Jul 7 2024
What are AI agents? 

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new target: AI agents. 

Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra, which allows users to interact with it using audio and video. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model has also been called an AI agent.  

And it’s not just hype, although there is definitely some of that too. Tech companies are plowing vast sums into creating AI agents, and their research efforts could usher in the kind of useful AI we have been dreaming about for decades. Many experts, including Sam Altman, say they are the next big thing.   

But what are they? And how can we use them? 

How are they defined? 

It is still early days for research into AI agents, and the field does not have a definitive definition for them. But simply, they are AI models and algorithms that can autonomously make decisions in a dynamic world, says Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who leads the company’s AI agents initiative. 

The grand vision for AI agents is a system that can execute a vast range of tasks, much like a human assistant. In the future, it could help you book your vacation, but it will also remember if you prefer swanky hotels, so it will only suggest hotels that have four stars or more and then go ahead and book the one you pick from the range of options it offers you. It will then also suggest flights that work best with your calendar, and plan the itinerary for your trip according to your preferences. It could make a list of things to pack based on that plan and the weather forecast. It might even send your itinerary to any friends it knows live in your destination and invite them along. In the workplace, it  could analyze your to-do list and execute tasks from it, such as sending calendar invites, memos, or emails. 

One vision for agents is that they are multimodal, meaning they can process language, audio, and video. For example, in Google’s Astra demo, users could point a smartphone camera at things and ask the agent questions. The agent could respond to text, audio, and video inputs. 

These agents could also make processes smoother for businesses and public organizations, says David Barber, the director of the University College London Centre for Artificial Intelligence. For example, an AI agent might be able to function as a more sophisticated customer service bot. The current generation of language-model-based assistants can only generate the next likely word in a sentence. But an AI agent would have the ability to act on natural-language commands autonomously and process customer service tasks without supervision. For example, the agent would be able to analyze customer complaint emails and then know to check the customer’s reference number, access databases such as customer relationship management and delivery systems to see whether the complaint is legitimate, and process it according to the company’s policies, Barber says. 

Broadly speaking, there are two different categories of agents, says Fan: software agents and embodied agents. 

Software agents run on computers or mobile phones and use apps, much as in the travel agent example above. “Those agents are very useful for office work or sending emails or having this chain of events going on,” he says. 

Embodied agents are agents that are situated in a 3D world such as a video game, or in a robot. These kinds of agents might make video games more engaging by letting people play with nonplayer characters controlled by AI. These sorts of agents could also help build more useful robots that could help us with everyday tasks at home, such as folding laundry and cooking meals. 

Fan was part of a team that built an embodied AI agent called MineDojo in the popular computer game Minecraft. Using a vast trove of data collected from the internet, Fan’s AI agent was able to learn new skills and tasks that allowed it to freely explore the virtual 3D world and complete complex tasks such as encircling llamas with fences or scooping lava into a bucket. Video games are good proxies for the real world, because they require agents to understand physics, reasoning, and common sense. 

In a new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers at Princeton say that AI agents tend to have three different characteristics. AI systems are considered “agentic” if they can pursue difficult goals without being instructed in complex environments. They also qualify if they can be instructed in natural language and act autonomously without supervision. And finally, the term “agent” can also apply to systems that are able to use tools, such as web search or programming, or are capable of planning. 

Are they a new thing?

The term “AI agents” has been around for years and has meant different things at different times, says Chirag Shah, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. 

There have been two waves of agents, says Fan. The current wave is thanks to the language model boom and the rise of systems such as ChatGPT. 

The previous wave was in 2016, when Google DeepMind introduced AlphaGo, its AI system that can play—and win—the game Go. AlphaGo was able to make decisions and plan strategies. This relied on reinforcement learning, a technique that rewards AI algorithms for desirable behaviors. 

“But these agents were not general,” says Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research at Google DeepMind. They were created for very specific tasks—in this case, playing Go. The new generation of foundation-model-based AI makes agents more universal, as they can learn from the world humans interact with. 

“You feel much more that the model is interacting with the world and then giving back to you better answers or better assisted assistance or whatnot,” says Vinyals. 

What are the limitations? 

There are still many open questions that need to be answered. Kanjun Qiu, CEO and founder of the AI startup Imbue, which is working on agents that can reason and code, likens the state of agents to where self-driving cars were just over a decade ago. They can do stuff, but they’re unreliable and still not really autonomous. For example, a coding agent can generate code, but it sometimes gets it wrong, and it doesn’t know how to test the code it’s creating, says Qiu. So humans still need to be actively involved in the process. AI systems still can’t fully reason, which is a critical step in operating in a complex and  ambiguous human world. 

“We’re nowhere close to having an agent that can just automate all of these chores for us,” says Fan. Current systems “hallucinate and they also don’t always follow instructions closely,” Fan says. “And that becomes annoying.”  

Another limitation is that after a while, AI agents lose track of what they are working on. AI systems are limited by their context windows, meaning the amount of data they can take into account at any given time. 

“ChatGPT can do coding, but it’s not able to do long-form content well. But for human developers, we look at an entire GitHub repository that has tens if not hundreds of lines of code, and we have no trouble navigating it,” says Fan. 

To tackle this problem, Google has increased its models’ capacity to process data, which allows users to have longer interactions with them in which they remember more about past interactions. The company said it is working on making its context windows infinite in the future.

For embodied agents such as robots, there are even more limitations. There is not enough training data to teach them, and researchers are only just starting to harness the power of foundation models in robotics. 

So amid all the hype and excitement, it’s worth bearing in mind that research into AI agents is still in its very early stages, and it will likely take years until we can experience their full potential. 

That sounds cool. Can I try an AI agent now? 

Sort of. You’ve most likely tried their early prototypes, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. “If you’re interacting with software that feels smart, that is kind of an agent,” says Qiu. 

Right now the best agents we have are systems with very narrow and specific use cases, such as coding assistants, customer service bots, or workflow automation software like Zapier, she says. But these are a far cry from a universal AI agent that can do complex tasks. 

“Today we have these computers and they’re really powerful, but we have to micromanage them,” says Qiu. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT plug-ins, which allow people to create AI-powered assistants for web browsers, were an attempt at agents, says Qiu. But these systems are still clumsy, unreliable, and not capable of reasoning, she says. 

Despite that, these systems will one day change the way we interact with technology, Qiu believes, and it is a trend people need to pay attention to. 

“It’s not like, ‘Oh my God, all of a sudden we have AGI’ … but more like ‘Oh my God, my computer can do way more than it did five years ago,’” she says.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 6 2024
Beware of Instant Site-speed Fixes

Lukas Tanasiuk once paid a firm to redesign his Shopify site, which sold electric scooters. The result was slow page loads and his efforts to improve them. What he found, he says, was a lot of false claims.

“I discovered corruption among folks who say they are page-speed optimizers,” he told me.

Page-speed optimization became Tanasiuk’s next opportunity. In 2023 he launched The Nice Agency, focusing on Shopify page loads.

