Should you date your content?

Repost from my Tahzoo Blogpost:

More and more it seems, online publishers (yes, you are a publisher) are publishing content without showing a (prominent) last-modified date. Why is that? And, more importantly, should you follow suit?

Why hide the date?

Without asking each and every one for the rationale behind this choice, I can make an educated guess:

For most readers, the date strongly indicates the content's relevance. If you are doing online research, would you take the time to read a SEO piece from 2013? Would you read any Social Media piece from 2014? Probably not.

The last few years, large groups have joined the Content Marketing movement—and rightly so. The Content Shock (full disclosure: published in 2014) has forced anyone doing serious online research to excel in content curation: weeding out the irrelevant from the excellent in seconds.

On search, Google will try to show the publication date of your content in the result list. Google will show the Title, URL, Date and a (Rich) Snippet, and the reader will use all that to rank the results:

Figure 1. If you are researching CMSes, which would you open?

It doesn’t seem like Google puts a big penalty on not having an (explicit) date, or on aging content, which is a bit strange to me: I have tweaked SOLR searches and usually the date weighs heavy in the relevance score.

But your content is evergreen, and time will not wither away its brilliance? Hiding the date from your publication could help you retain traffic to your hard-earned jewels.

Your implicit promise

Removing dates from your content prohibits me from using its age to ascertain its relevance. You, as a publisher, are making me, the reader, an implicit promise that I will not be disappointed in the timely relevance of your content.

This is a promise that is hard to uphold. Do you check your old content for relevance? Do you update your content to remain relevant? Do you unpublish aged content?

Having implemented many CMSes at a diversity of large content organizations, I know that this is rarely the case. The processes are not in place to do so, and the tools to support such processes are usually poor.

So: To date or not to date?

So, it could be that you are that one writer that keeps all your content crisp. Brilliant! I want to read! In that case, use your last-modified date to show me your hard work.

Do you fire and forget? No problem! Also put include your last-modified date—which will be equal to your published-on date.

Does your content have an extended shelf life? Kudos to you! I hope you have (or build) a reputation for this. I personally have no problem in sharing wayback content from big names—although they will have probably produced something better already.

If you want to provide relevant content to your readers, show the last-modified date. And set it at the beginning of your content so Google and your reader can use it. Google will help you here, because it puts greater value on the last-modified date than the published-on date.

Reading on?

Here's a nice read on experimenting the use of dates: Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts? (2013) Somebody was sorry sharing a 5-year-old piece, without considering it could still be relevant.

Do read the discussion section, including where they say that Twitter users hesitate to tweet anything over 14 days and make other good points about why to not date your content. Usually, it boils down to the “image” of the publisher. Relevance is in the eye of the reader.

In Social Media: Earn, then Own

Repost from the Tahzoo Blog:

In the past few months, some subtle and some not-so-subtle changes have happened in the social media landscape.  Together, I think they teach us a lesson on dependencies that could—or should—influence your Marketing Technology choices.

social media by Sean MacEntee 

TWITTER

On November 20th, Twitter disabled the Tweet count feature. As explanation, Twitter provided a dominantly technical and partly functional response, but left the community guessing as to the business reasons. Access to Tweet count remains possible only through a paid API. It’s not a dramatic change, but if Tweet count was part of your KPIs, I hope you reserved some budget for a fix.

Of course you should keep using your social media channels for your Content Marketing efforts, but business-critical data should be housed in your own analytics platform, not on rented land.

YOUTUBE

With the launch of YouTube Red on October 28th, YouTube offered partner creators a new revenue-share deal. All of the major content creators have been given the choice: accept the new deal or have your content made private.

This could very well be a sweet deal for the content creators, but it is still unclear what cut the creators will get and what the results for paid and ad-supported channels will be, but I do not think the content creators were altogether happy with this unilateral change. ESPN had to remove a large part of its content, not being able to meet the new conditions.

There’s a big chance you won’t be affected by this change, but it leaves us questioning what YouTube/Google’s next change will be. Will that effect you?

YouTube remains an attractive channel to stream video, but if videos are becoming a growing part of your Content Strategy, consider hosting your own videos and be liberated from conflicting ads and other restrictions on YouTube.

GOOGLE+

Google+ has been pushed by Google since 2011, but this year Google+ was abandoned as the Google Identity framework and updated last month to the revamped Google social network. Whether it will take off now is anybody’s guess as it is not part of the Google package deal anymore.

Change is unavoidable, but we must be in control of how we interpret change. And we should be able to react to change fast to seize new opportunities. Perhaps building a Google+ Community or Collection now is your next big thing. Or, perhaps, it isn’t.

FACEBOOK

In the last two years there has been much upheaval about the algorithms Facebook uses to filter your feed. Just search for “Organic Facebook Reach” and you will understand. Facebook offered explanations, but left lots of users baffled or angry, seeing organic reach drop by 50% or more.

So what can you do besides pay for the reach you once got for free? Unlike SEO, FTO (Facebook Timeline Optimization) seems to be the new science. The best overall advice is to do your own multivariant testing, and discover what works for you and your fans.

WRAP-UP

The best advice is to keep earning your audience. Keep distributing your story through your favorite social channels, and engaging potential customers in the process. Get new people into your CRM system so you can reach out to them in a personalized way should be your main objective. And, last, make sure you own all your important content, and distribute it over channels you control. Don’t build your house on rented land!

And, finally, build in the flexibility to change – you will need it!

If you are interested in finding out how Tahzoo can help you adapt to these and other change of the age of digital transformation—perhaps with a free evaluation of your present situation—let us know. We would love to help.