Daily Minute Master Series – September 16, 2019

Social Media

Facebook Expands ‘Today In’ Local News Section to More Than 6,000 US Cities and Towns

Facebook has this week announced that localized versions of the offering, which is designed to promote increased civic engagement, will now be made available to over 6,000 cities and towns across the US. Today In’, which is available via in-feed prompts, or via your Facebook apps listing, highlights the biggest news stories of interest in your local region, as well as local Page posts which are generating discussion, upcoming events, weather, local groups, school updates, etc. The intention of ‘Today In’ is basically to keep you updated on happenings in your community, in order to prompt increased participation. This new expansion, Facebook says, will also bring more localized content to “news deserts” – places which have a limited supply of local news. Facebook sources this localized content by “supplementing the available local news with relevant articles from surrounding areas”. In addition to this, Facebook’s also expanding the Facebook Journalism Project Community Network grant project, which aims to fund local journalism, while it’s also testing its breaking news indicator with more local news publishers in the U.S.

For the full article click here 

LinkedIn Adds New ‘Find an Expert’ Post Option to Connect with Relevant Freelancers

Back in July, LinkedIn rolled out its new services listings for profiles, which enable freelancers and SMBs to list the services that they provide on their LinkedIn profile, and be found for the same in search results. Now LinkedIn’s adding another element to this offering, with a new post option that enables users to fill in relevant fields in order to put out a call for help from experts. The new post type seeks to simplify the process of finding relevant freelancers and professionals, while also making your request for help stand out within LinkedIn feeds. Interested providers can click through for more specific info, helping (ideally) to filter your responses down to more relevant providers for each.  Initially, these tools were only available to a limited subset of users, but LinkedIn says that the new posting option is now available to all users globally, both on iOS and Android, while services listings on profiles are in the process of being expanded to more regions.

For the full article click here 

Facebook’s Testing a New ‘Chat’ Post Type to Connect Users to Private Messenger Chats

Facebook is testing out a new Facebook post type which would funnel viewers through to a private chat group on Messenger. The new post type – spotted by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong – would essentially enable users to promote a private Messenger chat group, and link their connections through to it. Given the overall rise in messaging use across all social apps, it makes sense for Facebook to be looking at ways to better incorporate connection to more private discussion. Depending on how its rolled out (if it’s rolled out), it could also provide new ways for brands to spark discussion around their products and offerings with their most dedicated fans. You could ask people for their opinions, or pose a question related to your industry, and start a discussion on key trends. That would be dependent on it becoming a post option for Pages, which we don’t know about as yet.

For the full article click here 

Marketing

Google now gives more preference to original reporting in search

Over the past few months, Google has been rolling out algorithmic updates to its rankings algorithms to give more preferences to stories that were the original source. Original reporting will not only rank better in Google Search but soon will also rank better in Google News, including Google Discover. In addition to original reporting ranking better, the stories will stay at the top of the news cluster for a longer period of time, Richard Gingras, the Vice President of Google News told us. Google is now talking about this change because of two reasons. The first is that the company has recently updated its search quality raters guidelines and added specific items around original reporting. The second is Google is now happy with how the new algorithms are working around original reporting being prioritized in search. If you are a publisher and you produce news content, it might not just be enough to do “value add” type of reporting. You may need to work harder to be the original news source of the topic to get real traction and traffic from Google. At the same time, this has rolled out over the past few months and if you saw any significant traffic changes from Google, this may be one of many reasons why.

For the full article click here