Daily Minute Master Series – January 31, 2020.

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Social Media

Instagram’s Testing Emoji Reactions for Direct Messages

As with Twitter’s recently launched DM reactions tools, given the availability of similar response functionality on other messaging platforms, it makes sense for Instagram to move in-step, tapping into habitual messaging behavior in order to facilitate more engagement. Instagram, it’s worth noting, also already has a ‘quick reactions’ emoji response process for Stories.

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Snapchat Outlines Sports Marketing Opportunities with March Madness Push

With the 2020 March Madness tournament approaching, Snapchat has this week published a new set of stats on the related sports discussion on its platform as it looks to promote its capacity to help marketers connect with audiences during the event. And certainly, some of those stats are impressive – first off, Snap says that its platform is able to provide “incremental audience reach to TV campaigns in the US”.

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Marketing

The Digital Marketing Transformation Led By Google and Amazon

In 2020 advertisers should take a cue from Google and Amazon, ditching old notions about what each platform is and expanding beyond their comfort zones. As with any new advertising program, concrete testing parameters, including separate budgets and potentially different performance goals, are an important foundation for gauging success. For some of Google’s upper-funnel formats, advertisers should consider shifting away from return-focused goals typical of Google search programs to instead look at customer engagement. Amazon holdouts should dive deeply into Stores, Enhanced Brand Content, and Posts to fully understand what level of brand-building is possible before continuing to rule Amazon out. Those already on Amazon should take a fresh look at their advertising campaigns to see if there’s opportunity with new-to-brand metrics to invest more heavily in areas that may be less efficient but capture a high percentage of new customers.

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Here’s How Much Brands Are Paying for Sponsored Content on TikTok and YouTube

An influencer marketing agency reveals how much brands are currently paying for sponsored content on TikTok and YouTube. TalentX Entertainment, an agency managing 32 influencers across Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok, tells Business Insider it charges brands $0.01 to $0.02 for each sponsored-video view on TikTok. On YouTube, brands are charged several times more at $0.03 to $0.08 per view. Brands are reportedly charged less for sponsored posts on TikTok because content is easier to scale on the app.TikTok is said to be a key focus area for influencer marketers looking for new opportunities to earn revenue. Since the app is still relatively new, influencers and brands haven’t yet found a standard price structure for sponsored content.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 30, 2020.

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Social Media

8 Terrific Tips to Optimize a Twitter Business or Brand Profile 

There are more than 330 million monthly users and over 350,000 tweets posted per minute. You know who’s out there in that massive, engaged audience? Your potential clients and customers. If they’re on Twitter, your business or brand should be, too. It’s not just customers and clients that are active on Twitter. It’s also journalists, bloggers, and influencers who are looking for brand, fan, and company story ideas – and when they go searching for something in your vertical, you want to make sure your business shows up. And let’s not forget the passionate consumers who flock to Twitter to voice opinions, concerns, and complaints – if a conversation starts about your brand, you want to monitor it, participate and steer it.

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Facebook Outlines Content Review Board Process, Which Will Provide Independent Case Assessments

Facebook has this week mapped the next stages for the implementation of its independent Content Oversight Board, which will help the platform make more informed decisions on what should, and should not be allowed to be shared across its network under its rules. The Content Oversight Board, which Facebook has been working on over the last year, will review cases where users disagree with initial content decisions made by Facebook – whether that’s resulted in content being removed or left up after their complaint. Some of these cases, according to Facebook, “go to the core of how we balance safety and free expression”, and as such, the Oversight Board will provide additional, independent review, and recommend subsequent action to Facebook, one way or another.

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Marketing

All Google Ads Campaigns to Utilize Standard Delivery As of May 2020

Google Ads is making standard delivery the only ad delivery method for all campaigns, including Display, Video, App, and Hotel campaigns. Google Ads began migrating campaigns from accelerated delivery to standard delivery last October, starting with Search and Shopping campaigns. Starting in April 2020, accelerated delivery will no longer be available as an ad delivery method for any new Display, Video, App, and Hotel campaigns. All existing Display, Video, App and Hotel campaigns using accelerated delivery will be automatically switched to standard delivery starting May 2020.Google says standard delivery is most suitable for all campaigns because it takes into account expected ad performance throughout the day.

