Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: March 2020, Week 1

Another installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots is here – a weekly column where we collect and write about the most relevant industry-related pieces of news that happened in the past seven days (or so). 

In our “March 2020”: Week 1” edition, you can read about the following events: 

• Facebook Updates Business-to-Customer Messaging Best Practices
• Google Creates a Brand New Company Position – ‘Creator Liaison’ for YouTube
• Google’s New “Search for Beginners” Episode Explains How to Hire a Proper SEO Person
• Google Updates FAQ Structured Data Guidelines Regarding Repetitive Content
• LinkedIn to Introduce the “Story” Feature…

…and more. 

Let’s get down to business!

Facebook Updates Business-to-Customer Messaging Best Practices

The social media giant has recently announced an upcoming update of Messenger’s set of business-oriented best practices. The update starts on March 4th when new policies for Facebook Messenger will become effective. 

The updated set of best practice changes should improve the customer-business communication and make the entire messaging experience quicker and much easier. 

“These policy changes were designed to improve the messaging experience between people and businesses by driving timely and personally relevant conversations, – prioritizing conversations started by people and related follow-up communications,” the team behind developers.facebook.com stated in their official post.

Visit Best Practices for Designing Great Messaging Experiences on Messenger to read more about this handy update. 

Google Creates a Brand New Company Position – ‘Creator Liaison’ for YouTube

“Creator Liaison” is a new position within the Google company that should encompass the relations and communication between video publishers and the YouTube platform. The position has already been filled by a former YouTube content creator Matt Koval.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, recently announced the news and welcomed Koval to the liaison team: 

Hello to @YouTubeLiaison — where @MattKoval is in a new role of helping people better understand YouTube and helping YouTube better hear user feedback.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 24, 2020

Much like Sullivan is a human bridge between SEOs and website owners, Koval is about to become the same for YouTube content creators as he will be advocating for YouTubers by resolving any potential concerns and issues they encounter. 

Here’s Koval’s first tweet addressing his new position: 

“Spent years as a @YouTube creator, and then years as a YouTube employee. There are challenges on both sides that each often don’t understand. My new job is to try and improve that understanding. Got ideas on how I can help? Lemme know!”

Read more on Google’s new ‘Creator Liaison’ position here. 

Google’s New “Search for Beginners” Episode Explains How to Hire a Proper SEO Person

The latest episode of Google’s video series called “Search for Beginners” covered the topic of hiring an SEO expert and provided us with an interesting and actionable 3-step guide to help businesses with this not-so-easy task.

The steps include: 

1. An interview
2. A reference check
3. A technical audit 

The said Search for Beginners video is available below: 

According to Google, the biggest advantage of hiring an adequate SEO expert is the option of improving your website’s performance through proper optimization, without wasting much time (and money) learning about and performing SEO tasks on your own.

In an attempt to balance things out, the creators of the video also mentioned the possibility to damage your site’s performance and rep by hiring an inexperienced SEO.  

Google Updates FAQ Structured Data Guidelines Regarding Repetitive Content

In an attempt to mitigate repetitive content and – presumably – prevent website owners from taking up too many SERP slots, Google has (somewhat quietly) updated FAQ structured data guidelines. 

Here’s the new line the company added to their developer document regarding structured data markup for this type of pages:

“If you have FAQ content that is repetitive on your site (meaning, the same question and answer appear on multiple pages on your site), mark up only one instance of that FAQ for your entire site.”

This new addition to these guidelines was noticed by Kenichi Suzuki who subsequently posted the information on his Twitter profile:

Google has updated the guidelines of FAQ: "If you have FAQ content that is repetitive on your site (meaning, the same question and answer appear on multiple pages on your site), mark up only one instance of that FAQ for your entire site."https://t.co/favNCmWMTa
cc: @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/JBpDdAxkIk

— Kenichi Suzuki💫鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) February 28, 2020

More information on this update available within this SEJ article. 

LinkedIn to Introduce the “Story” Feature

Much like Facebook did it about 3 years ago, LinkedIn is about to soon start offering its users the Instagram-like Story feature. The information went public recently, when Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s head of content products, revealed that they are currently testing the Stories feature. 

“We’re never done meeting our members where their voices are,” said Davies. “Last year, we started asking ourselves what Stories might look like in a professional context. Stories first appeared on Snapchat, with other platforms like Instagram and Facebook adopting them soon after. They spread for a good reason: they offer a lightweight, fun way to share an update without it having to be perfect or attached to your profile forever.”

How will LinkedIn’s (somewhat) professional community of users integrate this rather casual and often playful content sharing option, we shall see once this business-focused social platform officially rolls it out in a couple of months.  

TikTok Introduced the “Add Website” Option to Profiles

TikTok users may have noticed the absence of the option to include direct website links in their profile descriptions. Now, it seems that TikTok creators are testing this feature as the platform’s ‘Edit profile’ screen now offers a slot to add URLs of your own choosing. 

As this option is apparently in its testing phase, it has not yet been made available to all TikTok users.

But according to SEJ, it is likely to soon reach the profiles of all TikTok users. Although the option of adding direct website links to a user’s profile is a pretty common feature in many social networks, it is still unknown why TikTok hasn’t included it yet as it has huge marketing potential for businesses to drive traffic from this social platform. 

That’s it for this edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week around Wednesday, and until then – feel free to check out our previous edition!

Radomir Basta

CEO and lead SEO strategist at Four Dots and lecturer at Digital Marketing Institute Also an angry driver and huge tattoo fan. In love with growth hacking.

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