Tag Archives: online industry news

Last week, it was reported that Instagram now has a community of over 400 million active users, which makes it officially more popular than Twitter. This is just the latest in a string of not-so-great news for the network: its value has plummeted since its IPO in 2013, its growth has flatlined, and many of its new users are quick to abandon it.

In an effort to combat all this, Twitter has revealed some new features such as Moments, which will make users' timelines more organized and easy to understand. For content creators and marketers, however, the most important change involves the famous 140-character limit.

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It's commonly accepted that Google+ is nowhere near as successful a social network as Facebook or Twitter, despite having respectable user numbers. At the same time, Content Customs often argues that Google+ is a worthwhile platform for businesses; not only to gain exposure in a fashion similar to being on other social networks, but also for SEO advantages.

Now, even those benefits might be waning. With Google+ splitting up into separate services, it's unclear if the platform will remain advantageous for brands.

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Andrew Sullivan, well-known political blogger and pioneer of blogging as a journalism platform, announced his retirement last month. For 15 years, Sullivan had been operating his political blog, The Dish, through publishers such as The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Time and finally a proprietary paywall site.

To many, Sullivan is a "godfather" of sorts who paved the way for blogging as a career, defined what a blog could be, and demonstrated the influence that a blog could have. Now, however, his retirement is seen by some as part of an ongoing trend: the death of blogging.

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Google users may remember back in 2009 when live tweets started appearing in search results in near-real time. Google described the idea as a way to provide up-to-the-minute data related to users' queries, while also being financially beneficial for both Twitter and themselves.

That agreement lapsed in 2011 due to the two companies disagreeing about how exactly Twitter's data would be used and displayed. The creation of Google+ at that time may also have caused Google to become disinterested in supporting another social network. However, according to Bloomberg, the deal is back on.

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If your business considers 13- to 17-year-olds its target audience, chances are good that you're already using social media in your marketing campaigns. Facebook is undoubtedly the king right now, but several reports have shown its teen demographic slipping. For example, a Piper Jaffray report from this October showed that Facebook popularity among teens has absolutely plummeted this year.

A new report from iStrategy Labs confirms this downward trend; however, the severity of the problem and what to do about it is still quite debatable.

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