January 2022 Digital Marketing News Updates: Facebook Live Enhanced + Ad Objectives Reduced, LinkedIn’s Data Privacy Boost

Krista Neher

Jan 06 2022

Members of our All Access Pass and Digital Marketing Insiders get the first look at the latest digital marketing news updates each month. During a live, interactive webinar we cover what matters to marketers and answer questions. We spend hours combing industry news sites looking for the most important updates so you don’t have to!

Facebook News Updates

• New Features Make Lives More Interactive – Facebook launched a variety of features to improve engagements with live broadcasts. The new features include sharing featured links, polls, going live with multiple guests, live in stories, badges, front row, and more.
• Meta Make Horizon Worlds Available to Everyone – As Meta looks to expand users in the metaverse they are making their VR world platform available to everyone. It reminds many users of Second Life as users can explore worlds and interact on the platform.
• Facebook Simplifies Ad Objectives – Facebook is reducing the number of ad objectives available and streamlining the options. Objectives will be reduced from 11 to 6 making it easier for businesses to determine what they want to achieve.
• Facebook Launches Professional Mode for Creators – This is only available to “eligible creators” to provide their profiles with additional features. The updates include new monetization features, analytics for the profile (similar to Pages), and opportunities to increase reach with public content.

Instagram News Updates

• Reply to Comments with Reels – This new feature allows users to respond to comments with Reels videos. As Instagram continues to push this feature we expect to see more interactive video.
• You Can Now Embed Your Instagram Profile into Other Websites – This can be a great way to feature your Instagram profile and images on your website or blog.

LinkedIn Updates

• LinkedIn Beefs Up Data Privacy – As privacy becomes a bigger concern for advertisers LinkedIn announced their plans to enhance their first-party data. In a cookieless future, this will be key and LinkedIn is working proactively on this.

Twitter News Updates

• All Tweet Videos will have Captions Added – As social platforms aim to make their content more mobile-friendly, Twitter will automatically add captions. It is important to note that you CAN NOT edit the captions at this point, but presumably that will come soon.

Google News Updates

• Google Loses Top Domain Spot to TikTok – TikTok has officially overtaken Google as the most popular domain! This shows the consistently strong growth of the platform.
• Google Ad Insights Includes Prediction Tools – These are customized for your business and you’ll be able to see the specific insights and trends that Google sees based on their data. This is valuable even if you don’t run Google Ads.
• Local Search Updates – Google made an update back in November, but this article does a nice job of laying out the specific things that impact your local ranking. Google looks at Relevance, Distance, and Prominence.

Industry News Updates

• Social Video Gets as much Time as TV – This new report shows that social video is overtaking traditional TV. Also, keep in mind that this DOESN’T include online streaming – it is only social video. TV ads are clearly becoming less effective in driving mass reach.
• Ad Trends for 2022 – This study shows the advertising trends that most marketers are thinking about for 2022. There is a lot of perceived risk in social media and programmatic appears to have dodged the scrutiny.
• NFT Guide – As NFTs are becoming bigger (and linked to the Meta Verse) this is a great beginner’s guide to them – what they are, what they mean, and why you should care.

Read some more of our recent posts

• 2025 Digital Marketing Workshop Heads to Cincinnati!
• December 2024 Digital Updates - Meta Andromeda Ads, TikTok Affiliate Marketing, and Latest Trends in Social Media
• November 2024 Digital Updates - Meta Movie Gen, Influencing TikTok's Algorithm, and LinkedIn's Record Engagement
• October 2024 Digital Updates - Meta Upgrades AI, TikTok Search Ads Campaign, and Google Rolls Out AI Ad Image Editing Across Platforms
• 5 Digital Trends That Will Take Us Into 2025