He and I recently discussed his journey from merchant to agency owner, slow Shopify sites, and more. The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: Tell us what you do.

Lukas Tanasiuk: I’ve been a Shopify store owner since 2015. In 2020, I started a click-and-mortar store in Vancouver, Canada, selling personal electric vehicles, such as e-scooters, e-skates, one-wheels, and electric unicycles.

We grew that very quickly. We paid to get our site redesigned, but the download speed was super slow. In my journey to improve the speed, I discovered corruption among folks who say they are page-speed optimizers. I became passionate about it.

I realized few practitioners in the space were doing good work for a fair price. I decided this was my next opportunity. I started The Nice Agency in 2023 and have been scaling ever since, focusing solely on Shopify site speed optimization.

Clients come to us with non-native Shopify sites that are very slow. They have great functionality, but they load poorly. Shopify acts a lot like Apple. If you work within their tight ecosystems, performance is good. But the second you insert external components, performance suffers.

Every app in the Shopify space is third-party code. You can’t edit it. The developer doesn’t want you messing with it. Certain apps render pages on their own servers and then re-render them on your page.

The easy answer is building something natively into Shopify. If the cost isn’t too insane and the project scope isn’t wild, do it. We build directly into the theme. We don’t build apps.

Bandholz: How much would that cost?

Tanasiuk: It depends on the project. We’ve done jobs for $2,000 that add functionality to an existing rebuild.

The killers are the ones that replace entire components. I advise merchants to remove little-used components rather than replace them. Examples are A/B tests and review widgets. If you’re doing under $5 million in online revenue, you probably don’t need A/B testing.

Use common sense. Buy products from your own site. Browse your site. Keep an eye on conversion rates. Don’t be afraid to make changes without being data-driven. You can measure and analyze over time. You don’t need expensive software.

We’re doing optimization now for a client’s main product page. The primary visual asset is a high-end 45-second video describing the product. In Core Web Vitals, it’s the Largest Contentful Paint metric.

The video is the first thing that loads. The client has six conversion optimization apps attached to the product page, plus an A/B testing app. It takes 25 seconds for the page to load completely, which is terrible. The gold standard Shopify page speed is below three seconds.

In my experience, a static image with good copy and a clear call-to-action typically converts more than a video or a carousel. Download a heat map or a tracking tool. Very few visitors watch the video for more than a few seconds or click on multiple images in a carousel. Most look only at the static image. Plus, an optimized image won’t hurt page speed. So you’re losing on both fronts with videos and carousels.

My background, again, is as an ecommerce operator. An operator’s goal should be to improve the customer experience. A quick-loading website is essential. Many apps do the opposite. Unfortunately, many developers are looking for a quick buck and promising a faster site.

Bandholz: Care to name examples?

Tanasiuk: Here’s one from last fall. I posted a video on my page, which I’ve since removed, of a company making false page-speed promises. I partnered with a brilliant developer, Jake Casto, from Proton Agency in New York City. He provided the technical expertise while I offered the non-technical founder’s perspective.

A client had just installed the company’s app and asked my opinion. I went to the company’s site, and the first thing they’re marketing is an instant Shopify performance score of 90 to 95. That’s impossible. It was a huge red flag.

For weeks I asked colleagues and dug deeper. That’s how I met Jake Casto. He was making comments about them being sheisty.

He asked me to collaborate on an expose of these guys. We had multiple calls with the heads at Shopify. Other people at Shopify consulted directly with the Google performance team, who confirmed that everything we had uncovered was true.

So Jake and I created a report, reached out to the company’s CEO, and said, “We’re doing a report on you guys because we found some pretty weird stuff going on. We’ll send the report to you before we go live with it so you can write a response. We’ll add it to ours.”

Within hours, every mention of performance score improvement was wiped off their website. Their founder deleted every single tweet going back years that related anything to a performance score.

The lesson for merchants is this. Watch for red flags when you’re seeking Shopify site speed optimization. Be wary of big promises or overnight fixes for cheap.

Bandholz: Where can people find you?

Tanasiuk: I’m @Igobylukas on X. I’m also on LinkedIn. Our website is TheNiceAgency.co.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 5 2024
Google Gives Exact Reason Why Negative SEO Doesn’t Work via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about negative SEO provides useful insights into the technical details of how Google prevents low quality spam links from affecting normal websites.

The answer about negative SEO was given in an interview in May and has gone unnoticed until now.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is the practice of sabotaging a competitor with an avalanche of low quality links. The idea is that Google will assume that the competitor is spamming and knock them out of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The practice of negative SEO originated in the online gambling space where the rewards for top ranking are high and the competition is fierce. I first heard of it around the mid-2000s (probably before 2010) when someone involved in the gambling space told me about it.

Virtually all websites that rank for meaningful search queries attract low quality links and there is nothing unusual about, it’s always been this way. The concept of negative SEO became more prominent after the Penguin link spam update caused site owners to become more aware of the state of their inbound links.

Does Negative SEO Cause Harm?

The person interviewing Gary Illyes was taking questions from the audience.

She asked:

“Does negative SEO via spammy link building, a competitor throwing tens of thousands of links at another competitor, does that kind of thing still harm people or has Google kind of pushed that off to the side?

Google’s Gary Illyes answered the question by first asking the interviewer if she remembered the Penguin update to which she answered yes.

He then explained his experience reviewing examples of negative SEO that site owners and SEOs had sent him. He said that out of hundreds of cases he reviewed there was only one case that might have actually been negative SEO but that the web spam team wasn’t 100% sure.

Gary explained:

“Around the time we released Penguin, there was tons and tons of tons of complaints about negative SEO, specifically link based negative SEO and then very un-smartly, I requested examples like show me examples, like show me how it works and show me that it worked.

And then I got hundreds, literally hundreds of examples of alleged negative SEO and all of them were not negative SEO. It was always something that was so far away from negative SEO that I didn’t even bother looking further, except one that I sent to the web spam team for double checking and that we haven’t made up our mind about it, but it could have been negative SEO.

With this, I want to say that the fear about negative SEO is much bigger than or much larger than it needs to be, we disable insane numbers of links…”

The above is Gary’s experience of negative SEO. Next he explains the exact reason why “negative SEO links” have no effect.

Links From Irrelevant Topics Are Not Counted

At about the 30 minute mark of the interview, Gary confirmed something interesting about how links evaluated that is important to understand. Google has, for a very long time, examined the context of the site that’s linking out to match it to the site that’s being linked to, and if they don’t match up then Google wouldn’t pass the PageRank signal.

Gary continued his answer:

“If you see links from completely irrelevant sites, be that p–n sites or or pure spam sites or whatever, you can safely assume that we disabled the links from those sites because, one of the things is that we try to match the the topic of the target page plus whoever is linking out, and if they don’t match then why on Earth would we use those links?

Like for example if someone is linking to your flower page from a Canadian casino that sells Viagra without prescription, then why would we trust that link?

I would say that I would not worry about it. Like, find something else to worry about.”

