Facebook ads can now link to brands’ WhatsApp accounts

Facebook is piecing together the business side of WhatsApp in much the same way it did with Messenger.

In September, WhatsApp announced verified profiles for businesses to establish their presence on the messaging service that Facebook bought for $19 billion in 2014. Now, Facebook is giving businesses a way to kick-start conversations with customers on WhatsApp.

Businesses can now add buttons to their ads running on Facebook that link to their WhatsApp accounts, Facebook announced on Wednesday. These buttons are effectively the WhatsApp-specific alternative to the Messenger-linked buttons that Facebook introduced last year and expanded to Instagram earlier this year.

“Many people already use WhatsApp to communicate with small businesses. It’s a fast, convenient way to stay in touch. By adding a click-to-WhatsApp button to Facebook ads, businesses can now make it even easier for people to learn about their products, set up an appointment or use their service,” said Facebook’s product marketing manager, Pancham Gajjar, in an emailed statement.

The WhatsApp-enabled ads will only be shown to people on Facebook who have WhatsApp installed on their phones. They will resemble a standard News Feed ad but include a “Send Message” button that features WhatsApp’s logo. Hitting the button will open WhatsApp to a preformatted message designed by the business for a person to send to the business. People will be able to edit the message’s text before sending it, and the message will be delivered with an image of the initial Facebook ad so that the brand can identify which ad is responsible for the incoming message.

By leveraging ads in Facebook’s news feed, Facebook hopes to raise people’s level of awareness of and engagement with businesses on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is said to appeal to a more international audience of people who reside in areas where communicating with businesses through the same service they use to chat with their friends is a more established practice. Now that WhatsApp has opened to businesses, it’s time to make its users aware that it is open for business.

References

Peterson, T. (2017, December 13). Facebook ads can now link to brands’ WhatsApp accounts. Retrieved from Marketing Land: https://marketingland.com/facebook-ads-can-now-link-brands-whatsapp-accounts-230156

Twitter officially enables 280-character limit for all accounts

Less than two months after testing extending tweets’ maximum length to 280 characters, Twitter is enabling the new length for all users on Tuesday. The new maximum will apply to tweets in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean, in which space is less of an issue.

The company said 140 characters don't give users enough space for folks to express themselves. In a blog post, Twitter shared some of its product research regarding the 140-character limit.

“In languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. … We see that a small percent of Tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). … Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.”

The company said it spent time collecting data and feedback from its test group before making the change. With the change, Twitter has seen that people run into fewer instances when they are forced to edit their tweets for length. Under the 140-character limit, 9 percent of English-written tweets hit the cap. However, under the 280-character limit, that number dropped to 1 percent, according to Twitter.

References

Peterson, T. (2017, November 7). Twitter officially enables 280-character limit for all accounts, including brands. Retrieved from Marketing Land: https://marketingland.com/twitter-officially-enables-280-character-limit-accounts-including-brands-227921

Snapchat rolls out Sponsored 3D World Lenses

Snapchat debuted its latest augmented-reality ad format.

Advertisers can now create their own branded versions of Snapchat’s 3D World Lenses that allow people to augment videos shot with their phones’ rear-facing cameras with animated three-dimensional objects, like Snapchat’s famous dancing hot dog, that can be moved and resized to fit the scene.

Imran Khan, chief strategy officer of Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, announced the rollout of Sponsored 3D World Lenses on Thursday at an Advertising Week session in New York. Bud Light and Warner Bros. are the first advertisers to run these augmented-reality ads. In the Bud Light ad, the user can walk around a concession vendor selling Bud Light.  Warner Bros. is using the ad format to promote “Blade Runner 2043” and features one of the flying cars from the movie.

In addition to crafting 3D World Lenses to entertain Snapchat’s audience, brands can also create more purpose-driven campaigns, similar to the augmented-reality experiences brands have built using Apple’s new ARKit. For example, a furniture brand could design one for people to see how a couch might look in their home. To help with the production process, Snap’s creative team will work with brands to build their 3D Lens experiences, according to Khan.

References

Peterson, T. (2017, September 28). Snapchat rolls out Sponsored 3D World Lenses, bringing its AR format to advertisers. Retrieved from Marketing Land: https://marketingland.com/snapchat-rolls-sponsored-3d-world-lenses-bringing-ar-format-advertisers-225147

Facebook blocks Pages sharing fake news from buying ads

Facebook will try to stem the spread of fake news, even if it means cutting off some revenue.

