The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about the LinkedIn algorithm, must-have features for ecommerce sites, and YouTube’s ranking factors. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
What’s in your LinkedIn Feed: People You Know, Talking About Things You Care About
Pete Davies for LinkedIn Newsroom
Much like Facebook, LinkedIn is making a push to make your news feed more relevant and show the types of content you interact with the most. They are basing this algorithm off of their company saying, “People You Know, Talking About Things You Care About.” LinkedIn will be putting valuable content at the top of your news feed based on who you follow and who you have directly interacted with. This theme continues on to say that conversations that continue to go back and forth are deemed more valuable. They give a few more examples of how content might be changing in your feed and provide tips and best practices to get the most engagement out of your posts.
“Your LinkedIn feed is made up of the conversations happening across your professional communities: among connections; in the groups you’ve joined; and the people, pages, and hashtags that you follow. To decide what goes at the top, we use look at who’s talking (People You Know) and what they’re talking about (Things You Care About).”
Key Takeaways:
- Posting things that spark a conversation is always a good idea on any social platform. Getting more people to engage in a conversation will help your post rank highly in other users news feed, as well as your own.
- Use mentions, if you’re comfortable, to pull other experts into the conversation. Make sure you are mentioning people that know you and are likely to respond. Try not to mention over 5 people in your post.
- Hashtags have their place but try not to use over three per post. These will help others find your conversation.
P.S. If you’re wondering what you should do before posting to any social media platform, download our free Social Media Pre-Publishing Checklist.
15 Must-Have Features for Ecommerce Sites
Holly Gary for Search Engine Journal
If you run an ecommerce site and are having some trouble with conversion, you may way to look into this article. Holly from Search Engine Journal gives 15 important must-haves for ecommerce sites to boost sales. While this list is great, I would add one thing to it, automation. Having automation in place for any site is important if you want to keep users engaged. HubSpot offers workflows that can help you reach customers with very low effort. For example, we built a cart abandonment workflow to re-engage customers after they left their cart for more than 24-hours. This workflow alone has made our client $27,000 (from just one email). This workflow has a total of 3 emails which have influenced a total of $46,000.
“Trends don’t guarantee conversion rates or robust user experiences. There are certain elements that every ecommerce site should have to stay relevant and competitive.”
Key Takeaways:
- Mobile usability and user experience play a huge role in today’s shopping experiences. Most people are shopping from their phone and can become easily frustrated with a website that is difficult to navigate.
- Try to add a related items section to your checkout process. Amazon does a great job by suggesting additional things to buy based on your purchase. People are more likely to spend a few more dollars when they’re already at the checkout process.
- Create a wishlist. Again, Amazon does a great job of this too. Giving users a chance to create an account and make a list gives you the chance to re-engage with people that may have gone cold. Plus, you can send them discount codes to encourage purchases.
How the YouTube Algorithm Works (Or Why Your Videos Aren’t Getting Views)
Amir Jaffari for Shopify Blog
All social platform algorithms are ever-changing. Google released a research paper that outlined the specific ways videos get ranked and what factors will make them surface to more viewers. They give the 7 signals they use to rank videos and make recommendations. Most of these recommendations are out of your control, it’s really up to the user to influence how wide-spread your video gets.
“YouTube channels that find their consistency are able to sustainable grow their subscriber base and viewership because it makes it easier for people to decide to watch more of their content and subscribe to their channel.”
Key Takeaways:
- Creating highly expressive close-up video thumbnails have proved to be the best way to drive click-through rate.
- Click-through and watch time seem to be the biggest driving factor when it comes to rankings. This differs from other social platforms where discussion is favored.
Formatting your videos is very important. Keeping the same rhythm, time, and schedule will keep users interested because they know exactly what to expect. This article references a person favorite YouTube channel of mine that does a great job keeping a consistent format.
App Of The Week
SparkToro Trending By Rand Fishkin
SparkToro is a company that was started by Rand Fishkin after he left Moz. The main product is currently still under development but they offer up something in the meantime. SparkToro Trending is a place where you can go to see all of the things top marketers are talking about and sharing on twitter. This feed refreshes about 4 times an hour so you can stay up-to-date on everything going on in the marketing world.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Alexa, Google Home now battling perception of being ‘surveillance’ devices
- 26 Cheat Sheets Every Successful Digital Marketer Needs
- YouTube Introduces New Ways for Channels to Make Money
- SPOTIFY, YOUTUBE, AND OTHERS GET REIMAGINED AS RETRO ANIME TECH
- Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users
- Podcast Advertising Revenues Will Surpass $1 Billion by 2021
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
