Are bots hiding in plain sight and FB just does nothing about it?
TikTok might have been the headliner more often recently but today’s updates from Facebook definitely puts the blue giant in the spotlight.
- A report by Method Media Intelligence (MMI), that was also picked up by Bloomberg, claims that while Facebook has the tech to block bots, they basically decide to not deploy this tech after an account is logged in. This is just the headliner news, the report is actually more in depth about all things bot traffic and is well worth a careful read. How do you feel about those video views campaigns right now?
- If patents predict the future, you can expect Facebook to charge you to post actual links in your Instagram captions. Who knew you can actually file a patent for sharing a link? OK, we’re kidding, it’s a bit more complicated and you can check it out here. Don’t get too excited – Instagram said it has no plans to add links to photo captions.
- We’re not sure if this is influenced by lockdowns or not but this last update on today’s list is called “Watch Together”. If the name doesn’t already give it away, we can tell you it allows you and your friends to watch FB videos together in a Messenger video call. Yep, 2020 everybody…
The MMI report certainly stands out for us out of the three updates. Mostly because it’s not just about Facebook so if you care at all about traffic quality (real humans instead of bots), give that a more in depth read when you get the time!
LinkedIn marketing can actually work!
We’re excited! It’s rare to find case studies that are not on Facebook or Google… It’s even more rare to find one that focuses on LinkedIn. But 2020 is the year where nothing should surprise us anymore so here we are…
Digiday had a look at how The Economist has tripled its number of subscribers mostly driven by LinkedIn.
The kicker? It’s actually organic traffic from the social network for professionals.
It’s all content marketing. The Economist’s social editors select nine stories to go out on LinkedIn each day. The content is a mix of formats and it seems videos have more engagement but drive less referral traffic to the website.
The big change is that before, The Economist used to publish every story to social media as well. That was just too much and an approach that more carefully curates each story has been much better.
The Crew’s take: OK, it’s a bit of a brag on their side but… If you have paid content of any kind, it’s worth going to The Economist’s LinkedIn page and dissecting their strategy further.
SPONSORED BY UNBOUNCE
Automagically test your e-commerce landing pages against 34k+ competitors – and find out how to outperform them all!
That’s not a typo up there. And we have a question for you:
Have you ever wondered how Iron Man would analyze the copy of his e-commerce landing pages?
That’s a tricky question… But we might have the answer and it’s… with Machine Learning!
And even though your focus is more on scaling your e-commerce marketing than saving the Earth, this new machine learning tool can help take a little weight of the world off your shoulders.
How?
With the Unbounce Copy Analyzer.
Unbounce used its proprietary Machine Learning model to evaluate over 34k landing pages. So, they know more than a thing or two about writing high-impact e-commerce copy.
In a few clicks, you can get access to all this data in an easy-to-understand, personalized report that’ll help you feel like a marketing superhero.
How does the Unbounce Copy Analyzer work? Well… it’s easier than finding the right movie to watch on Netflix.
Just go here and insert the URL of your landing page and your current conversion rate.
You will then get a free personalized report (via email) that tells you how your landing page copy stacks up against thousands of your competitors. And exactly what copy changes to make to increase your conversion rate.
Crank up your conversion rate.
SEO
How to easily scrape bold keywords from the SERP
Here’s a quick and simple process to scrape all the bold keywords on the SERP. You can use it for Google as well as Bing.
It has been shared by Pablo Rosales in the SEO Signals Lab group. It allows you to find all the bold keywords in the SERP for a respective search. And also highlights just the organic bold keywords.
This can help you to understand the general semantic and words that are used on the page. Not that you’ll have to stuff all these words in your page, but rather, to understand the frequency and type of keywords that are being used.
The process is simple:
- Go to the “favorite” settings of your browser and create a new “favorite”.
- You can choose the name of the favorite. It can be “All bold keywords” or “Organic bold keywords”.
- In the URL section, insert one of the scripts that you find here. The first one is to find all bold keywords. The second is for organic-only bold keywords.
- Go to Google and make a search for a keyword.
- Click on the “favorite” from the bar.
- It will show up a window listing all the bold keywords of that page.
Well, it’s easier done than said, and if this list of steps doesn’t make much sense, watch the vid.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
TIKTOK: Oracle and TikTok might become business partners in the USA. The deal comes right before the ban deadline (today). The U.S. government still has to review the deal, but TikTokers already started posting celebration videos calling Oracle the “savior”.
SEO: Is this new? Brodie Clark found a Featured Snippet + How-To Schema hybrid on mobile.
YOUTUBE: Everyone is copying TikTok, right? YouTube joins the gang with Shorts – a new short-form video experience for creators and artists who want to shoot short… OK, you get it…
SEO: If your Google Search Console Index Coverage report looked weird yesterday, it was probably because of this issue reported on the Google Webmasters Twitter account – a longer than usual delay.
E-COMMERCE: Shipping rates for some FedEx services will increase by an average of 4.9%. This official announcement will give you more details.
BRAIN TEASER
Woops, we forgot Mondays are the days for our Twitter poll about last week’s subject lines! Don’t worry, we just do it on the second Monday of the week (aka Tuesday) instead. So, we have four options.
💰 Ad strategies.
🛑 Ad limit.
🎮 Drama.
🎱 Sabotage.
Which one do you think garnered the most opens? Vote here on Twitter!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
To the moon!
No, this is not about crypto because it’s not 2017.
The story is about Blue Origin and its partners (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper) who have completed its System Requirements Review (SRR), a key step in their work to help NASA get astronauts back to the moon by 2024.
OK, we’re maybe more excited than we should be about this but space is cool. Any step forward when it comes to space exploration is at least a little bit exciting for us.
It doesn’t beat launching a Tesla Roadster into space but we’ll take what we can get.