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Google Has Stopped Deduplicating Right-Sidebar Featured Snippets

Google still plans to remove featured snippets from the right rail and move the feature to the main listings. URLs for pages that earn the right-sidebar featured snippet currently appear twice on the first results page. Since this is temporary, site owners should monitor their traffic and click-through rate. When the format gets pushed into the main column, those URLs will only appear once within the organic results, as they do for regular featured snippets.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 29, 2020.

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Social Media

Facebook Outlines Evolving Privacy Tools on Data Privacy Day

Marking Data Privacy Day, Facebook has this week outlined it’s evolving efforts to provide users with more control over how their personal data is accessed, and how they can maintain awareness and control over such to avoid potential misuse. In a post written by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook outlines three key areas of improvement – and while none of the features shared in the post are new, as such, they do point to the company’s ongoing effort to provide more transparency over such process.

For the full article click here 

Snapchat Publishes New Data on Brand Expectations Among Gen Z Consumers

In the modern, connected era, brands have access to more consumer insights than ever before, while consumers have more ways in which to share their opinions, and be heard by the businesses they deal with. That’s changed the way many organizations operate, in various capacities – but importantly, it’s also changed what customers expect, in regards to engagement, response and subsequent action from the brands they buy from. This new paradigm is the focus of the latest research report from Snap Inc. – Snap recently partnered with the team from CASSANDRA in order to seek opinions from Gen Z consumers around what they expect, in terms of innovation, from the brands that they’re more likely to purchase from.

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Marketing

New Report Underlines the Importance of Social for Customer Service 

For a growing number of brands, social platforms have become key customer service channels, enabling consumers to get in touch, quickly and easily, on the platforms that they’re already using, while also providing businesses with an opportunity to address and resolve concerns, and provide further assistance as needed. And as more businesses jump on the social customer care train, that then raises the bar of expectation for others. These days, consumers expect to be able to shoot businesses a quick message, or tweet a brand handle and get a reply.

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How Emerging Email Innovation Will Impact Marketers in 2020

During a recent webinar where I co-presented with Senior Editor Jennifer Cannon, I received several questions relating to innovations that will impact email marketers in 2020. I wanted to take this opportunity to answer some of them.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 28, 2020.

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Social Media

LinkedIn Announces Merger of Elevate Functionality With Company Pages

“LinkedIn Pages and Elevate have enabled organizations to interact at scale with the people who matter most to their business, and tell their brand stories in ways not possible anywhere else. Over the last four years, hundreds of our customers have used Elevate to help their employees be brand advocates. At the same time, these customers – and over 50 million more organizations – have worked to build their LinkedIn Page so they can engage their most important audiences.”

For the full article click here 

Byte, the Second-Coming of Vine, Is Now Available on iOS and Android

Functionally, Byte is very much like Vine, which, by extension, means that it’s also similar to TikTok, though as noted by TechCrunch, Byte, at launch, lacks any of the additional remix, AR and effects tools available on the rising video app. TikTok also allows for longer uploads, which could give it an edge – although Vine’s 6-second time limit definitely worked in its favor first time around. Perhaps it’ll catch on again, and make Byte the next big hit.

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Marketing

What Local SEOs Should Focus on in 2020

Predictions are cheap; strategic and tactical advice is much more valuable. To discover what leading local SEOs are thinking about in 2020, I asked a number of local experts to offer their top three recommendations or pieces of advice for colleagues this year. I was curious if there was going to be any consensus advice. Beyond the fact that everyone needs to focus on Google My Business (and the repeated injunction to “test, test, test”) there really wasn’t any. The following four sets of recommendations, from GatherUp’s Mike Blumethal, Moz’s Miriam Ellis, RioSEO’s Krystal Taing and LocalSEOGuide’s Dan Leibson, illustrate the range of opinions and diverse tactics that constitute local SEO today.

