Daily Minute Master Series – February 23, 2021

February 23, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

15 TikTok Tips to Maximize Your Branded Content Efforts [Infographic]

TikTok is the trending app of the moment, with millions of people downloading the short-video app and jumping into its engaging, personalized content stream. Analysts project that TikTok will become the next billion-user platform sometime in 2021, and as it continues to grow, marketers are also paying more attention to the app, and its potential for their campaigns. Have you considered adding TikTok into your digital outreach mix?

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Google on SEO Best Practices for News Sites & Short Articles

Google’s John Mueller answers questions about SEO best practices for news websites, particularly as it relates to publishing shorter articles. News sites shouldn’t be overly concerned with the length of articles, Mueller says, as shorter articles are sometimes fine for the given query. This is discussed during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 19.

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62% of People Say Customer Photos Influence Purchase Decisions

A new report shows user-generated content, such as photos uploaded by customers, plays a significant role in purchase decisions. eMarketer reports that 62% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy a product if they can see customer photos and videos first.

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How to Lead People Effectively on Agile Marketing Teams

As a manager, you’re often left in the dust when organizations shift to agile marketing. While your role has always been to manage the team’s work, your direct reports are now spread out across different agile teams and have been told to only work on items from the marketing backlog. So if you’re not there to assign and manage work, where do you fit in? The good news is that you have an even more important role now — to coach, mentor and lead your people to be excellent in their craft.

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How Entrepreneurs Can Maximize Their Brand Voice Through Video Marketing

Consumers and marketers alike have noticed a significant upward trend in video content over the last few years, but what does this trend look like practically? A recent report by Hubspot sheds light on some key figures: 85% of businesspeople use video as a marketing tool, up from 61% just five years ago.

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10 Ways AI And Machine Learning Are Improving Marketing In 2021

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and the marketing teams they lead are expected to excel at creating customer trust, a brand that exudes empathy and data-driven strategies that deliver results. Personalizing channel experiences at scale works when CMOs strike the perfect balance between their jobs’ emotional and logical, data-driven parts. That’s what makes being a CMO today so challenging. They’ve got to have the compassion of a Captain Kirk and the cold, hard logic of a Dr. Spock and know when to use each skill set. CMOs and their teams struggle to keep the emotional and logical parts of their jobs in balance.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 22, 2021

February 22, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Facebook Launches Initial Test of its Cameo-Like Celebrity Video App ‘Super’

Yes, Facebook’s taking on TikTok with Instagram Reels, it’s looking into newsletters following Twitter’s recent acquisition of Revue, and it’s also considering a challenge to Clubhouse and the rise of audio social with its own, replicant feature.

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LinkedIn Announces New Initiatives to Support COVID-19 Recovery Efforts

As vaccine programs get underway across the world, LinkedIn has announced a range of new initiatives to support health organizations in maximizing their vaccine distribution efforts, while it’s also looking to assist disadvantaged workers in the UK as they look to get back on their feet.

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YouTube is Adding New Ways For Creators to Make Money

YouTube plans to roll out new monetization opportunities for creators, including ways to make money directly from viewers. In a blog post from YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, the company outlines how it intends to invest in the “next generation” of video.

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Getting Started with Google Tag Manager, Step By Step

Successful search marketing campaigns start with good data. Who is in your target audience, where they come from, and how they move through your website from landing to exit (preferably conversion) is essential information. The trouble is getting to the point where you have enough data to make smart marketing decisions. Marketers rely on JavaScript tags on the backend of webpages to gather information about site visitors. These are useful, but manually tagging and maintaining tags is time-consuming and tedious.

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Wix vs WordPress? Mueller Says Solve Content Issues

Someone tweeted their intention to build a Wix site to test how well it ranks for local search compared to WordPress. John Mueller responded with a series of helpful suggestions, emphasizing that platforms that take care of the technical are ideal for small business owners.

