Social Media

Instagram and Facebook Add New Features for #PrideMonth

Instagram has officially announced its latest Pride Month features, with some new creative and functional tools to help support the LGBTQ community. The new color additions were actually spotted by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong late last month, and provide some interesting considerations for Stories color-coding beyond Pride. In addition to this, Instagram is also adding in more gender listing options for users. Instagram’s new Pride features will go live from this week – meanwhile, on Facebook, The Social Network is now highlighting Pride-themed backgrounds for your updates. And while most of these additions are simple aesthetics, the change to gender listing options on Instagram is significant, and will provide utility beyond Pride Month alone.

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Snapchat’s Latest Updates to Its Commerce Experience Hint at Things to Come

Snapchat’s continuing its heavy push into commerce by bringing native checkout to five influencers on the app. On June 6, Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian West, Shay Mitchell, Spencer Pratt and Bhad Bhabie received a small update to their profiles: a shop button that lets users buy items from their respective brands. The native commerce feature is powered by Shopify and is the same technology that was previously used with SeatGeek to sell tickets to live events and in a small beta with Kylie Jenner last year. As of now, the influencers keep all revenue on sales. Merchants receive no customer data unless someone follows through with a purchase. “This is clearly a move to cater to the top-end influencers and get them focused on Shopify and Snapchat as top-of-the funnel channels, as opposed to just their Instagram page,” said Mike Rossi, CEO of Smile.io, a rewards program company. “Snapchat’s ability to monetize becomes much stronger if they become the source of the customer data.” Rossi said this new feature puts brands and influencers in a position to use Snapchat’s ad services more to retarget customers who didn’t end up purchasing anything. For Shopify, he said the ecommerce platform sees Snapchat as a yet another sales channel where Shopify wins because it’s simplified the checkout experience.

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Marketing

Salesforce to acquire data analytics platform Tableau

Salesforce on Monday announced that it has entered into a deal to acquire the popular analytics and data visualization platform Tableau for $15.7 billion. The acquisition is yet another move by the CRM that brings in new technology and tools that should bring better data — and understanding of that data — to users. Digital marketers often struggle with data for many reasons, but industry news like this point to a shift from which we will benefit. Extracting valuable insights and takeaways from data can be challenging, and people learn and absorb more information visually. While it’s a useful practice, it’s often a time-consuming task. Tableau’s capabilities should relieve the heavy-lift for digital marketers, and allow us to focus on the value of our insights instead of being “stuck” in data.

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Google brings the Assistant to Waze

Google Assistant has already come to Google Maps. Now it’s coming to Waze for Android in the U.S. in English. Google Assistant will now enable users to do a number of other things while driving, such as make calls, play music and initiate Waze commands hands free. The Google Assistant will likely come to the iPhone version of Waze at some point in the near future. Google needs to be careful to maintain Waze’s unique character as it does these reciprocal integrations. Waze has managed to successfully introduce ads for SMBs and enterprises into the app without alienating users. It has been much more creative and experimental than Google Maps on the ads front and done some innovative things, such as coordinating with out-of-home campaigns. Google will likely continue to use Waze as a kind of ads sandbox and testing ground before importing them into the flagship product, as the company seeks to drive more revenue from more Google products.

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Social Media

Facebook’s Cryptocurrency is Reportedly Set to Launch Later This Month

TechCrunch has reported that Facebook will release an overview of the specifics on June 18th, with the launch of a whitepaper that will explain how Facebook’s on-platform currency will work. The currency is now believed to be called ‘Project Libra’. “The digital token is designed to function as a borderless currency, without transaction fees, and will be aggressively marketed in developing nations where government-backed currencies are more volatile.” Facebook, reportedly, will target India first, with a specific focus on funds transfers via remittance. By making that process fee-free and simple, Facebook will look to build on its internal funds transfer process, with a view, eventually, to keeping that money on platform, and facilitating an increasing amount of purchases in-app. The project has the potential to be one of the most significant shifts in Facebook’s history, facilitating a whole new element within The Social Network that would enable purchases, exchanges and more.

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Instagram Adds On-Screen Lyrics to Music Stickers

Instagram is officially launching its new music stickers with lyrics option, which displays the song lyrics on screen, enabling users to sing along. The option may help Instagram fend off rising competition from TikTok, which has become popular among younger audiences largely due to its short, music-themed videos. Similar to Vine, the short video format of TikTok lends itself to music clips. Vine was able to fuel the careers of several musicians through viral trends, and TikTok looks to be filling that same gap. Instagram will be hoping to negate some of that with additional music options, but it’s hard to see them knocking TikTok off course entirely, given the app’s rising usage.

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Marketing

Google search update aims to show more diverse results from different domain names

Google announced on the Search Liaison Twitter account just now that it has updated its search results to show a more diverse set of search results. That means Google will aim to show no more than two results from the same domain for a particular query in the top results. Google said “A new change now launching in Google Search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results.” Google added, “This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results.” Google said “Site diversity will generally treat subdomains as part of a root domain. IE: listings from subdomains and the root domain will all be considered from the same single site.” This only impacts the core results, not the additional search features such as top stories, video snippets, image carousels or other vertical search features listed among the other web results. This can impact those who aim to try to get their domains to dominate for specific queries. This is more often seen in the reputation management industry but can also related to other areas of search.

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Google Analytics is Blocked by Firefox, Mozilla Explains Why [UPDATED]

An updated version of the Firefox browser was released this week which blocks all trackers including Google Analytics. That means traffic data may be affected when visitors are using the latest version of Firefox. Mozilla claims it’s making this change in order to keep users’ data private. Google Analytics offers a wealth of non-personally identifiable data and businesses will be worse off by having reduced access to it.Traffic from users on other browsers will be tracked as usual, although this does create a slippery slope. According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners.

