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The rise of TikTok: why Facebook is worried about the booming social app

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Chinese-owned video platform is set to overtake the advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined

TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years, as trendsetting teens and young adults make it the hottest social app of the moment – and Facebook is worried.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform is forecast to catch up with YouTube by 2024 when both are predicted to take $23.6bn (£18.2bn) in ad revenue, despite TikTok being launched globally 12 years after its Google-owned rival.

Helped by unparalleled moments of cool at the height of the pandemic – Idaho labourer Nathan Apodaca skateboarding along to Dreams put Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours back in the top 10 more than four decades after its release – TikTok’s surging growth belies the metronomic pace of its name.

Last year, it overtook the global ad take of Snapchat, previously the digital hangout of choice for teens and twentysomethings, and by the end of this year it will have surpassed that of Twitter. This year it is predicted to triple worldwide ad revenues, to $11.6bn, more than the $10.44bn for Snapchat and Twitter combined.

“TikTok’s user base has exploded in the past couple of years, and the amount of time users spend on the app is extraordinary,” says Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, which compiled the ad spend forecast. “It has moved well beyond its roots as a lip-syncing and dancing app. It creates trends and fosters deep connections with creators that keep users engaged, video after video.”

TikTok landed its billionth user in 2021, four years after global launch, half the time it took Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, and three years faster than WhatsApp. Earlier this week, analysts at data.ai revised a prediction that TikTok would hit 1.5 billion monthly active users this year, after its analysis revealed it had surpassed that milestone by 100 million users within the first three months.

The company is winning the battle for the “sweet spot” of social media users, those in the 18- to 25-year-old demographic where Facebook is seeing its biggest declines, with parent company Meta trying to stem the exodus by attracting them to stablemate Instagram.

TikTok is also becoming increasingly addictive. Despite the platform supposedly being restricted to those aged 13 and over, about 16% of three- and four-year-olds view TikTok content, according to research commissioned by media regulator Ofcom. This rose to 29% of all children in the five- to seven-year-old age group.

Last year the typical TikTok user spent 19.6 hours on average per month on the app, according to data.ai – equalling Facebook, the global leader in time spent by users on social media. For TikTok, this represents an almost fivefold increase in just four years, up from 4.2 hours in 2018.

“Facebook has always been the biggest competitor in this space for dominating users,” says Sam O’Brien, the chief marketing officer at performance marketing company Affise. “But it seems it can’t quite tap into convincing TikTok’s loyal users to revert back to its platform. TikTok has figured out its own way to give the platform an addictive quality.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta still dominates the market – Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users, and Instagram another 2 billion, with Insider Intelligence putting their 2024 ad revenues at $85bn and $82bn respectively. Even so, it emerged last month that fear of TikTok had led it to hire a lobbying firm to paint the company as the “real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app”.

“Meta clearly sees itself in a battle against TikTok for the hearts, minds and attention spans of millennials, a significant chunk of the social media market,” says O’Brien. “TikTok has experienced a staggering growth of users since the onset of the global pandemic, taking over a huge chunk of its competitor’s audience.”

Meta’s tactics aim to exploit the suspicion promoted under the Trump administration that Chinese companies, from telecoms giant Huawei to TikTok’s parent ByteDance, pose a national security threat as potential conduits of personal data to Beijing.

Two years ago, India, one of the world’s biggest markets for social media usage, banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok. However, Trump’s plans to force ByteDance to sell its international operations to a US firm, such as Microsoft or Oracle, petered out after he lost the US presidential election.

Nevertheless, suspicions remain among many users including those in the UK, which has banned Huawei equipment from being used in mobile phone networks. Last year, research found that almost a third of all Britons were concerned that TikTok might share their personal data with the Chinese government. Among those aged 18 to 34, a third believed it would hand over their data on request from China.

ByteDance has also come under pressure at home as Beijing has looked to rein in the power of the country’s tech titans. Billionaire co-founder Zhang Yiming unexpectedly announced in May that he would step down as chief executive, and in November relinquished the role of chairman, as ByteDance underwent a major restructure breaking it into six business units.

Nevertheless, the company remains in rude health and last December was named the world’s largest unicorn with a valuation of $353bn – up from $80bn a year earlier – with the markets hopeful of a blockbuster initial public offering in the future. ByteDance saw its total revenues, including its Chinese operation and substantial in-app and ecommerce business, grow by 70% last year to about $58bn, up from $34.3bn in 2020.

While Meta remains a much larger business and revenues rose 37% last year, to $118bn, Zuckerberg has felt the need to launch a commercial counterattack to shore up and diversify his advertising-based business model.

Always quick to ape the successful innovations of rivals, Meta is exploring launching virtual coins, nicknamed “Zuck bucks” by staff, for users of Facebook and Instagram to buy and use, in a very similar strategy to that already employed highly successfully by TikTok.

Earlier this week it emerged that TikTok is now the most lucrative app in the world for in-app purchases. TikTok users spent $840m on its virtual “coins” currency, which can be used to “tip” creators and promote videos, in the first quarter – up 40% year on year.

“It’s the biggest quarter for any app or game ever,” says Lexi Sydow, head of insights at data.ai, which published the report. “It’s the first app ever to beat a game in consumer spend in a given quarter.”

Zuckerberg’s revenue diversification plans follow an ill-fated launch of direct TikTok copycat Lasso in 2018, which shut after just 18 months. Meta is persevering with rival short-form video product Reels, which launched on Instagram in 2020 and Facebook last year, but despite its efforts TikTok’s momentum shows no signs of slowing down.

“Some young people have switched off Facebook entirely,” says Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders. “In the UK, 18-to-24s spend as much on TikTok as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp combined. There is rampant competition for time. TikTok is the one growing fastest right now, and has scale, it’s the one to watch.”

Feature Image Credit: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

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Sourced from The Guardian

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People Who Have a Good Work Ethic do These 7 Things Regularly

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By Anouare Abdou

Having a good work ethic is likely something you strive for. It’s also what you look for while hiring. But what exactly does a strong work ethic entail? Ideally, everyone should do their job well, so it’s a fair question to ask.

“Work ethic is more than showing up on time. Showing up on time is part of the job,” says Kristin Heller of HR Creative Consulting. According to her, most of the principles and habits that make up a good work ethic are timeless, and work ethic is a spectrum. “Work ethic is like performance – you will have employees on every level of the work ethic scale.”

But the pandemic has also affected how we perceive that term. “Before the pandemic, my clients were much more focused on visibility and climbing the rungs of the ladder to get promoted,” says Lauren LeMunyan, founder of The Spitfire Coach, a leadership development organization. “Now I see my clients looking to make the most impact and preserve their time outside of their roles and working time so that they can bring their best selves into the workday.”

Wondering what that looks like in practice? Here are seven things that people who have a good work ethic do regularly, according to Heller and LeMunyan.

1. They show that you can count on them

Reliability is a pillar of a good work ethic. “A good work ethic in 2022 is about doing what you say you will do, not in a people-pleasing way, but with a discernment that can evaluate priorities, impact, resources, and capacity,” says LeMunyan.

