Why are big companies boycotting FB ads?
Do your customers care about civil rights issues? Would you let this direct your advertising spend?
Large companies around the world are boycotting Facebook ads for the month of July in protest on hate speech policies.
Unlike Twitter Facebook had left tweets by the American President unlabelled on the site, although in response to the campaign this is changing.
Some are cynical about large companies motives. Companies that include Starbucks, Unilever, Verizon, Levi and Coca Cola.
Are they reacting because they want their customers to see they care? Are they taking a stand or is it due to financial pressures?
Facebook has responded by saying they will label hate speech and by giving a full outline of their policies regarding hate speech.
New Facebook Shopping Ad Audiences
Over the last year or so more and more companies and websites have blocked all cookies including the Facebook pixel.
This means that it will become harder to build warm audiences and retarget people who have visited our website and not purchased.
Facebook are reacting by letting you build more audiences based on their online behaviour.
This week Facebook added a new type of custom audience that ties to what people do on your Facebook and Instagram shop.
These mimic the audiences you can build if you run your store from your website. You’ll be able to create audiences of people who visit your shop, add to cart or buy from you.
These are exactly the same as audiences you can create for e-commerce websites, the difference is all this happens on Facebook.
The audiences can be used for retargeting, you can remind people they were thinking of buying. Encouraging repeat purchases from those who have bought previously and for creating lookalike audiences of the people who buy from you.
Lookalike audiences are made up from people who are similar to your custom audience and often work better for cold ad targeting.
As more companies and browsers block cookies and the Facebook pixel using audiences built within Facebook will still work.
Finally LinkedIn shows us who follows our page
LinkedIn has been working hard to get us using company pages. You need a company page to advertise.
This week a bunch of new stats for your LinkedIn company page appeared. These include a list of people who follow your page.
Up until now page follows were secret. This could be frustrating as you couldn’t know if you were reaching the right people.
You can also see more collated information about your followers including location, industry and company size.
Use these stats to know if you are hitting the right people with your company page and adjust your strategy if you aren’t.
This will make pages more appealing to businesses.
https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1278253474342408192/photo/3
Google Live Messages Are Rolled Out To More Businesses
Direct messaging is becoming a key way that customers get in touch with businesses. You can use a plugin on your website for live chat, use messenger on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter but now Google wants your messages.
This is a tool that was previously available to select business types in some regions but Google is rolling it out to all Google My Business users.
Customers will be able to message your business and you’ll be able to set up canned responses, welcome messages and products carousels amongst other features.
You’ll also be able to integrate the tool into your CRM tools outside GMB. I can see me using this when searching for restaurants and things to do when I’m travelling but there are many use cases beyond that.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this expands to booking and shopping.
https://www.blog.google/products/maps/now-sending-business-messages-google-maps-and-search/
Free Google product listings in search
Remember when all you needed to do to get your product at the top of Google searches was to do some simple SEO? Times have changed and Google has been balancing organic listings with ads, knowledge boxes and other data. These features have pushed organic results further and further down the page.
Google is launching a new feature that fixes this. Companies in the US will see their products appear at the top of search for free.
When someone searches for a product on Google they will get a ‘knowledge box’ displaying the product and a list of sites they can buy it from. The result looks similar to bricks and mortar business searches which list businesses by location.
This will condense search results and put more stuff in the way of regular search results but still gives businesses the opportunity to rank.
This is the second free tool that Google have given to online stories in the US. They recently offered free product listings in the shopping tab to businesses I the US.
https://www.blog.google/products/maps/now-sending-business-messages-google-maps-and-search/
Snapchat Gucci AR try on campaign
What if a customer could try on shoes in a shoe shop without leaving their home.
This would eliminate hygiene issues and you wouldn’t be left waiting while someone scrabbles around in the stockroom looking for your size.
This could be the future of shopping if the new tool from Snapchat and Gucci works out.
Snapchatters will be able to try on Gucci running shoes using an AR lens. This isn’t new, what is new is the ability to buy directly from the lens. A completely new type of interactive ad.
It would be wonderful to see tools like this expanded to small business e-commerce stores. We can already do it with glasses, could shoes be the next thing?
Facebook hashtags will be a thing
Until recently (Read this week) if someone asked me about using hashtags on Facebook I would have said NO!
Hashtags have been an annoyance to Facebook users in the past but it seems that’s changing. Facebook are putting a new focus on hashtags according to Mari Smith.
Facebook has been prompting people to use hashtags, some users are seeing a prompt to ‘Browse’ hashtag results.
Hashtag pages are also getting a makeover.
She not only recommends you use them on new posts but also suggests you update older posts to include tags.
Are Facebook users ready for this?
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