Five most important search marketing news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week has been a little quiet here in the UK. Mainly because of the bank holidays, but also because nobody could bear to be in an office because it's too damn hot – but let's see what we can find anyway…

Bing Network reaches 20% market share in the UK

Bing has announced that it has surpassed 20% market share in the UK, according to latest comScore figures.

This increases its share of the search market to one in five UK searches. That's the easiest maths I've ever done!

The latest IAB Digital Adspend report saw paid-for search increase 15.3%, which now accounts for 51% of all digital advertising spend in the UK. And as Bing now accounts for 840 million monthly searches, perhaps its time you took some attention away from Google.

The Digital Democracy Manifesto

The current and possibly future leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn took to Facebook Live this week to launch his Digital Democracy Manifesto.

Our writer Luke Richards reported fully on the story, but here's some of the highlights of the proposal…

Programming for everyone

The intention is to use publicly funded Open Source technology and a National Education Service to get more children and adults into programming, coding and development.

As Luke points out, this will be of interest to many in the digital sector, especially in light of the Conservative government's latest acknowledgement of the current digital skills gap in the UK.

Open knowledge library

This will be a free-to-use online hub of learning resources for the National Education Service. The Open Knowledge Library will be the digital repository of lessons, lectures, curricula and student work from Britain's nurseries, schools, colleges and universities.

Community media freedom

This part of the manifesto looks at access to media and how people are equipped to use emerging tools.

"The National Education Service will provide learning resources for students of all ages to acquire the theoretical insights and practical skills for analysing and making media."

Social media marketing spend has surged, but falls short of estimates

As Al Roberts reported in ClickZ this week, "Marketers' spending on social media has tripled in the past seven years but falls way short of where marketers expected it to be when they peered into their crystal balls in 2009."

This is according to a CMO Survey conducted by American Marketing Association, Deloitte and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, which found that social media now accounts for 11.7% of total marketing spend.

That's a big jump from where it stood in 2009 (3.5%), but still well short of the 17.5% marketers predicted it would account for today.

Someone should probably also tell marketers that crystal balls are now a largely defunct technology, dismissed as quackery by most scientists.

Facebook to punish advertisers with slow sites

According to Danny Goodwin in Search Engine Journal, how quickly your mobile site takes to load will soon impact whether people will see your Facebook ads.

In its own blog post, Facebook states that it will consider "website performance and a person's network connection in our ad auction and delivery system."

Facebook offers the following advice to speed up your mobile sites:

Minimising landing page redirects, plugins and link shorteners

Compressing files to decrease mobile rendering time

Improving server response time by utilising multi-region hosting

Using a high-quality content delivery network to reach audiences quickly

Removing render-blocking JavaScript

Behavioral targeting is coming to Snapchat

As Al Roberts reported in ClickZ, behavioral targeting is coming to Snapchat according to Snapchat's director of revenue operations Clement Xue.

According to Business Insider, "It looks as though any behavioral targeting will be limited to broad categories, rather than serving ads based on very specific interactions you have made inside the app," which would be consistent with Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel's distaste for "creepy" ads.

Which is a but rich coming from a company with a terrifying ghost as its logo.

AGGGHHHHH RUN AWAY!

Christopher Ratcliff is the editor of Search Engine Watch.You can follow him on Twitter: @Christophe_Rock

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Related reading

If you want to know how seriously any public company takes mobile, then take a look at the annual/quarterly reports.

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the worlds of search, search marketing, and beyond.

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