Heller says that weak work ethic employees tend to be “repeat offenders of unplanned time away from work,” which does the opposite of demonstrating that you’re reliable. On the other hand, people with a strong work ethic let others know in advance when they are coming in late, leaving early or out of the office.

2. They take initiative

They also take initiative. “Those employees see what needs to be done and do it. Once an employee fully understands their role, they do not need to be told every little move but rather take initiative to move forward and oftentimes help lead others in moving forward as well,” adds Heller.

3. They make their time count

Additionally, professionals who have a good work ethic understand the value of time, and they make their time count.

“My clients ask themselves, ‘What would be possible with the time I have available today and who do I need to communicate with to bring more ease into my day?’” says LeMunyan. She adds that those professionals know when to say no or “not right now” to things that are not important and urgent, and tend to focus on tasks where they can be in their zone of genius.

4. They seek to grow and learn

A desire to grow is a key indicator that someone values doing a good job too. Heller says that people who want to constantly learn and grow more, whether it be in their role or in their eagerness to take on new challenges, tend to have a great work ethic. “They want to grow and learn and it is up to leaders to allow it to happen.”

5. They love to make an impact

According to her, those are the same people who tend to jump on the opportunity to support others and make an impact because they want to bring value to their team: “They share their knowledge with others by teaching and training willingly because they want others and the business to be better.”

6. They are intentional about meetings

Being intentional about meetings is a more underrated habit of professionals who shine on the work ethic front, but it’s a particularly relevant one in the age of back-to-back Zoom calls and meeting-heavy work cultures.

For example, LeMunyan says that having a good work ethic can look like “adding time buffers in between meetings for at least 10 minutes to allow for bio breaks, action item planning, and follow-up items.” Or ending meetings earlier than scheduled: “These professionals value time and freely give it back to people so that they can get ahead of the day.”

7. They have a positive mindset

Finally, people with an amazing work ethic know that every organization has challenges. They don’t wear rose-coloured glasses and are not afraid to be honest about what is not working, but they do focus on bringing solutions rather than complaining.

They are “employees that bring issues and questions forward but do not complain about every little imperfection in business,” explains Heller. “They understand that to get better, leaders must be aware, but they also understand that no business is perfect.”

Most of all, they maintain positive energy and attitude while embracing all the habits above.

By Anouare Abdou

Sourced from Hive

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Turning point for artificial intelligence: Will the large cloud providers dominate?

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Could the tech giants take control of the AI narrative and reduce choices for enterprises? Experts weighed the pros and cons in a recent online conference.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning requires huge amounts of processing capacity and data storage, making the cloud the preferred option. That raises the specter of a few cloud giants dominating AI applications and platforms. Could the tech giants take control of the AI narrative and reduce choices for enterprises?

Not necessarily, but with some caveats, AI experts emphasize. But the large cloud providers are definitely in a position to control the AI narrative from several perspectives.

That’s part of the consensus raised at a recent webcast hosted by New York University Center for the Future of Management and LMU institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization, joined by Daron Acemoglu, professor at MIT; Jacques Bughin, professor at the Solvay School of Economics and Management; and Raffaella Sadun, professor at Harvard Business School.

There’s more to AI than cloud. The complexity and diversity of AI applications go well beyond the cloud environments where they are run — and therefore reduce the dominance of a few cloud giants.

Certainly, “AI will require more capacity in storage, of the information flow,” says Bughin. At the same time, “cloud is only one part of the total pie of the platform. It’s part of infrastructure, but the platform layer is what you develop in house and through a third party. This integration is going to be hybrid, even more important than the cloud itself. Let’s be very clear, it’s not about operation, it’s a lot of algorithms, it’s a lot of different data, that integration piece, that will require system integration, architecture and design. That means that different types of firms will be involved in that work.”

What Bughin worries about more is the innovation potential from AI startups that may be squashed by larger players gobbling up smaller companies and startups through mergers and acquisitions. “Companies like the big internet or AI guys are going and buying a lot of very small and very clever AI firms.”

At the same time, Sadun points out that smaller companies may be in a better position to leverage AI innovations — but need help with training and education to prepare them. “This issue of who benefits from AI is really important,” she says. “On the one hand, we might think the smaller firms may be able to use these technologies more effectively, because they are more nimble, more agile. Companies that have already digital can exploit and scale AI.”

Where the large cloud providers may also make their dominance felt is in the monopolization of the data that feeds AI systems, says Acemoglu. Cloud architecture itself can be based on price-sensitive and competitive cloud services, he explains. “But the cloud architecture will not enable you to exploit data. The area, where I worry about the future of AI technologies are those that enable firms to monopolize data. That’s where firms have an oversized effect on the future direction of technology. That means a few people in a boardroom are going to determine where a technology’s going to go. We want more people focused and people-centric AI. That’s not going to be possible if a few firms that have a different business model dominate the future of technology. ”

The value of an AI-driven enterprise “does not reside in the cloud that enables it,” Bughin believes. “I think there’s enough of competition for the price point not to destroy the value. The value will come from the fact that you have integrated these technologies where you work, and the way your company works, in your own back end. The back end is not going to be the battlefield. The value is from generating productivity and revenue, at a rate faster than what we’ve seen in traditional digital transformations.”

And, for the first time, we see the terms traditional and digital transformation used together in the same sentence. As these thought leaders relate, such transformations are moving to the next phase, enabling autonomous, software-driven operations and innovation through AI. It’s a question of whether large tech vendors control the momentum, or if it remains a market and practice with a diversity of choices. Stay tuned.

Feature Image Credit: Joe McKendrick

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Sourced from ZDNet

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How To Start An Online Boutique In 2022

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By Kathy Haan,  Kelly Main

Retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. will reach $1.06 trillion in 2022. With more people buying online than ever, starting a boutique is a great side hustle idea; the average income for e-commerce boutique owners is $6,013 per month. Getting started is easy, but it takes time to have all the pieces in place for a successful online boutique. We’ll even show you how to start an online boutique on a budget.

Step 1. Decide on a Niche

A niche is a specific type of product you focus on. When starting an online boutique, it’s important to choose a niche so you can stand out in the enormous sea of e-commerce businesses. Do some research and figure out what type of products you want to sell. Consider your interests, what’s popular in the market and which gap you can fill.

Some niche ideas include:

  • Cashmere clothing and gifts
  • Vintage-style costume jewellery
  • Children’s wall art
  • Plants and gardening tools
  • High-end stationery
  • Ship and boat model kits
  • Custom-fitted shapewear

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when deciding on a niche is chasing saturated markets. The niche you choose needs a captive audience, but yours must have an edge to compete in a dominant category. How will your products differentiate from the hoard of the same products sold by other boutiques?

Before choosing a name, it’s best to check to see if the domain is available to purchase. You can do this using a site such as GoDaddy. Otherwise, you can check its availability but wait to purchase the name in step five through your e-commerce platform.