Google Matches Topics From Page To Page

There was a time, in the early days of SEO, when thousands of links from non-matching topics could boost a site to the top of Google’s search results.  Some link builders used to offer “free” traffic counter widgets to universities that when placed in the footer would contain a link back to their client sites and they used to work. But Google tightened up on those kinds of links.

What Gary said about links having to be relevant matches up with what link builders have known for at least twenty years. The concept of off topic links not being counted by Google was understood way in the days when people did reciprocal links.

Although I can’t remember everything every Googler has ever said about negative SEO, this seems to be one of the rare occasions that a Googler offered a detailed reason why negative SEO doesn’t work.

Watch Gary Illyes answer the question at the 26 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/MDV Edwards

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 5 2024
Consumer Usage Of Social Media Platforms Is Shifting (Again) via @sejournal, @gregjarboe

According to a new Consumer Pulse survey from Sprout Social, usage of social media platforms is shifting again – in ways that will significantly impact brands.

According to the new data, Instagram (65%) has just passed Facebook (64%) as the No. 1 platform among the 2,059 consumers surveyed.

It’s worth noting that the participants of this survey included 1,009 US consumers and 1,050 UK consumers who have at least one social media account and follow at least five brands on social media.

So, this isn’t a global sample. And since the US population (335 million) is almost five times larger than the UK population (68 million), the survey isn’t a representative sample of either country. Plus, focusing on consumers who follow at least five brands on social media skews the results, too.

Nevertheless, when it’s broken down by age group, there are significant differences in usage that marketers will want to analyze and consider using in their social media campaigns.

For example, 519 participants were classified as Gen Z (18-24), 757 were Millennials (25-40), 502 respondents were Gen X (41-56 years old), and 281 were Baby Boomers (57-75 years old).

The consumer survey was conducted online by Cint on behalf of Sprout Social from May 17-27, 2024.

Usage Of Social Media Platforms By Age Group

Segmenting by age shows:

  • Gen Z uses Instagram most frequently, followed by TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook.
  • Millennials use Instagram most frequently, followed by Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
  • Gen X uses Facebook most frequently, followed by Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
  • Baby Boomers use Facebook most frequently, followed by YouTube, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

It’s also worth noting that 45% of the consumers surveyed have taken a “social media detox” in the past six months, and 51% plan to in the next six months.

So, it appears that a significant percentage of the “consumers” who follow at least five brands on social media need to take temporary breaks from “consuming” for a variety of reasons, including mental health, feeling overwhelmed, or wanting to reflect on their social media usage.

The Sprout Social Q2 2024 Consumer Pulse survey also found:

  • Gen Z has been most engaged with Instagram Reels (83%), Instagram Stories (81%), and TikTok posts (78%) over the last six months. Despite TikTok’s uncertain future in the US, this segment says it will be most engaged with TikTok posts (75.5%), Instagram Reels (74%), and Instagram Stories (74%) over the next six months.
  • Millennials have been most engaged with Instagram Reels (77%), Instagram Stories (77%), and TikTok posts (68%) in the last six months. This segment says they’ll be most engaged with Instagram Stories (75%), Instagram Stories (73%), and TikTok posts (66%) over the next six months.
  • Gen X has been most engaged with Facebook videos (67%), Instagram Reels (59%), and Instagram Stories (59%) over the last six months. This segment says it will be most engaged with Facebook videos (59%), Instagram Stories (60%), and Instagram Reels (59%) over the next six months.
  • Baby Boomers have been most engaged with Facebook videos (61%), Facebook Live (41%), Instagram Reels (41%, and Instagram Stories (41%) over the last six months. This segment says they’ll be most engaged with Facebook video (67%), Facebook Live (47%), Instagram Reels (46%), and Instagram Stories (42%) over the next six months.

With YouTube Shorts now averaging over 70 billion daily views, it may seem odd that this video format didn’t appear in the survey findings above.

But, as we reported, the platform’s recommendation algorithm shows videos that align with that specific user’s watching history and preferences.

In contrast, Sprout Social defines engagement as any interaction between a brand and its target audience on social media. This includes actions that show how actively involved an audience is with a brand’s content, such as clicking on links, sharing content, or commenting.

So, the skew in the sample combined with different key performance indicators (KPIs) explains this apparent discrepancy.

The Formats Of Brand Content That Consumers Find Most Entertaining

According to the Sprout Social Q2 2024 Consumer Pulse survey, they are:

  • “Edutainment,” which educates consumers about a product or service in a fun way (65.5%).
  • Posts using memes (40%).
  • Serialized content (38%).
  • One-off video skits (38%).
  • Interactive content like polls and stickers (34%).

And despite what marketers may have heard about the popularity of “lo-fi content” that’s intentionally rough, unpolished, and authentic, the survey found that most consumers say that production value does impact whether they engage with a brand’s content.

Many consumers surveyed agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is contributing to the already incredible saturation of content on social media and will exacerbate the challenges of misinformation going forward.

AI-Generated Content Should Be Disclosed

In addition, most consumers surveyed agree that AI-generated social content needs to be disclosed – but they’re somewhat split on who bears the responsibility for doing that.

Despite previous data showing that AI-generated content can be eye-catching or entertaining, the new data finds that it may negatively impact consumer buying decisions.

Consumers are closely split on believing brands (33%) or social networks (29%) are responsible for disclosing when AI generates social content. Only 6% think AI-generated content doesn’t have to be disclosed.

And 46% of consumers are less likely to buy from a brand that posts AI-generated content on social, while 31% are neither more nor less likely.

Plus, the new survey of 2,059 consumers in the US and UK found:

  • 83% of consumer agree that AI-generated content will make their social feeds more saturated than they already are.
  • 80% agree that AI-generated content will add to misinformation on social media.

Consumers Most Likely To Unfollow Brands

Finally, the Sprout Social Q2 2024 Consumer Pulse survey found that 43% of consumers are most likely to unfollow brands for having an unoriginal content strategy (i.e., their content has become repetitive or unoriginal).

And 42% of consumers are most likely to unfollow brands for collaborating with the “wrong” influencer (i.e., “they partner with influencers that don’t align with my values”).

While posting frequency isn’t a significant deal-breaker, it’s worth noting that younger consumers are more likely to unfollow influencers for posting too little (17% Gen Z vs. 10.5% all consumers). In comparison, older consumers are more put off by posting too much (24% Baby Boomers, 21% Gen X, 16% Millennials, and 14% Gen Z).

This trend holds true for unfollowing brands as well.

The Alternatives To Using Demographics For Targeting

Many marketers believe that a person’s age tells us where they fall in the life span and indicates what social roles and responsibilities they may have. Which generation they belong to may also tell us what events in history influenced their social thinking.

However, marketers should also read “How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward.”

It notes:

“A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience, and behavior within generations.”

What are the alternatives to using demographic groups for targeting?

Well, that’s a good topic for another column on another day. But let’s just say that there are more options than you can shake a stick at.

Disclaimer: All statistics above are from a gated Sprout Social report, unless otherwise indicated by a link.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 5 2024
42 Facebook Statistics & Facts For 2024 via @sejournal, @annabellenyst

Don’t believe what you may have heard; Facebook is still a dominant social media force in 2024.

