Author’s note: This post is a slightly updated version of my Information Week article, published on November 18th, 2019. It has been updated to include new insights since its original publication.

There’s a funny, unspoken aspect about the phrase, rule of thumbs. Those so-called rules change over time.

One marketing rule of thumb — the right video length to engage customers — has been changing. Despite a two-minute rule of thumb that became a rule of thumb among marketers, companies are debating the optimal length to convey a message. …

2020 is proving to be the year in which marketers are recognizing their limits. Social media platforms are also recognizing limits, with the largest even establishing an actual limit.

Facebook is limiting the number of ads marketers can run or have under review from their business pages. The limit is meant to help the platform better serve the ads in the newsfeed. The limit also gives marketers improved budget deployment for their campaigns.

How Ad Limits Will Work on Facebook

The ad limit consists of tiers based upon the spending from each page. The highest spend amount in a month within a rolling 12 month period is weighed against the tier limits. …

It is wonderful to imagine an analyst hitting the ground running to bring his or her skills to bear on a key problem. The desire for such a person certainly exists, as demand for data analysts and managers have risen over the years. In 2018, LinkedIn reported that job shortages for data science skills intensified between July 2015 and July 2018. According to LinkedIn, any manager in Dallas or Atlanta would have had hiring options back in 2015, but in 2018 both cities ranked among the top 10 that had shortages for data science skills.

Yet the reality is that such a data miracle worker will likely work a few miracles, if at all. No one person will embody all the analytic and data science skills that a manager requests. Managers must be ready to seek candidates who have the right temperament to engage a range of skills, rather than narrow specific skills. Everyday data science and problems demand a breadth of skills. The right person needs to show a breadth of interest because learning and applying the desired skills require working with other professionals as much as it does a mastery of certain topics. …

There are a ton of articles that explain how to get started with content marketing, but what about what happens after a year or two of creating content? Or three? Or even if it has been ignored for longer? The thought alone can leave a small team unmotivated.

Every year marketers face the task of reviewing their content calendar and updating old content. This year looks more complex after a series of major disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic shutdown of retailers. …

So many professionals across the US have adopted WFH — work from home — as a response to the pandemic. But working remotely has opened the potential for the social media trend Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to take place in a business environment. IT teams can play a vital role to manage FOMO and keep organizations moving while adapting to this isolating way of working.

To get a handle on how this phenomenon occurs let’s look at how FOMO is defined and experienced. FOMO is an anxious feeling of being left out of other people’s lives. It occurs while viewing social media commentary and posts from other people. Studies and discussions have linked FOMO to a self-feeding pattern in social media usage. People want to connect to other people’s thoughts and feelings through Facebook post, TikTok videos, and Tweets. …

Despite the years since Twitter launched, there remains a considerable number of small business people that do not understand the purpose of Twitter.

Yet as of 2020 half of the world population uses social media for news, sharing thoughts, and announcing events, let alone Twitter. Your next campaign can go from mundane to terrific by reexamining your usage against new features and standard rules. The usage is likely in need of an update, especially since tweet character limits were increased to 280 characters back in 2017. That change heralded the end of Twitter’s iconic 140 character limit. …

A growing factor to monitor playbacks in YouTube is the watch time metric. Watch time represents the aggregate amount of time that people spend watching videos in your channel. It is available in YouTube Analytics. YouTube Analytics treat watch time as a primary metric among the standard metrics — impressions, click-through rate, views, and viewer watch time. Watch time influences the YouTube algorithm to optimize search results for videos that have increased their viewer watch time.

Watch time has a value to YouTubers in the same way as another advertising metric, dwell time, has for marketers and advertisers. Dwell time is the amount of time a customer remains in a venue, or in a specific area within a venue. The origins of dwell time comes from television’s golden age, but because YouTube videos can be seen on multiple channels, monitoring watch time is a meaningful proxy for dwell time. You can use it to audit how video content and its associated media is being consumed. …

URL. Three letters that are very important to businesses online. They are meant to give users a way of connecting to a business through a Website page, social media profile, Web app, or a digital medium.

Often businesses like to include a keyword into the URL. The purpose of the keyword is to draw a site to a higher position on a given search query and become more discoverable to people who are conducting the search. Because the people doing the search are potential customers, businesses consider this strategy a terrific way to attract customers at a low initial cost.

However, words have to be chosen carefully and weighed against how a business operates. Keywords for businesses often are the common products and services they are offering. …