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Hello and welcome to another edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots – our weekly column where we comb through some of the most relevant news and events that took place within the digital marketing landscape over the last week or so.

Let’s see what “December 2020: Week 4” edition brings us:   

  • New tab on LinkedIn Pages Helps You Showcase Your Company’s Products 
  • New Creative Tools in Instagram’s Reels and Stories
  • New Small Business Resource Center for Marketers at TikTok
  • Over 5 Million Sites Affected by Contact Form 7 Plugin Vulnerability
  • Google Is Moving Its Structured Data Testing Tool to a New Domain

Alrighty then, let’s dive right in!

New Tab on LinkedIn Pages Helps You Showcase Your Company’s Products

LinkedIn’s marketing team has provided us with a new “Products” tab, enabling users to showcase their products on this network. 70% of customers today choose their purchases by previously researching them online, which means that proper representation of your product is of paramount importance. 

Having this in mind, it is a no brainer to understand that creating a community around your product who will ask questions, endorse or generally share their experiences with it is an excellent channel for growing your business.

LinkedIn team explains:

“With Product Pages you can spotlight product endorsements and testimonials by your users, gather ratings and reviews from current users, and generate leads with a custom call-to-action button, such as a demo request or contact sales form. In the new “Products” Tab, you can add new products you want to feature and include rich media like videos or product screenshots, descriptions and more.”

New Tab on LinkedIn Pages Helps You Showcase Your Company’s Products | Four Dots

(Image source: LinkedIn)

With an audience of more than 722M professionals, over 10 000 product pages in B2B category, and steady growth, it is safe to say that LinkedIn is just the right place to showcase what you have to offer.

New Creative Tools in Instagram’s Reels and Stories

In the spirit of holidays (probably), Instagram has decided to give us a gift of new features in Reels and Stories

The first one will most certainly be favorite among karaoke fans since it brings “Audio Mix” and “Voice-over” options. Basically, you can now add additional tracks – either by adding music clips or via voice recording. Not sure if this new feature rings a bell, but it certainly “Tiks a Tok” (pun intended). 

Instagram is also adding a ‘Reels’ watermark to the top left of your clips to ensure that the “Reels” branding pops up every time clips are re-shared. Now, does that sound familiar too? 

New Creative Tools in Instagram’s Reels and Stories | Four Dots

(Image Source: SocialMediaToday)

Instagram Stories will now have a “Photobooth” option, enabling you to take several pictures with only one press of the button, just like Boomers used to make in real photo booths – unironically.

Instagram still hasn’t confirmed a full roll-out of these new features, so keep your eyes on the screen. 

New Small Business Resource Center for Marketers at TikTok

In its continual expansion of options and business opportunities, TikTok’s new addition to the family is Small Business Resource Center offering a number of creative resources, success stories and other useful information for a growing business.

“From success stories to creative tools and free webinars, it has everything you need to grow your small business on our platform.”

New Small Business Resource Center for Marketers at TikTok | Four Dots

(Image Source: TikTok)

2020 was a very tumultuous year for TikTok – from a total ban for the app in India and a semi-ban in the US to a constant growth of new members projected to reach one billion in 2021, this underdog has shown it has teeth and has brought innovation and fresh ideas that are now shamelessly copied by “The Big Boys”.  

Over 5 Million Sites Affected by Contact Form 7 Plugin Vulnerability

In a short and somewhat skittish release, Contact Form 7 team has published an update of their WordPress plugin as a result of a discovered critical vulnerability allowing attackers to upload malicious scripts. 

As they explain in their release:

“An unrestricted file upload vulnerability has been found in Contact Form 7 5.3.1 and older versions. Utilizing this vulnerability, a form submitter can bypass Contact Form 7’s filename sanitization, and upload a file which can be executed as a script file on the host server.”

Over 5 Million Sites Affected by Contact Form 7 Plugin Vulnerability | Four Dots

(Image Source: WPFixIt)

In layman’s terms, filename sanitization is the cleaning process of a string to be safe for use as a filename by removing and restricting certain files and elements like directory paths and invalid characters.

In short – Contact Form 7 versions from 7 5.3.1 and under are considered vulnerable, so you should probably update your plugin ASAP. 

Google Is Moving Its Structured Data Testing Tool to a New Domain

Great news for all Structured Data Testing Tool fans. The tool isn’t being shut down after all, as it was previously announced, but is getting migrated to a new domain.

In July 2020, Google decided to cancel the Structured Data Testing and move its basic features onto the Rich Results Test tool. This didn’t sit well with a huge chunk of the SEO community, nor did it sit well with website owners. 

As their dissatisfaction by this decision reached the folks over at Google, the feedback was heard loud and clear and Google is now, 5 months later, bringing back the Structured Data Testing Tool. 

The brand new address is Schema.org and it is expected to be relaunched in April 2021. It is important to mention that once the tool becomes active again, it will no longer check for Google Search rich result types.

More info available here.  

Wrapping Up

That would be all for this installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week, until then – feel free to check out our previous edition!

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