feedback that we could then incorporate it into our reporting and send back updates,” she explains. “It was a much different conversation than what we get on our public social channels. We built up a very highly engaged audience.”

It also paved the way for Bloomberg to bundle bite-sized content into personalized packages that balance depth with the demand for distilled information. The outcome was a new format it calls the “micro newsletter.” The content is longer than a push alert but shorter than a typical newsletter.

Boyce describes the content as a “very conversational update three times a day at the end of each region’s news day, summarizing the big stories of the day.” It has been so popular with the audience that it prompted Bloomberg to “create multiple sub-groups around topics like markets or the Middle East so that we could send more targeted messages.”

Using this approach, which was nominated for a SOPA (Society of Publishers in Asia), a benchmark for world-class journalism, Bloomberg has done more than grow its numbers. It has recruited and audience of advocates eager to follow the discussion no matter where it takes them.

In December Bloomberg moved its distribution to Telegram, a messaging platform projected to hit 1 billion users by 2022. (Admittedly, Bloomberg’s move was driven more by necessity than inspiration as Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, made good on its promise to crack down on what it considers “non-personal” use on the platform. In December efforts turned to the gray area of newsletters. And it ruled that publishers will no longer be allowed to send out newsletters on WhatsApp.)

Within two weeks of moving the micro-newsletter messages over to Telegram, Boyce reports that Bloomberg “gained over 25,000 followers” on the new platform many of whom migrated from WhatsApp. But efforts to leverage the popularity of messaging platforms doesn’t stop there. Bloomberg is “continuously evaluating other ways to meet users where they are,” Boyce says. It’s a smart approach in the age of pull.

Messaging is the new frontier

As we kick off a new decade, it’s critical that content creators — be they media companies or marketers — understand consumers’ growing appetite for concentrated content on their terms and in the spaces where they choose to congregate. It’s a global phenomenon that sees audiences flocking to messaging apps, drawn by the simplicity of snackable content.

It also offers audiences the opportunity to “share and discuss news, away from the toxicity of political debate that threatens more open spaces,” according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019. Based on data from almost 40 countries across six continents, the report highlights this mega-trend. It notes that WhatsApp has already become a primary network for discussing and sharing news in western countries (where WhatsApp has a strong presence) as well as non-western countries including Brazil (53%), Malaysia (50%) and South Africa (49%). The upshot: “as more people use messaging services, news usage has also risen.”

Now that news organizations and media companies have an audience on these platforms, they must adopt the culture and language of these communities and capture the Zeitgeist to deliver on the promise of pull. A decade ago, companies were just beginning to develop this mindset, with the understanding that constant and instant accessibility of information was an audience demand and responding with models that would rebalance businesses and organizations to be powered by pull.

But there was a catch. We had the message, to borrow a concept from the visionary Marshall McLuhan. But without messaging platforms, we lacked the medium to deliver at scale. Today we have both. Mobile — messaging in particular — is where people spend their time. And content companies who build experiences that are right-sized and optimized can leverage this behavior to engage highly-receptive audiences.

Why the time is right to shine a light on ‘dark social’

November 1, 2018 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

One of the least understood portions of the web is becoming one of the most important: dark social. And as the calendar turns from Halloween to the Day of the Dead, it’s time to shine a light into the darkest corner of the web to understand how people are sharing content via messaging services, email, texting, and other platforms that don’t show up easily on analytics programs.

For a long time, referrals that showed up on Google Analytics as “direct” were a mystery. Could that many people really be typing in long URLs into their browsers? No. Instead, they were cutting and pasting URLs into an email to friends, or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Those referrals became known as “dark social” because of our ignorance about their true source. And with public sharing on Facebook and other platforms down, dark social is only growing more important, with an estimated 84% of all sharing, according to RadiumOne.

But there are ways to better gauge where those dark social referrals are coming from. There are also ways to reach people on messaging apps, through chatbots and targeted promotions. Even more important, reaching people on dark social requires a new way of thinking of them in their “tribes” or personal space where gauging sentiment might be more important than marketing a product directly.