The name you choose must be easy to spell, memorable and catchy. While you can choose a domain name ending in something other than .com, it’s easier for customers to remember your site when using .com instead of .biz or .info.

Step 2. Set Up Your Legal Entity

Setting up your legal entity will determine how you’re taxed and what liability you have as the owner of the online boutique. The most common legal entities for small businesses are sole proprietorships and limited liability companies (LLCs).

Sole Proprietorship: As the name suggests, this is a business owned by a single person. There’s no paperwork required to set up a sole proprietorship, but you will need to register your business with the state and get a tax ID. This is the simplest way to set up a business, but you’re personally liable for any debts the business accumulates.

LLC: An LLC offers some liability protection for the owner, and it’s easier to get bank loans and other funding as an LLC than as a sole proprietorship. To set up an LLC, you’ll need to file Articles of Organization with your state and get an employer identification number (EIN) from the IRS. Most states offer this ability 100% online with little to no wait time to incorporate. You can also use an online business filing company, such as BetterLegal or Inc Authority, to do the filing for you.

Step 3. Make a Business Plan

Many small business owners skip the step of creating a business plan. While not required, it’s a good idea to have one in place to track your progress, determine the feasibility of your boutique, understand both your customer and competition, pivot and secure financing.

Your business plan can include sections such as:

  • Executive Summary
  • Business Description
  • Products and Services
  • Market Analysis
  • Target Market
  • Marketing Plan
  • Financial Plan
  • Business Structure and Ownership
  • Legal Requirements
  • Operations and Management

You can find templates for your business plan by visiting the U.S. Small Business Administration site. Not only can you access help online, but the SBA also has Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) to assist you on your entrepreneurial journey. These networks provide advice, mentoring, workshops and small business grant opportunities.

Step 4. Source Suppliers and/or Materials

Finding reliable product suppliers for a price you can afford is half the battle of running an online boutique. Find a supplier or wholesaler who offers quality products, on-time delivery and excellent customer service.

To find suppliers, search for terms such as “wholesale” or “product supplier” and include the type of product you’re looking for in your search, such as “clothing supplier.” You can also check out trade shows in your industry to meet with suppliers and get product ideas.

Sources for products include:

  • Alibaba
  • DHgate
  • Mable
  • Oberlo
  • Tundra
  • Abound
  • Boutsy
  • Handshake
  • Etsy Wholesale
  • Faire
  • Bulletin
  • IndieMe
  • RangeMe
  • LA Showroom
  • FashionGo
  • Stockable
DHgate.com home page

DHgate can be a great source of wholesale goods for your boutique.

Step 5. Create an Online Store

To establish your store, you first need an e-commerce platform. You can either use a hosted platform, which is a turnkey solution that includes everything you need to launch and maintain your store, or an open source platform, which requires a bit more technical know-how to set up and maintain. Open source platforms provide far more customization options than what you’d find with a hosted platform.

The platform you choose will determine the features and functionality of your store, so it’s important to choose one that offers the features you need to run your business. Read our e-commerce platform guide for recommendations.

For ease, we’ll show you how to set up a Shopify boutique. It offers a free 14-day trial.

  • Go to Shopify.com and create an account
  • Install product apps (e.g., print-on-demand apps)
  • Select a theme and customize it with your branding
  • Add products
  • Add, delete and customize web pages
  • Organize your menu
  • Set up a custom domain name
  • Set up shipping
  • Create a test order
  • Choose a plan and publish

Please note that while it’s free to create an online boutique with Shopify’s free 14-day trial, you will need a plan in order for your site to be professional with its own custom domain name and ad-free hosting. This is the case for every quality ecommerce site builder, including Weebly, Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.

Step 6. Market Your Online Boutique

Now that you have your online store up and running, it’s time to start marketing it. There are a number of ways to market an online store, and the best approach depends on your budget, target market and goals.

Common marketing strategies for online stores include:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.)
  • Social media marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Affiliate programs
  • Influencer marketing
  • Loyalty programs (create buzz through existing clients)
  • Trade shows
  • Press coverage

 

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Kathy Haan,  Kelly Main

Sourced from Forbes Advisor

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How to Make Passive Income in the Creator Economy

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Sourced from Entrepreneur

Alfonso Cobo, founder of Unfold, outlines trends and opportunities for digital creators.

Who are you and what is your business?

I am Alfonso Cobo, founder of Unfold, a social storytelling app that lets you create photo templates and bio sites for selling anything.

What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in the creator economy?

The biggest trend we’re seeing is creators diversifying their income streams — users who sell products are starting to explore content, content creators are selling physical goods, and creators are dipping their toes into Web3. There’s an emphasis on becoming less reliant on any one platform, while also setting up passive income streams that bring in steady revenue so the creators have more space and stability to focus on their craft. Most influencers currently still rely on brand deals, and most are looking to diversify.

What are the top trends in social and digital selling?

Social commerce will soon exceed social advertising — it will quickly grow to be a huge chunk of global ecommerce. Universally, we’re seeing that brands and businesses who embrace social selling are seeing great returns and are also realizing that it’s an opportunity to build a stronger relationship directly with the consumer.

We’re creating and seeing smarter monetization tools, and the real key is that there are so many touchpoints and platforms, you want to remove friction points along the way. Bio Sites are a huge trend in social selling because they provide creators with a unified ecommerce link that they can share across their platforms and communities. And coming next, sellers are looking at Web3 as a way to drive new revenue channels, more transparent business models and higher engaged communities.

What are the biggest challenges that creators are facing?

Creators have to manage a presence on a bunch of different platforms because there is no central hub that aggregates all the tools and data that they need in one place. Each tool and platform in the market has its own niche and goes deep into a specific use case or vertical.

This also makes it challenging for creators to truly own and monetize their audiences in a way that is platform agnostic when they may have very different followings or content styles from Instagram to TikTok.

Smart creators understand that their audience is made up of different types of fans with different levels of passion and willingness to pay, but this requires high levels of focus, providing different levels of offerings like editions, 1/1s, and auction mechanisms to meet fans where they are and convert them from casual and active fans to super fans.

Unfold became a part of Squarespace in 2019. What insights do you have for entrepreneurs about integrating into a bigger ecosystem?

I asked myself three questions about becoming part of their ecosystem, and all of the answers were yes:

  1. Do you provide something with a similar goal but in a different lane? We found that what Squarespace provides for online, Unfold provides on social. So yes.

  2. Do your customers’ goals overlap? There is a lot of overlap within our customers’ goals, which is to start creating and monetizing their brands with the highest quality design alignment across all digital selling. So yes.

  3. Will we approach integration thoughtfully and patiently? We gave ourselves a few months to watch our products grow independently, which illuminated ways to build new releases that were completely complementary. Around that time, Squarespace’s mission was evolving to provide creators with everything to sell anything, and because we gave ourselves a discovery period our natural role presented itself – providing ways to monetize social in the broader ecosystem.

What’s next for you?