With over 3 billion active users, it remains a key player for businesses, marketers, and social media enthusiasts.

And despite the rise of newer, shinier platforms, Facebook’s expansive reach and diverse user base are still unrivaled, making it a powerful channel for both personal and business engagement.

In this article, we’ll highlight the latest Facebook statistics and facts, providing a comprehensive overview of its reach, user behavior, and influence.

Facebook Overview

1. Facebook is the world’s most-used social platform in 2024, with over 3 billion global active users.

2. It is the third most-used app globally among mobile users, trailing only WhatsApp and YouTube.

3. Facebook ranks third in terms of time spent (behind TikTok and YouTube), with users spending an average of 19 hours and 47 minutes on Android app per month.

4. 64.1% of Facebook Android users open the app every day.

5. Facebook is the third most visited website in the US, with an estimated 2.90 billion monthly visits in April 2024.

6. Of its monthly US visitors, roughly 50.07% are mobile users, and 49.93% are using a desktop.

7. Globally, users spend an average of 3 minutes and 42 seconds on Facebook per app session.

8. Facebook is the second most searched query globally, with a search volume of 584.9 million.

9. Facebook is the fourth most downloaded social networking app in the US, behind Threads, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

(Source) (Source) (Source) (Source) (Source) (Source) (Source)

Facebook Company Background

10. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

11. The platform was originally launched as ‘TheFacebook’ on February 4, 2004. In August of 2005, it rebranded to Facebook.

12. Mark Zuckerberg is the current CEO of Facebook.

13. Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.

14. Facebook has 69,329 employees in 2024, a decrease of 10% year-over-year.

(Source) (Source) (Source)

Facebook Financial Performance

15. As of May 2024, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has a market cap of $562.19 billion.

16. Meta generated $36.46 billion in revenue in Q1 2024, reflecting a 27% increase year-over-year.

17.  The company reported a net income of $12.37 billion in Q1 2024 – a significant 117% uptick from Q1 of 2023.

(Source) (Source)

Facebook User Statistics

18. Facebook had an average of 2.11 billion daily active users (DAUs) in 2023.

19. Facebook has approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users (MAUs).

20. That figure represents 37.7% of the total population and 57% of total internet users.

21. Facebook saw a 3.4% increase in MAUs between April 2023 and April 2024.

22. More than two-thirds of the world’s total internet users visit Facebook monthly.

23. English is the most represented language among Facebook users (53.8%), followed by Spanish (14.9%) and Hindi (8.5%).

24. Approximately seven in 10 US adults report ever using Facebook, second only to YouTube (83%).

25. A third of US teens aged 13-17 use Facebook, a decrease from 71% in 2014-2015.

26. More than 56.8% of Facebook users are male in 2024.

(Source) (Source) (Source) (Source) (Source)

Facebook Statistics By Location

27. 1.37 billion of Facebook’s MAUs are based in the Asia Pacific, making it the largest segment of the app’s users.

28. Europe and the US & Canada make up the next largest user groups.

29. Facebook’s global audience size, April 2023:

Country Active Facebook Users
India 369.9 million
US 186.4 million
Indonesia 135.1 million
Brazil 114.2 million
Mexico 93.3 million
The Philippines 91.9 million
Vietnam 75.6 million
Bangladesh 54.2 million
Thailand 51.6 million
Egypt 47.0 million

(Source) (Source)

Facebook Advertising

30. Advertisers can reach 2.24 billion users on Facebook in 2024, representing 41.3% of all internet users and 27.7% of the total population.

31. Among active Facebook users, 53.8% say they use the platform to follow or research brands and products. This ranks the platform second behind Instagram (62.7%) and ahead of TikTok (47.4%).

32. Male users aged 25-34 years old make up the largest portion of Facebook’s advertising audience (18.4%), followed by those aged 18-24 years old (13.5%).

33. Ad impressions on Meta’s Family of Apps (FoA), which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, increased by 28% YoY in 2023.

(Source) (Source) (Source)

Facebook User Activities And Engagement

34. Active users use the app to message friends and family, with 72.6% doing so regularly.

35. Posting or sharing photos or videos is a common activity for 63.2% of Facebook users.

36. Almost 60% of users leverage Facebook to keep up to date with news and current events.

37. Facebook is the go-to platform for news for three in 10 Americans, making it the most popular social platform for this purpose.

(Source) (Source)

Facebook Content And Engagement

38. Link posts account for 44.5% of Facebook posts.

39. Photo posts follow at 33.4%.

40. Video posts make up 18.9% of content.

41. Photo posts receive an average engagement rate of 0.35%, followed by video posts at 0.23%, and album posts at 0.22%.

(Source)

Most Followed Facebook Pages

42. The top 10 most followed Facebook pages are:

Brand Followers*
1 Facebook App 188 million
2 Cristiano Ronaldo 168 million
3 Samsung 161 million
4 Mr. Bean 140 million
5 5-Minute Crafts 126 million
6 Shakira 124 million
7 Real Madrid C.F. 121 million
7 CGTN 121 million
9 Will Smith 116 million
9 Lionel Messi 116 million

*Facebook followers as of January 2024

(Source)

In Summary

Say what you will about Facebook, but its enduring relevance is undeniable.

With extensive reach, a broad user base, and significant advertising potential, Facebook will remain a cornerstone of any social media strategy in 2024.

By understanding these trends and user behaviors – and leveraging many of the insights covered above – you can maximize the potential of Facebook to drive engagement, awareness, and impact.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 5 2024
Organic SEO Strategy Guide: How To Boost Search Visibility & Drive Growth via @sejournal, @idigitalinear

This post was sponsored by Digitalinear. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

In a world where consumers search online for nearly everything – from product recommendations to local service providers – your brand’s digital presence is everything.

The right organic SEO strategy can boost your search visibility and drive sustainable business growth.

SEO is becoming increasingly complex with sweeping algorithm changes, intense competition, and the recent flood of AI-generated content.

So how can you navigate these challenges to enhance your site’s visibility and raise brand awareness?

Here, we’ll break down a strategic approach to organic SEO, focusing on building a solid foundation and continuously optimizing and analyzing performance.

Step One: Web Inspection

The first step to address is the core user experience of your website.

SEO strategies should always begin with the end user, how you solve their problems, and how you communicate your value to them.

If your website is a new obstacle to them, they’ll find solutions elsewhere. So, your first job is to clarify your intended user experience and make it seamless. This will take both audience research and technical optimization.

The audience research portion of inspecting your website should include:

  • Identify Success Metrics and Conversion Points: Your website must do its job well. You need a clear understanding of what you want users to do, which target audiences are likely to take those actions, what questions and pain points those users have, and how you can address them. Much of that strategy work comes later in the process, but for now, you need a clear view of your goals and intended user journeys. This will help you prioritize the most impactful technical fixes.
  • Assess Content Coverage and Quality: High-quality, relevant content is crucial for engaging users and ranking well in search results. Moreover, you need content that addresses the real needs of your target audiences at multiple stages of their journey. Understanding users’ needs and questions is critical to their experience and to lead them toward desired actions. Conduct a content audit to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement: identify low-engagement pages and analyze competitors to see what content you’re missing.

