What’s New in the Digital Marketing World?

Hey guys! In this week’s podcast episode I wanted to talk about a bunch of things that are new in the digital marketing world. I talked about new digital marketing trends in 2021 and then specific news updates about individual social media platforms.

As always, I will provide the links to each article I mentioned in the episode. So let’s get into the episode!

I covered an article on PPCexpo titled “What’s new in Digital Marketing? Latest Trends in Digital Marketing in 2021.” Here are the trends I broke down in today’s episode:

1. Voice search. This PPCexpo article shares that “voice search is projected to account for more than 50% of all searches by 2020. With over 33 million devices already using voice search.”
2. Conversion optimization. Does your business have a landing page? This article says that you should have a few! Businesses that have 31-40 landing pages generate almost 7 times as many leads as businesses that have just a few landing pages. Note: For those who may not know, a landing page is a standalone page, separate from your website that serves a singular purpose. For example, realtors might make a landing page for an open house for a specific property they’re selling.
3. Content marketing is changing. If you’re reading this on WordPress and have a blog of your own I’m sure you’ll understand what I’m going to say next. Blogging has become such a saturated realm of the internet that it takes more than a standard text post about a common topic to get potential clients. You have to experiment with different formats like video and make sure that you’re sharing original, creative content.
4. You need video content. Many marketers are using videos in Emails and on their landing pages which can boost conversions by almost 90%.
5. Visual search is becoming more and more popular. Pinterest has invested heavily in this feature and even launched lenses (According to the article lenses is, “a visual search tool that enables people to use visual search to find products and buy them online.” Google Lens is another feature to look out for.
6. Podcasting is not in the past! It’s important to remember that even though there are so many Podcasts out there, so many of them are inactive, don’t post consistently, or don’t market themselves at all. Over 40 million Americans listen to an average of 5 podcast episodes each week. Don’t give up on putting out Podcast episodes and if they aren’t giving you the results you want, maybe rethink your podcast marketing strategy!
7. Track your analytics to get a realistic understanding of where you are now and in order to help yourself make more effective decisions about future advertising.
8. Embrace 2021’s trends to remain competitive.

This is the end of the first article we discussed and the beginning of a brief tangent I went into that I wanted to share. As someone who works around Real Estate agents during my full-time job, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern. Many Real Estate agents will pass around outdated information, watch videos that are several years old, and finally feel ready to share a trend as it’s dying out. I am a firm believer that knowledge doesn’t have an expiration date but when you go to research anything about social media, it’s important to watch newer content because of how often these platforms update. Whether it’s Facebook changing their rules for advertisements or Instagram adding Instagram reels, watching a video that’s just a few months old could be inaccurate and set you up for failure. Push yourself to hop on a trend as soon as you hear about it, not three months down the line. The social media world moves fast!

Next, I covered Instagram’s new blog post which sheds light on how Instagram’s mysterious “algorithm” works.

Instagram’s main point in sharing this information is to debunk the misconception that one algorithm is responsible for what people see and do not see on the app. This blog post discusses that there are multiple algorithms. They even reference fact that “by 2016 people were missing 70% of all their posts in feed, including almost half of posts from their close connections. This is their reasoning for why they use the algorithm they use today because they want users to be able to consistently see content they’re interested in. Something I’ve always heard is that watch-time is the most valuable metric on any social media platform that you’re using, so this logic also applies to Instagram’s motivation.

Another interesting thing Instagram shared was users’ habits when it comes to utilizing the platform’s specific features. For example, people tend to watch stories when they want to see content from their closest friends, but when they want to see something completely new they visit their explore page. I think that it’s extremely beneficial to remember this thought process when we’re developing strategies for our Instagram stories versus our Instagram feed posts.

Now let’s get into how Instagram ranks your feed and stories. Your feed and stories are all recent posts from people that you follow. Instagram calls information that they have about what was posted and who made the posts “signals.” Here are the most important signals they mentioned:

1. Information about the post- The app looks at how many likes a post has, when the post was posted, how long video posts are, and what location is attached to the post.
2. Information about the person who posted- The app looks at how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks.
3. Your activity- This looks at factors like how many posts you’ve liked to figure out what content you are interested in.
4. Your history of interacting with someone- For example, if you comment on someone’s post, this shows how interested you are in seeing posts from a particular person.

