Ahead of its June 2021 algorithm update, Google made a significant announcement as part of its shift to emphasize overall page experience in determining its search ranking — it was lifting its thumb off the scales in favor of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is a Google-created open source HTML…

Three years into Facebook’s attempt to take a bite from Twitter’s breaking news empire, there exists very little good data on the social media’s giant’s most visible effort — the Breaking News Indicator. Facebook’s Breaking News Indicator is a bright red label that certain U.S. and global publishers can apply…

Since Twitter’s expansion to 280 characters about two years ago, it’s been loosely acknowledged that tweets in the expanded range have somewhat higher engagement. Reports have varied on how much of a boost this has provided. Social media optimization platform SocialFlow said tweets in the expanded range had double the…

It’s often called “recirculation” in Facebook parlance, or “strategically reposting” older stories. You know, putting stuff on Facebook that you already published there days, weeks or even months ago. The attraction for digital publishers is simple: You boost, in theory, both Facebook exposure and referral traffic with almost no additional…

Responses that start with “saved you a click” or “I didn’t click the link, but …” are ubiquitous on social media, especially Twitter. But more and more, some analytics show it’s becoming less a punchline and more a reality at a time when publishers aren’t as concerned with soft social…

The most surprising wrinkle in the New York Times’ piece The Follower Factory wasn’t the existence of this dark industry. And it wasn’t that some in the media paid for followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. …

Starting in January of this year, we at the Chicago Tribune started to anecdotally see a fairly significant change in our post reach. We weren’t seeing a huge difference in post consumption or daily average reach, but we were just seeing more misses than hits. At the Tribune, we have…

As the response was fairly positive to my original Medium post on headline engagement and best practices, I wanted to share a few more examples before I moved on to other topics. After the first piece, I received a lot of nice comments, the great folks at MediaShift republished the…

Let’s start with the obvious: Most news sites are in headline crisis. It’s truly a crisis because your headline is the first — and maybe the best — shot you have at attracting a reader. Yet many headlines look like these: Honestly, based on those examples, it’s hard to argue…