A comprehensive technical website audit should include:

  • Technical SEO: Ensure your site is technically sound by checking for issues like broken links, duplicate content, and proper use of meta tags. Many tools can assist with this, but individual tools may not provide a complete view. You may need to combine reports from multiple different tools.
  • Site Speed and Core Web Vitals: Slow-loading websites can deter visitors and negatively affect search rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify speed issues.
  • Mobile-Friendliness: Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means that mobile-friendliness isn’t only important for mobile users. Your website’s indexing and ranking depend on its mobile performance, no matter what device is being used to view it. The content of your pages should be the same and provide the same experience between desktop and mobile. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help you assess your site’s performance on mobile devices. If you want to lean into mobile trends, then mobile app development allows you to provide mobile users with unique, seamless experiences.
  • User Experience (UX): A positive user experience encourages visitors to stay on your site longer, reducing bounce rates and improving SEO. Evaluate your site’s navigation, layout, and overall usability, keeping your success metrics and conversion points in mind. Users should be able to find the next steps quickly.

A full website audit is both technical and strategic. Sometimes, you need an external perspective to accurately identify the UX and communication issues you might be encountering. This is where an SEO agency can provide the perspective, research, and dedicated resources a website needs for long-term success.

Digitalinear specializes in organic SEO, and packages begin with deep research into your business and niche alongside technical audits.

With a team of dedicated SEO professionals, Digitalinear performs a thorough website inspection using the best tools available, ensuring no stone is left unturned in your audit.

Step Two: Deep Optimization

Once you’ve identified the areas of your site that need improvement, the next step is to optimize.

Optimizing your website ensures that it meets search engines’ technical requirements while providing a seamless and engaging user experience.

This is where you should get into the fine details of keyword research and query intent matching, ensuring that your SEO goals align with the business goals of your website that you identified in step one.

Top rankings for keywords won’t have a business impact if you haven’t matched them to your core audience. Traffic won’t result in signups or sales if you’re not effectively engaging those users.

Research is one area where an SEO consultancy can be particularly helpful in providing objective competitor and industry analysis.

Here are some key research elements for optimization:

  • Keyword Research: Identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords for your industry. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find keywords that your target audience is searching for.
  • Content Optimization: Intent has been a big deal in SEO lately, and you must optimize for it as well as keywords. Matching your content to users’ needs and intents is where all your research will pay off in engagement, retention, and conversion. Use keywords naturally and ensure your content answers your audience’s questions and needs. Ensure you have wide and deep coverage of relevant topics demonstrating your unique expertise. Build strong networks of internal links to help users and search engines navigate and parse your content.

Key optimization techniques that lead to higher search rankings include:

  • On-Page SEO: This broad category includes content-focused and technical implementations to make individual pages shine. Your research and analysis thus far should culminate in a page with exceptional user experience. The elements load quickly and provide a consistent experience. The content demonstrates your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). You implement keywords, metadata, and linking effectively.
  • Link Building: Build high-quality backlinks to your site from reputable sources. This can help improve your site’s authority and search rankings. Creating content people share and want to link to is the first step. Then, you can actively seek links through many outreach strategies, such as digital PR, email, and social channels.

A full optimization process is a ton of work. Digitalinear is an SEO agency with services designed to simplify your process.

Their expert team uses advanced tools and techniques to ensure your site is fully optimized for search engines and users alike.

Additionally, Digitalinear provides web design and development solutions to enhance user interface and overall experience.

Step Three: Analyze Growth

After optimizing your website, it’s important to continuously analyze its performance to refine and improve your strategies over time.

This involves monitoring key metrics to evaluate the success of your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

By regularly analyzing your growth, you can better understand what’s working and what’s not.

Here are some key SEO metrics to monitor:

  • Organic Traffic: Track the number of visitors coming to your site through organic search.
  • Engagement Rate: Monitor the percentage of visitors who do not engage with content.
  • Keyword Rankings: Keep an eye on how your targeted keywords are ranking over time.
  • Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, etc.
  • Backlink Profile: Analyze the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site.

Digitalinear offers ongoing SEO consultancy. They can help you select the best metrics for your business goals and track and analyze them.

Their expertise ensures you make informed decisions that lead to tangible results, helping you drive continuous growth and stay ahead of the competition.

Start Meeting & Exceeding Your Growth Goals With Digitalinear

To navigate the complexities of SEO and achieve your growth goals, it’s essential to have a strategic partner that takes the time to understand your business, where you are now and where you want to be.

This involves a holistic approach to organic SEO through comprehensive site audits, deep optimization techniques, and continuous performance analysis. The audience research and testing involved are ongoing processes of learning.

Digitalinear offers expert guidance and tailored SEO solutions to help you enhance your online presence and drive sustainable growth.

With a team of professionals dedicated to exceeding your business objectives, they ensure that every SEO strategy is optimized for success.

Learn more about how Digitalinear’s tailored SEO services can make a difference for your business.

LEARN MORE

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Digitalinear. Used with permission.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 5 2024
The Download: recycling clothing, and fish-friendly hydropower

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

A polyester-dissolving process could make modern clothing recyclable  

The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A team of researchers hopes to change that with a new process that breaks down mixed-fiber clothing into reusable, recyclable parts without any sorting or separation in advance.

How they did it: Many garments are made of a mix of natural and synthetic fibers. Once these fibers are combined, they are difficult to separate. To tackle this problem, the team used a solvent that breaks the chemical bonds in polyester fabric while leaving cotton and nylon intact. To speed up the process, they power it with microwave energy and add a zinc oxide catalyst. 

Why it matters: While similar methods have been used to recycle pre-sorted plastic, this is the first time they’ve been used to recycle mixed-fiber textiles without any sorting required. Read the full story.

—Sarah Ward

What new hydropower tech says about climate action

Back at MIT Technology Review’s ClimateTech event in 2022, Gia Schneider, a cofounder of Natel Energy, spoke about her company’s mission to design hydropower turbines that are safer for fish.

To illustrate her point, she shared grisly images of fish that had been hit by conventional turbine blades. On the other hand, the fish swimming through Natel’s turbines seemed relatively unbothered, curving around the blades and going on their merry way downstream. 

