#57 - The Changing Face of Online Communications

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Hi! Welcome to #57 where we chat about what’s going on in the world of online communications – there’s a lot happening right now!

What did Andrew and Heather learn this week?

Andrew learnt that Google are about to roll out an unsubscribe button that sits at the top of emails for Gmail users. This means it is in a more prominent place on the email and could impact marketers – people don’t need to scroll to the bottom anymore! This highlights the need to be talking to your market in other ways…

Heather read during the week that 80% of all smartphone shipments are now Android, while 44% of emails are checked on iPhones. This suggests that more business people are still using iPhones, but we know that Android have been steadily improving their platform.

What’s going on with Online Communications?

This is also the week that Facebook has paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. What’s app with that? People are turning more to services like WhatsApp in order to circumvent the fees of the phone companies by communicating using wifi. As far as images per day being processed, WhatsApp far out-paces Facebook or Snapchat. It’s ten times bigger than Instagram and is attracting the younger market – something Facebook has been losing recently.

Here are some other happenings online;

Some of the biggest apps with the younger generations are the image and video editing tools. Video and images are an important communication source for them.
Snapchat is growing fast and is largely used by the 15 – 24 age group.
The emergence of “gifographics” (the gif/infographic) and the re-emergence of gifs now that they can be seen properly on sites like Google+ and Pinterest. (check out the cheetah gifographic from Imgur below – click to see the original with movement).

What should business owners do?

Listen to your target market – where do they hang out? If your target market is older, you probably don’t need to be on Snapchat for example.
Know what’s available, but don’t go into overwhelm! Keep an eye on your analytics to know who you have coming in and to have an idea of what they use.
Images – we have found that ‘real’ images (photos we have taken ourselves) tend to draw better engagement. People are interested in your story and how you see the world.