Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: June 2020, Week 2

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 world over the last 7 days or so.

Let’s see what “June 2020: Week 2” edition brings:   

• Instagram May Introduce Permissions for Site Owner’s to Embed IG Photos
• Facebook Test-drives Email Marketing Tools for Business Pages
• Google to Roll Out a Featured Snippets Update
• Bing’s Backlink Research Tool Has Been Updated
• Bing Webmaster Tools’ New Site Scan Feature Can Track Down Technical SEO Issues 
• LinkedIn to Roll Out Highly-Anticipated New Ad Targeting Feature 

Alrighty then, let’s dive right in! 

 

Instagram May Introduce Permissions for Site Owner’s to Embed IG Photos

In the wake of the events that led to Newsweek being sued for copyright infringement, Instagram might introduce a new rule demanding from site owners to get permission from Instagram users before embedding their posts on a web page. 

Newsweek faced a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a photographer whose Instagram post was embedded on their page without the photographer’s permission. 

Now it seems that this isolated case may cause a snowball effect (caused by one snowflake of a photographer) that may lead to a new rule for website owners in terms of using media coming from Instagram. 

As far as Instagram’s terms of service is concerned, it states that users provide a copyright license to Instagram every time they upload a photo, but according to a statement provided to Ars Technica, the said license doesn’t cover websites displaying embedded media coming from Instagram:

“While our terms allow us to grant a sub-license, we do not grant one for our embeds API. Our platform policies require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders. This includes ensuring they have a license to share this content, if a license is required by law.”

So, what does this mean for website owners?

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the moment is to not embed any Instagram media without the creator’s permission.

We’ll have more information once the Newsweek lawsuit has been completed. 

 

Facebook Test-Drives Email Marketing Tools for Business Pages

Good news for businesses that are looking for new ways to send marketing emails. Facebook is currently testing a new set of handy tools that will allow SMEs to easily insert contact lists and compose marketing emails. 

Businesses and email marketers will be able to create effective campaigns through Facebook and easily track their performance.

Facebook confirmed  the testing of these tools in a statement to Adweek in which a Facebook representative stated the following:

“We’re testing new email marketing tools with a small number of businesses to help them more efficiently notify their customers of changes to their services and operations. We’re evaluating whether these tools are beneficial for people and businesses before deciding whether to expand it further.”

If it turns out to be successful, this set of email marketing tools might be available to more users than just small and medium-sized businesses. 

You can read more about these tools and how they are being tested in this SEJ article. 

 

Google to Roll Out a Featured Snippets Update

The company used its Google SearchLiaison Twitter account to announced an upcoming featured snippets update that will surely turn out to be quite a nifty new feature. 

The update enabled the following feature: the users who click on the snippet are taken, not just onto the page providing info about their search query, but jump-link-style throw them directly to the relevant piece of text on that web page containing information they are looking for.  

The text providing the answer will be highlighted so it is more conspicuous to the user.  

Below is an example of how this new feature works:  

And when you click on the snippet, you are taken directly to the relevant piece of text, as shown here:

 

However, as there’s always a catch, this new update won’t be applied to all featured snippets, but only to those where Google is certain the user is indeed directed straight to the relevant content segment.

As we have done with AMP pages since December 2018, clicking on a featured snippet now takes users to the exact text highlighted for HTML pages, when we can confidently determine where the text is, for browsers that support the underlying technology….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020

The good news for website owners is that there’s no need for any special markup or add-ons for this new feature to work. 

 

Bing’s Backlink Research Tool Has Been Updated

Good news for SEOs who use Bing as its backlink tool now packs a cool new feature that reports competitor backlinks. 

Backlinks is back in the new Bing Webmaster Tools https://t.co/OiERBQYViP ! Backlinks not only for your site but also for other sites (tab Similar sites), including for sites we suggest. Have a look and give us feedback on this beta tool.

— Microsoft Bing Webmaster Team (@BingWMC) June 2, 2020

Bing’s backlink research tool is preferred by many due to the handy and insightful data it is able to provide, including: 

• links from unique top referring domains
• links on a page per page level
• top anchor text

Now, you can have access to the same type of data, but for your competitors. Handy stuff, especially for those researching links within their link building process.

What’s the Value for SEOs?

Though there are numerous link building tools available to SEOs, this one can really bring added value to the table. Not only because it comes straight from a search engine that provides you link data for your own website, but because you can now track link-related data for the pages you do not have verified access to.

More information available in this SEJ article.

 

Bing Webmaster Tools’ New Site Scan Feature Can Track Down Technical SEO Issues 

More good news for Bing-focused SEOs and site owners as the company launches a new on-demand site audit tool that helps you check websites for technical SEO issues that may be hurting their rankings and have a negative impact on the pages’ performance in search engines.

The Bing Webmaster Tools upgrade is called “Site Scan” and is a convenient way of making pages and websites more user- and search engine friendly. 

Below you can see the dashboard for a new scan:

Find out more in this Search Engine Land article. 

 

LinkedIn to Roll Out Highly-Anticipated New Ad-Targeting Feature 

LinkedIn’s highly demanded and anticipated new ad targeting feature – Engagement Retargeting Options for Lead Ads and Video Views – is finally about to see the light of day.

The new feature, that will be rolled out during July, enables advertisers to create retargeting audiences of users who: 

• Have Video Ads 
• Have interacted with Lead Gen Forms

We advise you to check out this SEJ article to read about why there was such a huge demand for this new ad targeting feature.

 

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!