Digital Marketing News 05/10/2022 – 05/16/2022

Social

TikTok Enables Brands to Reach Users More Effectively

TikTok introduced its newest contextual advertising solution for brands: TikTok Pulse. Now advertisers can place their brand among the top 4% of all videos in the platform.

With TikTok Pulse, ads can appear next to a content in a user’s For You Feed. This maximizes the brand’s exposure and allows them to drive engagement and action within diverse communities. 

TikTok also gives advertisers the ability to choose among 12 categories of Pulse, including beauty, fashion, gaming, and cooking. This feature guarantees targeted ads that are relevant to users.

An in-house inventory filter ensures that TikTok Pulse ads are shown alongside verified content, with TikTok’s highest level of brand suitability applied on the platform. Advertisers can also utilize post-campaign measurement tools such as third-party brand suitability and viewability verification to analyze and understand the impact of their campaigns.

The social media giant offers their first advertising revenue share program through TikTok Pulse. Creators and publishers with at least 100k followers will be eligible in the initial stage of this program. As TikTok reiterated, they’ll continue to focus on developing monetization solutions in available markets to reward their valued creators.

Social

Meta Introduces New Ad Formats and Messaging Tools for Small Businesses

Meta is shining the spotlight on small businesses with new tools for messaging and ad management, as well as promotion and lead generation.

To help businesses get discovered by new customers, Meta will soon roll out a WhatsApp Business app feature that supports the creation of Facebook and Instagram ads that open to a WhatsApp chat. Below is an example of the new experience:

Two new messaging features are also coming to the Meta Business Suite. While conversations from Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct are now centralized within Inbox, moving forward it will include WhatsApp as well. Multiple people within one organization can manage messages in Inbox, so this tool can save businesses time and money and increase productivity.

Meta is also making customer reengagement possible for small businesses as they test a new capability that allows businesses to send promotional campaigns via Messenger to customers who opt in. This feature aims to drive sales and customer loyalty.

Lastly, Meta is expanding their lead generation and customer acquisition tools by launching:

• Quote request on Instagram

  - Currently in the testing phase, this allows businesses to put a "Get Quote" button on their Instagram profile and use "Get Quote" stickers in Stories.

• Lead filtering with Instant Forms

  - Responses to a multiple-choice question can be used to filter leads that may not be a good fit for the business.

• Creative flexibility

  - Meta is testing a more flexible and customizable Instant Form, allowing businesses to add visuals and content in the form.

• Gated content

  - Businesses can soon provide additional resources directly from the Lead Ad Form without redirecting the user away from the platform.

• Partner integrations

  - Businesses can now download lead info

  directly to their own CRM

Web

Astra WordPress Theme’s Newest Version Delivers Better Performance

The widely popular Astra WordPress theme, used by nearly 2 million websites, released an update to boost its performance and improve its UI and design.

Astra is a free WordPress theme with a rare five-star rating on the official WordPress theme website. Its free version has been updated to Version 3.8.0, while the paid pro version has been updated to Version 3.6.8.

Astra theme’s popularity is due to its ease of use when it comes to designing a website and it’s not heavily-dependent on code to improve performance. It is engineered to be SEO-ready out of the box and also integrates well with major page builders.

The revamped Astra theme has an easier design flow that helps publishers and designers create websites faster. They automated the design features in the “Latest Posts” block and now offer theme style-based default settings for the headings, link colors, and fonts. They also fixed a bug on their Quote blocks which improved its look.

The latest version of Astra provides more freedom to change the appearance of the page design, with updated design controls that are more intuitive and easy to use. A significant change in the newest version is the theme’s reduced usage of CSS, which aims to improve website speed to create a better user experience for site visitors.

Social

LinkedIn Announces Changes on Content Ranking

Improvements on LinkedIn’s feed algorithm aim to provide users with relevant and high-quality content.

Professional networking site LinkedIn announced an update on its algorithm which will change how content is ranked in people’s feeds. Users now have more control over their feed content, as LinkedIn provides options for users to limit their visibility over content they’re not interested in.

User feeds will show more targeted activity from a user’s network, as LinkedIn begins prioritizing posts and actions that are valuable to the user. This includes content relevant to an individual’s interests, content that generates authentic engagement, and helpful polls.

It’s important to note that low-quality content that directly asks for interactions will no longer be promoted by LinkedIn. Irrelevant updates won’t be shown anymore, along with politically-oriented posts (if the user chooses so), network alerts, and low-quality clickbait posts designed for interactions. 

Businesses utilizing LinkedIn may need to rethink their approach. To continue maximizing the platform’s reach and benefits, businesses must now focus on creating high-quality content that users will genuinely want to consume and engage with.

Social

Meta Opens New Ways for Creators to Earn From Reels

Reels, Meta’s video platform, shifts its focus to original content with rewards for creators and new insights that will help track performance.

In Meta’s latest update to Reels Play, they introduced Challenges on Facebook, which opens new revenue streams for creators. In this gamified earnings initiative, creators can participate in a series of sequential, cumulative challenges every month to receive monetary rewards upon completion of a challenge. 

When one challenge is completed, the next one unlocks. This will continue until the creator earns $4,000 in a given month or the 30-day bonus period ends.

Meta is also working on boosting the advertising and revenue-sharing programs they’ve already established. The testing phase of overlay ads in Reels on Facebook is also being made available to more creators. This move could be Meta’s response to TikTok Pulse, a competing advertising solution for brands.

To help content creators produce short-form videos that make an impact with their audiences, Meta is ramping up its performance data. From Facebook’s Reels Play Bonus Insight page, creators will be able to see how many plays a Reel received and how much they earned from it over a period of time.

Finally, Meta also announced that the cross post functionality will be available for Reels. This will allow content creators to share video to their Facebook and Instagram followers in a seamless way.

What you can do next

• Maximize the reach of TikTok Pulse by creating engaging ads and utilize its ad categories to deliver content that are relevant to your target audience.

• Always keep your tools updated to their latest version to retain their optimum performance.

• Ensure that your LinkedIn initiatives are rewarded by the platform by creating high-quality content that drives organic engagement.

• Invest in producing valuable, original, and targeted content to maximize your social media initiatives.

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