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If you start to feel the low burn of anxiety rising in your gut whenever you hear about messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, take comfort — you’re not alone. Much of the coverage on messaging apps to date has been accompanied by a mixture of sheer awe at their velocity and the oddly foreboding tone of a teenage dystopian blockbuster.

I asked Eytan Oren, CEO a consultancy that specializes in messaging apps called BlockParty, why he thinks that is: “The growth of the ecosystem took a lot of people by surprise — especially in the U.S. where chat apps took longer to catch on. At this point there are more people on chat apps than traditional networks, and though that shift was several years in the making, some people experienced it as an overnight success,” he explained.

“There’s also a level on which people may have grown comfortable with a small pantheon of “social media” leaders — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. All of a sudden you have a dozen chat apps with hundreds of millions of users to consider on top of those traditional outlets, and it can be daunting to know where to start.”

Whether it’s the arrival of something we don’t yet understand or unease over the sheer volume of users each of these messaging apps have accumulated, the tone around messaging apps is reminiscent of the restlessness that accompanied the emergence of social media 12 or 13 years ago. So what does that mean for marketers? Well, let’s take a closer look.

What Exactly is a Messaging App?

At their core, messaging apps enable one-to-one or one-to-few interactions in a fast, often cost-free way.

Skype and Blackberry Messenger are commonly thought of as the “grandparents of messaging apps,” which today number in the hundreds. The largest messaging apps in the world include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber, Line, and Snapchat. Each of these have their own regional and demographic stronghold. The graphic below from BlockParty demonstrates their scale:

You cannot talk about messaging apps without addressing their rapid growth of adoption. According to GlobalWebIndex, 75% of internet users today use some sort of a messaging app.

Research from Business Insider shows how quickly messaging apps have caught up to and surpassed social media network usage. Their chart below compares WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Oh, and by the way, it’s measured in billions – with a B. So the top four messaging apps have 2.125 billion monthly active users worldwide.

Which leads me to the next question: Is all this hoopla — billions and billions in monthly usage, exponentially growing articles, and spiking public attention — really just over the ability to send tiny little messages?

Likely not. Read on, my wise and good-looking visitor, read on.

How Are Messaging Apps Different From Social Media?

Part of understanding the import of messaging apps is zeroing in on what makes them different from traditional communication channels such as broadcast or social media.

If social media removes the barriers for people to broadcast messages out to an audience of many, messaging apps remove the barriers for people to interact one-on-one. And what are those barriers? Data plans for starters. One reason messaging apps spread so quickly with younger generations is due to the fact that they became known as the free alternative to text messaging. Whether you are talking to someone across the street or across the globe, most messaging apps enable you do to do so over WiFi without cost or impact on your mobile data limits.

Privacy concerns is another barrier messaging apps seem to address. For a generation that grew up with the highly public nature of social media, messaging apps offer a shade of privacy to talk with one or a group of your friends away from the public eye. Having private or semi-private channels for communication is of increasing importance, particularly as you look beyond messaging into a wider array of transactions. Which leads me to the next point …

Why Messaging Apps May Not Ultimately Be About Messaging At All

If you think of messaging apps as just another form of text messaging, you may be missing the larger picture.

We have a bad habit of naming things before we really understand what they’re capable of. We did it with social media. Early on we named Facebook, Twitter and similar sites “social media” because “media” was the only framework we had for mass communication. And that name colored our interpretation of it.

“Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?” Was the common retort against Twitter, for example.

The reason so many initially missed the point of social media was that they looked at it through the lens of traditional media, and “media” had historically been reserved for essential and polished information at the time. All the news that’s fit to print. But social really wasn’t media in the traditional sense at all. It was something entirely new. It opened up millions of simultaneous platforms and angles from which to see and report on the world around us.

We may be headed down a similar path with messaging apps. We’ve named WhatsApp and the like “messaging apps” because that’s our current context for them. They send messages. But what if the larger story behind messaging apps is not that they remove barriers to sending messages, but rather that they remove barriers to all digital interactions and transactions.

Today messaging apps are starting to evolve to include video, images, and even financial transactions. Everlane and Zulily use Facebook Messenger to take orders and process returns. The companies leverage an integration between Messenger and Zendesk to funnel messenger requests directly through their support channels.

What Everlane, Zulilly, and Zendesk are doing is just the beginning. Rare Pink, a Jeweler in London, is using WeChat exclusively to communicate with about 10% of its customers. Hotels like LINQ in Las Vegas are also opening up messaging apps for fast check-in and to enable guests to adjust the lighting and temperature in their rooms.

A guest of LINQ hotel opens their suite door with WeChat

Promoting an open API for anyone wanting to build apps or integrations into it, WeChat has been quick to develop new use cases for messaging. As a result, they’re seeing it seep into every aspect of users’ lives.