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How to Build Traffic to New or Struggling Websites

There’s an idea that Google prefers “fresh” content. That’s not entirely correct. The idea comes from a misunderstanding of Google’s “freshness algorithm.” The freshness algorithm promotes new content when it is trending and of the moment. The freshness algorithm is not about promoting recently published content. It’s about promoting trending content. The publication date is not a ranking factor. Changing the publication date will not make the web page rank better. Google’s freshness algorithm is 100% about relevance to users. A fresh web page is relevant to a person searching for the latest information.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 27, 2020.

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Social Media

5 Reasons Businesses Need to Get on TikTok

A once predominately lip-synching app has grown into a full short-form video content hub. The platform sports features similar to those of Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter all meshed together to suck people in and keep them scrolling for more. That’s right, we’re talking TikTok. TikTok is booming and there is no way to ignore it. So, it is about time we address it head-on.

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Snapchat Signs New Deal with NBC to Air Daily Shows Covering the 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Snapchat has signed a new deal with NBC which will see it host a range of exclusive programming around the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As reported by Variety: “The 2020 Olympics partnership encompasses four daily original Snapchat Shows produced by NBC, exclusively for the platform in vertical-video orientation. Those include – for the first time – two highlights shows that will be updated in “near real-time,” according to the companies. Overall, NBC plans to produce more than 70 episodes for Snapchat, more than three times the 2018 Winter Games.”

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Marketing

Google Will Re-Assess its New-Look Desktop Search Display After Criticism of the Latest Update

Earlier this month, Google rolled out a new display format for its desktop search result listings, which aimed to bring them more into line with mobile search display, and added prominent favicons and URL listings to each result. But the change has seen significant criticism, with some suggesting that the format makes it much harder for users to distinguish between paid ads and actual, earned results.

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LinkedIn Announces Merger of Elevate Functionality with Company Pages

LinkedIn has announced that it’s merging the functionality of its Elevate employee advocacy platform into its company pages tools, providing more ways for LinkedIn page managers to engage their employees in order to amplify relevant updates and build reputation online. As explained by LinkedIn: “LinkedIn Pages and Elevate have enabled organizations to interact at scale with the people who matter most to their business, and tell their brand stories in ways not possible anywhere else. Over the last four years, hundreds of our customers have used Elevate to help their employees be brand advocates. At the same time, these customers – and over 50 million more organizations – have worked to build their LinkedIn Page so they can engage their most important audiences.”

For the full article click here

Daily Minute Master Series – January 24, 2020.

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Social Media

Facebook Highlights Evolving Topics of Conversation in Latest ‘Topics to Watch’ Report

Facebook has this week released its latest ‘Topics to Watch’ report, which highlights all the key subjects that saw significant increases in mention volume in December 2019, the last month of the last decade. Facebook’s Topics to Watch reports can be a great way to stay ahead of the latest trends and shifts – Facebook’s research team says that up to 80% of the topics they’ve identified in their monthly reports have gone on to become more significant movements, which means that by tapping into them early, you can potentially stay ahead of the curve.

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TikTok Signs New Music Licensing Deals to Enable Increased Music Usage and Partnerships

Music is central to TikTok, and the company is now close to further legitimizing such connection with a raft of new music licensing deals which are, reportedly, close to being announced. As reported by TechCrunch, TikTok has this week signed an agreement with Merlin, an agency which represents a range of independent music labels and artists, while TechCrunch also says that TikTok has agreed to similar licensing deals with Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music, though nothing has been officially announced on the latter three as yet.

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Marketing

Google Offers Guidance on Featured Snippets Update

Google used to give a URL two spots in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when that URL ranked with a featured snippet, also known as position zero because it ranked above position one of the normal search results. That is no longer the case. Google will no longer show duplicate URLs for pages promoted to the featured snippets.This process of removing duplicate URLs from SERPs containing featured snippets is called deduplication

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7 Trends B2B Marketers & Companies Must Embrace in 2020

Marketing’s inherently dynamic nature requires that marketers in every industry stay on top of the continuously evolving trends, tools, and topics. Timing is of the essence. If you’re “fighting the last war” by following your 2019 marketing blueprint, you will inevitably fall behind the innovators who are leaving the past in the dust. So let’s look at some of the tools and strategies that forward-thinking companies should embrace this year.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 23, 2020.