Facebook will block Pages that repetitively publish posts flagged as fake news from buying ads on the social network, the company announced on Monday. “If Pages stop sharing false news, they may be eligible to start running ads again,” Facebook product managers Satwik Shukla and Tessa Lyons wrote in a company blog post.

Facebook already prohibits pages from buying ads that link to articles flagged as fake, through a process involving third-party fact-checkers that Facebook enacted earlier this year. But that policy didn’t wholly prevent fake news publishers from using Facebook as a way to drive traffic, since they could still buy ads linking to non-fake articles on their sites. Now Facebook is extending the penalty.

After being criticized for fueling the rise of fake news leading into last year’s presidential election, Facebook has been stepping up its efforts to tamp down that spread. In addition to working with outside companies like ABC News, PolitiFact and Snopes to confirm or dispute links’ veracity, Facebook has kicked fake news publishers out of its ad network and banned advertisers and Pages that try to camouflage links in ads and posts that violate Facebook’s rules.

References

Ha, A. (2017, August 28). Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won’t be able to buy ads. Retrieved from Tech Runch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/28/facebook-fake-news-ads/

5 Exciting Changes Coming to LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s has been rolling out a ton of new features to help boost the utility and opportunity of the service. Some of them are live right now, and if you’re a regular contributor on the network, you likely have access already.

Here are five of LinkedIn's new changes which are either already available or coming soon - and how they can be of benefit.

1. Multiple Photos in Posts

You can now add more than just one photo to your posts on LinkedIn.

This is a welcome change that should have happened years ago. People use LinkedIn to show off their company culture and events, and trying to squeeze updates into one photo just wasn’t enough. Show off your business with this new feature.

2. Native Video Content

Soon you’ll be able to shoot your videos within the platform.

Users will be able to record video on the LinkedIn app and share it directly to their network. This content could be given priority in the feed (though no one at LinkedIn has confirmed this).

3. Off Network Sharing

In the past, if you shared a Pulse article on another social network, would be readers need to log into LinkedIn to view your content. LinkedIn has decided to go away with this - it appears exclusivity has been trumped by the need to attract more website visitors.

4. Share Drafts

LinkedIn's long form publishing platform is a great place to write and republish content - and now you can have others edit your LinkedIn articles before you hit publish.

If you’re writing for your company page, this makes editing a lot easier for your content team.

5. Disable Comments

Finally, LinkedIn is giving more control to publishers - you can now turn off comments on your posts, helping users eliminate spam and harassment from the social network.

References

Kerby, J. (2017, August 06). 5 Exciting Changes Coming to LinkedIn. Retrieved from Social Media Today: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/5-exciting-changes-coming-linkedin

Google Now Shows Job Postings In Its Search Results

It’s now official: Job listings are coming to Google’s search results in a much more prominent way. Google’s job search initiative is now live in US search results. Initially debuted at the company’s I/O conference, Google For Jobs sees the search giant collaborating with other companies in the job matching industry to connect employers with the right candidates.

While joining the power of Google’s machine learning capabilities, combined with the services provided by other job matching sites, Google aims to help users find the right job for them. Whether you’re seeking an entry-level job, or a high level executive position, Google For Jobs will be able to surface opportunities of all types.

Google For Jobs can be activated on either desktop or mobile by searching for keywords such as “jobs near me”, “retail jobs”, and so on. In addition to job descriptions, Google will also show key information including when the job was posted, commute time from your home, whether it’s full or part time, and even reviews of the employer.

If there’s a particular type of job you’re interested in, you can turn on alerts and receive an email notification whenever a job matching your criteria gets posted.

References

Southern, M. (2017, June 20). Google For Jobs is Now Live in Search Results. Retrieved from searchenginejournal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-jobs-now-live-search-results/202986/

Facebook is Fighting the War Against Clickbait

Facebook is getting more precise in its fight against clickbait.

After training its news feed algorithm to recognize clickbait headlines last year and penalize the sites and Pages associated with these posts, Facebook will now target individual posts that link to articles that overpromise and underdeliver, in order to better isolate and eliminate the clickbait trying to invade people’s news feeds.