Recently, our climate reporter Casey Crownhart had a chat with Schneider about how Natel is working to change hydropower technology and juggle climate action with freshwater ecosystems to make hydropower a bit more fish-friendly. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter covering innovations in climate and energy tech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Google’s plan to ditch tracking cookies is not going well
Adtech firms are worried the replacement program will pose major risks to publishers. (Insider $)
+ The new project could slash publisher ad revenue by 60%. (Press Gazette)

2 NASA is launching a gamma-ray telescope

In the hopes of studying the creation and destruction of chemical elements. (Ars Technica)
+ Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible. (MIT Technology Review)

3 We need more alternative fuels
Planes, trains, and automobiles are getting leaner and greener. (Knowable Magazine)
+ Clean fuels are a hugely expensive moonshot. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Tom Hanks’ son has become a face of online white supremacy
He claims his phrase “white boy summer” has been hijacked by the far right. (NYT $)

5 Threads is weighing up selling ads
A year after launch, it still hasn’t toppled its bitter rival X. (Bloomberg $)
+ Threads’ aversion to hard news could make or break it. (WP $)
+ The platform has recently hit 175 million users and is still going. (The Verge)

6 The UK’s general election has descended into a cringe meme war
Young voters aren’t falling for it. (Wired $)

7 Inside the great air conditioning debate
There’s no rule saying you have to keep it at 72 degrees. (Vox)
+ AC units aren’t a long term defense against heat waves. (CNN)
+ Why air-conditioning is a climate antihero. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Thinking of changing your life? Try it in The Sims first
From testing out bold interior design choices, to learning new languages. (WP $)
+ How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play.  (MIT Technology Review)

9 A teenager discovered her identical twin on TikTok
The revelation sparked the unraveling of a long-held family secret. (Vice)

10 The world’s most-delayed video game has finally been released
It’s been 22 long years in the making. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“We have won the war on floppy disks!”

—Taro Kono, Japan’s digital minister, tells Reuters he has succeeded in his mission to rid his government of its reliance on floppy disks.

The big story

The new US border wall is an app

June 2023

Keisy Plaza, 39, left her home in Colombia seven months ago. She walked a 62-mile stretch with her two daughters and grandson to reach Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, on the border with Texas.

Plaza has been trying every day for weeks to secure an appointment with Customs and Border Protection so she can request permission for her family to enter the US.

So far, she’s had no luck: each time, she’s been met with software errors and frozen screens. When appointment slots do open up, they fill within minutes. A new app, called CBP One, is supposed to help alleviate the sorts of issues Plaza has encountered. But will it? Read the full story.

—Lorena Rios

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ If you’re traveling today, here’s how to avoid the worst of the traffic and crowds—whether that’s by car, plane, or train.
+ Similarly, if your pets aren’t enjoying the fireworks as much as you are, there’s plenty of ways to calm them down.
+ It’s the general election here in the UK, which can only mean one thing—dogs at polling stations!
+ What comes after Gen Z? Why, Gen Alpha, of course.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 4 2024
Ask An SEO: What Are The Best Resources To Learn SEO And Who Are The Best People To Follow Online For Good Advice? via @sejournal, @HelenPollitt1

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Nicolò, who asks:

“What are the best resources to learn SEO and who are the best people to follow online for good advice?”

This is a great question that goes to the heart of what a lot of people struggle with when learning SEO. There is a lot of information online.

There are a lot of SEO “experts.”

Often, there is a lot of contradictory advice.

So, how do you sort the truth from the fiction – the opinionated from the experienced?

People To Follow

The issue in the SEO industry is that we are often left in the dark. Google and the other search engines offer us morsels of information, and we run wild with speculation.

Unfortunately, this can then become “fact.”

The rumor spreads. Pretty soon, you’ll hear it discussed in agency pitches and incorporated into brand strategies, all without it being properly questioned.

Finding the truth amid all of this noise can be tricky. Essentially, you are asking me, “Who and what can I trust?”

Really, the answer is to find SEO pros to learn from who are constantly testing their own assumptions.

I’m not going to list names here. I don’t want to risk putting you off following an SEO on social media purely because I haven’t included them in my list.

There are a lot of highly accomplished SEO pros who I don’t know.

Instead, I’ll suggest some ways of identifying those people who are digging into SEO and drawing conclusions from data.

Conferences And Publications

Start by attending SEO conferences and taking note of the speakers who are bringing something new to the table.

These are the people who are conducting experiments or backing up their claims with their own case studies.

Similarly, look for authors writing in reputable SEO publications – like Search Engine Journal – read their work and follow those constantly looking to question conventional wisdom and prove or disprove it with data.

Conference organizers and publication owners perform a certain level of due diligence, which means you are a little bit safer following the people they have chosen to showcase than following strangers on the internet.

Follow Who They Follow

A good next step to expand your list is to look at who the people you identified above follow.

If the same names pop up on the social media profiles of these conference speakers and article writers, you can be reassured that they are bringing useful insight to the platform.

Try to identify who they are discussing SEO with on social media. Snoop on those conversations and see who your trusted list of people to follow are also having informed discourse with.

It’s okay, too, if the SEO professionals you follow do not necessarily agree with what’s being said by the other people, as long as those other people are bringing rational, data-backed opinions. Sometimes, we learn best through hearing both sides of an argument!

Ask For Recommendations

It’s also perfectly acceptable to ask for recommendations of who to follow online like this Reddit user did.

To avoid getting back the same small list of famous SEO professionals each time, consider reaching out to some of your “trusted” SEO pros from the list above and ask them who they would recommend for specific areas of SEO.

For example, are you looking to learn more about local SEO or ecommerce SEO?

Ask for recommendations of who they would turn to if they had a question in that field.

Be Part Of The Discussion

SEO is constantly evolving, and no single SEO expert has all the answers. We learn from each other and from discussing ideas and opinions.

It’s never too early in your career to take part in those discussions.

Join In The Conversation

Look for conversations that are happening on SEO topics and join in the discussions. For example, @MordyOberstein’s #SEOChat over on X or the Google Search Central Help Community 

Try some of the Reddit subreddits about SEO, like r/TechSEO and r/bigseo. There will be a lot of discussions (I mean arguments, really) that will give you some quick insight into what practicing SEO pros make of particular ideas or approaches.

You can simply read through questions and replies, or you can take part. Give your own thoughts and ask for critiques and opinions. Engaging in discourse and learning from others can help you to sharpen your knowledge.

Start A Conversation

Perhaps, if you’re feeling brave, you can start your own conversations in these forums.

There is always the risk that you might be met with answers by people who haven’t really practiced SEO that much. The great/awful thing about the internet, however, is there are always people waiting in the wings to argue and say an opinion isn’t valid!

Ask a specific question and crowd-source the answer. Wait for the arguments to be presented and countered, then use it as an opportunity to learn how to validate others’ SEO opinions.

Conferences And Meet-ups

As already mentioned above, seeing who is speaking at events can give you an idea of some reputable people to follow, but let’s explore that a bit more.

Learn Something New

Something I recommend to SEO pros, both experienced and new, is to attend SEO talks that don’t interest them. That might seem counterintuitive, but it can actually be extremely eye-opening.

The chances are that the aspects of SEO you find exciting are the ones you will actively seek to learn more about.

If you are interested in the technical side of SEO, you will likely look for talks on cutting-edge experiments, advances in load speed and rendering, or case studies about complicated migrations.

But you possibly already know a lot about that as you are already interested in it. Every once in a while, set out to attend the talk you are least interested in.

If you are a digital PR at heart, attend a tech talk or two. If you are an in-house SEO, attend a talk about client management.