For more than 500 million users in China, [WeChat is] essentially The Everything App. People use it to talk with their friends and their colleagues, and also to… book train tickets and get their laundry done, order dinner and play the lottery, pick out clothes and play videogames. It’s the remote control for your smart home, a mobile bank, and a way to renew your visa,” explains David Pierce, senior staff writer at Wired.

You can, for all intents and purposes, live your entire life within WeChat. It takes a phone full of apps to replicate its entire functionality.”

Let’s go over that again: “It takes a phone full of apps and replicates its entire functionality.”

So maybe the above chart comparing social media networks and message app usage is the wrong idea. Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about messaging in terms of apps at all, but rather as an evolving infrastructure.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There was a time when social media was a perplexing newcomer to our lives. Today it’s hard to imagine an election season or a winter storm or an episode of the Bachelor without an accompanying hashtag. Social changed the way we absorb the world around us — from the trivial to the momentous. It took years to find its place, but it’s indelible now.

When we think about messaging apps, we ought to think about not what they are today, but what they could be — what their underlying functionality makes possible — down the line. A recent report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism paints this picture well: “While messaging is currently a clearly defined function of specific apps, the future is likely to be one wherein the capability is baked-in to nearly all digital technologies and services. The point where a messaging app begins and ends will begin to blur,” they explain.

When you look at the unique ways in which companies like Everlane, Zendesk, and LINQ are starting to use messaging apps, it’s not hard to see how this permeation could begin. We’re a ways off still, but it’s possible to imagine a time when messaging apps will be so widely used they will become indistinguishable from any other mass utility. As NeimanLab’s Joseph Lichterman predicted, “Soon messaging will become like electricity — ubiquitous and involved in nearly everything we do.”

What do you think are the possibilities for messaging apps in your industry? What would it take for them to gain traction as a marketing, sales and service channel within your business? Share your thoughts below. 

In the past few years Google have been refining the way that it displays results to users. In particular, Google has been increasing the number of Featured Snippets that it displays for queries.

What’s a Featured Snippet? And more importantly, what do you have to do to appear there? Well, that’s what I set out to explore. 

What is a Featured Snippet?

A Featured Snippet is shown in some search engine results pages (SERPs), usually when a question-based query is being searched for. The snippet displays content from within one of the pages ranking on page one that directly answers the question searched for without the user having to visit the actual page.

Here’s an example for the query, “how to make bread“:

The Featured Snippet is the box at the top that displays the direct instructions that have been pulled from the tasteofhome.com webpage. You may have heard these referred to as ‘answer boxes’ in the past. 

Why Should You Care About Featured Snippets?

One of the first conclusions that a lot of people involved with SEO jumped to was that featured snippets would have a hugely negative impact on the amount of people that actually click through to the pages within the results. This actually hasn’t been the case. In fact, it’s dramatically increased the click-through rate (CTR) of results ranking within it.

From a sample of just under 5,000 queries, I found that the CTR to the HubSpot website for high volume keywords increased by over 114%, even when we ranked #1 (just below the Featured Snippet — like in the example below).

So to give you an example, let’s say you rank #1 (the first post below the snippet) on page one of Google for a keyword that’s searched for 10,000 times. From the data I’ve collected, you could expect roughly 1,700 visits, compared to the 3,700 you might see if you landed the Featured Snippet spot — and that’s just one keyword.

How Do You Rank in the Featured Snippet Section?

Featured Snippets have been a bit of a mystery for a lot of people involved with SEO, as it hasn’t been that easy to determine what influences getting your content to appear within them.

There’s been a lot of conflicting advice out there, including the idea that Schema.org data was the reason behind Google displaying this data. However, considering that more than 80% of the websites I’ve looked at that rank within the Featured Snippet don’t use any kind of Schema.org markup data, it’s safe to say that this isn’t the case.

Not only that but Gary Illyes, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has said outright that structured data has nothing to do with ranking in the Featured Snippet.

Instead of speculating, I decided to run some research of my own. I wanted to answer the following questions:

• How frequently does a Featured Snippet appear in the SERPs?
• How often does HubSpot rank within the Featured Snippet?
• How much of an impact does the Featured Snippet have on CTR from the search engines?
• What factors contribute to ranking in the Featured Snippet box?

The results of the test should give you a good idea on how you can start ranking more frequently within the Featured Snippet box.

