June Online Marketing Roundup

Another Month is coming to an end, and that means that is time to our summary of the most important news of June. Let’s get started!

1. Twitter Launches Two New Features

Every month, millions of people Tweet about what they love: products they buy, places they visit, books they’re reading or vacations they’re planning. But it can be challenging to find and engage with the most relevant Tweets, images and videos about products and places when you’re looking for them.

That’s why Twitter has decided to test two ways to make it easier for users to discover rich and relevant content about products and places on Twitter.

Those new features are called:

• Product and place pages
• Product and place collections

A. Product and place pages

This will be a new way to surface and organize relevant Tweets about products and places on dedicated pages. These pages will feature images and video about the product alongside information such as a description, price, and an option to buy, book, or visit the website for more information.

B. Product and Place Collections

In addition to pages, twitter is also beginning to test new ways for people and brands to create and share Twitter collections of products and places.

You’ll be able to browse rich collections from influencers you care about and get more information about the products or places you find interesting.

2. Google Trend Updates

Last June 17, Google announced the biggest update to Google Trends in three years. They have introduced 4 new features, let’s see them:

1. Real-time data

You can now explore minute-by-minute, real-time data behind the more than 100 billion searches that take place on Google every month, getting deeper into the topics you care about.

You’ll be able to track the stories most people are searching for and where in the world interest is peaking. Explore this data by selecting any time range in the last week from the date picker.

2. A New story-centric homepage

The Google trends home page has been changed to feature a ranked list of real-time list of trending stories that are receiving a high volume of searches across Google.

This gives you a highly useful dashboard for monitoring real time search trends which can inform your marketing efforts.

This re-designed home page now also integrates results from searches in YouTube and Google+ to paint a better picture of what is grabbing the online communities attention.

3. Better coverage for deeper insights

Google has also increased the breadth and coverage of Google Trends data to allow for in-depth research on more niche topics in smaller geographies.

4. Curated data sets

Google's News Lab team will now be examining trending topics every day and finding interesting tid-bits of data which are highly relevant to recent news stories, and then publishing them on Twitter for all to see!

3. Facebook Adds Authorship

Facebook has released a new "authorship" feature that's powered by the Author meta tag. If this sounds remarkably similar to Google's Authorship which was shuttered last year, that's because it is.

This is a web development tool that connects the byline in a story preview in the News Feed to the writer’s Page or Profile with Follow.

With a simple meta tag, writers and publishers can now indicate the author profile or publishing page for any given piece of content. The result is a linked name attached to any shares of that content on Facebook that allows viewers to see the author and potentially follow them.

4. Twitter Introduces Autoplay Video

Twitter announced last June 16 that it will start serving autoplay video to its users.

Over the past year Twitter have made several changes to improve how people share, discover and watch videos, such as reducing the number of taps it takes to play a video, introducing a native mobile camera and bringing videos and Vines front and center in your timeline.

That’s why now native videos, Vines and GIFs will begin to play back automatically. So you can keep up with the action without missing a Tweet and get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly.

Once you tap the video, sound will turn on and the video will continue to play in an expanded view. If you turn the video to landscape mode, the sound will automatically turn on and the video will expand to fill the screen.

5. Facebook Empowers Ads Manager

Facebook has decided to improve Ads Manager and Power Editor to make it easier to create, optimize and monitor ad campaigns.

A. Facebook Ads Manager Improvements

Ads Manager will now feature a streamlined layout that brings performance metrics to the forefront of the tool. That means advertisers can quickly reference how their ads are performing in the same environment where they create and edit them.

Also the date range will be adjustable and performance data can be filterable by objective, metric, delivery status and other options. Plus, they can automatically save and send reports at set intervals, so they don’t have to manually run and distribute reports.

Lastly users will now have the ability to edit multiple ads, bids, targeting in one fell swoop. Each campaign, set and ad will also have the ability to be duplicated directly within Ads Manager

B. Facebook Power Editor Improvements

The new version of the tool offers a larger and more functional layout for creating ads, as well as improvements to advanced search and bulk editing, so advertisers can easily find and edit existing ads and create new ones.

The search feature will allow for searching by name or ID as well as the filtering by delivery status or objective. A “recently edited” and “recently uploaded” filter will also exist to keep recent updates within arm’s reach.