DuckDuckGo Becomes the 2nd Largest search engine
How much do you care about privacy for your search engine?
This month privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo became the second largest search engine in the world after Google.
But a long way after Google. Google has over 94% of market share, DuckDuckGo 2.25%. This still beats Bing and Yahoo.
It grew by 73% over the same period last year.
Will we see this trend toward privacy focussed online business grow? How can you as a business leverage this trend?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-hits-new-record-100-million-searches-per-day/392736/
LinkedIn adds filters to company page invites
Did you know you can invite your LinkedIn connections to follow your company page?
But the invite process is hard. You don’t want to invite all your connections, some won’t be the right people. So how do you choose?
Until now, you had to go through one by one selecting people. But LinkedIn just made it easier.
When you click the invite button you can now filter your connections by locations, companies, schools and Industry.
This will make the process easier and it will ensure that you are inviting the people most likely to benefit from your content.
Goodbye ‘Our Story’ on Facebook
About us pages are the second most popular pages on websites. So why is Facebook getting rid of them from pages?
‘Our story’ was the equivalent of an ‘about us’ page for Facebook.
Not all businesses completed that section and we’ve no clue how many people viewed them.
Perhaps this is why Facebook is getting rid of them. This week users saw warnings telling them that the ‘Our story’ section will disappear.
This could be part of streamlining business pages ahead of moving them to the new ‘Page Experiences’.
Facebook makes alt text better
Alt text helps people who are visually impaired understand your images.
On Facebook, very few people add alt text to their images so Facebook uses object recognition to create its own.
Up until now, this process has been limited but it’s about to get a whole lot better.
The Alt text update will use AI to describe images better, it will be able to identify more activities, landmarks and types of animals. Plus it will highlight the primary features of an image giving more context.
Add Q&A to TikTok
Question and poll stickers have been huge on Instagram. Now TikTok is getting its own Q&A.
Users with a ‘Creator’ account will be able to add Q&A to their profile. People will be able to ask questions publicly so that creators can respond with a video.
At the moment this is for creator accounts only but I can see it being rolled out to business accounts if the test is a success.
Pinterest adds Dynamic Creative for Advertisers
Dynamic creative shows different versions of ads to different people. It should make the ads more relevant to users.
Pinterest is adding Dynamic Creative to its ad product. Just like Facebook, advertisers will add their product feed to Pinterest. This pulls in product images and pricing making it possible to show a product ad to someone from the advertiser’s audience who is searching for something similar.
This could be a powerful addition to Pinterest ads.
WhatsApp pauses privacy update
People freaked out when WhatsApp announced it was updating it’s privacy settings.
They started moving to other chat tools and complained.
It was the additional data users believed they’d be sharing with Facebook that caused the panic.
Because of this, WhatsApp is moving the date that you need to agree to the policy to the 15th of May.
They also clarified that the new data collection was all related to the new business tools and shopping that they are rolling out.
Will people stick with WhatsApp? The new tools could be huge for business but is it one step too far for those with privacy concerns?
https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-update
Get a headstart on Google Analytics 4 & understand the lingo with the GA4 phrase book