Organizing the Featured Snippet Analysis:

Just to give you a bit of insight into what data I pulled, here’s a brief overview:

1. I gathered a total of 4,713 different search queries where hubspot.com ranked between #1 and #5 on page one of Google.com.
2. The queries all contained either, “how to,” “what is,” “how do,” or “how does.” This was intentional, as Stone Temple found that from 850,000 question-based queries, 19% of them had a Featured Snippet.
3. I analysed the SERPs for each of the 4,713 queries to see if there was a Featured Snippet present or not.
4. Of the 4,713 queries, 1,361 (29%) of them had a Featured Snippet present. The remaining 71% either didn’t have a Featured Snippet or they did but it was an unlinked “definition” box (i.e. it just gave the definition of a word and didn’t link to a page — like this).
5. Once I had the sample of 1,361 queries that displayed Featured Snippets, I scraped the SERPs again to see who was ranking within it, what the content of the Featured Snippet was, and what the URL of the featured page was.
6. Of the 1,361 queries (where HubSpot rank between #1 and #5 on page one), we appeared in the Featured Snippet 444 times (33%), leaving a remaining 917 queries where we didn’t rank in the Featured Snippet.

What the Featured Snippet Analysis Revealed:

The analysis helped me uncover a few interesting things …

Allow me to explain what this chart is demonstrating:

• The numbers (1–5) in the y-axis relate to the position on page one that a HubSpot URL ranks for a given query.
• For each position HubSpot ranks for, there is a bar that shows how often we appear in the Featured Snippet (blue) and how often we don’t (orange).

So, for keywords that we rank #1 for on page one in Google SERPs, we only appear in the Featured Snippet 18% of the time. Contrastingly, we appear in the Featured Snippet 28% of the time when we rank #5. Strange, right?

Well, what this says to us is that once you’re in the top 5 results on page one, building backlinks and other authority signals matter much less for ranking in the Featured Snippet. In fact, I’ve seen lots of occasions where relatively unknown websites with much less SEO authority than HubSpot have ranked above us.

The semantic relevance to the keyword in question, along with clear page structure seems to be much more important. 

Here’s another interesting piece of data that illustrates how valuable it can be to rank in the Featured Snippet within Google …

Again, to decipher this graph, here’s a brief overview:

• The x-axis relates to the monthly search volume for the search queries measured.
• The y-axis shows the click-through rate (CTR) of the ranking HubSpot URL from within Google (i.e. how many people clicked on our search result versus the rest of the results in the search results page for a query).
• The blue line plots the CTR from the SERPs for HubSpot URLs when we do not appear in the Featured Snippet, broken down by query search volume (x-axis).
• The orange line plots the CTR from the SERPs for HubSpot URLs when we do appear in the Featured Snippet, broken down by query search volume (x-axis).

By and large, we get much more clicks through to our content when we appear in the Featured Snippet, but this becomes increasingly important as the search volume for a query increases.

For high traffic keywords, ranking in the Featured Snippet saw an average increase in CTR of over 114%, and that’s even if we’re ranking #1 on page one.

This chart is a little more straightforward. As I mentioned above, I extracted all of the content from within the Featured Snippets that I sampled. I did this to identify any trends in the content being displayed in order to better understand what Google is looking for.

As you can see, content between the length of 54-58 words in total seemed to appear by far the most frequently.

7 Key Takeaways to Help You Rank in the Featured Snippet Section

From the analysis that I’ve done, here are the conclusions that I’ve drawn:

1. Backlinks matter much less for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one.
2. There should be an area on the page where the search query appears in a header (h2, h3, h4, etc.).
3. The content you want to appear in the Featured Snippet (the answer to the query) should be placed in a <p> tag directly below the header mentioned above. This answer should be between 54–58 words long.
4. Google doesn’t always just pull through a whole paragraph of text into the Featured Snippet. If you add “Step 1,” “Step 2,” “Step 3,” etc. to the start of each subheading within a page (h2) then Google will sometimes just pull through the subheadings and list them chronologically, like in the example above for this URL. This is particularly prevalent in question-based queries.
5. Featured Snippets for the same query often have different content within Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.com.au, and Google.ie. Try “how to search on Google” as one of many examples.
6. For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g. “Inbound Sales”), it’s much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text as opposed to a step-by-step. Page structure is incredibly important here.
7. Google tends to prefer ‘answers’ that begin logically as an answer would. Here are a few examples to demonstrate what I mean by this:

My advice for anyone looking to increase their visibility within the Featured Snippet box is to first run a quick audit of the keywords that you’re ranking for within your current SEO campaign, and how many of them are question-based queries. Once you’ve got this list, you can drill down on where you’re currently ranking, how well your content is structured, and then devise a plan to reoptimize your content based on the advice I’ve given above.

How will you apply this to your own SEO efforts? Drop a comment below or tweet me directly to share your thoughts and ideas. 

The power of search engine optimization (SEO) is irrefutable. When your organization is easier to find on Google and Bing, you’ll generate more visibility around your work. Your nonprofit will experience the perks that come with bringing more people to your website—from increased membership to PR attention and beyond.