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Responsive Search Ads Are Now Default Type for Google Ads

Google has made it official: Responsive Text Ads will now be the default ad type in Google Ads search campaigns. The ad format debuted in 2018.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 19, 2021

February 19, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Twitter Continues to Quickly Evolve its Clubhouse Competitor ‘Spaces’

As audio social platform Clubhouse continues to gain momentum, Twitter is working to quickly evolve and roll-out its own version of the same, with Twitter Spaces gradually trickling out to more users, and getting new feature upgrades in line with user response. Over the past week, Twitter has previewed a range of improvements for the Spaces UI, including a new display of all speakers and listeners in a room, and more prominent markers for speakers and hosts within a Space.

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YouTube Shorts Launching in USA in March

YouTube Shorts, a stories-like vertical video format that allows users to create clips of 15-seconds or less, is coming to the USA next month. Shorts launched in India in September 2020 where it currently remains in beta. YouTube says the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled since December.

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Facebook Blocks Australian News

Facebook announced they were restricting Australians from sharing news. The move was in response to a proposed law that Facebook characterized as misunderstanding the facts of how publishers interact with Facebook.

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The Good, The Bad And The Value Of Affiliate Marketing

In the world of digital advertising, there isn’t a more complex character than affiliate marketing. It has an interesting origin, a fall from grace, a self-betterment era and a current-day redemption quest. With a history spanning over two decades, affiliate marketing has a story arc worthy of network TV. However, similar to some classic primetime dramas, there have been times when it’s hard to tell if affiliate marketing is the good guy or the bad guy.

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Four Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Hard

Everywhere you turn today, businesses are seeking guidance to leverage content marketing. Visibility management and content marketing platform Semrush highlights this tremendous shift in their recent 2021 predictions. The pandemic has created all-new customer behaviors that no one is immune to. Meeting the customer where they are at means developing a relationship that sets your business apart from your competition.

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How to Lead People Effectively on Agile Marketing Teams

As a manager, you’re often left in the dust when organizations shift to agile marketing. While your role has always been to manage the team’s work, your direct reports are now spread out across different agile teams and have been told to only work on items from the marketing backlog. So if you’re not there to assign and manage work, where do you fit in? The good news is that you have an even more important role now — to coach, mentor and lead your people to be excellent in their craft.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 18, 2021

February 18, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Facebook’s Looking to Reduce Political Content – What Will That Mean for Facebook Marketing?

Last week, Facebook announced that it’s launching a new test that will see a reduction of political content in people’s news feeds.

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LinkedIn’s Developing a New Program to Support Content Creators on the Platform

LinkedIn has launched the first stages of a new plan to develop a support framework for content creators on the platform, which will ultimately lead to new advertising and promotional opportunities through the app’s most influential users. Last week, LinkedIn’s Editor in Chief Dan Roth posted a new job ad for a Head of Community, focused on supporting LinkedIn creators around the world.

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How B2B Marketers Can Use Instagram for Lead Gen

Did you know that it is, in fact, possible to use Instagram as a lead-generation tool? It’s true! And there are lots of creative ways B2B organizations can—and do—use Instagram to grow their business. In this session, you’ll learn how to create and implement an Instagram strategy that sets your B2B brand up for success.

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Google Forced to Pay $1 Million For ‘Misleading’ French Hotel Rankings

France’s Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and the Repression of Fraud (DGCCRF) launched an investigation into Google’s hotel rankings to monitor the fairness and nature of information, resulting in a fine of €1.1 million. The investigation was launched in 2019 and continued into 2020 after French hoteliers complained about the tech giant’s star rating system.

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Google On The Worst it Can Do Against Black Hat SEO

Google’s John Mueller explains the strongest penalties that can be issued against sites caught using black hat SEO tactics.

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10 Tips for Building a Scalable Enterprise Blog

No enterprise SEO strategy is complete without plans to build out an engaging and informative blog. Aside from adding depth to websites, blogs help businesses reach potential customers through organic search, establish expertise, authority, and trust. However, brands won’t reap the benefits of business blogging unless you invest the required time and resources to develop a blog strategy that’s sustainable and scalable. To bring in a consistent stream of traffic and compete with others in your industry, your business needs to publish blog content regularly, address industry trends as they emerge, and follow the best practices for SEO that evolve along with Google’s algorithms and guidelines.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 17, 2021

February 17, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Social Media Statistics Are for Marketing Purposes

As the debate roils on about the dismantling of big tech, lawmakers are renewing calls that powerful social platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook, share the blame for such major events as the capital riots in Washington, after getting slapped for their outsized role in swaying votes in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, Google and Apple played no small part in, albeit temporarily, squashing Parler for offering too much free speech while the U.S. Commerce Department is hoping to dial back usage of WeChat and TikTok for offering too little privacy. And more to the nuts and bolts, the impact of the Solarwinds hack has rippled through government organizations worldwide. For some, these have been a whirlwind few months full of revelations. For threat researchers dialed into public and open web intelligence channels throughout 2020, it’s time to ask: is anybody listening?

