Social Media
6 Key Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020
We know that consumers are growing increasingly wary of ads in their feeds, and more than ever before, they’re now seeking reviews from people they trust when making purchasing decisions. These people can be friends and family, but the circle of trust has now grown to people they follow on social media, ranging from celebrities to niche artists and experts in specific fields. Social media has always been great for SMBs and startups, because it allows small brands with little to no budget to compete with larger brands on the same stage. Many SMBs don’t have the budgets to go after the “named” influencers, so we see a larger opportunity for the growth of micro-influencers in the new year.
For the full article click here
Instagram Adds Age Checks For New Accounts, New Options to Restrict Messaging
Again, adding additional measures to protect younger users is an important step, even in basic form like this. Facebook has had the same for years, and TikTok also has age checks in place. And while younger users can still side-step such requirements, it adds another detection and enforcement tool, expanding Instagram’s options in this respect. Interestingly, Instagram is also looking to age-gate business accounts. Earlier this year, a research report suggested that a growing number of young users had started converting their personal Insta profiles into business accounts in order to access more in-depth audience data on post-performance, in response to Instagram hiding total like counts.
For the full article click here
Marketing
Now Is The Time To Position Your Site For A Successful Start to 2020
It is the holiday season again, and you know what that means… the year is almost over and it’s time to start preparing our SEO strategies for next year! Along with eggnog frappuccinos, cooler weather, and people putting Christmas lights up (way too early), the end of the year signifies a time for reflection – and this rings true for SEO as well. As your current SEO strategy winds down, now is the time to position your site for a successful Q1. Specifically, if your strategy has a heavy focus on link acquisition and manual outreach, the end of the year is the perfect time to shift some of your efforts to other areas – response rates to outreach are traditionally lower in November and December as people are away from their emails on holiday vacations.
For the full article click here
Facebook Adds New Measures To Enforce Targeting Restrictions On Potentially Discriminatory Ad Types
First off, Facebook has announced that the new ad restrictions in these categories will now be applied across all of its various ad creation surfaces, including Ads Manager, Instagram Promote, the Facebook Marketing API and ads created via Facebook Pages. The new restrictions for these ad types came into effect back in August, but up till now, they’ve only been fully enforced when those ads were purchased through Ads Manager. Now, the limitations will be uniform across Facebook’s ad surfaces, ensuring that the restrictions are more thoroughly enacted.
For the full article click here
Daily Minute Master Series – December 16, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Pinterest Introduces Tool For Discovering Top US Search Terms
Pinterest is introducing a new tool to help marketers keep up with the top US search terms on the platform. Currently in beta, Pinterest Trends provides an overview of the most popular search terms from the past 12 months. The tool will also highlight when particular search terms have hit their peak, along with other insights to help marketers plan their content and advertising strategies.
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Twitter Lets iOS Users Post Live Photos as GIFs
Twitter is rolling out a new feature to its iOS app, which lets users easily upload their live photos as GIFs. This feature is exclusive to iOS because live photos are an Apple innovation. A “live” photo captures 1.5 seconds before and after the user taps the shutter button. That means it would turn into a 3-second GIF on Twitter. If you have an iPhone 6S or above, you can ensure you’re taking a live photo by tapping the corresponding icon and looking for the yellow label that says “LIVE.”
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Marketing
Lytics Now Integrates with Google Marketing Platform to Enable Customer Data-Informed Campaigns
Customer data platform Lytics announced this week it now integrates with Google Marketing Platform’s full suite of tools, including Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Optimize 360, Display and Video 360 and more.The integration makes it possible for marketers to target ads with their customer data housed in Lytics and improve retargeting efficiencies by recognizing and suppressing existing customers as they convert. It also enables real-time analysis of Lytics segments in Google Analytics. The Lytics tag is also now available natively in Google Tag Manager for easy deployment.
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SMS Overtime: Managing Your Online Business Reviews
Start with Google. Google reviews have the biggest impact on your reputation and search rankings. Google owns 93 percent of the search market, and as noted earlier, reviews are one of the most important local search ranking signals on Google. Accumulating customer reviews on Google is most important for both your reputation and your visibility online. Facebook remains an important number two choice to focus your time. Research from Vendasta shows that Facebook is a critical site for reviews owing to its traffic and review volume, which is true in my experience working with clients. After all, next to Google and YouTube, Facebook is the world’s most popular site – and its user base is growing.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 13, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Snapchat Adds Swipe-Up to Call Ad Option in the Middle East
Up till now, Snapchat advertisers have been able to drive website visits, extended video views and app installs from ‘Swipe Up’ ad links. The capacity to power phone calls adds to your options – as explained by Snapchat:“Driving a user to call your business can close a purchase quickly, as your sales associates have more control over the user experience by speaking with the consumer directly. More importantly, a user calling showcases a high level of consideration and intent to purchase, which businesses can capitalize on.”
