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Nearly a Quarter of Italians Quit Social Media Last Year
22% of Italians have quit social media completely in the last year alone. Could we be at the precipice of a new era in social media? I think so.
The Italians who quit cited three main reasons:
- Getting tired of the content they see in their feeds.
- The prevalance of fake news in their feeds.
- Privacy concerns.
What we are seeing is a delayed version of the response we should have had as a society when news feed algorithms were first introduced back in 2006.
For Italian marketers it means nearly a quarter of their potential target audience are no longer reachable by social media, and it could get worse from there. No matter how many cringe dancing videos, how many bad acting 3 minute videos on Facebook, or how many influencers on Instagram pump your product/service you still miss ¼ of the whole population. That’s a big chunk of potential sales down the drain.
For those marketers search might be attractive (i.e. Google, Bing, Neeva, and DuckDuckGo) but we might also see a resurgence of some offline media in Italy to reach these ghost consumers.
If you’re a small business, brand, or marketer in Italy and you haven’t optimized for search or ran search ad campaigns before, here’s some advice for you:
- Find an SEO practicioner close to you. - Even though you may not be meeting in person, having someone in a nearby area can help with all kinds of cultural issues, language, work timelines, and more. For example my agency does SEO but we focus on being the best Dallas SEO Company and service other USA markets. We would rarely be the best fit for an Italy-based company.
- Avoid hiring a web design agency to do your SEO work. - Web designers are often told by ‘gurus’ to sell SEO work as a way to earn extra or recurring revenue, but they are rarely experts in the field and often times fail to understand the importance of algorithm updates and SEO signal development such as link building, co-citation, and using relevant entities. At least once per week we talk to a small business that is in rough shape because they hired a designer to do SEO work and aren’t seeing any benefits.
- Search Engine Optimization is a long game - Unlike social media where ‘likes’, ‘reactions’, ‘retweets’, etc… are instantaneous and can give a business owner gratification quickly, SEO requires a lot of work over a long period of time to pay off. Not only should your SEO team be building and creating new content, they should be optimizing content or offering optimization tips, reviewing technical issues and providing insights / documentation, researching algorithm updates, and even conducting their own research on the side to stay ahead. Put all together this is a perplexing amount of work to provide success compared to shooting a video and writing some sales copy (not implying that social is simple by any means). Due to this I recommend planning your SEO out in yearly segments with firm but flexible goals that are realistic. If you haven’t done SEO before then pick one product/service/category to go after first instead of taking a shotgun approach to the whole thing.
- Avoid hiring an SEO or SEM practicioner that only does one thing like “link building” or “growth hacking”. Unless that one thing is “PPC management” and they are great at it (search based advertising) you will likely run into a lot of problems hiring SEOs like this. A true SEO should undertand nearly all things they will need to optimize for and simply be stronger in some areas than others.
- Be cautious about hiring an SEO on a Gig Worker platform - Gig Worker platforms such as Fiverr or Legitt like to claim you can do all of your SEO with their services and improve your business. Unfortunately often times the opposite is true and the work done by these workers can actually damage your business. If you do not know what you are doing, avoid Gig Worker platfroms and seek out an Agency, Consultant, or vetted Freelancer in your local area.
If indeed social media is dying or about to undergo a major transformation, this could cause a lot of marketing disruption globally not just in Italy. It might be a prudent measure for businesses anywhere to start thinking critically about their digital marketing mix and ensuring there are both short-term measures in place (i.e. social media, ads, etc…), long-term measures (i.e. SEO and email list building), and start considering offline meaures (i.e. billboards, radio, etc..)
- Getting tired of the content they see in their feeds.
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Optimizing Your WordPress Website With Plugins
Let’s talk optimizing your WordPress website using plugins. First off, you can use plugins to make your site better. Some website desginers and SEOs will say that you shouldn’t use very many plugins and they could be right. You should be aware that some plugins add 3rd party content like fonts, css files, and javascript that can slow your page load speed down.
Another issue with plugins is code conflict. The code require for one plugin to work might cause problems with another plugin or with your theme. These conflicts are extremely difficult to predict and are an unfortunately common occurance. The more plugins your website uses, the more likely your site will suffer from a future code conflict.
Finally, plugins can be hacked, or have older code that is compromised, or simply stop being updated by their developers. Since most WordPress plugins are free and open source, this leaves website owners in a tough situation if a plugin should fall prey to hackers or become digital cruft. If you’re a developer you might be able to custom code a fix, but the rest of website owners using the same plugin(s) would be in a tough spot.
These issues lead most web development and optimization experts to simply recommend against plugin usage, but they shouldn’t discouarge you from using plugins completely. Before installing a plugin ask yourself if it is necessary, check to see if the developer keeps it maintained (at least one or two updates per year is often sufficient), and read recent reviews (since WordPress can change quickly reviews older than a year or two are often not representative of the current plugin).
To find a WordPress plugin to enhance your site, first determine what sort of new features you want to add to your site. Then check out this list of the best plugins for WordPress. My team and I review every single plugin added to this list and continually update it based on our experiences, feedback from the community, and developer updates.
Before adding a new plugin you should build a test version of your website either on a development domain, on your local drive (i.e. your computer’s hard drive), or by using a service that provides a testing enviroment.
Instead of adding your plugins directly to your live site, considering adding your plugins to this test environment and see how adding the plugin impacts the overall usage of your site including load time, other plugins, and theme functions. If all is clear you can then add the plugin to your live site.
If you are buying a premium plugin from a site like Code Canyon, check to see if the plugin has a history of being updated by looking at the last updated date or even digging through Archive.org records. if the plugin is new check to see if the developer has other plugins on the marketplace with a history of being updated. If the developer themselves is new then know you are taking a bit of a risk and weigh that against the potential usefulness of the plugin.
Before adding anything to your website you should always run a backup for your website. For best results do not host your backup on the same server as your website, but use a third-party hosting service instead like Dropbox, Backblaze, etc…
If you have the budget I would also recommend a WordPress management service that keeps your live and dev WordPress websites up to date by managing your core, backups, theme, and plugin versions and running tests similar to those discussed above. Larger companies may have in-house I.T. teams, this work should be delegated to them with your marketing and/or operations teams kept in the loop.
There are various WordPress plugins that actually help your website perform better for users and search engines when used correctly. My favorites are WP Rocket, Asset Cleanup Pro, and Autoptimize. Some hosting providers today also build their own plugins to help your website’s performance on their infrastructure, these should likely be considered as good if not better than other optimization plugins out there.
When used properly WordPress plugins are an extremely valuable tool to help your website grow and to improve your business. When used incorrectly they can cause huge issues that harm your site, your business, and possibly even your users.
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