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Facebook Provides Tips on How to Create Effective Instagram Reels Content

Are you looking to get into Instagram Reels for your business? If so, then this new video from Facebook’s Creative Shop team is for you – in the second video of its new tips series, Facebook has provided a brief overview of how to create effective, engaging Instagram Reels clips.

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Instagram Plans to Launch Multi-Participant Live-Streams Later This Month

While audio live-streaming is having its moment, Instagram is still catching up on the last big live-streaming trend, with Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri revealing that that company is planning to launch multi-participant IG Live video chats within the next few weeks.

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How to Write Meta Descriptions for Local Stores

Looking to write meta descriptions that convert local traffic into customers and leads? Learn how in this edition of Ask an SEO.

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5 Habits of Top-Performing Email Marketers

Email remains one of the most important and effective marketing channels. Yet, a recent study suggests email marketers are running the risk of negatively impacting their email program by not following best practices. Even the most seasoned marketers know that you can’t focus on the big picture without locking down basic best practices.

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What You Should Know When Mapping Your 2021 Marketing Strategy

Marketers in nearly every industry were forced to throw out their playbooks in 2020 because of the global health crisis. People’s daily lives were changing, so brands needed to try new things to reach audiences stuck at home. Unsurprisingly, internet videos emerged as the best channel for capturing an increasingly online audience.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 16, 2021

February 16, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

LinkedIn Launches ‘Return to Growth’ Digital Magazine, Outlining Marketing Tips and Notes

With 2021 – hopefully – a year that sees the economy getting back on track in the wake of the pandemic, many companies are now eyeing the next stage of their growth, or re-growth, as it might be. With that in mind, this week, LinkedIn has published a new digital magazine called ‘Return to Growth 2021’, which outlines a range of insights, case studies, interviews and tips to help businesses map out a more effective marketing strategy for the year ahead.

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Facebook & Instagram Shops Integrate With Shopify

Facebook and Instagram Shops are adding Shopify as a payment option which is estimated to increase conversion rates by 1.72x. All Shopify merchants selling on Facebook and Instagram can now offer Shop Pay as a checkout option for customers. Checking out with Shop Pay is said to be 70% faster than a typical checkout, which is due in large part to how it pre-populates customer details such as billing and shipping information. When a customer uses Shop Pay for the first time their information is stored for future purchases. Next time they checkout with Shop Pay they can speed through the process with a simple tap.

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Pinterest Gaining in Popularity with Gen Z, Millennials & Men

Not sure whether your brand will find an audience on Pinterest? New figures from the visual social network suggest it’s easier than ever before, as monthly average users (MAUs) have increased 37% globally. Although U.S. Pinterest users have grown slower than its international audience, Americans remain the primary source of Pinterest’s revenue and a goldmine of opportunity for marketers to reach and inspire new audiences.

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4 Disruptive, Uncomfortable, Yet Inevitable Martech Trends

Industry veteran Jep Castelein on the future of martech.

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Nano Influencers: Who Are They and How to Work With Them [Infographic]

When mapping out your influencer marketing strategy, the most common approach is to go for the biggest names, who’ll offer you the biggest audience reach, and thus, the best return on your ad spend. But don’t overlook the value of those with smaller, but more engaged, communities, who can also help connect you with the people who are increasingly more likely to buy from your brand. These smaller-scale influencers are called ‘micro’ or ‘nano’ influencers, and they can be highly valuable to your businesses, despite their relative audience size. If a local nano-influencer, for example, only has 1,000 followers, but all of them are local business owners, that can have a significantly larger impact on your promotion than a broader reaching campaign.

