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 and Soundcloud.
In this episode, we talk about Instagram stories, social media growth, and scholarship link building.
We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
We Analyzed 15,000 Instagram Stories from 200 of the World’s Top Brands (New Stories Research)
By Brian Peters for Buffer’s Blog
The “Story Model” that Snapchat, Facebook, and now LinkedIn use has really worked for Instagram. This study released from the Buffer Blog dives deep into the reasons why certain stories perform better than others.
The chart above shows the average completion rate of stories year over year from 2017 by industry. This will give you an insight into how much time you should invest in creating stories if you fall under one of these categories. For example, if you work for a sporting company, you will likely want to invest some time connecting with your audience through Instagram stories because people tend to watch and consume 80% of the content related to that industry.
Key Takeaways:
- 1 to 7 stories is the optimal length
- The best time to post Instagram Stories is outside of work hours
- More content leads to greater median reach and impressions
Social media growth is over in the U.S. — which is its most valuable market
By Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner for Recode
Social media growth has slowed down in the recent months, so much so that social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat are no longer adding new users. Facebook has seen the biggest decline and even showing a loss in users. This is most likely due to all of the security issues surrounding the brand.
The biggest issue for these companies is that they have fewer people on their platform which means they are making less money from ads. This will likely cause these platforms to either:
- Charge more for ads
- Put more ads in front of our face
And I don’t about you, but I don’t know if I can handle any more ads interrupting my nightly Facebook video bingeing.
Key Takeaways:
- The decline will force social media giants to get creative with advertising
- Might be a reason why we see Facebook rolling out the Portal
- It will be interesting to see how these companies plan to get back their massive drop in users.
Does Content Marketing Actually Work? The Data Says Yes.
By Patrick Campbell for ProfitWell
For their weekly podcast, ProfitWell posed an interesting question: More and more companies are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon, but is it really paying off for them?
To answer that question, they gathered data from over 3,000 subscription businesses and 30,000 subscription consumers and analyzed the data.
Articles key takeaways include:
- Content-related Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are 15% lower than paid CAC
- 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep
- Companies with blogs get 67% more leads compared to those without a blog
- Inbound marketing close rates are 8-10 times higher than outbound efforts
- Companies utilizing a content strategy see roughly 30% more growth than those not leveraging content marketing
Blogging Statistics and Trends: The 2018 Survey of 1000+ Bloggers
Andy Crestodina for Orbit Media
Orbit Media has sent out a survey to bloggers for the past 5 years asking them a series of questions to measure the evolution of content creation. These questions fall into 3 main buckets:
- Length, Time and Frequency
- Process and Measurement
- Content Formats, Original research, and Promotion
Often when people think about content, they may think that people want short concise blog posts that quickly describe the problem and solution. This is increasingly not the case. Length of time and investment in blogging has increased year over year. Blog posts are getting longer and more detailed than ever.
Key Takeaways:
- Bloggers report strong results for content taking longer than 6 hours to create
- Longer content out performs quick
- More time is being spent on blog preparation and research which is ultimately affecting its overall performance.
Lighting Round
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.
- Google Quietly Redesigns YouTube Video Embeds w/ Cleaner Look, Channel Shortcut
- Is the Era of Voice Texting Upon Us?
- Facebook Opens Its First Small Biz Pop-Up Stores inside Macy’s
- Samsung and Huawei both just lost the race to unveil the first phone with a foldable screen
- Further protections from harmful ad experiences on the web
- Search Console Launches an Experimental “Domain Properties” web property
- Measure the Business Impact of Instagram and Pages (Beta)
- LinkedIn Introduces Public Beta of Objective-Based Advertising in Campaign Manager
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!