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Instagram Begins Rolling Out Collaborative Group Stories Option
Instagram will be hoping that by providing more tools on this front, it’ll be able to maximize interest in group messaging use, and boost engagement. And definitely, having the capacity to create your own, private stories with friends will have a level of appeal. It could also hold a level of appeal for brand use – though it is worth noting that Instagram Direct groups are limited to 32 people. It’s not clear if the option is being rolled out to all users as yet, or if it’ll be launched in phases, but you can likely expect to see it appear in your Instagram message threads sometime soon.
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Marketing
3 Ways to Measure Influencer Success Without Instagram “Likes”
Back in July, Instagram began hiding likes in seven countries. Now, Instagram has announced it will begin hiding likes in the United States as well. Account-holders will still be able to see their personal like counts, but visitors will not. As a result, the “popularity contest” that was for so long at the heart of Instagram will cease to exist hopefully creating a more welcoming environment where users feel comfortable expressing themselves. This rather surprising platform change carries with it significant impact as those marketers who were largely reliant on vanity metrics to measure social media success now find their influencer measurement capabilities turned upside down.
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Global Email Benchmark Report Finds Email Isn’t Dead – It’s Essential
Email marketing and analytics provider Twilio SendGrid has published its third Global Email Benchmark Report, with a portion of the study dedicated to analyzing email recipients and senders. The report found that 95% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents stated that their personal email — notably not their work email — is essential to their daily lives. The study also examines factors including open rates, send frequency, personalization and different media types to provides monthly engagement data from over 60 billion emails.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 12, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Twitter Will Set Up A New Team to Explore A Decentralized Social Media Network Model
It’s an ambitious remit for the bluesky team, and Dorsey acknowledges that it could take “many years” to develop a useable decentralized standard for social media communication. But by building an open community, which would be inclusive of companies, organizations, researchers and civil society leaders, “all who are thinking deeply about the consequences, positive and negative”, Dorsey believes that this could be a key initiative, which could advance the capability of social media as a connective medium.
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Instagram’s Working on a New ‘Poses’ Mode for Stories
The option would be the latest in the ever-growing list of Instagram Stories tools. Just this week, reports have suggested that Instagram is also now testing new ‘Layouts’ and ‘Shoutouts’ modes for Stories content, while even more tools are still in the works, and at varying stages of development. That makes sense – Instagram wants to maintain the momentum of Stories, and cater to demand – but with even more Stories tools, there’s also a risk that such options could eventually become generic through repeated use.
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Marketing
73% of Marketers Plan to Increase ABM Budgets in 2020
Account-based marketing tactics are set to account for a growing share of marketing budgets in 2020. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of marketers who are using account-based marketing (ABM) tactics plan to increase their ABM budgets in the coming year, according to a study by Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) and the ABM Leadership Alliance. On average, the ABM-practicing marketers said they dedicated 29% of their budgets to ABM in 2019. The report, which surveyed 196 marketers from B2B technology and business services companies, found that 71% of the companies saw greater ROI within their ABM efforts compared to their traditional marketing initiatives.
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How to Dominate SERPS by Focusing on Topics Instead of Keywords
If you have been in SEO for any amount of time, you know that keywords have always played a large role in the discipline’s success metrics. That’s why it is so common to hear so many conversations around keywords and keyword research when talking to anyone about SEO. While I think that keywords are still important for measuring success for a site, I think updating that keyword-focused mindset to focusing on topics will yield better results.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 11, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Instagram’s Now Testing It’s New Layout Options for Instagram Stories Frames
Instagram has begun limited testing of a new ‘Layout’ option in Instagram Stories which enables users to select from a range of presentation styles for their visuals within a Stories frame. The Layout option was first spotted in testing by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong back in August, but now seems to have crossed over to the next stage of beta testing. At that time, Wong also reported that Instagram had been testing a range of new Boomerang modes, which would further add to your creative options.