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Social Media

Facebook Publishes New Safety Guide for Athletes

In the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Facebook has published a new guide to help professional athletes better secure and protect their Facebook and Instagram accounts. As explained by Facebook: “This guide is designed to help you prevent, protect, moderate, and escalate on both Facebook and Instagram. We’ll run through how to protect your password, set up two-factor authentication, understand Page access and take action when you’ve been hacked. We’ll also walk through how to moderate your Pages, and how to escalate when you experience bullying and harassment.”

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Instagram’s Adding a New Way to Find and Share Stories that Mention Your Profile

The option could be great for brands looking to showcase relevant mentions, which could include customer feedback, endorsements, influencer marketing partnerships, etc. It may well be worth taking a look through your Stories mentions regularly, with a view to amplifying relevant messages, adding a level of social proof via customer comment. At this stage, it’s not clear how widely accessible the option is. Instagram rolled out its ‘Stories About You’ feature a few months back, which provides a similar listing of active Stories that mention your @handle (though in your Mentions feed, not within the Stories flow like this), but that listing is only available to Instagram users with either a business or creator account.

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Marketing

Google Adds New ‘Collections’ Listings Based on Your Search History

Google’s looking to make your search history more functional by gathering topically related queries that you’ve entered in the past into defined collections, based on subject groups. As explained by Google: “Today, we’re launching some changes to Collections in Search to make it easier to jump back into your task without digging through your search history. Using AI, Collections in the Google app and mobile web now groups similar pages you’ve visited from Search related to activities like cooking, shopping and hobbies. You can choose to save these suggested collections so you can come back to them later.”

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3 Tips for Brands Looking to Utilize TikTok for Marketing

According to the data, TikTok was the third most-downloaded app of the year, beating out both Facebook and Instagram (in fourth and fifth places, respectively). Typically, the significant rise of a new social media app opens the floor for online debate – should users create a personal or professional account with the platform or skip it? TikTok’s current audience is dominated by younger users, and depending on a brand’s target market, this may either turn businesses on or off in creating accounts. However, most major social media apps were initially written off as passing fads, and are now embraced and utilized on a daily basis by large organizations.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 22, 2020.

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Social Media

Instagram’s VP of Product Provides Insight into its Hidden Like Count Test

“This one came from the team that works on interactions and feed, so this team is incentivized to try to drive more likes [and] more comments, but in all of their user research, they heard so loud and clear that people felt like the public like count was a very high area of pressure for them when they produce content on Instagram […] the act of expression itself is what we cared about, not the validation, or perceived validation, that a public like count gets people.” 

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Changes Could be Coming for Twitter’s Explore Page

As part of its enhanced focus on topics, and connecting users to the tweets that will be of most interest to them, Twitter has been working to refine its Explore listings of late. You might have noticed a few weeks back that topic listings disappeared from the main page, for example, then returned a few days later. Well, Explore could be set to change again – this week, Twitter product designed Martin Craster has put out a call to users asking for feedback on how they can improve Explore in line with audience need.

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Marketing

SameSite Requirements for Cookies: What SEOs and Developers Need to Know

As part of ongoing efforts to improve browser safety, the Chrome development team announced a new implementation of SameSite attributes and requirements regarding cookies. The new code uses a more stringent ‘secure-by-default’ model for getting and setting values on the browser. The difference is an enforced SameSite value of ‘None’ plus Secure in third-party cookie contexts. This change also makes it easier for browser creators to grant the user options to manage third-party cookies and first-party cookies independently.

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Get Ready For An Even Stronger Google in 2020

Welcome to a new decade. Search behavior continues to shape the way businesses operate in the digital world. And Google continues to influence search behavior. As I talked with my colleagues and researched trends for 2020, it became clear that for all the controversy surrounding Google’s growth – for all the buzz surrounding threats to Google, including the rise of Amazon – Google just keeps finding ways to become more dominant. Here’s what I see happening in the coming year:

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 21, 2020.

