As the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for March 11, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.
1. Up to 140 characters in a Tweet, except . . .
What’s the optimal character count for a tweet, blog, or Facebook post? How many characters does a link take up? In a quick-read post that I’ve printed to keep handy, Hubspot provides a beyond-the-basics summary of character counts that are best for the major social media channels.
Two of my favorite learnings? That including a link in a Tweet takes up 24 characters, and the ideal length of a Tweet that includes a link is 120 characters, not the allowed 140.
2. Is Netflix’s All-Episodes-At-Once Release Model a House of Cards?
In this brief post from Business Insider, Netflix defends not only facilitating the “binge watching” of old shows like Breaking Bad and Justified, but their policy of releasing the entire season of a new show at once, as they do with House of Cards. So – why? Because people are moving away from binge watching.
I’ve watched this phenomena with interest, and here are my concerns:
I’m not convinced that the opportunity for binge watching makes that option completely better all the time. Downton Abbey was extremely successful sticking with the episodic release model.
Binge-release seems to work for pure subscription businesses like Netflix, but is unproven in ad-based revenue models. Is there value or only customer irritation to be found in a binge-watching ad play?
The binge-release model accelerates the appetite for content in a ways similar to the advent of cable television and 24-hour, mass-channel programming. More content may have to be delivered faster, as audiences binge-watch a “season” of a show, and don’t want to wait 18 months for the next fix.
So – stay tuned for future observations . . . and tell me what you think about binge-release programming.
3. Hubspot Offers 15 Free Infographic Templates
In case you missed in, Hubspot offered some free infographic templates in January. This article also includes some basic guidance on building your Infographic. Great tools for the infographic-challenged!
4. Desktop Reading Continues to Slide
According to a BI Intelligence article, desktop reading of key news publications continues to slide. The article doesn’t mention whether the traffic is moving to mobile apps, or declining absolutely, but is worth a quick scan. No time? Check out the graph below:
5. Build Your Brand Through Excellent Customer Experiences
While many of the predictions in Forrester’s “The 2016 Top 10 Critical Success Factors to Determine Who Wins And Who Fails In The Age Of The Customer” are less cutting-edge than you would expect from the organization, one of them bears repeating, and heeding:
October 2015 “In 2016, leaders will put in place customer-obsesses operating modules, while laggards will only market themselves as customer-obsessed.” Forrester
A particular point is that of working cross-functionally to deliver a consistently excellent experience across any type of interaction your customer has with you. It’s not the first time we’ve explored this concept, but 2016 is a good time to start working on it. How are customer service, billing, the technical help desk and your sales team really treating your customers? Make sure you know.
Have a great weekend, everyone. And remember –Daylight Saving Time begins Sunday at 2 a.m. Set your clocks forward one hour!
Diane
Diane Pierson has deep experience in product management and marketing, having delivered results to companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, American Lawyer Media and Copyright Clearance Center. She has built products & services that have delivered over $100 million in revenue and knows what works, and what doesn’t, when executing product plans and strategies. She is also a contributor to Subscription Insider. (Read Diane’s full Bio)