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Social Media

Facebook Adds New Page and Group Ranking Factors into News Feed Algorithm

Facebook has now issued an amendment to that update to also add in new ranking signals for content from the Pages and Groups that people are most interested in. In the new amendment, Facebook says that it recently issued surveys focused on Page and Group content, and what people want to see more, or less of. Based on the responses it’s received, Facebook says that it has updated the News Feed algorithm to “prioritize the Pages and groups we predict an individual may care about most”. What, exactly, that means – and how Page managers can use it to advantage – is unclear. There’s obviously little that Page managers can do now about the time that people have been following their Page, and engagement has always been a factor in boosting Page reach.

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LinkedIn Improves Video Marketing Metrics via New Integration with Moat

Video is the best performing content type on all social media platforms, and that includes the professional social network LinkedIn. According to internal data, LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post – while for paid content, LinkedIn members now spend 300% more time watching video ads, as compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content. Now, LinkedIn is improving its measurement options for video, to help assure marketers of their actual performance. The platform has announced a new integration with Moat Analytics, which will provide additional, third party data oversight to further validate on-platform video data. Moat’s video performance data has become the industry standard, with several other social platforms already offering supplementary Moat data to solidify their metric offerings (and provide additional, third-party reassurance). LinkedIn says that the integration “gives LinkedIn advertisers the ability to validate their viewability metrics, while also providing traffic quality verification”.

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Twitter Tests New Options to Simplify Common Engagement Actions

Twitter has begun testing two new updates that you’ll likely notice in your process. The first is designed to help users share tweets with their close friends more easily, while the second is a new format for follow notifications which makes it easier to see more information about new followers, and to follow back immediately. First off, on sharing – Twitter is trialing a new option which will prompt users with direct sharing links via DM to the people they most regularly communicate with. Encouraging more DM discussion makes sense, and it’ll be interesting to see if the addition does result in more sharing and interaction switching to Twitter DMs – if, indeed, it is rolled out more broadly. The other test – which has been noted by various users – is a new mini profile card alert for new follows, which makes it easier to get more context about that user, and follow back from the prompt. There’s no guarantee that either of these tests will get rolled out more broadly, and there are, of course, various other updates being trialed in the Twttr test app relating to conversation flow and improving on-platform interactions. It generally takes some time for Twitter to assess, but you can expect some of these changes to start flowing through, and to become visible in your feeds at some stage in the near future.  

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Advertising

Google is expanding when it shows ads to ‘people in targeted locations’

Google has been quietly rolling out a change to the location targeting options in Google Ads. The change was first spotted in display campaigns, but now appears to have rolled out for search and shopping campaigns, too. Google has changed the “People in your targeted locations” option to “People in or regularly in your targeted locations.” The old setting of “Reach people in your targeted locations” did not include showing ads to people “who searched for your target locations but whose physical location was outside the target location at the time of searching.” With this change, instead of showing ads to people only when they are physically located in your targeted locations at the time of their search, it will also include people who regularly commute or travel to your targeted locations even when they aren’t physically there when they perform a search. The change is somewhat subtle but important to note. It’s another level of targeting control getting supplanted by machine learning.

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Social Media

Twitter Officially Rolls Out ‘Go Live with Guests’ Option

The new ‘Live Guests’ option will allow viewers to apply to take part in the conversation, with their avatar appearing on-screen (when permitted to join by the streamer), and their streaming audio available to all viewers. It seems to be a step behind other streaming platforms, with both Instagram or Facebook Live already offering split-screen video guests as an option within their tools. With the social media arms race heating up in the latest AR and Stories tools, audio-only guests feels a little underwhelming. Interesting, but not overly interesting at the same time.

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Instagram is Testing an “Order” Sticker for Stories

Instagram has been spotted testing “order” stickers in stories, which may indicate it’s working on new ways to complete transactions. It’s unclear what functionality this sticker might offer. Instagram has been rapidly expanding its shopping capabilities as of late. However, shopping in stories has been available since last year. Instagram stories are a popular channel for promoting upcoming events, so it would be fitting to let users order tickets from stories. It’s important to note that Instagram hasn’t officially acknowledged that it’s rolling out an “order” sticker.

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Marketing

ALEXA, SCRATCH THAT: AMAZON TO LET USERS DELETE VOICE COMMANDS

Amazon.com Inc. is updating its Alexa voice software to let users delete recordings of their voice using a spoken command, a move that follows criticism of the company’s privacy practices related to its digital assistant. Bloomberg reported last month that some Amazon employees listen to users’ voice recordings as part of an effort to improve the software. In some cases, those workers can access the location of the person whose voice they are transcribing. Amazon’s privacy and user policies didn’t explicitly disclose either practice. Amazon’s move also comes as other technology giants make a point of touting their own efforts to safeguard user data. The company also gave its Alexa privacy website a facelift, adding a bit more explanation on how the software works. The company’s Echo Show 5, a new version of the screen-bearing smart speaker line, announced on Wednesday, comes with a shutter that lets customers cover the built-in camera.

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Advertising

Google sunsetting two bidding strategies in June

Google will retire the Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share automated bidding strategies at the end of next month. Instead, advertisers will be encouraged to use Target Impression Share, which encompasses impression share for certain page position targets. The strategies will no longer be available for new campaigns starting in late June. This shift is in line with Google’s introduction of new ad position metrics that focus on the top and absolute top impressions and impression share and plan to eliminate average position reporting later this year. Google suggests using the new impression share metrics when aiming to show your ads in particular locations on the page.

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