Previously, Facebook considered website domains or Facebook Pages at large when hunting for clickbait. That helped its system to broadly identify bad actors that push out a lot of clickbait, but it also made it harder to quarantine the occasional clickbait from an otherwise reputable publisher. Now, by taking into account individual posts, Facebook can strike down these one-off offenses without leveling an entire publication or needing to wait for a publication’s clickbait volume to mount.

Facebook’s algorithm will also now distinguish between headlines that withhold information and headlines that exaggerate the story. The divide-and-conquer tactic is supposed to make Facebook’s system more effective when evaluating whether a post links to a clickbait, per a company blog post published on Wednesday.

That post isn’t clear on exactly how the change helps. But since Facebook is running a bunch of headlines through its computers so those computers can learn what a clickbait headline looks like, it’s possible that the computers had a hard time finding those patterns when considering a headline like “When He Opened the Door, He Didn’t Know He’d Be Met by This…” and one like “This Article Will Change Your Life.” The first headline uses a lot of plain language, whereas the second has common clickbait keywords like “change” and “your life.” So most likely Facebook’s computers needed to separately learn the first headline type to more accurately understand its characteristics, which is exactly how Facebook has trained its computers to distinguish between these two types of headlines.

“We categorized hundreds of thousands of headlines as clickbait or not clickbait by considering if the headline exaggerates the details of a story, and separately if the headline withholds information. A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify large sets of clickbait headlines,” according to Facebook’s blog post.

Facebook will also start to test fighting clickbait in other languages besides English. Sometime in the coming weeks, its algorithm will begin to evaluate posts that are written in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese.

References

Peterson, T. (2017, May 17). Facebook now pinpoints individual posts to keep clickbait out of the News Feed. Retrieved from MarketingLand: http://marketingland.com/facebook-now-pinpoints-individual-posts-clickbait-214935

Is “Siri” the new Google’s competitor?

A new study from Fivesight Research, “US Consumer Search Preferences Smartphone & Desktop: Q1 2017,” finds that Siri is the mobile “search engine” of choice after Google. The study was based on a survey of 800 US adults split roughly evenly between iOS and Android users.

Google was by far the dominant mobile search engine, with an 84% aggregate share among respondents. Among Android users, Google’s search share was 90%. Among iPhone owners Google had a 78% share. After Google, however, Siri was named by more respondents as their “primary search engine” than Bing or Yahoo. (However, this doesn’t reflect query volume, just identification as the primary engine of choice.)

Siri was the primary search engine of 13% of iPhone owners. This finding is significant because it suggests the long-term, potentially disruptive impact of voice and virtual assistants on traditional “query in a box” results. It’s important to point out, however, that these responses reflect self-reported data and many not line up one-to-one with behavior.

Siri was also the most widely adopted virtual assistant among the available choices, used by a higher number of iOS users than “Google Now” was by Android users. Google Assistant wasn’t one of the available choices on the survey.

A very large percentage of respondents (72%) said they were using virtual assistants to “supplement” more traditional mobile search.

Only 16% of iPhone owners did not use a virtual assistant, while just under 40% of Android users did not. Among iPhone owners who used assistants other than Siri, 10% used Google Now, and 4% cited Cortana. Among Android users, 24% were using virtual assistants other than Google’s own, with 10% using Cortana and the remainder distributed across several others, including Viv.

The survey also found that Chrome was the dominant mobile browser, with a 48% share, followed by Safari, with 37%. Roughly 14% of iPhone owners used Chrome as their primary browser. However, Android owners reported a higher level of non-Google browser use, with 11% choosing a Microsoft browser and another 10% using “other.”

When working on your search engine marketing it is paramount to take all important variables into consideration. If your business needs a “search engine marketing overhaul” make sure you contact a professional digital marketing agency with proven experience in search engine optimization and search engine communication.