By doing this, you have a high chance of learning something completely new that will enhance or complement your existing skill set. For example, the in-house SEO will be able to apply skills discussed in the agency talk to their own stakeholder management issues.

Some good conferences to start with include BrightonSEO (Brighton, UK, and San Diego), WTSFest (Philadelphia, London, Berlin), MnSearch Summit.

Read more: The Best SEO Conferences For 2024-2025

Look Outside Of SEO

A good way to expand your knowledge of SEO is to not just attend SEO conferences. Go to events where a more holistic digital marketing approach is spoken about.

Or, if you are feeling really inclined, go to one that discusses adjacent disciplines like PPC and email marketing. This way, you may well learn more about the context of SEO in the digital landscape and how to better implement it within a complicated marketing system.

There are several specialist conferences that cover marketing subjects like paid media, social media and content marketing available, including ADWorld Experience, Hero Conf, and Content Marketing World.

There are also large multi-discipline conferences that cover a wide range of digital marketing topics, including Moz Con, State of Search, INBOUND, and the Growth Marketing Summit.

Go To Panels

A conference talk is, by design, very one-sided (heckling aside!). The speaker presents the material how they want to and goes into as much depth as they feel appropriate.

Due to this, you don’t have any opportunity to hear other peoples’ views on the subject or even their challenges to the assertions made.

Panels, however, are more collaborative and discussion-focused. Many events that have traditional workshop or presentation formats will also have the occasional panel or fireside chat.

These are your opportunities to hear the views of multiple SEO pros, perhaps even disagreements on a subject.

Listening to more than one view of a topic will help you discern what you agree or disagree with and ultimately form your own opinion. It is a good way of preventing yourself from just agreeing with whoever you have heard speak on the subject most recently.

Participate In Webinar Q&As

Webinar question and answer sessions are another way to hear multiple SEO pros give their opinions on a topic. They will also allow you to ask your own questions to the participants.

For example, the Good Signals “SEO Office Hours” webinar hosted by Michael Chidzey and Jo Juliana Turnbull is a weekly webinar that allows viewers to submit their questions in advance or ask questions during the event itself.

Then, a panel of SEO practitioners will discuss their thoughts on the questions.

Similarly, if you want to hear directly from the horse’s mouth, you can participate in Google’s “SEO Office Hours” asking your questions directly to Googlers from the Search Quality team.

Read more: Top 17 SEO Podcasts For 2024

Communities

Many communities have been set up to help with learning SEO. Some are region – or demographic-specific to help with more nuanced questions or support those traditionally less supported in the industry.

These communities are designed to facilitate a safe space to ask questions and get answers from others in the industry.

This sort of networking isn’t just useful for increasing your practical knowledge of SEO, they can also help with job opportunities. There are a lot available but here is a selection:

Location-specific Meetups include:

Create Your Own

If there isn’t a community that serves your specific need, or you’d prefer something smaller, consider creating your own.

It could start off as regular meet-ups at local cafés where you get to know other SEO pros in your area.

Or perhaps, an online call once a month where you can just bring questions to each other.

Maybe you have met some other SEO pros you feel you could learn from. You might be able to invite them to participate in a Slack or WhatsApp group.

Create A Forum

Another way to create a community that uses existing infrastructure and is, therefore, much easier to create is through Reddit or other forums.

You could set up a “subreddit” for a particular aspect of SEO and share it on other SEO subreddits. That way, you can encourage a much wider range of people to participate without you needing to know and invite them all personally.

Resources

To finish, let’s return to the question I discerned at the beginning: “Who and what can I trust?” There are already a lot of resources online about SEO, some less helpful than others!

Newsletters

Other than online blogs like Search Engine Journal, there are newsletters that can round up breaking industry news and case studies.

For example, Aleyda Solis’s “SEOFOMO Newsletter” sends a weekly summary of interesting articles and webinars from the SEO industry.

Nikki Halliwell’s “Tech SEO Tips newsletter” offers news and tips designed to help solidify your tech SEO knowledge.

Tom Critchlow’s “SEO MBA” newsletter focuses on the career and management side of SEO.

Women in Tech SEO also has a newsletter for everyone in the industry to learn SEO from, summarising interesting articles that have been recently released.

Training Courses

There are a lot of SEO training courses out there, paid and free.

Some that have been highly recommended to me in the past are the Hubspot Academy, Semrush Academy, BrightLocal Academy, Blue Array Academy, and the BrightonSEO short courses.

Sometimes, though, you may want to go more in-depth into new areas of SEO. Perhaps you don’t really know where your skills gaps lie. For this, I would strongly recommend looking at Aleyda Solis’s LearningSEO.io.

It is a free and highly comprehensive roadmap of SEO concepts. It runs from beginner to advanced, with reliable free resources accompanying each.

Summary

There is a lot of information about SEO online. It’s an ever-evolving subject and that means more content will be produced on it all the time.

With that amount of information available, it can be overwhelming to know who or what to trust.

Use the suggestions and resources above to start to curate your own list of trustworthy material and people to learn from. That way, you can keep expanding your knowledge in a safe and helpful way.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 4 2024
10 Creative Ways To Motivate Your Marketing Team via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

Everyone loves a good pizza party, but there are many more fun and creative ways to motivate your marketing team!

Motivation is about creating an environment where people can do their best work, offering incentives that meet real needs, and building a healthy team culture.

Giving incentives for hard work can significantly increase company loyalty, prevent burnout, and keep the creative juices flowing.

It’s not only about rewarding performance. Your team should feel supported and that they have the trust and appreciation of their peers and managers.

In this list, we share some unique ways to motivate your marketing team while promoting a positive company culture and continued performance.

1. Convenient Rewards Programs

Gift cards, vouchers, and other flexible perks can address the needs of employees by letting them choose how and when they use the rewards. These can be merit-based, but making them permanent perks for all team members can help increase retention.

Many companies offer business-focused rewards programs to make implementation easier on your end.

Uber for Business is a great example of a program that allows businesses to offer perks to employees, such as ride and meal vouchers.

Regularly improving an employee’s day or making their commute a little easier is a great way to show that you care about their wellbeing as well as their performance.

2. Remote Flexibility

Since the boom of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (or from a cozy coffee shop) is now easier than ever.

If your company still requires your marketing team to come into the office, it might be worth considering a more flexible work model.

Remote or hybrid work allows employees to enjoy greater flexibility in their schedules, which reduces commuting time and lets them structure their day in a way that suits their needs.

Not only does this promote better work-life balance, it can also lead to improved employee retention and productivity.

3. “Weekly Wins”

Allow your marketing team to share their wins and gain encouragement from other team members.

Daily stand-up meetings are often all housekeeping and business; this is a missed opportunity to showcase the amazing things your team is working on.

Dedicate a time each week to share “weekly wins” – or any other catchy name to match.

Announcing accomplishments can boost morale while encouraging all the marketers on your team to participate, identify their wins, and strive for success.

4. Mentorship Hour

Most employees identify longevity and upward mobility as essential factors when deciding to stay with a company.