Monetization tools will continue to be a priority for us as we expand how our customers can set up and test new revenue streams. We’ll continue to release products that help creators to tell their stories in a consistently beautiful way across all social platforms – this consistency across platforms and channels will help build long-term customers. And creators want the ability to roll out multiple Bio Sites so that they can have flexibility to add more link-in-bios as they acquire new audiences. We want to empower creators to be successful in telling their story exactly the way they want to, and we’ll be focusing on new video content creation and monetization tools to help them do that.

Feature Image Credit: Unfold

Sourced from Entrepreneur

 

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Forcing WhatsApp and iMessage to Work Together Is Doomed to Fail

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By Matt Burgess

Europe’s Digital Markets Act requires interoperability between popular messaging apps. But experts warn encryption could be compromised.

The newest law designed to rein in Big Tech aims to make all your favorite messaging apps work seamlessly together. Sounds great, right? Well, we have some bad news.

Every day, billions of messages are sent using end-to-end encryption. Millions of people use iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal to chat with friends, family, and colleagues, and those conversations are all automatically protected by strong encryption. But it’s not possible to send a message from one encrypted app to another. If you use Signal and your friends only use WhatsApp, someone has to compromise.

Under the European Union’s wide-ranging Digital Markets Act (DMA), which European lawmakers approved last week and is expected to be implemented this year, the owners of messaging apps will be required to make them interoperable if another company requests that they do so. As a result, the largest messaging platforms—including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, which the DMA designates as gatekeepers—will have to open up to rivals.

“Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files, or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice,” the lawmakers said in an announcement. Under the plans, Signal could ask to work with Messenger, for instance. Or Meta could request that WhatsApp be made compatible with iMessage—a logistical challenge even if Meta and Apple weren’t actively feuding, but one EU lawmakers say is worth solving.

Proponents of interoperability say the law will give consumers more choice and will allow third-party clients to build out extra functions. And while MEP Andreas Schwab, the lead negotiator for the DMA, says that the politicians are not looking to weaken encryption, cryptography experts are concerned the proposals will not be technically possible without compromising end-to-end encryption, potentially putting those billions of messages we send each other every day at risk.

While end-to-end encryption has become seamless for people using messaging apps, no two apps implement encryption identically. WhatsApp uses a custom version of the Signal encryption protocol, for example, but users still can’t message each other across the apps. And while Apple’s iMessage is interoperable with SMS, these standard text messages aren’t encrypted.

Many cryptographers and security experts have already pointed out flaws in Europe’s plan. “Interoperable E2EE [end-to-end encryption] is somewhere between extraordinarily difficult and impossible,” Steve Bellovin, one of the world’s leading cryptographers and a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, tweeted on Friday.

“When you start talking about different companies exchanging encrypted communications with one another, there are many serious considerations here that are extremely difficult to resolve,” says Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer and founder of decentralized publishing platform Capsule Social. “It is very likely that there will be a serious degradation of the cryptographic techniques that will be necessary in order to accommodate this proposal,” Kobeissi says.

The proposals put forward as part of the DMA—which has yet to be fully published—don’t include technical details on how interoperability would work, but officials say the changes should be rolled out over a number of years. Basic features such as messages between two people should be implemented three months after a tech company is asked to provide them; audio and video calls have a four-year deadline.

“Making end-to-end encrypted messaging apps interoperable is technically challenging and creates real risks for privacy, safety, and innovation,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, said in a statement. “Changes of this complexity risk turning a competitive and innovative industry into SMS or email, which is not secure and full of spam,” he says. In an interview with tech journalist Casey Newton, Cathcart said the move could cause misinformation problems and moderation issues for WhatsApp. “I have a lot of concerns around whether this will break or severely undermine privacy, whether it’ll break a lot of the safety work we’ve done that we’re particularly proud of, and whether it’ll actually lead to more innovation and competitiveness,” he said.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment about encryption but said it has general concerns that parts of the DMA will create “unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities.” Signal did not respond to a request for comment.

Not everyone is against interoperability and end-to-end encryption. Matrix, a nonprofit that’s building an open source standard for encryption, has published multiple blog posts outlining how it believes the EU’s proposals could work. “The main challenge is the trade-off between interoperability and privacy for gatekeepers who provide end-to-end encryption,” the team behind Matrix say.

There are broadly two routes that could allow encryption to work across apps operated by different companies. The first involves tech companies allowing access to APIs that connect to their messaging services—this is the option Schwab and lawmakers are leaning toward. The second involves more radical change: All companies would have to adopt and implement one universal encryption standard.

Neither is easy.

Connecting to an open API could involve a company using a “bridge” that joins the two platforms together. Signal would, for instance, have to implement multiple bridges if it wanted to work with different apps. “Every device has to speak every language, but at least users have the building blocks to get at each other’s messages, rather than then being arbitrarily locked away by the gatekeepers,” Ian Brown, a visiting professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro, wrote for Interoperability News.

Using a bridge would involve decrypting messages, potentially on someone’s device, and then making them appear in the destination app. Removing the end-to-end encryption would open up a new layer that could be attacked by hackers or malicious actors. “How do you guarantee that the things sitting next to your messaging app are benevolent and not malicious,” says Robin Wilton, director of internet trust at the Internet Society. Kobeissi adds that it’s unclear under the proposals who would manage the exchange of public encryption keys and how cryptographic metadata would be shared between companies. If Signal and iMessage become interoperable, which one changes its encryption to match the other?

One of the biggest unanswered questions is how interoperability would ensure you are chatting with the people you think you are. People use different usernames on each platform, and not knowing who someone is could lead to identity issues, explains Alan Duric, cofounder of encrypted messaging app Wire. “If you’re communicating across Wire and WhatsApp, how can the Wire user be certain that the person they are talking to on WhatsApp is authentic?” he says. “How can they be sure the person they’re talking to is even using WhatsApp at all?” Duric says this can be combated by verifying each user’s identity, which can then help reduce abuse and spam.

Those in favour of interoperability say the best way to do this would be for all companies to adopt one encryption standard and stick to it. These standards already exist—for instance, the Matrix messaging protocol, the XMPP standard, and the upcoming Messaging Layer Security. “If every player in the field—so the gatekeepers but also the smaller player—all connect to the same standard, it ends up being a big glue between the different services,” says Amandine Le Pape, a cofounder of the Matrix standard. This would avoid companies implementing APIs via a piecemeal process, although this isn’t what the European Union has opted for at the moment. “The DMA is just the first step,” Le Pape says.

Getting all messaging apps to use one standard would be a significant, time-consuming challenge. “Potentially, you could just have a situation where everyone switches to Matrix,” Kobeissi says. “But Matrix is a fundamentally different security architecture, not just from an end-to-end encryption perspective, but also from a threat modelling perspective.” Each app faces different potential attacks against it—based on its user base and operations—so moving to one model would require companies to reassess how their users could be compromised.