We invite you to visit Xperience Marketing Solutions’ website where you can find additional information about organic SEO, sponsored SEM – google Ads and much more.  

www.xperiencemarketingsolutions.com  

References

Sterling, G. (2017, April 6). Siri is Google’s nearest mobile search competitor [Report]. Retrieved from Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/survey-siri-googles-nearest-mobile-search-competitor-272640

The Top Reasons Your Business Needs a Mobile-Friendly Website

It feels like every day new statistics are released about the rising prevalence of mobile usage in the world - more and more people are accessing their email, viewing websites, engaging on social media, and making purchases, all from the convenience of their phones or tablets. It’s safe to say, if your website isn't optimized for mobile, you’re missing a significant portion of your target audience. The time is now to get your website into tip-top, mobile-friendly shape for maximum business exposure.

Unconvinced? Don’t just take our word for it. Take a look to this new info-graphic which outlines the top reasons your business needs a mobile-friendly website right now. Among the key facts outlined in the graphic are:

• 1.2 billion people worldwide are accessing the web from mobile devices.
• Since Google’s algorithm update in April 2015, Responsive Design is now preferred in Google’s rankings over having a separate mobile website, or not having a mobile-friendly website at all.
• 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

Having a website that is mobile-friendly and user-friendly is the first step in staying competitive in the digital marketplace - and ultimately, seeing long-term business success.

References

Julie, C. (2017, March 29). The Top Reasons Your Business Needs a Mobile-Friendly Website [Infographic]. Retrieved from Social Media Today: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/top-reasons-your-business-needs-mobile-friendly-website-infographic

What's the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing can be a confusing concept to grasp. Is there even a difference between them?

Both terms are often used interchangeably, which makes matters even worse. It is important to understand the difference between the two terms and that they are different.

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

SEO is essentially a component of the larger category, SEM. According to Google’s Knowledge Graph, search engine optimization is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”

The SEO industry is continually changing due to the frequent changes made to Google’s algorithm. But, there is one aspect of SEO that stays constant: SEO is made up of On-Page and Off-Page activities.

What components does SEO include?

As stated above, SEO is comprised of two different activities.

·         On-Page SEO includes:

-Incorporating selective keyword naturally into title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, alt text, etc.

-Blog posts and page copy that is written and optimized with quality

-Clean and formatting page URLS

-Optimized page load speed

-Google authorship incorporated

-Social sharing integration within your content

And much more!

·         Off-Page SEO includes:

-Creating a high quality, natural backlink profile (aka having other high quality/authoritative sites link to your site naturally)

-Social sharing signals

-Social bookmarking (Stumbleupon, Reddit)

-List goes on here too!

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

According to Wikipedia, “Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization and advertising.” SEM includes SEO tactics, as well as several other search marketing tactics.

What components does SEM include?

Other than search engine optimization, SEM includes the use of paid search, such as pay per click (PPC) listings and advertisements. Most of the time, SEM strictly includes PPC campaigns and activities, but if you use SEO and paid search, that falls under SEM efforts.

What is the main difference of SEO and SEM?

The main difference between these two terms is that search engine optimization is simply a component of search engine marketing. As mentioned above, SEM includes components of paid search, such as PPC and also SMM (social media marketing).

It is important to note that you should never use the terms SEO and SEM interchangeably, because although they work hand in hand, they are not the same term.

References

Rende, N. (2014, June 19). What's the Difference Between SEO and SEM? [FAQS]. Retrieved from Hubspot: https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/seo-sem-faqs

Don’t be fooled by fake news

Social media, for better or worse, is a part of 21st-century culture and it's has been deeply ingrained in the daily lives, experiences and viewpoints of Americans of all ages.  Millennials and new generations don't know a world without Instagram, Facebook and Google.  Intersecting daily with social media networks it’s simply their reality.

Social media connects users across the world, allowing them to share ideas, thoughts, and content. While the dangers of social media are prominent in teachings to youth, the entire spectrum of what exactly is dangerous may not be covered. Students are warned of the consequences of posting scandalous photos or inappropriate comments. However, there are other important concerns to take into consideration when it comes to social media communication. One of these important social issues is the fact that many people are getting badly influenced by “fake news”.

As a result of this concerning trend, some social networks are taking action. Now, Facebook is letting its users flag news stories as fake or a hoax and working with fact checkers to vet them, it is the first effort to address fake news since the United States election. Facebook stated on Dec. 15 that it is taking steps to weed out “the worst of the worst” fake news from its platform.

So, be responsible, get educated and don’t believe everything you read in social media platforms. Always check with reliable sources first before sharing any news.