Show Notes
1.
LinkedIn Publishes New Guide to Effective Brand Building on the Platform - LinkedIn has
published another new guide on the value of brand-building on the platform, and establishing connection with your target buyers through a more all-encompassing promotional and outreach process.
The 33-page guide is the latest in a series of marketing overviews from the platform, which also published a similar branding guide
last month. One Key advice from LInkedIn:
"Before customers come to market, in a buying scenario, they should be primed with repeated, memorable exposure to your brand. Then, as those buyers come in-market, more rational messaging can help you capitalize on this underlying brand strength to achieve short-term results"
2. Twitter Pauses Verification Program, After Accidentally Verifying Fake Accounts - So it's not the same as the total pause that Twitter put on verification applications back in May - a week after re-opening them, following a four-year halt. But it's indicative of another spanner in the works for Twitter's internal assessment and approval systems, which have been consistently problematic, and have left many confused as to what Twitter's blue tick actually means, and whether it carries the weight that some appear to place upon it.
3. Pinterest Introduces Hair pattern Search for Inclusive Results - Pinterest is taking another step towards maximizing inclusion, with the addition of a new, first-of-its-kind hair pattern search option, which will enable Pinterest users to search for hair products and ideas based on varying hair types.
Similar to Pinterest's skin tone search qualifier, Pinners will now also be able to discover ideas based on their specific hair type, which will help narrow down their results with more personalized, useful matches in the app.
Pinterest also notes that its system has detected a hair pattern in over 500 million images, ensuring that users will be able to get results based on their personal selection.
The easy-to-apply filters will make it much easier to find more specific matches for each user, and as noted, add to Pinterest's broader focus on maximizing inclusion, and catering to a broader range of people with functional processes to help guide their discovery process.
And hair, specifically, is an important element of interest for Pinners.
"In the past month alone, there were over 120 million searches for hair and over 5 billion Pins were created related to hair on Pinterest. We’ve also seen that top hair searches on Pinterest are personalized - for example, “natural hair twists protective" (15x) and "best haircuts for thick wavy hair" (13x)."
4. TikTok Partners with Vimeo and Canva to Streamline Content Creation - Vimeo is used popularly for uploading and sharing videos (a decent alternative to YouTube), the TikTok users will be able to access the “Vimeo Create” tool on the platform which Vimeo had introduced in February last year. The Vimeo create has a variety of new tools which will help users in creating and editing their videos in such an attractive way that it will be a standout content among the millions of videos that circulate around TikTok and the best part about this is that users can directly upload their edited and finalized videos from Vimeo to TikTok.
This is a great opportunity for users who do not want to buy subscription of high end editing application because it is way out of their budget and the subscription on Vimeo Create not only gives you access to a variety of new tools; it is budget friendly too.
Moving on from Vimeo, another great platform we would like to talk about is Canva which now has worked on 50 TikTok related templates for users and saving their time in the editing process. The best part about the tool is that it is extremely user friendly, and so even if you are new to the application it will not take much time for you to get a hang of Canva.
5. Snapchat Launches 'Snapchat Trends' - For the first time, Snap is giving a glimpse into the topics and moments most relevant to the Snapchat Generation with the introduction of Snapchat Trends. Snapchat Trends highlights the most popular keywords shared with the Snapchat community via public Stories and My Stories that have been viewed by a large group, in addition to a searchable database of terms. With these insights, Snap is able to provide a new level of visibility into organic chatter on Snapchat, looking at what our community is talking about and showcasing popular Snaps that exemplify each trending topic.
5 Ways to Apply Snapchat Trends to Your Business
#1 Product Market Research
Trends data can be a helpful jumping off point in researching organic consumer behavior to evaluate overall market fit for your product or service. Any vertical or industry — whether it’s Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Automotive, or Entertainment — can use trend data to understand what products, shows, flavors, or models are most commonly being talked about.
#2 Creative Messaging and Copywriting
For brands looking to build contextually relevant creative, this is a great way to keep a pulse on those trends and ensure that creative copy not only fits its context, but stands out.
#3 Building User Profiles and Personas
Because communication on Snap most often occurs among close friends, Snapchatters often share what they’re doing in their daily lives, including both major life moments and more mundane daily activities. This can lead to powerful insights when building a profile of who your target audience is and what they do throughout their days and weeks, like going to work, shopping online, and streaming the latest content online.
#4 Researching Key Moments
Similar to the concept above, we’ve seen that Snapchatters not only use Snapchat to celebrate major milestones, but they also tend to celebrate those moments in between — what we like to call Snapchat Holidays. This can be anything from National Ice Cream Day to International Women’s day, and we tend to see a massive groundswell in conversation around these “in-between” holidays. For any brand looking to “own” a relevant moment, Trends can be an incredibly powerful planning tool in finding just the right moment to align a media strategy to.