Companies would have to rebuild their entire encryption systems and change multiple features in their apps, a process that could take years. Take Meta: In 2019, the company said it was going to make Instagram DMs and Messenger end-to-end encrypted by default and integrate their infrastructure with WhatsApp. Three years later, the company is still trying to untangle its systems and add safety features. The transition has been harder than expected—and Meta controls all of the technology involved.

Ultimately, how much companies change may come down to the technical realities and the degree of pressure the European Commission, which will enforce the DMA, puts on them. Like GDPR, the DMA could lead to multimillion-dollar fines for businesses that don’t comply. However, GDPR has been poorly enforced—including a provision that says people should be able to transport their data from one app to another. Tech companies may have no choice if the European Commission enforces the DMA—but that could be the least of their worries.

Feature Image Credit: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

By Matt Burgess

Sourced from WIRED

 

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If Your Workplace Isn’t Offering These 4 Things, They Need to Update Their Benefits

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By FairyGodBoss

According to a 2017 Glassdoor survey, 57% of job seekers say that benefits and perks “are among their top considerations” when accepting a job. In the midst of the Great Resignation that continues into 2022, benefits are still front of mind for job seekers — and even important for retaining employees who are thinking about jumping ship. Here are offerings all companies should have in 2022 if they’re looking to reengage and retain their employees.

1. Flexibility.

Newer generations have promoted the incorporation of flexible work options. It is clear that no two employees are able to work in the exact same fashion. When flexible positions are offered, a company can have a variety of employees that showcase unique skills. Companies that create a diverse workplace will notice the overwhelming benefits over time.

Many employers miss the opportunity to hire exceptional employees because of the lack of flexible positions. Just because an individual thrives better in a different scenario doesn’t mean they aren’t an asset to your company.

Managers and HR professionals should consider creating opportunities for a range of employee types. In order to develop flexible positions, brainstorm realistic options. For example, many thrive in remote positions because they can produce better work when in the comfort of their own home. Some people prefer going to work some days, and completing their tasks at home during other days.

It’s not just management’s view of flexibility that counts. They need to be proactive in asking their employees what they want.

“Once I considered the perspective of employees, I’ve become better at my job,” revealed Daniel Neal, HR manager at Assignment Service and RatedWriting.

2. Employee wellness benefits.

Neglecting the well-being of employees is not only unethical, but it is also a dangerous disadvantage. When employees are viewed as workers rather than humans, it creates an unhealthy workplace dynamic. In order to prevent this notion, it’s of your best interest to show authentic dedication prioritize employee wellbeing. By ensuring that employees have healthy well-being, not only will they perform better, but they will enjoy their jobs more.

There are several ways that employee wellness can be worked into a company. Recognition, health benefits, a genuine relationship among all workers, and less pressure are factors that lead to positive wellbeing.

3. New technology.

Old methods often produce outdated results. Due to new generations and changes in our world, outdated work methods don’t always suffice. New strategies are a solution to gaining company success in the modern world.

Let’s say your company fails to incorporate technology use. Our world now revolves heavily around technology in order to operate. When companies don’t utilize technology, they will struggle performance-wise. It’s no surprise that modern workers already have ample technology expertise. Allowing workers to use technology, especially for certain jobs, is a clever decision. Technology can be used to lessen work difficulty, efficiently advertise and build quick relationships with customers and clients.

4. Analytics and feedback.

Rather than assuming how employees can improve, management should provide real solutions based on the analytics of the company. Company analytics can be measured by the overall performance of each employee combined in all areas.

After data is collected, management can identify the problem areas. For example, maybe a majority of employees struggle to fill in information in a certain format. If so, the company can adapt the format in a way that all employees are able to easily complete that task.

With analytics comes employee appraisal. In order to both fairly, but also accurately appraise employees, managers need to give back quality constructive criticism. Some employers and HR professionals mistake harsh feedback as constructive criticism. The issue is the feedback is often blunt and doesn’t promote employee improvement. Modern employees prefer constant feedback rather than annual appraisals. In order to learn and improve, they need to know about how they can become better workers — in a constructive way.

Companies that aren’t aware of these trends risk not only falling behind in the job market but also losing valuable current employees. By offering flexibility, employee wellness benefits, new technology and regular feedback, they can reengage employees and stay competitive with other companies — all while making for a happier workforce.

This article first appeared on Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women dedicated to helping them achieve their career goals.

By FairyGodBoss

Sourced from Hive

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Farewell ZDNet: Data remains the lifeblood of innovation

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Looking back on the past six years, the headlines may have pivoted to cloud, AI, and the continuing saga of open source. But peer under the covers, and this shift in spotlight has not been away from data, but because of it.

t’s been a wild ride over the past six years as ZDNet gave us the opportunity to chronicle how, in the data world, bleeding edge has become the norm. In 2016, Big Data was still considered the thing of early adopters. Machine learning was confined to a relative handful of Global 2000 organizations, because they were the only ones who could afford to recruit teams from the limited pool of data scientists. The notion that combing through hundreds of terabytes or more of structured and variably structured data would become routine was a pipedream. When we began our part of Big on Data, Snowflake, which cracked open the door to the elastic cloud data warehouse that could also handle JSON, was barely a couple years post stealth.

In a short piece, it’s going to be impossible to compress all the highlights of the last few years, but we’ll make a valiant try.

The Industry Landscape: A Tale of Two Cities

When we began our stint at ZDNet, we’d already been tracking the data landscape for over 20 years. So at that point, it was all too fitting that our very first ZDNet post on July 6, 2016, looked at the journey of what became one of the decade’s biggest success stories. We posed the question, “What should MongoDB be when it grows up?” Yes, we spoke of the trials and tribulations of MongoDB, pursuing what cofounder and then-CTO Elliot Horowitz prophesized, that the document form of data was not only a more natural form of representing data, but would become the default go-to for enterprise systems.

MongoDB got past early performance hurdles with an extensible 2.0 storage engine that overcame a lot of the platform’s show-stoppers. Mongo also began grudging coexistence with features like the BI Connector that allowed it to work with the Tableaus of the world. Yet today, even with relational database veteran Mark Porter taking the tech lead helm, they are still drinking the same Kool Aid that document is becoming the ultimate end state for core enterprise databases.

We might not agree with Porter, but Mongo’s journey revealed a couple core themes that drove the most successful growth companies. First, don’t be afraid to ditch the 1.0 technology before your installed base gets entrenched, but try keeping API compatibility to ease the transition. Secondly, build a great cloud experience. Today, MongoDB is a public company that is on track to exceed $1 billion in revenues (not valuation), with more than half of its business coming from the cloud.

We’ve also seen other hot start-ups not handle the 2.0 transition as smoothly. InfluxDB, a time series database, was a developer favourite, just like Mongo. But Influx Data, the company, frittered away early momentum because it got to a point where its engineers couldn’t say “No.” Like Mongo, they also embraced a second generation architecture. Actually, they embraced several of them. Are you starting to see a disconnect here? Unlike MongoDB, InfluxDB’s NextGen storage engine and development environments were not compatible with the 1.0 installed base, and surprise, surprise, a lot of customers didn’t bother with the transition. While MongoDB is now a billion dollar public company, Influx Data has barely drawn $120 million in funding to date, and for a company of its modest size, is saddled with a product portfolio that grew far too complex.

