Company page updates for LinkedIn
If you have employees, they could be your biggest advocates on LinkedIn. The latest updates to LinkedIn company pages reflect this.
It is adding some features previously only available on a paid tool ‘elevate’. The first one adds a ‘My Company Tab’ to pages. This is a place where employees can find trending and curated content from your business and share it.
You’ll also be able to access new analytics that will show you the impact of these shares from employees.
Another feature will be ‘product pages’ which will be a part of your company page. This is a space where people can share experiences and ask questions about products. These products (think software rather than e-commerce) will be connected to Lead Forms so that when someone clicks ‘learn more’ they can send you a question privately.
Expansion of YouTube shorts
If you want to get more traction on YouTube right now, Shorts are the thing to do. These are videos that are shot vertically and can be up to 60-seconds in length. If you tag your video #shorts it will be marked as a short and get extra distribution.
But Shorts is also an app from YouTube that is similar to TikTok. It has many of the same features including multi-clip editing and music. Until now it’s only been available in India but in March it’s coming to the US.
Hopefully, this is the beginning of a wider roll-out and we’ll start to see more creative short videos on YouTube soon. But will this be the beginning of the end of longer-form videos?
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/neal-innovation-series/
Roll out of Facebook shop to Canada and UK
Retailers, if you don’t have your Facebook shop yet, get ready.
Facebook Shop is a virtual department store on Facebook. When you select ‘Shop’ from the menu, you will find products from the businesses you follow and discover new things. They are being rolled out to the UK right now.
This could mean more reach for your online products and more sales. Although this is a roll-out to Canada and the UK only, it signals that it may not be long until we see them here in Ireland.
Spotify podcast transcript
What is the best content type for your customer? Could it be audio? We know audio content is taking off in 2021. We’ve seen Clubhouse explode and all the social networks are adding new audio and voice features.
Spotify, known for being an audio platform, is also embracing new ways to listen. What started with music, and grew to include podcasts, will soon offer the option to turn your written content, think blog posts, into a podcast, published via Anchor.
This is great for accessibility, but if you’ve ever had Alexa read you a Kindle book, you’ll know automated voices can take getting used to.
https://www.axios.com/spotify-interactive-podcast-tools-218eb4d1-9a9f-4dd4-b0fc-5d56a22b3e12.html
How’s that WhatsApp privacy update going?
Do your customers trust you? Lack of trust is a problem WhatsApp is facing right now. After asking people to agree to a new privacy policy, involving sharing information to Facebook, they faced a massive backlash.
People were suddenly suspicious, they don’t trust Facebook with their data. Because of this WhatsApp delayed the update.
But now they are giving it another go. This time they are sharing way more information about how the data is going to be shared with Facebook, what remains the same and how the update could benefit customers and businesses.
Will it work? Will people ever fully trust Facebook tools?
https://blog.whatsapp.com/more-information-about-our-update
Is it you or is it Facebook?
Facebook is full of bugs. So much so that when you are working on something and it doesn’t work, you never really know is it you, or is it Facebook.
A new site from Facebook will now show you if there are any known issues in Facebook ads or WhatsApp business.
This could reassure you, or frustrate you more. It’s also worth looking back at the history to see what problems have been reported recently.
Firefox adds total cookie protection
Although cookies on websites can be useful for staying logged in, most people are uncomfortable with being tracked across the internet. We’ve talked about this before, the new iPhone update will make our Facebook ads harder to track and Android is working on something similar.
The third most popular internet browser, Firefox, is adding more protection to users this week. It’s always been strong on privacy. This latest update will continue to allow cookies but will restrict them to the site you are on. This will restrict data collecting pixels like Facebook and Google.
If this results in more people using Firefox we could see other browsers follow suit, making it much harder for us to use cookie-based advertising in the future.