Hello,
This week we didn’t have any major news, but there are a series of small updates that you might be interested in from Google, Facebook and Twitter.
1. Facebook seeks foothold in your office – did you ever dream about staying on Facebook while you are at the office and seing your boss happy that you are checking notifications from your buddies? It seems that Facebook is prepairing to launch a new product called „Facebook at Work” which will allow collaboration over documents, chatting with your colleagues and much more, competing with Google Drive or Microsoft Office products offerings. Another good thing is that your personal Facebook account will be separate from your work account, even though the look which includes newsfeed and groups remains similar.
2. Facebook Lets High-Rolling Brands See What Users Really Think in This Elite Program – the program called Grapevine allows advertisers who spend a fortune on Facebook ads campaigns to get exclusive access to anonimous data from comments and other social activities of Facebook users, revealing what people think and say.
3. Facebook’s Cracking Down on Brands, and It’s Great News For Content Marketing – a very good analysis on which the purpose of social media presence for brands should be: bringing visitors to your website, to your blog. Investing resources for increasing the number of fans on Facebook even after the latest updates in terms of reach is proven to be nothing but „vanity metrics”. Read the contently.com article to see the whole argumentation on why you should not „build a house on land you don’t own”.
4. Google Officially Launches “Mobile-Friendly” Labels In Mobile Search Results – tired of opening websites which are unreadable or not functioning properly on mobile? Google has once again proved to care about our time and introduced a new label right in the results page to reward people who invested in making their site mobile-friendly and help us detect them before clicking on them.
5. Google Keyword Planner Now Shows Conversion Estimates – see how your bid influences conversion rate and value. Check the searchengineland.com article for more details on getting started, screenshots, options.
Google’s Knowledge Graph Finally Shows Social Networks Not Named Google+ – Icons and links to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Myspace, YouTube and other profiles are now visible for some brands and celebrities in the Knowledge Graph. Be sure to have your Google account language set as English, otherwise the new update won’t show.
6. Google AdWords Puts Focus on Shopping Campaigns – the main changes are: Data Quality tab in the Merchant Center will be replaced by Diagnostics tab making troubleshooting for companies easier and 5 new features have been added to Shopping Campaigns: Auction Insights Reports, Search Impression Share, Device and Time Segmentation, Bid Simulator Columns and Flattened view of your product groups. Read the ppchero.com article for more explanations on each of them.
7. Setting the Record Straight on Viewability, Fraud and Metrics – a very interesting educational article about the difference between ad visibility and ad fraud and what is the industry doing to address these issues.
8. Surprise! Google rolls out an ad-free option – Google finally found a way to make everyone happy with Google Contributor, a tool which allows users to pay for funding their favorite publications instead of seing the ads. Those who choose to pay 1$-3$ will see a „Thank you” message instead of ads. Only 10 publishers are included for now in Google Contributor program (among them Imgur, Mashable, The Onion, Urban Dictionary, WikiHow), but more are soon expected to benefit from this tool.
9. Yahoo and Mozilla Partner to Bring Yahoo Search to Firefox – Yahoo will become the new default search engine for Firefox U.S. across both desktop and mobile in December as Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, announced on the blog. This change will only affect the users in United States, those in Europe will continue to have Google as the default search engine for Firefox.
10. Twitter Finally Makes All Your Tweets Searchable – users will now be able to search through all the public tweets. Half a trillion posts can give you an amazing view on how people perceived certain events like elections, notorious accidents, sports events, festivals.
This was all for this week. Have a productive week ahead!