It’s no longer Big Data

It shouldn’t be surprising that the early days of this column were driven by Big Data, a term that we used to capitalize because it required unique skills and platforms that weren’t terribly easy to set up and use. The emphasis has shifted to “data” thanks, not only to the equivalent of Moore’s Law for networking and storage, but more importantly, because of the operational simplicity and elasticity of the cloud. Start with volume: You can analyse pretty large multi-terabyte data sets on Snowflake. And in the cloud, there are now many paths to analysing the rest of The Three V’s of big data; Hadoop is no longer the sole path and is now considered a legacy platform. Today, Spark, data lakehouses, federated query, and ad hoc query to data lakes (a.k.a., cloud storage) can readily handle all the V’s. But as we stated last year, Hadoop’s legacy is not that of historical footnote, but instead a spark (pun intended) that accelerated a virtuous wave of innovation that got enterprises over their fear of data, and lots of it.

Over the past few years, the headlines have pivoted to cloud, AI, and of course, the continuing saga of open source. But peer under the covers, and this shift in spotlight was not away from data, but because of it. Cloud provided economical storage in many forms; AI requires good data and lots of it, and a large chunk of open source activity has been in databases, integration, and processing frameworks. It’s still there, but we can hardly take it for granted.

Hybrid cloud is the next frontier for enterprise data

The operational simplicity and the scale of the cloud control plane rendered the idea of marshalling your own clusters and taming the zoo animals obsolete. Five years ago, we forecast that the majority of new big data workloads would be in the cloud by 2019; in retrospect, our prediction proved too conservative. A couple years ago, we forecast the emergence of what we termed The Hybrid Default, pointing to legacy enterprise applications as the last frontier for cloud deployment, and that the vast majority of it would stay on-premises.

That’s prompted a wave of hybrid cloud platform introductions, and newer options from AWS, Oracle and others to accommodate the needs of legacy workloads that otherwise don’t translate easily to the cloud. For many of those hybrid platforms, data was often the very first service to get bundled in. And we’re also now seeing cloud database as a service (DBaaS) providers introduce new custom options to capture many of those same legacy workloads where customers require more access and control over operating system, database configurations, and update cycles compared to existing vanilla DBaaS options. Those legacy applications, with all their customization and data gravity, are the last frontier for cloud adoption, and most of it will be hybrid.

The cloud has to become easier

The data cloud may be a victim of its own success if we don’t make using it any easier. It was a core point in our parting shot in this year’s outlook. Organizations that are adopting cloud database services are likely also consuming related analytic and AI services, and in many cases, may be utilizing multiple cloud database platforms. In a managed DBaaS or SaaS service, the cloud provider may handle the housekeeping, but for the most part, the burden is on the customer’s shoulders to integrate use of the different services. More than a debate between specialized vs. multimodel or converged databases, it’s also the need to either bundle related data, integration, analytics, and ML tools end-to-end, or to at least make these services more plug and play. In our Data 2022 outlook, we called on cloud providers to start “making the cloud easier” by relieving the customer of some of this integration work.

One place to start? Unify operational analytics and streaming. We’re starting to see it Azure Synapse bundling in data pipelines and Spark processing; SAP Data Warehouse Cloud incorporating data visualization; while AWS, Google, and Teradata bring in machine learning (ML) inference workloads inside the database. But folks, this is all just a start.

And what about AI?

While our prime focus in this space has been on data, it is virtually impossible to separate the consumption and management of data from AI, and more specifically, machine learning (ML). It’s several things: using ML to help run databases; using data as the oxygen for training and running ML models; and increasingly, being able to process those models inside the database.

And in many ways, the growing accessibility of ML, especially through AutoML tools that automate or simplify putting the pieces of a model together or the embedding of ML into analytics is reminiscent of the disruption that Tableau brought to the analytics space, making self-service visualization table stakes. But ML will only be as strong as its weakest data link, a point that was emphasized to us when we in-depth surveyed a baker’s dozen of chief data and analytics officers a few years back. No matter how much self-service technology you have, it turns out that in many organizations, data engineers will remain a more precious resource than data scientists.

Open source remains the lifeblood of databases

Just as AI/ML has been a key tentpole in the data landscape, open source has enabled this Cambrian explosion of data platforms that, depending on your perspective, is blessing or curse. We’ve seen a lot of cool modest open source projects that could, from Kafka to Flink, Arrow, Grafana, and GraphQL take off from practically nowhere.

We’ve also seen petty family squabbles. When we began this column, the Hadoop open source community saw lots of competing overlapping projects. The Presto folks didn’t learn Hadoop’s lesson. The folks at Facebook who threw hissy fits when the lead developers of Presto, which originated there, left to form their own company. The result was stupid branding wars that resulted in Pyric victory: the Facebook folks who had little to do with Presto kept the trademark, but not the key contributors. The result fractured the community, knee-capping their own spinoff. Meanwhile, the top five contributors joined Starburst, the company that was exiled from the community, whose valuation has grown to 3.35 billion.

One of our earliest columns back in 2016 posed the question on whether open source software has become the default enterprise software business model. Those were innocent days; in the next few years, shots started firing over licensing. The trigger was concern that cloud providers were, as MariaDB CEO Michael Howard put it, strip mining open source (Howard was referring to AWS). We subsequently ventured the question of whether open core could be the salve for open source’s growing pains. In spite of all the catcalls, open core is very much alive in what players like Redis and Apollo GraphQL are doing.

MongoDB fired the first shot with SSPL, followed by Confluent, CockroachDB, Elastic, MariaDB, Redis and others. Our take is that these players had valid points, but we grew concerned about the sheer variation of quasi open source licenses du jour that kept popping up.

Open source to this day remains a topic that gets many folks, on both sides of the argument, very defensive. The piece that drew the most flame tweets was our  2018 post on DataStax attempting to reconcile with the Apache Cassandra community, and it’s notable today that the company is bending over backwards not to throw its weight around in the community.

So it’s not surprising that over the past six years, one of our most popular posts posed the question, Are Open Source Databases Dead? Our conclusion from the whole experience is that open source has been an incredible incubator of innovation – just ask anybody in the PostgreSQL community. It’s also one where no single open source strategy will ever be able to satisfy all of the people all of the time. But maybe this is all academic. Regardless of whether the database provider has a permissive or restrictive open source license, in this era where DBaaS is becoming the preferred mode for new database deployments, it’s the cloud experience that counts. And that experience is not something you can license.

Don’t forget data management

As we’ve noted, looking ahead is the great reckoning on how to deal with all of the data that is landing in our data lakes, or being generated by all sorts of polyglot sources, inside and outside the firewall. The connectivity promised by 5G promises to bring the edge closer than ever. It’s in large part fueled the emerging debate over data meshes, data lakehouses, and data fabrics. It’s a discussion that will consume much of the oxygen this year.