#5 Competitive Research
One final and very valuable use is to understand the market in which a brand, product, or service operates. It can be used not only to understand consumer sentiment towards specific products or types of products, but also to understand competitive offerings and how those products fit in the market. By analyzing multiple products in one query, you can easily compare the peaks and valleys of conversation over time to see how your brand is faring relative to the competition on Snapchat. This can be incredibly insightful input for both ongoing brand-health monitoring and also larger quarterly business reviews.
6. Google: Cover All Your Bases With Searcher Intent & Your Content - Lily Ray shared an interesting chart from Ahrefs, the SEO toolset, showing how for a single keyword phrase, there were multiple intents from searchers spike over a different time period. In which, John Mueller of Google responded that it makes sense to create content that covers "both possible intents."
7. Google Now Allows You To Report Indexing Issues - Google announced that all signed-in Google Search Console users who go to the English help form can now submit indexing bug notifications to Google.
To access the form, you need to be signed in to your Search Console account and access the English version of either of these
two help documents.
Google did say "before reporting an Indexing issue, always consult
our community forums and check our support documentation, which highlights some additional helpful tools." "Support is limited to English at the moment, but we will explore expansion to more languages in the future," Google added.
8. YouTube Rolls Out 3 Updates For Creators - YouTube Studio is receiving three updates on mobile and desktop that will help creators stay informed on data that matters to their channel.
The updates include:
- Improved real time cards - These cards display up-to-the-minute data on important channel metrics like subscriber counts and video views. Realtime cards are getting improved at the video level and at the channel level. The improvements appear to be the addition of reach and engagement data, which now have dedicated tabs.
- An inbox for channel mentions - Creators now have access to a mentions inbox in YouTube Studio. The inbox will show you all the places where your channel has been mentioned on YouTube. If your channel is tagged in the comment section of another channel’s video, for example, the mentions inbox is where you can go to find out about it. Replying to mentions may help get more eyes on your channel as it can make you more visible to different audiences. The mentions inbox can be found where you access viewer comments in YouTube Studio. A new tab will let you toggle between the comments inbox and mentions inbox.
- Hashtag autocomplete suggestions - YouTube is launching hashtag autocomplete suggestions, which will recommend relevant hashtags based on what’s most popular. The feature works in a similar way to hashtag suggestions on Twitter and Instagram. Start typing the hashtag and YouTube will display possible tags to use, along with data on how many channels and videos are using each hashtag.
9. YouTube Updates Search Results - YouTube is overhauling its search results with changes to the visual presentation of SERPs as well as the types of content returned.
The updates to YouTube search include three significant changes:
- Improved visual presentation - YouTube is making it easier for users to see what a video is about before clicking on it. The search results pages are now more visual. Instead of a static thumbnail, users can see a preview of each video when they scroll over it. Users can now make more informed decisions about the content they watch. This is already possible on desktop and now the feature is coming to mobile. In addition, YouTube search results pages will display video chapters when available.
- Automatic translations - YouTube is making more content available to more people with the introduction of automatically translated captions, titles, and descriptions. This makes it possible for users to enjoy a greater variety of videos regardless of the language they’re in. When YouTube is not able to return relevant content for a user’s search in their own language, it will return translated content. YouTube will first start supplementing search results with English videos, with plans to expand to more languages in the future. Eventually, YouTube hopes all its content will be accessible through automatic translations.
- Integration of Google search results - Google search results are getting integrated into YouTube. But only on a limited basis, for now. YouTube is experimenting with returning search results from Google when there’s not enough video content available to satisfy a query. This feature is currently available on mobile devices in India and Indonesia. YouTube will consider further expansion based on user feedback.
10. Google Advertisers Can Adjust Conversion Values in Smart Bidding - Stephen Chang, Product Manager, Google Ads in an announcement wrote “You can adjust conversion values based on characteristics like location, device, and audience. By applying a rule to these characteristics, you can adjust conversion values to align more closely with your business outcomes,”
This added feature means that businesses can use their inherent knowledge of what’s working in their industry to improve their conversion rates in Google Ads. For example, if advertisers know certain audiences or people in certain locations are most likely to convert, they can set a rule to multiply the conversion value for the chosen group by two.
For example, let’s say you run a sporting goods store and know that an audience of people similar to repeat customers who have bought triathlon gear will be worth more to your business in the long run. Now, you can set a rule to multiply the conversion value for this specific group by a factor of two.
“These rules will also be used by Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS to optimize your bids in real time. Conversion value rules will be available for Smart Bidding across Search, Shopping, and Display over the next few weeks,” wrote Chang.