Members of our Digital Marketing Insiders get first look at the October 2018 Digital Marketing Updates plus answers to their questions. Want to join? Learn more here!
Facebook will Allow Pages to Join Groups – Yes, that means more opportunities for businesses to grow their presence organically. Groups can choose to allow Pages or not, so you probably won’t see this available in every group but it could be an interesting way to grow your presence.
Facebook Stories Ads are Here – Stories is HAWT and growing fast – a new study shows over 60% of people use them. Now you can advertise in Facebook Stories to get in the stories feed with full screen impact.
Get Better Ad Tracking with More Events – “Events” in Facebook ads allow you to track when someone takes an action on your site with the Facebook Pixel. You can now easily ad more standard events to make your ad campaigns easier to track and tie back to real business value.
More Visibility on Ad Placements – When you run ads on Facebook they can actually appear in a wide variety of places on and off Facebook, and marketers have had little visibility as to where their ads were going. Facebook now offers more visibility into these placements giving you better insights into your strategy.
Canvas Becomes Instant Experiences and Has New Templates – Canvas ads that take over the entire screen are now called Instant Experiences, and with the relaunch Facebook offers 5 types of Experience templates to make it easier to drive action and get results. The new templates look really nice 😉
Facebook Watch Goes Global – Facebook Watch launched in the US a year ago and is now available globally. Watch allows users to upload longer format shows or episodes and is competition for YouTube and online TV. This will expand the inventory for mid-roll ads, which allows brands to have forced-view video ads in the content.
Facebook Creator Studio Offers New Features to Creators – In an attempt to win over video content creators Facebook is rolling out a variety of new features. The idea is to provide more options for creators to earn from ad revenue, and to drive more time on Facebook for users.
Instagram News Updates
Instagram Accounts Get New Privacy Updates – Instagram announced a ton of updates including showing more features about the accounts – like the date joined, location, current ads and more. The goal is to make account details more transparent and prevent fake accounts on the site.
Instagram Increases Shopping Features – They rolled out 2 new features – shoppable stories and shopping in explore. As the holidays are approaching we see social networks rolling out features to get a share of the holiday shopping ad budgets.
IGTV not Looking Hot – Instagram TV was launched to drive longer format videos to the site, and to earn great share of user attention. So far, the usage has been small, and many report low views of their content. It will be interesting to see if Instagram can maintain this format, and it may be worthwhile to hold off in making your IGTV strategy.
Bring on the Emojis – Instagram adds an Emoji shortcut making it easy to add emojis to your copy. If you aren’t using them yet, get with it 😉
Send a Poll in a Direct Message – Instagram continues to innovate around fun and simple features to engage users (taking a page from SnapChat). You can now send a poll in a direct message. Fun!
Twitter News
Twitter Lets you Ditch the Algorithm and View Time Based Feed – Twitter announced that they are making it easy to switch from the algorithm feed to a time-based feed (see newest content first). This is an interesting development as most social networks now rely on the algorithm to drive viewers.
Twitter Puts Live Broadcasts at the Top of Your Timeline – We know that Facebook has been featuring Live Video for a while now, although few remember that Periscope (owned by Twitter) actually pioneered live videos. Twitter is trying to earn back live video audiences by featuring it at the top of the timeline.
LinkedIn News Updates
LinkedIn Relaunches Groups – Linkedin is relaunching groups – with a renewed effort to make them more relevant and prominent. Groups popularity has declined in recent years – it remains to be seen if this will be enough to revive them.
LinkedIn Launches Dynamic Ads – You can now easily create dynamic ads based on the content of a LinkedIn Profile. This can lead to more relevant ads and better results.
LinkedIn Rolls Out Automated Bidding for Sponsored Posts – I was shocked that this didn’t already exist, but you can now use automated bidding to maximize your budget vs attempting to choose the right maximum bid amount for your budget.
Snapchat News Updates
SnapChat Launches Visual Search with Instagram – This is seriously cool – you can now see a product on SnapChat and search for it on Amazon to buy. This could be a game changer for influencer marketing and retail.
SnapChat Launches New Features in Shoppable Ads – Shoppable ads allow you to buy directly from the ad – and SnapChat is launching more features to supercharge these ads going in to the holiday season.
New SnapChat Spectacles – These actually look cool but seriously – I didn’t know they were still a thing! You can now capture video and images directly from the sunglasses and upload them wirelessly.
Pinterest News Updates
Pinterest has 250K Daily Active Users – Pinterest continues to grow (although without a lot of fanfare) and has demonstrated continued growth and active growth from users. Users are highly motivated to act and are often actively looking for ideas, making it a good place for brands to connect with people who want to take action.
Pinterest Opens API to Influencers – As influencer marketing grows, Pinterest wants a piece of the pie – to achieve this they are opening up their API so influencer programs can see the exact impact their campaigns are having.
YouTube News Updates
Vertical Video Ads are Coming to YouTube – That’s right – YouTube, the last holdout of horizontal video is now launching video units for advertising. This can make it easier for brands to use consistent formatting in their video ads across platforms, as Facebook is already predominantly vertical.
Search News Updates
Google Data Studio Now Available – Google Data Studio is now available to all users where you can easily visualize data to get a better understanding of what the data means and drive insights.
Google Algo Update – Google provided some insight on the algo update that suggests regular updates and hints at recency being a factor. They reiterate that their aim is relevance for the user.
Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook – People are leaving Facebook or taking a break based on new research. Also, many users are adjusting their privacy settings, which shows that younger users especially are taking charge of their digital footprint.