October’s always an exciting month in the digital marketing world. People start getting ready for Black Friday and Christmas campaigns, things start to pick up after a usually slow September… But this October has been even busier for most! Make sure you keep up to date with the digital world so that you can make the most of these tools and features before the busiest season of the year!
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Facebook and Instagram Updates In October
October 6th 2020 was the day Instagram celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary. The social media powerhouse decided to celebrate by rolling out multiple new features for users.
The first feature gives users access to ‘Stories Maps.’ Have you ever needed to painstakingly trawl through your archived stories to find that story to add to your highlights? This new feature displays a monthly view calendar which makes life easier when navigating through your older stories.
To resonate with National Bullying Prevention Month, Instagram is launching a multitude of wellbeing updates. Two new features aim to reduce negative interactions, including bullying and harassment in the comments section. Users can hide comments similarly to comments that have been reported. Instagram says they’re also trailing further additional warnings with their AI-powered feature that notifies users when their comment may be considered offensive.
The last feature (more of an Easter Egg) was to allow users to choose from one of their old logos to be the profile icon on their home pages. While the app has seen numerous updates and upgrades across its short history, it’s the evolution of its logo that the company chose to focus on to celebrate its anniversary with users.
Facebook Messenger and Instagram’s direct messaging service are set to merge. The merging of the two will allow shared messaging across both platforms, as well as video calls and the use of a range of tools drawn from both platforms.
“We’re connecting the Messenger and Instagram experience to bring some of the best Messenger features to Instagram,” Facebook’s Adam Mosseri and Stan Chudnovsky, the heads of Instagram and Messenger said in a statement. “People on Instagram can decide whether to update immediately to this new experience.”
Free Listings on Google Shopping Tab
Google recently announced that they were going back to their old ways and offering shopping listings for free. It’s been suggested that it’s a compassionate move to help out retailers who may be struggling during the pandemic. Others are saying it’s to compete with Amazon in the organic search results. Whatever the reason for the change, it’s great news for retailers and should be utilised immediately!
You can list your items by uploading your product feeds to Google Merchant Centre account and then be sure to opt-into the Surfaces on Google program. This will allow your products to show in relevant search results across Google Search, the Google Shopping tab, and Google Images.
Shopping on Youtube
Youtube is basically a website we all go to for various different reasons and watch videos about the topics we’re interested in, whether these are funny cat videos or product reviews from influencers.
When you watch a Youtube video about a product, you then leave Youtube to go and find out where that product’s being sold, so you can make your purchase.
Now content creators on Youtube will be able to tag the products in their videos so you can click through to the product straight away from the video and make your purchase quickly and directly on Youtube.
Google has tried out similar things before, just not as thorough. How do you think this will affect influencers and content creators?
New LinkedIn Features
LinkedIn Events feature was rolled out earlier this year and now LinkedIn is rolling out a few updates to make this feature even more useful and attractive for users.
You can now collect data by adding registration forms to your events for free and downloading that list directly. (Note that the forms are in a testing phase, so you might not be able to add them to your events just yet) These forms will be pre-filled with their LinkedIn information, like name and email addresses, meaning attendees will not need to manually type in these details.
There are new organic discovery features you can use to promote your events. Events will be on a separate tab on your LinkedIn page and LinkedIn will notify your followers about the event. You can also share your event on your feed, which would mean that there would be a call-to-action button and a banner to make it stand out.
You can also promote your event with single image ads and retarget people that have attended your previous events.
We can’t wait to try these out and attend live events on LinkedIn. Have you spotted any interesting events yet? Let us know!
The New Google Analytics
A lot of businesses use Google Analytics to understand their customers and make the right decisions at the right time and now there is a new version of it! Let’s have a look at what new features are coming to Google Analytics.
One of the features will alert you when there is a trend in your data, meaning Google will let you know if more people start showing interest in a specific product. They will also be adding new predictive metrics and help you predict future actions your customers might take. These sort of insights will definitely be really useful, especially when they’re integrated with Google’s other tools, like Google Ads.
You can now see insights based on where in the customer journey your customers are. These stats are available on the left-hand side under Life Cycle. The 4 new categories are acquisition, engagement, monetization and retention.
Go ahead and set up a new ‘Google Analytics 4’ property, alongside your existing ones to have a play around and see what the new GA has to offer. (These properties were previously called Web + App Properties) Let us know what you think of the new insights, do you think they’ll be useful to your business?
New Features Coming To Google Ads
Speaking of Google, Ads are getting a few new features as well!
Local campaign and inventory ads will now have attributes like ‘dine in’ and ‘pickup later’, these are just 2 of the many attributes Google has rolled out in the last 6 months. We’ve covered pretty much all of them in our previous monthly round ups.
Custom insights that are specific to your business and smart bidding for in-store transactions will also be coming your way. These are both in the beta phase and will be rolled out in the next couple of months.
There is also a brand new campaign type coming in the future: Performance Max Campaigns. This is expected to be in the beta phase next year.
We can’t wait to get our hands on these features! Which one will you be trying out?
2 comments
Exciting to hear these new features. I will be checking out these features especially LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing the content.
Thanks for the tip about free listings on Google shopping! That’s awesome, I have an online business and some clients you do too – so this will be a great extra source of free traffic. Great insider tip, thanks
Matt