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Scaling Marketing Workflow With AI

Scaling the marketing efforts is not heavy lifting for marketers since artificial intelligence merges with marketing workflows. AI is capable of taking away the task-heavy load so that marketers can focus on strategy and creativity. Getting results from marketing is also becoming a more significant challenge due to increased marketing channels and the need to be everywhere. In that regard, AI tools are becoming useful in many aspects of marketing efforts, from customer profiling to automating content research, from making the data personalized to enhancing design capabilities with less effort, from getting more qualified leads to efficient SEO campaigns.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 15, 2021

February 15, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

TikTok Publishes 2021 Content Trends Report, Highlight Rising Subjects of Audience Interest

TikTok has published a new rising trends report, which highlights a range of key topics that saw significant growth in interest on the platform throughout 2020. TikTok’s ‘What’s Next’ overview puts a spotlight on the most consumed and fastest rising content categories on the platform over the past 12 months.

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ClubLink Offers a Better Clubhouse Link for Sharing on Social Media

Although the popular audio chat platform Clubhouse today includes a way to share your upcoming hangouts and events across social media, the resulting link that displays is fairly boring. A new link-sharing tool called ClubLink can help. The tool allows hosts to better promote their events by offering a more customized social media preview featuring a photo that includes the room name, who’s attending, the date and time (using the host’s time zone) and even profile icons of the hosts themselves. The tool was built by two Germany-based colleagues, online marketer Jens Polomski and coder and digital marketer, Peter Thaleikis.

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Is TikTok Marketing Right for Your Business?

As little as three years ago, the term “tick tock” simply conjured the sound of analog chronometers. But today, the term refers to a platform and a digital medium driving several of the hottest cultural trends. Now that same sound is marking off precious seconds for businesses to seize a potentially massive marketing opportunity.

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Real Marketers Don’t Guess!

Real marketing isn’t about guessing because it has a foundation in Market Orientation and research which helps the well-trained marketer answer the question of what a customer wants with the only correct answer: “I don’t know, but I do know how to find out.” So how do we move from guessing to making educated decisions?

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Content Marketing: The New Name for a Well-Established Discipline

The creation of targeted information—about companies, products, services, and just about anything else—has been around for generations… just under different names. Collateral, sales aids, product literature, brand books… all were the earlier monikers for what’s now lumped into “content.” So the seemingly limitless number of articles, social media and blog posts, podcasts, and God knows what else about the purported nuances of the content marketing discipline reveals one thing: a lack of perspective. That’s why students learn (or are supposed to learn) history in school—to give them a sense that there was a world that existed before they were born.

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Is the Marketing Database Dead?

The evolutions and revolutions in marketing have been and remain relentless. What was once the marketing database has evolved as marketers have adopted customer data platforms (CDPs) and new ecosystems of activation platforms. Perhaps the rise of the CDP brought a sense that marketers were finally mastering first-party data—drawn from their enterprise systems and operational data lakes—and at last making strides in managing customer interactions.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 12, 2021

February 12, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Facebook Adds New Safety Features to Messenger for Safer Internet Day

Facebook has added some new safety and control options to Messenger to coincide with Safer Internet Day, giving users more ways to easily manage who can contact them through the app.

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Shopify Expands its ‘Shop Pay’ In-Stream Payment Process to Facebook and Instagram Shops

Shopify has announced a new integration with Facebook which will enable Shopify users to purchase items via its ‘Shopify Pay’ payment system when buying in Facebook and Instagram Shops.

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Instagram Will Now Limit the Reach of Re-posts from TikTok Within its Reels Clone

Hey, remember how a few weeks back Instagram posted some tips on how to create great Reels content, and within those tips, it sort of, kind of alluded to the fact that it didn’t really like users re-posting their TikTok clips to Reels?

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With Influencer Marketing, You Can’t Afford to Set It and Forget It

Influence is not a static quality. It’s a status one has to earn, then maintain. That, as much as any fact, underlines the importance for a business to pay close attention to the influencers it uses for marketing efforts.

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3 SEO HTML and Coding Issues Answered: Ask an SEO

This lightning round edition answers 3 questions focusing on HTML and coding issues. Learn about button text, how many links are too much, and more.