Unfortunately, many managers create an environment of stagnation by not providing mentorship, training, or opportunities for growth. Implementing a mentorship program could be a great way to keep your team motivated and feeling supported.

Whether that’s pairing some of your senior team members with junior marketers to hone their skills, or allocating a portion of your training budget to coaching or learning platforms, continued education in the workplace shows your team that you are willing to invest in career development and skills.

5. Local Activities & Events

Team Happy Hour is always a favorite, but it can also feel overdone.

Why not mix it up with some more creative activities? Some great ideas include mini golf, escape rooms, sporting events, hiking, wilderness retreats, and concerts, to name a few.

Now, not every type of event will be everyone’s cup of tea. Attendance should be optional.

However, getting creative with your team events can help you build rapport and nurture relationships between team members. You could always survey your marketing team to field ideas about cool things to do in your area.

6. Friendly Competition

Turn mundane tasks into a friendly competition by creating games, charts, or leaderboards tracking success. These don’t have to be highly structured; in fact, the more fun, the better!

For example, marketing team members can place a sticker every time they post a video that goes viral.

Or, create funny bingo cards with various milestones that your team can check off – and then win a prize.

7. Lunch-And-Learn

Even the junior team members have something to share, and a “lunch and learn” allows them to share knowledge.

Team members can volunteer to share a unique learning from the week, a tutorial on something they’ve accomplished, or a think-piece on something they find super cool to the group.

This allows team members to share their insights and learn from their colleagues.

8. Office Aesthetics

If your marketing team works from a company office, then you’ll want to make sure their workspace is as inviting as possible.

Office aesthetics do matter – from incorporating elements like artwork and plants, to comfortable furniture and community spaces.

A comfortable yet focused space both helps to promote productivity and collaboration between team members. Yes, ping-pong tables are still a thing.

9. Workshops (Without The Work)

Give your marketing team time off from the daily grind by bringing in guest speakers or hosting a workshop.

This can be a time for your team to hear fresh insights, learn new techniques, and explore industry trends.

It can also be inspirational to hear from marketing leaders on what works well and the lessons they’ve learned.

10. Join The Club

Give your team a piece of the company culture by offering participation in the brand’s podcast, YouTube channel, or blog.

These channels can allow team members to share their own insights, grow their professional brand, and build trust in the company.

Your team likely brings a treasure trove of experience to share with your audience. Giving your team these platforms can be a great motivator and vote of confidence in their skills.

A Little Support Goes A Long Way

Many business owners forget how important it is to provide continued support and incentives for their marketing teams.

Your team wants to feel that you respect their work, energy, and contributions to the company. There are many effective and creative ways to show your marketing team you care.

From career growth opportunities to remote flexibility to customizable perks, every business should incorporate some incentive program to encourage team retention and promote well-being.

Not only do happy marketers do better work, but they are more likely to stick around for the long run. This can pay off for your company for years to come.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Lucky Business/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jul 4 2024
AI companies are finally being forced to cough up for training data

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

The generative AI boom is built on scale. The more training data, the more powerful the model. 

But there’s a problem. AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and many websites and data set owners have started restricting the ability to scrape their websites. We’ve also seen a backlash against the AI sector’s practice of indiscriminately scraping online data, in the form of users opting out of making their data available for training and lawsuits from artists, writers, and the New York Times, claiming that AI companies have taken their intellectual property without consent or compensation. 

Last week three major record labels—Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group—announced they were suing the AI music companies Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement. The music labels claim the companies made use of copyrighted music in their training data “at an almost unimaginable scale,” allowing the AI models to generate songs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.” My colleague James O’Donnell dissects the lawsuits in his story and points out that these lawsuits could determine the future of AI music. Read it here. 

But this moment also sets an interesting precedent for all of generative AI development. Thanks to the scarcity of high-quality data and the immense pressure and demand to build even bigger and better models, we’re in a rare moment where data owners actually have some leverage. The music industry’s lawsuit sends the loudest message yet: High-quality training data is not free. 

It will likely take a few years at least before we have legal clarity around copyright law, fair use, and AI training data. But the cases are already ushering in changes. OpenAI has been striking deals with news publishers such as Politico, the Atlantic, Time, the Financial Times, and others, and exchanging publishers’ news archives for money and citations. And YouTube announced in late June that it will offer licensing deals to top record labels in exchange for music for training. 

These changes are a mixed bag. On one hand, I’m concerned that news publishers are making a Faustian bargain with AI. For example, most of the media houses that have made deals with OpenAI say the deal stipulates that OpenAI cite its sources. But language models are fundamentally incapable of being factual and are best at making things up. Reports have shown that ChatGPT and the AI-powered search engine Perplexity frequently hallucinate citations, which makes it hard for OpenAI to honor its promises.   

It’s tricky for AI companies too. This shift could lead to them build smaller, more efficient models, which are far less polluting. Or they may fork out a fortune to access data at the scale they need to build the next big one. Only the companies most flush with cash, and/or with large existing data sets of their own (such as Meta, with its two decades of social media data), can afford to do that. So the latest developments risk concentrating power even further into the hands of the biggest players. 

On the other hand, the idea of introducing consent into this process is a good one—not just for rights holders, who can benefit from the AI boom, but for all of us. We should all have the agency to decide how our data is used, and a fairer data economy would mean we could all benefit. 

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

How AI video games can help reveal the mysteries of the human mind

Neuroscientists and psychologists have long been using games as research tools to learn about the human mind. Video games have been either co-opted or specially designed to study how people learn, navigate, and cooperate with others, for example. AI video games—where characters don’t need scripts and appear to play when you’re not watching—could allow us to probe more deeply and unravel enduring mysteries about our brains and behavior, suggests my colleague Jessica Hamzelou in our weekly biotech newsletter, The Checkup.

Ready, set, go: Scientists who have done this type of study were able to observe and study how players behaved in these games: how they explored their virtual environment, how they sought rewards, how they made decisions. And research volunteers didn’t need to travel to a lab—their gaming behavior could be observed from wherever they happened to be playing, whether that was at home, at a library, or even inside an MRI scanner. Read more from Jessica.

Bits and Bytes

AI is already wreaking havoc on global power systems
A really well-done data visualization of the insane amount of electricity AI requires and how it is transforming our energy grid. A startling statistic: Data centers use more electricity than most countries. (Bloomberg) 

The AI boom has an unlikely early winner: wonky consultants
It seems every company out there is thinking about how to use AI. But the problem is that nobody is sure exactly how to do that. And so in come consultants, who are profiting from AI FOMO. Work related to generative AI will make up about 40% of McKinsey’s business this year. (The New York Times)

Deepfake creators are revictimizing sex trafficking survivors
A new low: For the past few months, the largest deepfake sexual abuse website has posted deepfake videos based on footage from GirlsDoPorn, a now-defunct sex trafficking operation. (Wired)

I paid $365.63 to replace 404 Media with AI
A journalist paid gig workers to use ChatGPT to plagiarize news. The result: grammatically correct nonsense. (404 Media)

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments