Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: October 2020, Week 4

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 “October 2020: Week 4” edition brings us:   

• New WhatsApp Shopping and Payment Tools Announced 
• Facebook Tests The Nextdoor Style ‘Neighborhoods’ Feature 
• Facebook to Roll Out New Advertising Options for the Holiday Season
• Instagram Updates Fan Badges to Let More Users Monetize Their Content 
• New Info on How Google Identifies Individual Passages of a Web Page 

Alrighty then, let’s dive right in! 

New WhatsApp Shopping and Payment Tools Announced 

Facebook is further continuing to increase its investments into online shopping as it announces new and expanded WhatsApp shopping/payment tools to help businesses sell more products and services online. 

Facebook is looking to provide a way for businesses to more easily communicate with their customers and close sales more easily via WhatsApp. The companies will enable their buyers to browse, select and pay for items via this platform, all while directly communicating with an online shop. 

“Many of the old ways in which people and businesses communicate are not working,” says Facebook’s official statement. “While businesses spend billions of dollars annually managing phone calls, e-mails, and SMS, people do not want to wait on hold, get passed from person to person, or wonder if their messages were received.”

Facebook’s dedicated shopping tab for both Facebook and Instagram has already been announced prior to this news, along with the in-app purchases function – which are now being expanded on WhatsApp as well.

Facebook Tests The Nextdoor Style ‘Neighborhoods’ Feature 

It didn’t take long for Facebook to recognize how crucial Facebook Groups are in terms of connecting users with similar interests, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more than 1.8 billion active Facebook users engaging in Groups on a monthly level, and with local communities getting stronger connections by using them, the social media giant decided to create another group-based feature called “Neighborhoods”. 

(Image Source: Social Media Today)

“Neighborhoods” aims to better connect Facebook users to other people within their immediate vicinity and thus create a new way to help local communities stay connected and up to date with local tidings.  

“More than ever, people are using Facebook to participate in their local communities,” said Facebook in their statement for TechCrunch. “To help make it easier to do this, we are rolling out a limited test of Neighborhoods, a dedicated space within Facebook for people to connect with their neighbors.”

But are Facebook’s intentions all that altruistic? Or is there a brand new social app tapping this market so Facebook is making sure they catch that same wave too? Find out here. 

Facebook to Roll Out New Advertising Options for the Holiday Season

With Christmas slowly but surely creeping up, Facebook is adding some new advertising tools that should aid retailers in leveraging the upcoming joyful season as much as possible and hopefully make people buy more things they don’t really need. 

Social commentary aside, one of the main upcoming updates is the feature through which you will be able to create Instagram ads using product tags within Ads Manager. This will allow users to add Instagram’s product tags directly to paid promotions.

(Image Source: Social Media Today)

Though adding product tags in Instagram posts has been possible for a while now, brands can now add these tags specifically to their ads. You can find out more about the new features and updates here. 

Instagram Updates “Fan Badges” to Let More Users Monetize Their Content 

Instagram Live fan badges is a feature that was introduced half a year ago in an attempt to let its users make money off of live streams in a very Twitch-like manner. Now, it’s being expanded to 50,000 additional creators.

The fan badges work like this: for a small fee ($0.99, $1.99, or $4.99), Instagram users receive a fan badge next to their name when they leave a comment on an Instagrammer’s live stream.

Below is an example of these multi-tiered heart-shaped badges: 

(Image Source: SEJ)

There are multiple tier levels of these fan badges depending on how much money you are (for some reason) willing to pay, making transparent exactly how much money you’ve contributed. More information available here. 

New Info on How Google Identifies Individual Passages of a Web Page 

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, has recently shared more insight on the upcoming update that is said to improve 7% of global queries. The change will enable Google to identify individual passages of a web page, and in that help the search engine to better understand how relevant a page is to a given query.

This update has caused the SEO community to ask Sullivan a series of questions via a dedicated Twitter thread:

Last week, we shared about how we will soon identify individual passages of a web page to better understand how relevant a page is to a search. This will be a global change improving 7% of queries:https://t.co/iQoXktmSkt

In this thread, more about how it works…. pic.twitter.com/2oqdoCkt6r

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 20, 2020

Google typically evaluates an entire web page in order to figure out how relevant the page is to the keywords and/or key phrases entered via a query. This turned out to be quite challenging with evaluating very long web pages or those that cover multiple topics. Long-form content, though effective in various SEO aspects, can dilute key content segments that are relevant to the made query.

The upcoming changes should enable Google to solve this issue.

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!

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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