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Facebook Adds New, Interactive Features for Portal Smart Speaker
“Story Time lets you bring children’s stories to life with augmented reality effects that change your appearance to match the characters. We’re adding new renditions of classic stories, Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears, plus new tales from Llama Llama, Pete the Cat and Otto.” And that’s not the only new interactive tool – Facebook’s also adding ‘Mic Drop’, a lip-synching option which will enable you to perform popular song clips “on an AR stage during a call”, and will come with Stories-style AR masks to “transform you into various music genre characters from a punk rocker or hippie to an ’80s rock star”.
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Marketing
Facebook Introduces 3 New Ad Reporting Tools 3 Things Marketers Need to Focus on in 2020
Much like the plaid miniskirt trend, micro-campaigns are short and sweet. If you haven’t heard of a micro-campaign, no worries — 2020 isn’t here quite yet. Micro-campaigns are small pieces of a larger campaign and these bite-sized campaigns are released to customers earlier. For example, you have a new product launch for athletic shoes. In the 2019 way of working, you’d spend a few weeks (or months) planning the campaign from beginning to end. It would include sponsorships, blog posts, social contests, in-store promotions, etc., with every last detail for the entire campaign planned in advance.
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Pro Tip: Why You Should Stop Using Last-Click Attribution in Google Ads
When was the last time you searched for something, clicked an ad and purchased immediately? Probably never. That’s why it’s time for marketers to stop using last-click attribution for measuring success in Google Ads. Often, people are searching on multiple devices and do extensive browsing and research before making a purchase. Understanding the impact that higher-funnel keywords have on conversions can help better utilize spend, cut out waste and inform other digital marketing channels such as SEO and social media.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 10, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
New App Lists TikTok Influencers by Engagement, Topic and Audience
With more businesses looking to tap into TikTok in 2020, this new app could be particularly helpful. Called simply ‘Influence Grid’, the app uses publicly available TikTok data to provide listings of TikTok influencers based on a range of customizable parameters, including country, topic, account size, average video views and engagement rate. The app’s data is updated every 20 days, ensuring that the information and tags stay fresh, and remain relevant to each users’ content, and additional options, like the capacity to download lists to .CSV, are also reportedly on the way.
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Snapchat Begins Testing ‘Cameo’ Mode, Which Inserts Your Image into GIFs
Snapchat has begun live testing of a new mode called ‘Cameo’, which will enable users to insert their faces into GIFs, adding their own, unique spin to a range of short video clips. when you tap on the Bitmoji icon in the messaging section, you’ll soon have a new option represented by the outline of a face with a plus symbol on it. Tap on that and you’ll be prompted to take a selfie for your Cameo videos. You then select a body type for reference, and you can begin adding your image into the set of GIFs available – Snapchat says that there will initially be around 150 short video clips available for Cameo, with sound, with new ones coming each week.
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Marketing
Facebook Introduces 3 New Ad Reporting Tools
In time for the holiday shopping season, Facebook is rolling out new tools to assist advertisers with analyzing campaign performance. Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and publishers. With this data, advertisers can better understand how ads are performing, which demographics they’re reaching, and where the most conversions are coming from. Here’s more about the new ad reporting tools.
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4 Ways to Improve Your PPC Strategy in 2020
For many of us, December is a less busy time of year. People go on vacation and business slows down. And as with many PPC marketers, I like to use this time to get caught up, regroup, and prepare for the coming year. You might consider doing the same. Because the strategies you put into place now can continue to pay dividends throughout 2020. If you’re not sure where to start, here are four suggestions for where to put your efforts.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 9, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Facebook Launches Cross-Account Reporting and Custom Ad Metrics
Facebook has this week added some new performance measurement options in Ad Manager, including cross-account reporting and custom metrics. First off, on cross-account reporting – now, when you’re managing multiple Facebook ad accounts, you’ll be able to get a clearer, overall view of ad performance, all within the Ad Manager dashboard, as opposed to having to extract the data for each account yourself.
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Instagram Publishes New Guides for Parents and Teens on Safe Use of the App
Instagram has this week published two new guide books, both for parents and for teens, to help them better understand how to use the app safely, and how to manage the potential psychological impacts of navigating the feed. Produced in conjunction with The Jed Foundation, which works to promote measures to protect the emotional health of teens and young adults, the guide books contain a range of insights into how Instagram works, and aim to shine a light on what’s happening behind the scenes for each user, in order to reduce unhealthy comparison.
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Marketing
Google Ads to Explain Why Changes in Performance Occurred
Advertisers can view explanations for changes in impressions, clicks, and cost. Google Ads will provide the most likely reasons behind why the changes occurred. With this new feature, advertisers can spend less time diagnosing performance changes and more time optimizing their campaigns. Look for it next time you’re comparing changes over time – significant changes will be emphasized in blue, as shown in the example below.
