Snapchat Makes it Easy for Millennials to Vote

I'd like to focus this week’s blog post on the 2016 presidential election. However, the focus isn't on the candidates themselves but on the importance of who is voting. An article on Adweek titled Snapchat Wants to Help Register Users to Vote in November focuses on a strategy to get millennials to the polls in November. What I find so interesting about this strategy is the use of a social media app to promote voter registration. This technology update may be a smart way to reach young voters but the content needs to be engaging. "The ads, which feature celebrities including Jared Leto, Ciara, Ryan Seacrest, Jimmy Fallon, and Dwayne Johnson, encourage U.S. adults to vote in their national, state and location elections (Swant)." Snapchat has become a very powerful way to reach a younger audience. We have seen this from many advertisers and companies that use Snapchat as a platform for advertising.

Yet, is Snapchat a powerful enough platform to get millennials to vote? From personal experience and being a millennial myself I believe that using celebrities could be beneficial but it's really going to be what the celebrities say in terms of content that will get millennials to vote. They will need to relate to the younger generation when convincing us to go and vote, and provide us with an easy way to register. "The snaps themselves can't help would-be voters go quite all the way, but they will direct people to a mobile website to go through the rest of the process (Swant)." According to many statistics, for many years there haven’t been a lot of young voters. “Back in 2010, the last midterm election fewer than a quarter of voters ages 18 to 29 showed up to the polls (Seipel).” We have seen a lot of coverage for this year’s election and I think that alone plus the candidates is going to get more millennials to the polls. Snapchat is powerful platform but so are the candidates, so it will be interesting to see the voter turnout for the 2016 election.

This YouTube video provides instructions on how to register to vote using Snapchat.

Being Mobile Friendly

An article on Social Media Today titled Google to SEOs: Time to AMP Up discussed the importance of being mobile friendly. Google is consistently coming out with new updates, and this deals with the mobile web pages how quickly they load on a mobile device. You will need to do this update ASAP if you want your pages to rank organically in 2016.

This technology advancement involves speed so unnecessary page scripts and server calls don't break the user experience. “It effectively closed the unrestricted playground that web developers have enjoyed- often at great cost to the under experience- for decades (Baldwin). The article points to the importance of SEOs being aware of the new format and it should be a top priority.

I found this article very interesting because I was able to handle work that would involve this new update. For instance, over the summer when I was doing my internship abroad I was working very closely with our SEO manager and when we were helping build the content on a website we realized the importance of being mobile friendly when it comes to the content and document of a web page. “Content marketers have shown a great interest in the technology because Google has indicated in the past year that AMP-optimized pages will receive preferential rankings on SERPs. Additionally, such pages will obtain greater reach for the publishers because they will be selected for display more often and travel much better on bandwidth-constrained networks (Baldwin).”

Below is a Youtube video that explains the relationship between SEO and AMP. 

Where are you at Internet?

An article on Social Media Today titled Publishers: It's Time to make the Internet Great Again made me think, isn't the Internet already great? We use the Internet multiple times a day for retrieving answers, keeping up to date, and other pleasures. So why isn't it great? 

The article focuses on publisher’s content and how it doesn’t fit the medium or face extinction. Currently publishers are serving content to the 140 characters, 5-seconds-vanishing-image generation using the old-school, long-form article content format, despite the fact that we're living in the era of Snapchat where consumers desire short bursts of visual content (Olmert). Publishers are realizing how the content on the Internet is changing. People are clicking and staying on a page for five seconds and there is little to no engagement.

The most interesting part about the content on the Internet is how the content is being shown because it’s not the content itself that people aren’t interested in. Today we check for new content every few minutes, spend more than 20 hours a week reading and sharing content on our smartphones and consume nearly 1.5 hours a day of online video (Olmert). I certainly wouldn’t say the Internet isn’t great but publishers should create content that is visual, shortened and centralized.

This video offers helpful information on how your content can engage consumers. 

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/technology-data/publishers-its-time-make-internet-great-again