It’s cold outside but content marketing is hot. Three things content marketers need to know today.

Don’t Cry for Telcos: No one uses their phones any more to talk to people or to send old-timey text messages. But before you feel sorry for the shareholders of Rogers and Bell, note that we are consuming a lot more content on them these days. In fact, Cisco just released a report which estimates that North American data usage will increase six-fold over the next 5 years, shooting from 557K terabytes per month to over 3,000K terabytes. That’s a lot of data charges.

#RIPTWITTER?: The few remaining Twitter fanatics have taken to the ramparts to decry rumoured changes to their beloved (and increasingly irrelevant) platform.  First, it was about longer Tweets – some reports claimed that the struggling platform would drop its iconic 140 character maximum to a WeChat busting 10,000. Now there’s talk of Twitter introducing an algorithm which would choose what you see based on a bunch of factors – it would no longer be a chronological timeline.  Sounds a lot like Facebook. (Ironically, back in the day when it actually considered Twitter a threat, Facebook once dropped its algorithm for a minute to be more like Twitter.)

What’s up with WhatsApp? Last week, the app that none of your North American friends use, announced its one billionth user. Users now send over 42 billion messages a day on the platform, more than all the SMS messages sent by ALL the world’s telecoms (see point 1). Now that achievement is crossed off the to-do list, the Facebook-owned app has committed to monetizing the platform. We look forward to paid content marketing and distribution tools, something the platform has already tested, we hear, with great success.