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Social Shorts: TikTok Under Fire For Discrimination, Facebook Enforces Special Ad Restrictions, Twitter expands Brand Surveys
The social media giant filed a lawsuit Wednesday against one entity and two individuals for allegedly operating a hacking campaign targeting accounts on the social network. The alleged hackers are being accused of taking over their victims’ accounts to use their money to buy ads and fraudulent products, according to the lawsuit. Facebook said it’s paid more than $4 million in reimbursements to victims of these hacks. The company said it will continue to work toward mitigating malicious behavior on the platform, adding, “Creating real-world consequences for those who deceive users and engage in cloaking schemes is important in maintaining the integrity of our platform.”
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 6, 2019.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Your Youtube Subscriber Numbers Could Take a Hit This Week
So YouTube’s saying that even if you do lose a few subscribers, that won’t really matter, in a broader context, as they weren’t really watching your content anyway. Which is true – but then again, subscriber counts do matter in respect to the platform’s monetization tools and expanded features. YouTube Stories, for example, is only available to channels with over 10,000 subscribers, while Super Chat, YouTube’s live-stream tipping feature, only becomes available once you hit 1,000 subscribers.
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Marketing
The Process and Performance of Ad Retargeting, and Why You Should Be Using It
As noted, retargeting is a cookie-powered form of tracking which enables a javascript code to non-invasively, and anonymously, ‘follow’ your targeted audience across the internet. Website owners embed a small segment of code within their website – commonly referred to as a pixel. Whenever a visitor arrives onto one of your pages, this pixel will leave an anonymous cookie that will be stored in their respective browsers. From here on in, whenever your cookied visitor browses the internet, the code will carefully position relevant adverts to pique the interest of your former visitors.
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Facebook Adds New Measures To Enforce Targeting Restrictions On Potentially Discriminatory Ad Types Google Extends Optimization Score to Display Campaigns
Scores range from 0% to 100% and indicate how well your campaigns are expected to perform based on a number of factors such as targeting, bid automation, ads and extensions and more. The score is accompanied by a set of automated recommendations with indicators of how much of a score improvement you can expect to see by accepting them. These scores and accompanying recommendations can be directionally helpful, but don’t accept the recommendations blindly. Carefully consider them and whether they are right for your campaign. And equally important on the flip side, an optimization score of 100% with no recommendations does not mean there aren’t plenty of opportunities for improvement.
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5 Ways to Make PPC & CRO Together for Bigger Wins
Paid search advertising (PPC) and conversion rate optimization(CRO) are both great for boosting business performance in their own right. Going a step further and combining their insights, however, can make them greater than the sum of their parts.By sharing your findings between the two to combine paid search and CRO into one strategy, you can drive the very best results.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 5, 2019
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
6 Key Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020
We know that consumers are growing increasingly wary of ads in their feeds, and more than ever before, they’re now seeking reviews from people they trust when making purchasing decisions. These people can be friends and family, but the circle of trust has now grown to people they follow on social media, ranging from celebrities to niche artists and experts in specific fields. Social media has always been great for SMBs and startups, because it allows small brands with little to no budget to compete with larger brands on the same stage. Many SMBs don’t have the budgets to go after the “named” influencers, so we see a larger opportunity for the growth of micro-influencers in the new year.
For the full article click here
Instagram Adds Age Checks For New Accounts, New Options to Restrict Messaging
Again, adding additional measures to protect younger users is an important step, even in basic form like this. Facebook has had the same for years, and TikTok also has age checks in place. And while younger users can still side-step such requirements, it adds another detection and enforcement tool, expanding Instagram’s options in this respect. Interestingly, Instagram is also looking to age-gate business accounts. Earlier this year, a research report suggested that a growing number of young users had started converting their personal Insta profiles into business accounts in order to access more in-depth audience data on post-performance, in response to Instagram hiding total like counts.
For the full article click here
Marketing
Now Is The Time To Position Your Site For A Successful Start to 2020
It is the holiday season again, and you know what that means… the year is almost over and it’s time to start preparing our SEO strategies for next year! Along with eggnog frappuccinos, cooler weather, and people putting Christmas lights up (way too early), the end of the year signifies a time for reflection – and this rings true for SEO as well. As your current SEO strategy winds down, now is the time to position your site for a successful Q1. Specifically, if your strategy has a heavy focus on link acquisition and manual outreach, the end of the year is the perfect time to shift some of your efforts to other areas – response rates to outreach are traditionally lower in November and December as people are away from their emails on holiday vacations.
