2015 was a year of significant change for digital marketers, agencies and brands — many of whom watched and reacted as new platforms sprung up, new best practices came into play and new rules provided guidance for digital marketing. Was it Snapchat’s year? Our guide showing brands how to make the most of its new “Discover” feature was the most popular article our editorial team published this year. “That dress” was also a big draw, as we chronicled the dozens of brands that tried to newsjack one of the biggest viral stories of the year. The growth of the martech industry made for a popular infographic when we published it early in the year, and changes involving Google, Facebook and the FTC’s social media guidelines were popular news stories, too.
Beginning today and continuing through the end of December, we’ll be looking back at the most popular content we published in 2015. This’ll include our most popular columns (overall, and broken out by topic) and our most engaging stories on the main social networks.
We begin today with a look at the most popular news stories of the year.
Marketing Land’s Most Popular News Stories Of 2015
This list is based on pageviews, and includes news stories published between January 1 and December 19, 2015.
Danny Sullivan, February 10: “I am not a Snapchat expert. That’s because at nearly 50 years old, I’m neither a teenager nor millennial. I’m not in the 13-24 age group that makes up about half of Snapchat’s estimated 100 to 200 million users. I’ve had no interest in using it to send quick snap messages to friends and family. All that changed about two weeks ago, when Snapchat Discover launched.”
Martin Beck, February 16: “In a major reversal, photo posts are now the worst performing of all posts by Facebook brand pages, according to new data from social media analytics company Socialbakers. Photo posts are half as likely to be seen as videos, the new king of engagement on the Facebook platform.”
Ginny Marvin, September 28: “Enabling CRM uploads and targeting has been incredibly successful for Facebook, and arguably for Twitter, as well. And advertisers have been pushing for Google to enter the fold. Google seems to have come to terms with the privacy considerations involved, perhaps as a result of watching Facebook ad revenues continue to climb.”
Danny Sullivan, February 26: “It’s the debate that rocked Twitter. Is that dress immortalized on BuzzFeed white and gold or blue and black? Brands wasted no time jumping onto the meme.”
Matt McGee, March 15: “Domain industry veteran Ron Sheridan, the former business development director for Domain Sponsor and Oversee.net, agrees with Schwartz. ‘I can think of no other way to label it than what it is: plain and simple economic extortion,’ he told us, also via e-mail.” 6.) Infographic: The 2015 Marketing Technology Landscape
Marketing Land: “Technology continues to be essential to marketing activities, as evidenced by the latest Marketing Technology Landscape, a long-running graphical view of the martech space by Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec and chair of Marketing Land’s MarTech conference happening this March.”
Martin Beck, June 12: “The FTC’s basic message — that material relationships between brand and endorser on social media must be “clearly and conspicuously” disclosed — hasn’t changed. But FTC is now getting more specific with detailed guidance about social media issues that weren’t on the agency’s radar five years ago.”
Danny Sullivan, November 18: “There’s no need to worry about whether you want to invest the time and bandwidth downloading some app for a one-time use. If it works as promised, you’ll be able to browse within apps with the same type of experience that you browse web pages.”
Martin Beck, May 12: “We surveyed all the major social video platforms to see what counts as a view. For Facebook and Instagram, viewing only 3 seconds of a video of any length is considered a view. For YouTube, it’s “around” 30 seconds, the service tells us. In all those cases, the overall length of a video isn’t factored in. It’s an odd way to count at a time when for display ads there’s increasing pressure about the accuracy of view statistics.”
Danny Sullivan, August 10: “Google’s being acquired. Its new owner will be Alphabet, a palace coup pulled off by Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.”
So there you have it — the most read news stories of the year on Marketing Land. If you’re looking for a similar list from our sister site, Search Engine Land, it’ll be published there in a couple days. Meanwhile, be sure to come back here to Marketing Land tomorrow for our lists counting down the most popular Search Marketing and Marketing Strategies columns.
On behalf of the Marketing Land editorial team, thanks for reading us during 2015. Happy holidays to you and best wishes for 2016!
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