April Online Marketing Roundup

In case you went on vacation, were abducted by aliens, or up to your elbows busy in work this April, this is just the article you need to get all caught up on the latest news. So, whatever the case may be, check out this post with this months most important headlines. Time to read our April Online Marketing Roundup!

Facebook's Algorithm is Changing, and It’s Not Good News for Brands

Facebook is updating its algorithm to create a better experience for their users, which some expect is going to limit the amount of branded content showing up in people's news feeds.

Translated, this means that facebook will start showing a right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to.

They are saying that this balance will be different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about in any given day.

Here are the three main updates that Facebook mentioned:

The first is improving the experience for people who don’t have a lot of content available to see. This means, if you run out of content, but want to spend more time in your News Feed, you’ll end up seeing more.
The second update tries to ensure that content posted directly by friends such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in the News Feed.
Lastly, many people have complained about seeing their friends liking or commenting on a post. So, the third update will make these stories appear lower down in News Feed or not at all, so people are more likely to see the stuff they care about directly from friends and the pages they have liked.

How Will This Affect my Business Page?

According to facebook these changes will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline. However Facebook is also encouraging business pages to post more content that their audiences find more meaningful.

Google's “Mobilegeddon” Has Arrived, Have You Passed the Test?

In case you haven’t heard a thing these last two months about Google, they’ve made some big changes to their algorithm. Please be aware that starting from Tuesday the 21st of April, all websites must have a Mobile friendly version if they want to keep a competitive ranking in mobile searches.

This means that from now on Google is making it easier for mobile searchers to find mobile-friendly web pages. So take note, if you’re a marketer or a small business owner, you’re much more likely to boost awareness of your business if your website is mobile friendly.

Or, In other words :

Mobile-friendliness is now an official search engine ranking factor

More than 60 percent of all Google searches are now being performed specifically from mobile devices and this new algorithm reflects that growing trend. Google now favors sites with large text, easily clickable links, and optimized sizes that fit the smaller screens of smartphones and mobile devices.

But, don’t freak out, here are some of the most important facts that you should know regarding this Google change:

If you are behind on getting your website mobile-optimized, you won’t be punished permanently. Websites can upgrade their "mobile-friendliness" at any time to appear higher in Google’s search results.
Google also gives you the right tools to check if your site has passed the mobile friendly test. You need to know that Google is the absolute from now on when it comes to mobile friendliness. So make every effort to meet its expectations, not your own. That’s why we recommend you should only trust in Google Mobile Test
Google says that non-mobile-friendly sites won’t disappear from mobile Search results, they may still rank high if they hold great content the user wants.
This update has no effect on searches from tablets or desktops. It affects searches from mobile devices across all languages and locations.
This update it’s a page-level change. For instance, if ten of your site’s pages are mobile-friendly, but the rest of your pages aren’t, only the ten mobile-friendly pages can be positively impacted.
Google won’t give a stronger mobile-friendly ranking to pages using responsive web design vs hosting a separate mobile site (like www for desktop and m.example.com for mobile). Mobile-friendliness is assessed the same, whether you use responsive web design, separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving for your configuration. If your site uses separate mobile URLs or dynamic serving, Google recommend reviewing the Mobile SEO guide to make sure Google is properly crawling and indexing your mobile pages.

Twitter Now Lets You Opt In To Receive Direct Messages From Anyone

Twitter has recently introduced a new feature that allows users to opt-in to receive direct messages from anyone on the site, not just followers. Great news as this is a move that could potentially be very beneficial to businesses.

Twitter says that a new Direct Message button will appear on profile pages for both Android and iPhone users. This button will only appear on the profiles of people you can send Direct Messages to (you’ll have to activate this option, and you can find it in your Settings under the privacy heading) making it more obvious with a glance who’s turned the feature on already.

This is an important change because now business could simply adjust a setting in order to hear from all of their customers – even if those customers didn't want to be publicly tweeting any of their thoughts and opinions.

Another reason this change is so important is because many businesses use Twitter for customer support, which can sometimes require the exchange of personal and private information, including financial info. This is great because for obvious reasons, these actions definitely need to take place over DMs exclusively.

Google’s New Mobile Breadcrumb URLs

Google has also started replacing the URL’s with the site names and breadcrumb trails in the mobile search snippets. You'll now see a better representation of how any page in question lives within a particular site.

Google’s philosophy believes that well-structured URLs offer users a quick hint about a page topic and how a particular page fits within the whole scheme of a website. This is why they’ve decided to use the real-world names of a given site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of a site in a breadcrumbs-like format.

These changes are rolling out gradually and will initially only affect mobile results. This means the site name change is US-only for now and breadcrumbs are rolling out worldwide.

These changes are giving webmasters a better way to communicate a site name and it’s breadcrumb data through structured data schema. To find out more, the schema markup to specify the site name can be found here and the schema for breadcrumb can be found here.

It is basically a little extra markup that you can add to your source code in order to communicate these variables more directly to Google.