It’s been a great run at ZDNet but it’s time to move on. Big on Data is moving. Big on Data bro Andrew Brust and myself are moving our coverage under a new banner, The Data Pipeline, and we hope you’ll join us for the next chapter of the journey.

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Sourced from ZD Net

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The Ultimate SEO Website Migration Checklist

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By Clay Kramer

Website migration is more than just an update. It’s a process of substantial change in your website’s structure or tech stack. Migrating your site can be time-consuming, expensive, and risky. But sometimes, it’s either the best or the only option.

Migrations usually take place when:

  • You change your company’s name, so you have to move to a new domain
  • You begin implementing the HTTPS protocol, making your site more secure
  • You move to a new content management system (CMS), such as WordPress
  • You do a major website redesign
  • You change your site’s structure, to optimize for conversions or navigability

Nevertheless, if it’s not done properly, a website migration can have negative effects on your SEO. As a result, your ranking, traffic, and authority could drastically decrease.

What can you do to prevent SEO pitfalls? In this post, we’ll share 14 website migration best practices that will help you restructure or move your site without undermining your SEO efforts.

Let’s dive in.

Before you get started

To ensure a smooth transition, thorough planning and testing are key. This is why, before taking a look at SEO, we’d like to share some premises to get your website migration right.

Let Your Audience Know

Notify your users that your website will be moving. Migration is a challenging process. Therefore, there are chances of having some setbacks from time to time. Transparency is key and every large company does this. Tell your audience beforehand, so they can know what to expect, and plan accordingly.

Don’t Do It All at Once

A step-by-step approach makes changes easier to manage. Migrating the entire site in one morning might not be the best approach. Start by creating a staging site, and build your new website there. Once everything works smoothly, you can proceed to push the changes to your domain. This is especially useful if you are running multiple types of migration (e.g: URL, HTTPS, and CMS).

Do It When Traffic Is Low


Understanding your audience goes a long way. And, when it comes to migration, knowing when your traffic is low can be helpful. If you make major changes when just a handful of users are online, any hiccups will have a relatively small impact. Moreover, thanks to the lighter server load, your new site will be crawled and indexed more quickly.

Be Ready For Setbacks

Although website migration comes with great benefits, as aforementioned, it is quite challenging. Plan, test, and make the most out of your staging site. Don’t get discouraged if something turns out wrong, it’s part of the process.

Next, we’ll share a couple of tips that will help you minimize the chance of things going south.

SEO migration and why it matters

Search engines find your site, crawl it, and rank it over time. Google decides how to crawl and rank your site depending on certain data sources you provide. For example, your sitemaps or your site’s interlinking. When you modify your website, you modify that information as well. Consequently, applying an SEO migration strategy is crucial to not lose the visibility that took you so long to build.

Additionally, a poorly handled migration can turn your most linked-to pages into 404s. These changes would have an impact both on both SEO and UX.

With an SEO-focused strategy, you make sure you’re not losing visibility in the process of migrating your website.

How Long Does It Take?

On average, SEO migration takes approximately 3 months. However, the amount of time required for SEO migration will depend on how big your website is.

If your site has over 100 pages, it’s going to take way less than if your site has 3,000 pages. The duration of your SEO migration will depend on the amount of content you’re moving, along with any audits that may be necessary. Be patient and have all your resources ready.

Website migration checklist

The most effective way to migrate your website and protect your SEO efforts is to plan ahead.  There are a couple of the steps you should follow to get it right:

  1. Audit your existing site
  2. Create a backup
  3. Set up a staging site
  4. Run a health check on your new domain
  5. Crawl your site
  6. Create a map of 301 redirects
  7. Update all your links
  8. Set up a custom 404 page
  9. Set up an XML sitemap
  10. Test on mobile
  11. Set up your schemas
  12. Update your robots.txt
  13. Keep control of your old domain
  14. Do a post-launch performance check

1. Audit your Existing Site

Before starting your migration, it’s important to conduct an SEO audit on your existing site. That way, you’ll understand which problems your current site has, and you will be able to fix them during your migration. Make sure you review:

  • Duplicate content
  • Content relevance
  • Broken links
  • Page structures
  • Mobile performance
  • Missing or duplicate meta tags

2. Have a Backup

It’s a good idea to back up your site before you start working on it. With a proper backup, you’ll be able to revert any site-breaking mistakes you may make.

3. Work with a Staging Site

A staging site is a private website that serves as a testing ground for new updates. We recommend you always work with a staging website. It’s extremely useful to test any new changes without affecting your live site. And, with the right SEO tools, you can even do SEO testing on staging.

4. Do a  Health Check on your New Domain

If you’re moving to a new domain, you should check its organic health first. In other words, you should screen for past or current problems in the domain, so you can have a clear idea of what you might face in the future. These problems could be:

  • Past penalizations for spammy content or backlinks
  • Irrelevant or spammy current backlinks pointing to your website

By checking the metrics and the history of the new domain you can know what it used to contain (e.g: games, adult content, literature, etcetera), what Google relates it to, and see if it’s beneficial for your business or not.

5. Crawl Your Site

Crawl your site and create a URL and content inventory. With it, you’ll be able to:

  • Get a general look at your URLs
  • Detect problems and correct them on your staging website
  • Set 301 redirects and map old URLs to new URLs
  • Detect outdated internal links and update them to reflect the new URL structure
  • Set optimization priorities

Tools like ScreamingFrog and Moz are great for this task.

6. Set Permanent Redirects

Once you have listed all your URLs, you’ll notice which ones are working as intended and which ones aren’t. It’s time to fix that.

Every URL in your new website must take users somewhere. But it can be hard to ensure that after you’ve changed your URL structure.

That’s what 301 Redirect maps are helpful for. By using a 301 Redirect map you can redirect all your problematic URLs to new and better pages.

How you’ll set 301 redirects will depend on your CMS and your preferences. But, in most cases, it’s as simple as opening your .htaccess file (which you’ll find at the root of your domain), and adding this line:

Redirect 301 /old-page.html  http://newsite.com/new-page/

Remember to replace “/old-page.html” and “http://newsite.com/new-page/” with your old and new URLs respectively. Do this for every new redirect.

For each of your missing pages, you need to find a destination on your new site. We urge you to be attentive and careful when setting up redirects. We recommend that you use Google Search Console to handle both redirects and the indexing of your new pages. You can manually submit your URLs into Search Console and ask Google to crawl them.

7. Protect your Links

Once you’ve updated your new URLs and know how they’ll be, it’s time to update internal links. Thus, you can prevent broken links or internal redirects. ScreamingFrog is useful for this.

The same applies to backlinks in other websites directing to your website. You can get a look at your backlinks with a tool such as Majestic, MozLink Explorer, or Ahrefs. If the URLs those sites are linking have been redirected, you shouldn’t need to contact them. But, if the content in question has been removed and you don’t want to set up a redirect, you can:

  • Create a new piece of content under that URL
  • Leave it as is (which makes you vulnerable to broken link building strategies)
  • Contact the editors of the sites that link to yours, and ask them to replace the link

8. Have a custom 404 page

Despite all your efforts, there might still be some broken links left on your site, after you launch. This is why it’s essential to have a custom 404 page to redirect users to navigate through your site. Otherwise, they will encounter a blank page and will likely leave.