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Google Adds 12 New Types of Manual Action Penalties

Google has 12 new types of manual action penalties which involve violations of Google News and Google Discover policies. This marks the first time a website could potentially receive a manual penalty for violations of News and Discover policies. Previously, manual actions were limited to violations of Google Search. That’s not to say Google hasn’t been enforcing its policies around News and Discover. It has – but up to this point enforcement has been automated. A manual penalty, unlike an automated penalty, is issued by a human reviewer at Google. The penalty is applied after the reviewer determines the site is not in compliance with Google’s guidelines.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 11, 2021

February 11, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

7 New Social Media Marketing Opportunities on Facebook & More

Make good use of the social media features & platforms at your disposal! Check out 7 new social media marketing opportunities on Facebook, Twitter & more.

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Twitter Posts Record Revenue Result in Q4, Maintains Usage Growth

Twitter has shared its latest earnings results, posting an increase of 5 million daily active users to 192 million, and a record quarterly revenue result, driven by higher ad spend.

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TikTok Lays Out Plans for New eCommerce Integrations as it Eyes the Next Stage

While TikTok continues to grow, it still remains at risk of losing its top creators to other, more established platforms if it’s not able to provide adequate monetization tools and options. Both YouTube and Facebook provide more ways for creators to make money, and while TikTok now has the audience, its advertising system is not up to the same stage to compete on this front, which will become a bigger problem over time, if that gap can’t be addressed.

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Top 5 PPC Tips for Technology Brands

More and more companies are discovering the benefits of a well-run PPC program. However, competitive keywords in certain industries, especially the technology industry, can be extremely costly. $50 CPCs? No, thank you! Do not let expensive keywords prevent you from developing a strategy to reach your target audience in this industry.

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Core Web Vitals Might Include Noindexed Pages

Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answered questions about Core Web Vitals and how the scores are calculated. He also discussed the possibility of noindexed pages being be used as part of the Core Web Vitals calculation in the new ranking signal that is coming soon.

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How to Create a Viral Marketing Strategy Using Memes

On Inauguration Day, social media was not fixated on President Biden but rather his former opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders made waves on social media after a photo of him from the event evolved into a meme. Since Inauguration Day, a cross-looking Sanders has been superimposed onto everything from “Sex And The City” scenes to the throne from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s” theme song. Memes are viral by nature. Their success relies on users creating new iterations of recognizable images and sharing them online. The reach they garner and the engagement they foster creates meaningful connections between large groups of social media users. If brands can successfully tap into this, it is a sure-fire way to reach innumerable more social media users.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 10, 2021

February 10, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Snapchat Posts a 62% Increase in Revenue, Adds 16 Million More Users in Latest Quarterly Update

Snapchat has published its latest performance update, showing a major boost in revenue for Q4 2020, and a solid increase in active users over the period. First off, on usage – Snapchat added 16 million more daily actives in the quarter, taking it to a new high of 265 million DAU.

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Pinterest Rises to 459 Million Users, Posts Strong Revenue Result in Q4

Pinterest has posted its latest performance update, posting a significant jump in revenue, and steady growth in overall usage. First off, on users – Pinterest added 17 million more users in Q4, taking it to 459 million actives.

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YouTube Launches Updated Sports Platform to Cater to Rising Demand for Sports Content

With interest in sports content rising on YouTube, the platform has today announced that it’s updated its YouTube Sports platform, while it’s also expanding its connected TV ad offerings to help brands reach sports fans on the platform.

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Does Influencer Marketing Work For E-Commerce?

There are three prongs in the very subject of this article: who can be an influencer, the importance of influencer marketing in e-commerce and whether or not the former adds value to the latter’s ecosystem.

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Google’s John Mueller Explains Inconsistent Discover Traffic

Google’s John Mueller offers insight into why traffic from Google Discover is likely to be inconsistent from one day to another. This topic is discussed during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 5. A question is submitted from a site owner concerned about their referral traffic from Google Discover. They say it fluctuates wildly despite no significant changes being made to the site.

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Google: Removing Blog Comments May Impact Search Rankings

Google’s John Mueller advises site owners that removing all comments from a website may adversely impact search rankings. Mueller offers this advice during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 5. A question is submitted by a site owner asking whether blog comments are factored into Google’s search rankings. They want to remove comments from their site and ask if that can be done without losing rankings.

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