The Rise of Dark Social

They are like two ships passing in the night: the rise of messaging apps and the decline of public social sharing. Just looking at Facebook user statistics gives us a stark picture:

From November 2014 to September 2017, Facebook Messenger users went from 500 million to 1.3 billion.
From December 2013 to December 2017, WhatsApp users went from 400 million to 1.5 billion.
From Q1 2017 to Q2 2018, Facebook interactions went from 29.1 billion to 12.8 billion.

Yes, 12.8 billion is still a lot of interactions, but you the trend is clear. People are losing trust in social networks and flocking to private messenging services.

As Arik Hanson at Business2Community noted, even Facebook’s Instagram is thinking beyond the public feed. “Let’s look at the direction they’re going: Investing heavily in Stories and direct messaging (both “private” for the most part, when it comes to engagement). Many of the new features added recently revolve around these two areas: poll sticker, slider stickers, polling via DM. These are the areas Instagram is focused on – not the public-facing feed as much.”

How to Get a Handle on Dark Social

There are ways to bring dark social into the light. While vanilla Google Analytics shows dark social traffic, there are ways to segment pages to see which ones are getting the most action from dark social. (99Signals has a good primer on that here.)

And there are always advanced tools like GetSocial and AddThis that can help identify which pages are getting hit the most from dark social. They also show where some of those sources are.

However, tracking down dark social the same as regular social referrals might not be the point. As Alpha Group’s David Cohn points out on MediaPost, “part of dark social’s appeal is its ‘off the grid’ nature, [so] we wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by looking for too much data and meaning among the noise.”

Taking Action to Reach Users

So how does a marketer or publisher get a return on investment by reaching folks on messaging apps, texting or emails? Cohn says the key is to figure out basic demographics on the platforms and the groups who congregate there. He uses the example of a foodie group in New York that could start to send more traffic to food publications and restaurants. “A marketer or publisher wouldn’t know exactly whom to target, but they would have a place,” he wrote. “And they would recognize this community as a gathering place for worthy targets.”

One example from India shows how ROI can grow when targeting dark social. When streaming service iflix wanted to increase its users, it found that its most loyal customers had one important thing in common: They liked sharing viral content and celebrity gossip on messaging apps. According to Business Today’s Sonal Khetarpal, iflx targeted messaging apps users. They converted 1 million more paid subscribers in six months. And the cost of acquisition dropped from $25 to $3 per person.

While it’s true marketers are tiring of social media planning that moves from one platform to the next each season, they’re going to have to get serious about messaging apps and dark social. More folks will have to take chatbots seriously, or just better targeting to users of messaging apps. Otherwise, they will miss a massive, growing opportunity as more people become disaffected with public social media spaces.

Industry-Research

Instant messaging use rises as more people opt for closed platforms

October 7, 2015 Research Team—DCN

The popularity of instant messaging (IM) has soared over the past year, with a 12% uplift in daily usage as more people opt for closed messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber. Over half of internet users worldwide (55%) are now using instant messaging every day, while 76% are using it on a weekly basis, according to Connected Life, a study of over 60,000 internet users worldwide from global research consultancy TNS. Despite this, social platforms are still rising in popularity with a 6% uplift in daily usage. As people’s online habits become ever more fragmented, TNS asserts that brands need to tap into the growing popularity of IM and other emerging platforms. The research shows an increased need for a content-driven approach across IM, social and traditional channels.

Among TNS’ key findings:

The US still lags the ‘mobile-first’ markets with 35% of US internet users using IM every day, but is catching up quickly (up 10% compared with 2014).
Instant Messaging (IM) is particularly dominant in emerging “mobile-first” markets, with daily usage rising even higher in markets like China (69%), Brazil (73%), and South Africa (64%).
Facebook has maintained its position as the world’s favorite social platform; almost one third of global internet users (30%) say they use it every day.
Facebook’s dominant position among US internet users is even stronger at 53%, followed by YouTube (26%), Instagram and Twitter.
TNS found that although IM users are wary of brands interrupting them, they are more concerned with how content they share impacts their own image.

TNS data reveals that consumers are even more connected to each other, and across multiple platforms. While IM popularity is rising, traditional social media platforms are still holding strong, allowing content to go viral more quickly. The challenge, says TNS, is for brands to create content that consumers actually want to share.