When it comes to success with SEO, long-tail is the name of the game. In other words, your best strategy is to target phrases or expressions that you’re using to target your audience. To understand this difference, take a look at the following examples of long-tail keywords:

• “keyword research tips for nonprofits”
• “improve distribution to your blog posts”
• “tips for increasing membership rates for nonprofits”

Unlike keyword expressions like “marketing tips” or “nonprofit marketing tips,” long-tail keywords revolve around a very specific search intent. They’re also challenging to identify, as Google releases minimal search engine data to the public. You’ll need to do some research to ensure that you’re taking the right steps forward. The good news? We’ve got a proven-framework for success.

Tips for Creating and Optimizing Your Nonprofit’s Keyword Strategy

1) Brainstorm a Topic List

Get 5 people in a room with a whiteboard, and start brainstorming a list of topics that are important to your organization. These can be anything: problems that your nonprofit is tackling, communities that you serve, issues you stand for, or services that you offer. The more broad the better—you’ll want to create a list that’s thorough and comprehensive. Worry first about major themes, and then dig into specifics afterwards.

With some creative mind-mapping and outlining, you can structure this brainstorm into a list of keywords that you can research. By starting with the keywords first, you’ll ensure an approach that prioritizes your audience’s needs over any algorithm.

2) Organize Your Brainstorm

Take the brainstorms you generated, and start grouping your ideas by causes, communities, and personas. The, translate this ideation process into a cohesive list of topic ideas. From there, create a list of keywords that are relevant to each topic (eventually, you’ll commit to focusing on one keyword per topic).

What you’ll soon realize is that there are numerous directions that you can take with your content. Take a step back to understand why, and figure out the directions and angles that are most on-point with your cause. This approach will help ensure that your ideas are the right combination of interesting, engaging, and easy to find through search engines. 

3) Research Related 

The beauty of natural language is that it’s subjective. That’s why, after building your initial blog topic and SEO keyword lists, you’ll want to research similar angles and directions. You might also ask another team member to help—just to provide an extra eye and set of recommendations.

Your keyword research should involve SEO tools, conversations with customers, and data from your web analytics software. Cast your net wide and figure out what you don’t know. Look for hidden opportunities to reach your target audiences through search.

4) Mix Long-Tail and Head Terms

Just because long-tail is the name of the game doesn’t mean that you should avoid head terms altogether. After you’ve managed your SEO strategy for six months to a year, you’ll start to see trends among keywords that are driving traffic.

Use this long-tail success data to continue to identify other potential head terms. Think of these as keywords that are more general—and more competitive to rank for in search engines as a result. Using long-tail keyword data, you can better target the head terms that are most aligned with your brand and that make sense to target as a result.

5) See Where Your Competitors Fall

The search landscape is highly competitive: you’ll want to understand how Google ranks key players in your industry. See where your competitors fall by conducting keyword research audits on their blogs and websites.

Instead of looking to replicate what they’re doing however, look for hidden opportunities. Among nonprofits, especially, similar organizations should work together and share successes—not try to outrank each other.

The knowledge of how your partner and peer institutions are ranking can help you come up with ideas that you may not have previously seen. Don’t build your SEO strategy in a bubble: know what others are doing so that your nonprofit is visible, too.

6) Cut Down Your List to Start

When it comes to a successful SEO strategy, planning is only part of the equation. Execution is equally important.

Make sure that you’re focused in your approach: start by targeting a few keywords and monitoring the results of those efforts. Replicate what works, nix what doesn’t, and keep forging ahead with small, steady tests. Over time, you’ll see trends that you wouldn’t have been able to foresee.

Focus with SEO is key. If you spread yourself too thin, you won’t see real results.

Need More Support?

Here’s a free SEO template, along with some in-depth instructions. These resources are designed for the corporate sector, but the tips are just as applicable to nonprofits. 

Be sure to re-evaluate your process every few months: once a quarter is a good benchmarks. As you start to build visibility in search, you can add more keywords to your lists. 

Grow slowly and steadily. Watch what your nonprofit peers are doing. Aim to be relevant. Structure, strategy, patience, and creativity will be your best SEO assets.

Instagram for business has become an essential element of social media marketing. With 400 million users, over 80 million posts per day, and a 93% growth month-over-month for businesses using it, Instagram is an extremely useful social media platform to take advantage of. While other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn each serve their own purpose, Instagram is a platform where you can show your company’s human side.

It’s not too late to get your business started with Instagram, but it’s important that when you do, you go about it in the right way. That’s why Hubspot and Iconosquare teamed up to bring you How to Use Instagram for Business. In this guide, we’ll teach you how to leverage Instagram for your business, from determining your brand guidelines to understanding the anatomy of a perfect post. 

You’ll also learn:

• What, when, and how to post on Instagram to get followers
• How to set goals
• How to use contests to grow followers fast
• Best practices for using hashtags
• Tips for measuring success and proving value to your executives
• Examples of brands to pull inspiration from
• And more!

Click here to download How to Use Instagram for Business today.