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Social Media

Social Shorts: Instagram Tests Web DMs, TikTok Explores Curated Content Streams, Pinterest Passes Snapchat in Users

Pinterest eclipses Snapchat in users. In 2019, Pinterest surpassed Snapchat as the third-biggest social media platform in the U.S. and will continue to stay ahead in the coming years, according to the latest estimates from eMarketer. In 2018, Snapchat barely edged Pinterest out with 75.8 million users (compared with Pinterest’s 75.5 million), despite the fact that Snapchat lost users after its major redesign. Snapchat rebounded last year with 80.2 million users, but was still surpassed by Pinterest, which claimed 82.4 million users at the end of 2019.

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Instagram Drops IGTV Button Due to Lack of Use

Instagram is dropping the IGTV app from its home screen, saying very few users have been clicking on it. Users are primarily accessing IGTV content through links from the main feed, as well as the Explore feed and directly from creators’ profiles. IGTV videos can still be accessed this way going forward. Instagram also has a dedicated IGTV app, which will still be available, but a report from TechCrunch reveals the app has failed to catch on with users. Only 7 million of Instagram’s 1 billion+ users have downloaded the app since it launched in June 2018.

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Marketing

Keywords in SEO: What It Means to Write for Search Audiences in 2020

SEO content is content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines. That term, however, has fallen out of favor with many SEO professionals. That’s because “SEO content” implies content written for search engines rather than humans, and that’s not good. Why? Because Google’s algorithm is a programmatic representation of the searcher. If the algorithm is trying to model what a human visitor would pick as the best result, the answer to “how to rank” is to do what’s best for searchers.

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A New Search Engine Enters the Market – OneSearch from Verizon Media

An unlikely competitor enters the search engine market as Verizon Media launches its privacy-focused OneSearch. OneSearch promises not to track, store, or share personal or search data with advertisers, which puts it in direct competition with DuckDuckGo. It’s available now on desktop and mobile at OneSearch.com. What differentiates Verizon Media’s OneSearch from DuckDuckGo, a more established privacy-focused search engine, is the ability for businesses to integrate it with their existing privacy and security products.

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Daily Minute Master Series – January 20, 2020.

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Social Media

LinkedIn Brings 3 New Features to LinkedIn Pages

LinkedIn pages are gaining three new features designed to facilitate more community engagement and form stronger relationships with followers. According to LinkedIn, there are now more than 50 million organizations around the world utilizing pages to connect with customers, prospects, and employees. To assist these organizations, LinkedIn rolls out regular updates every quarter. With this quarter’s update, new features include invite to follow, LinkedIn Live integration, and new posting options.

For the full article click here 

Twitter Confirms That It Won’t Be Adding an Edit Option Anytime Soon

Tweet editing advocates, brace yourselves. This week, in an interview with Wired, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that an edit button is not on the cards for the platform, and likely never will be. Dorsey’s statement pours cold water on previous indications he’s made in regards to a possible edit option. In late 2016, Dorsey gave users hope by suggesting that tweet editing could be made available within a confined window, like a 5-minute gap after posting a tweet, within which you would be able to fix up any errors as required.

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Marketing

How to Grow Your Organic Traffic with Amazing Content & Collaboration

Even if a site does not sell similar products or services as you, but they compete for the same real estate in the search results, they are a search competitor and someone you need to pay attention to as you conduct keyword research. As you analyze your site and competitor sites, you should be looking for the best opportunities to start ranking quickly. Your best opportunities will be keywords and phrases that have relatively low competition – based on backlink numbers and the authority of ranking domains – and high search volumes.

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The Latest Data on the January 2020 Google Core Update

Now that the Google January 2020 core update is mostly rolled out, we have asked several data providers to send us what they found with this Google search update. All of the data providers agree that this core update was a big one and impacted a large number of web sites. What we know from Google, as we previously reported, is that the January 2020 core update started to roll out around 12:00 PM ET on Monday, January 13th. That rollout was “mostly done” by Thursday morning, on January 16th. We also know that this was a global update, and was not specific to any region, language or category of web sites. It is a classic “broad core update.”

For the full article click here

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