For the full article click here
Facebook Adds New Measures To Enforce Targeting Restrictions On Potentially Discriminatory Ad Types
First off, Facebook has announced that the new ad restrictions in these categories will now be applied across all of its various ad creation surfaces, including Ads Manager, Instagram Promote, the Facebook Marketing API and ads created via Facebook Pages. The new restrictions for these ad types came into effect back in August, but up till now, they’ve only been fully enforced when those ads were purchased through Ads Manager. Now, the limitations will be uniform across Facebook’s ad surfaces, ensuring that the restrictions are more thoroughly enacted.
For the full article click here
Daily Minute Master Series – December 4, 2019
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Twitter Expands Access to Brand Survey Tools to Help Brands Understand Ad Effectiveness
“We’ve developed a proprietary Creative Attribution model to identify the Promoted Tweet or In-Stream Video Ad responsible for high and low brand lift, which helps marketers hone their creative strategy for the future. Additionally, marketers can learn how the frequency of their ad exposure affects brand metrics or understand the lift in message association for their brand and its competitors (hint: if there’s a lift for your competitor, perhaps the creative and messaging is not differentiated enough).”
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TikTok Continues to Refine Content Policies in Response to Various Concerns
Yes, TikTok seems like the next big thing, the next major social media platform moving into the mainstream, and yes, there definitely, on the surface, seems like a lot of marketing opportunity in the short video platform, particularly in regards to connecting with younger audiences. But questions still remain around the platform’s various content moderation and policy approaches, with two new issues arising this week which point to concerns within the app’s process.
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Marketing
How Deep Learning Can Reduce Bias In Advertising
The problem that many marketers currently face is that they rely on third-party platforms to determine who their ad is shown to. For example, while advertising platforms like Facebook allow marketers to roughly sketch out their target audience, it is ultimately up to the algorithm itself to identify the exact users who will see the ad. To put it another way, a company might put out an ad that is not targeted to a specific age group, ethnicity, or gender, and still find that certain groups are more likely to see their ads than others.
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ListenFirst Provides Branded Content Reporting Across Multiple Social Platforms
There are numerous tools to help marketers keep tabs on their own influencer and branded content performance analytics, but finding cross-platform competitor data can difficult. ListenFirst is giving brands — and media companies — cross-channel analytics to determine benchmarks for branded content partnerships so that they can compare their performance against other industry sponsorships. “By understanding how media, advertisers and their social media offerings perform across every industry, our sales team can better prospect and capitalize on sponsorships,” said AT&T’s VP of Revenue and Strategy for Original Content Gerryann Agovino. The VP reported ListenFirst’s Branded Content Analysis platform offered her team a new layer of intelligence that helped tailor their sales strategies.
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Daily Minute Master Series – December 3, 2019
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Twitter Publishes 2020 Marketing Calendar to Help with Strategic Planning
“Twitter is a place for people and brands to connect with what’s happening – and while new conversations are constantly unfolding, there are some buzzworthy dates and events you can plan on. As such, we’ve rounded up 2020’s most-anticipated events that will unfold on Twitter – from the Olympics to #WorldEmojiDay – along with monthly tips for tying them into your strategy.”
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Facebook Tests Tool That Lets Users Transfer Photos to Google and Other Platforms
Facebook is testing a new tool that gives users the ability to move photos and videos between Facebook and other platforms, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The test is initially rolling out with support for Google Photos, with other platforms to follow in the coming months. The move is part of the Data Transfer Project, a joint initiative among Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft aimed at making it easier to transfer data between online services.
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Marketing
Picking the Best Platform for Your Influencer Campaign
Though many think of YouTube and Instagram as the only options, Twitter and TikTok are giving the former a quite literal run for their money. Marketers have always chased eyeballs. Now, they’re chasing influencers across the far corners of the internet. Better to fish where the fish are than to cast a line into the void. And where these fish are—the social platforms—marketers are finding that the water is welcoming if they understand how influencers treat each platform.
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5 Audiences You Should Exclude from Your PPC Campaigns
With the blurring of match type accuracy, PPC has become more about audience targeting than ever before. Ad platforms offer almost infinite ways to slice and dice audiences to reach the perfect customers for your brand. As you build an audience strategy, identifying the people you don’t want to target is just as important as finding the people you do want to reach. Negative audiences help reduce wasted spend, ensure people see the right messaging at the right stage of the funnel, and prevent weary shoppers from being retargeted with products too many times.
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