Make sure your 404 is optimized to take users back to your website’s home. You can also lead them to pages that may be relevant for them. For instance, you can list your most visited pages on your 404.

9. XML Sitemap

Create a new XML sitemap and upload it to your Google Search Console. Thus, it will be easier for search engine bots to understand your website’s structure.

Most sites have two types of sitemaps:

  • An XML sitemap, made for bots
  • An HTML sitemap, made for humans

The HTML sitemap is usually found on the site’s footer. The XML sitemap, on the other hand, is accessible by adding /sitemap.xml to a website’s root domain. For instance, https://jeffbullas.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure both of these sitemaps reflect the new changes on your site. Depending on your CMS, you may be able to automatically create and update your sitemaps with a plugin.

10. Responsivity Matters

Before indexing your site, Google will evaluate your mobile experience. Consequently, building your new website with mobile UI in mind is vital.

Google has also shown a preference for sites that use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). So, consider the possibility of delivering your content to mobile users in this format.

11. Mind About Schema

Schema is a set of data vocabulary that helps search engines understand your content. While implementing it doesn’t directly translate into better rankings, it can help you get rich snippets and lead to more clicks.

If you don’t use it yet, give it a go. And if you already do, don’t forget to consider it for your migration.

12. Update Robots.txt

You can use robots.txt files to offer suggestions to search engine robots about how they should crawl your site. Your robots.txt should always include:

  • Files and directories that search engine robots aren’t allowed to crawl
  • Your sitemap’s URL

Create a robots.txt for your new website, and update it on Google Search Console. That way, you can prevent Google from crawling sensitive directories. For instance, if you’re migrating to WordPress, you may want to disallow robots on the /wp-admin/ directory. In that case, you’d include the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

13. Don’t Let Your Old Domain Expire

If you let your old domain expire, someone else may buy it and take advantage of your backlinks. On the other hand, by staying in control of your domain, you can:

  • Maintain control of your online reputation
  • Make sure all backlinks are properly redirected

14. Post- Launch: Check Performance

Once your new website is live, you’ll have to check if it meets your performance standards.

Chances are that, after a change (however large), your position in the SERPs won’t be instantly affected. A couple of weeks after your new website has gone live, conduct an audit and check:

  • Engagement metrics
  • Speed across different devices and browsers
  • Average SERP positioning
  • Organic traffic
  • Backlinks

SEO isn’t a one-off project. It’s a consistent effort. And, the longer you invest in SEO, the better the result you’ll get. After migrating your site, use technical SEO tools regularly. That way, you can stay on top of any new changes that may impact your position in the SERPs.

Key takeaways

Migrating your website is a big challenge that should be taken only if it is worth the effort. You can protect your SEO wins by working with the right tools and implementing best practices.

If you don’t have the expertise to face these challenges in-house, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional. It’ll be worth it.

By Clay Kramer

Clay Kramer is the Head of Product at SEORadar, an SEO disaster prevention tool used by thousands of people worldwide.

Sourced from JeffBullas.com

 

 

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Major Brands Are Shifting to TikTok, and You Should Be Too

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By Michael Della Penna

The unconventional virality that comes from the social platform creates real-world opportunities for brands

With one billion global active users and more expected in the coming year, TikTok is driving significant growth for brands of all sizes and industries.

From transforming side hustles to successful businesses to immortalizing a pug named Noodle, TikTok’s unconventional virality is creating tangible, real-world opportunities for brands. The social platform even inspired millions of people to recreate an ASMR salmon bowl video (which, according to Instacart, spiked ingredient orders by 97% during the trend’s peak).

Unlike legacy platforms like Facebook and Twitter that have become “cheugy”—a word coined on the platform itself and is associated with things that are out of touch and outdated—TikTok rewards originality over volume of spend, enabling any brand to reach a targeted and engaged audience.

In short, TikTok creates moments—moments that become experiences enjoyed and shared around the globe. More than a marketing channel, TikTok is a key to the future for brands. Here’s how your brand can lead TikTok in 2022.

Champion the next generations

The future prosperity of brands relies on reaching new generations.

With over half of Gen Z consumers using the platform daily, there are long-term implications to winning on the platform and they shed a light on the future of marketing—the importance of creating a moment or experience for users that form a connection and loyalty over time.

Especially as it rises in engagement and legacy platforms lose share to their younger counterparts, TikTok is the key to reaching younger demographics that are gaining significant market power.

They’re culturally driven and outspoken, and as a result, they’re turning to their trusted brands and peers on TikTok for recommendations on everything from cleaning products to travel hacks, and even how to invest in the stock market.

Denny’s, for example, is featuring student athletes to celebrate the accomplishments of underrepresented groups and connect with younger diners. Brands have an extraordinary opportunity to champion these young customers as key influencers and make a powerful impact that goes beyond a product launch.

Bring your brand personality to life

Understanding that audiences on TikTok respond better to authenticity instead of hard selling, successful brands on TikTok harness the power of entertaining content to create experience and drive engagement.

For social media marketers, this marks a new approach to content creation. When in doubt, unhinged and comedic content is the answer.

Violating all previous norms of social media marketing, Duolingo’s TikTok is the perfect example of the impact this strategy can have on a modern brand. Racking up over 58.6 million likes since February 2021, Duo the Owl pines for Dua Lipa’s love, mocks the brand’s legal team and trolls users and celebrities.

Just like the other social media platforms, TikTok is saturated with branded content, making it critical for marketers to change up their typical approach. Going beyond the scope of what the product is, marketers create exponential opportunities for content that are geared towards entertaining and engaging users and thus driving brand awareness.

Success on TikTok is driven by consistent engagement, and sometimes you have to be a little unhinged to achieve it.

Create a moment, not an ad

TikTok’s interest-based algorithm allows brands to create a moment by reaching targeted audiences in a more impactful way.

Dunkin’s partnership with TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio is a prime example. Dunkin’ tapped into the Gen Z zeitgeist at peak popularity, leading to hundreds of thousands of drinks sold across the nation.

But you don’t have to be Dunkin’ to hit big ROI through influencer partnerships. TikTok provides a unique opportunity: A creator doesn’t need millions of followers to go viral.

Engagement is the holy grail of TikTok and should be your brand’s main focus. An influencer partnership, innovative product or unhinged video should merely be the tipping point in a larger strategy.

Ask yourself questions like: How can users duet this video to continue the conversation? How can this tag capture the attention and engagement of our target market? Is there also an opportunity to raise visibility or support for a cause that ties into the brand’s mission?

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Feature Image Credit: Dunkin’s partnership with TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio reached targeted audiences in an impactful way, as seen in sales.Dunkin’

By Michael Della Penna

Sourced from ADWEEK

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