Daily Minute Master Series – August 8, 2019

Social Media

Pinterest adds new e-commerce layer with personalized ‘shopping hub’ atop user feed

Pinterest continues to push e-commerce initiatives, introducing a personalized “shopping hub” last week that displays at the top of users’ feeds with product recommendations pulled from retailers’ organic Product Pins and Catalog feeds. Pinterest also rolled out an updated shopping section that will display below Product Pins, highlighting Catalog content from the respective brand. “Making it easy to browse into the catalogs of brands of all sizes, like Target, Birdies Slippers, Joybird, The Tie Bar and Parachute,” Pinterest wrote on its business blog. Pinterest is continuing to build out e-commerce features for its discovery platform to connect users to more branded product recommendations. This personalized “shopping hub” gives retailers the opportunity to expand their reach on the platform outside of ad campaigns.

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Facebook Adds New Slideshow Option to Facebook Stories to Boost Usage

In it’s latest attempt to get more people using Facebook Stories, Facebook has introduced a new Stories option, which will enable users to add a still image slideshow to their Story. The new option, provides a simplified way to add a stream of images, which will play out through your Story frames. That could be particularly relevant among older users and/or those less familiar with the Stories format, both of which are key audience groups that Facebook ‘s keen to get onto the Stories train. But it also again raises the question, with Facebook pushing yet another Stories option as it seeks to boost engagement: Is Facebook Stories really going to supersede the News Feed as the primary social sharing option on The Social Network? The data does support the Stories shift, growth momentum which Facebook says will see Stories overtake feed sharing this year. 

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Marketing

Google testing tools now support evergreen Googlebot

Google announced that many of the testing tools available within Google Search Console or the Google developer portal are now using the new evergreen Googlebot for crawling. Three months ago, Google launched what is being called evergreen Googlebot. In short, it means that Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, will crawl the web using the latest version of Chromium – basically what you and I see when we launch Chrome and browse the web. Googlebot and Chrome will be using the same rendering engine. Now, three months after this launch, the tools Google have now support and will continue to support the latest version of Chrome. That means what you see in Chrome, what Googlebot sees and what Google shows you in its testing tools should all match. These tools are: Search Console’s URL inspection tool, Mobile-friendly test, Rich results test and AMP tes.  With this update, the testing tools will now show us what Googlebot sees today. For the past three months, the testing tools were using the old version of Googlebot and what those tools were showing you were actually not exactly what the new Googlebot was seeing. So now you can depend more on these tools for your SEO tests and validations.

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Google discontinues Trips mobile app

After three years, Google has phased out the Trips mobile app and integrated its “Things to do in a destination,” “Trip reservations” and “Saved places” features into Search and Maps. This follows the launch of Google’s browser-based travel planning tool announced at the company’s Marketing Live event in May. Did you even remember Trips existed? The impact of shutting it down will be minimal, but moving the users it did have from the Trips mobile app to Search and Maps for their travel planning may yield more opportunities to show ads to potential customers that have expressed interest in businesses like yours or have already booked travel to the area you service. Google.com/travel’s browser-based interface offers the same trip planning features on desktop and mobile, which may allow advertisers to target travelers that are logged in as they plan their itineraries at home and when they’ve arrived at their travel destinations.

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