After the app takes these signals into account, they start to make a series of educated guesses. These guesses are to try and figure out how likely you are to interact with a post in different ways. In your feed, they look at 5 things- how much time you spend looking at a post and how likely you are to comment, like, and save a post. They also look at how likely you are to click on the profile picture of the person who made the post. They add and remove these “signals” over time, constantly trying to modify their algorithm to get better at finding what you like.

A couple of other interesting tidbits that were shared are that Instagram wants to avoid showing you too many posts from the same person in a row and they mentioned that until recently they valued stories that were re-shared from user’s feeds less because they kept hearing that users were more interested in original stories. However, when big events happened like the Olympics for example, they saw a huge burst of re-shared posts and knew their users were expecting their stories to reach more users than they actually did, so Instagram changed this.

They also briefly discuss how important it is to follow the community guidelines and call out misinformation. A PSA that I think is important to mention is that third-party fact-checkers can label your posts as misinformation and apply a label to the post without taking it down. However, if you’ve posted misinformation multiple times, Instagram themselves want you to know that they may make all of your content harder to find.

Read more of Instagram’s blog post that I linked down below to learn more about how they rank explore, how they rank reels, shadowbanning, and how you can influence what you see.

Now for the perhaps messiest but most intriguing news, I’ve seen recently in the digital marketing world: Facebook and Apple, the feud continues.

Facebook has announced that they will be launching a new interface that will show influencers how much money Apple and Google take from them. You love to see it.

In an article posted on the Verge written by Jay Peters, the author goes more into detail about what this new interface actually is. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO announced that this new interface will show influencers how different fees affect their earnings on the platform. This release is happening while Apple is getting a lot of negative attention for their App store fees.

Zuckerberg didn’t say when this new interface will be released. The CEO also made sure to note that Facebook will keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges, and their upcoming independent new products free for creators until 2023. Initially, Facebook promised not to collect fees from the events feature until at least 2021 and that when the company finally does do a revenue share for this feature, “it will be less than the 30% that Apple and others take.”

This is conveniently happening while Facebook and Apple are still engaged in a public feud because of Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature that was introduced with the iOS 14.5 update. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has publicly stated that privacy should be a human right in regards to Apple’s new feature, while Zuckerberg continues to state that this update will harm small businesses and raise costs throughout the internet.

I want to make a point to state that even though I include short opinions about both of these platforms and updates, I don’t think it’s as simple as being right or wrong. I think both privacy and supporting small businesses are important. I think both companies have come out with some amazing features and some not great features. Most importantly I believe every company, especially ones that completely dominate a specific field should be continuously challenged and forced to evolve. I think it’s interesting that Apple, which is a company that also gets scrutinized often for their alleged violations of privacy, is the one to challenge Facebook, but maybe that’s more effective. Maybe a major company forcing another major company to evolve is more effective than other routes that we’ve seen taken over the past few years.

Even this new Interface that Facebook is releasing, sounds amazing. Apple should be scrutinized for its prices if its client base isn’t happy. If any company has a large percentage of their client base upset at how they do business, it might be time to evolve. Competition is crucial to making sure that users are satisfied and a company never remains stagnant. I think it’s interesting to see that not only has this feud between Facebook and Apple not died out by now, but they are still actively and publicly continuing this feud by releasing helpful features for their users. It’s a strange way to put out some unexpected positivity to both of their loyal client bases.

So, that wraps up today’s episode! I am genuinely so interested to read your comments down below and to see what your opinions are on this feud between Facebook and Apple. Please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts! See you in next week’s episode!

Sources:

https://ppcexpo.com/blog/what-is-new-in-digital-marketing

https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/shedding-more-light-on-how-instagram-works

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522706/facebook-creators-apple-google-fees-payment-interface-events