Facebook makes a couple of small updates
Yesterday was a quiet one in the marketing world, but Facebook managed to drop a couple of interesting updates that caught our attention – here’s what we learned:
- Facebook is providing easier access to hashtag usage metrics. As reported by Matt Navarra on Twitter, you’ll now be able to see how often a hashtag is being used when you’re writing a post. This is a great way to figure out whether the hashtags you’re using are relevant or useful for your audience!
- Protect your property. A new tool launched yesterday, called Rights Manager, is now available in creator studio. The tool will help creators and publishers protect their created content and set permissions on how it can be used.
- Eyeing an EU exit? Facebook has said that it won’t be able to operate in the EU if the Irish Data Protection Commission puts a halt on the international data transfer of EU users. Let’s get one thing straight, though: No, Facebook probably isn’t ever going to disappear from Europe – it’s a warning to the data commission, though, of what might happen if they step on Facebook’s toes.
Advertising on Facebook has been tumultuous for many of you out there in the past month or two, but it looks like the company is still churning out updates as fast as ever.
And seriously, EU marketers, don’t worry – we’re pretty confident Facebook isn’t ditching you anytime soon.
SEO
What are pre-rendered keywords?
Here’s a quick tip from Mike Sonders on Twitter, and it all has to do with pre-rendered keywords.
A quick refresher, if you’re new to the term: when Google is ‘very confident’ that it knows which site to rank first, it will pre-render that page for faster loading times.
So, what does that mean for SEOs? Here’s the deal with pre-rendered results:
- To figure out which results in the SERPs are pre-rendered, you’ll need some sort of SEO tool. Mike recommends the SEO Minion Chrome add-on.
- Once that’s installed, do a quick Google search. In Mike’s thread on Twitter, he points out how, for the term ‘form builder’, JotForm is the pre-rendered top result.
What does it all mean? If you’re seeing pre-rendered results on keywords you want to rank first for, it’s probably a bit of bad news – because if Google’s pre-rendering a result, it’s confident that the pre-rendered result is the one that should be in the first position.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go after these keywords, but keep in mind that it might be harder than normal, and it may sometimes be better to focus your SEO efforts elsewhere!
A hint, though: Just because the top result is pre-rendered and difficult to outrank doesn’t mean you can’t still show up on the first page for plenty of clicks, though. When it comes to SEO, experimentation is king!
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SOCIAL MEDIA
Engage now, sell later
At the end of the day, advertising is about getting sales. And, especially when it comes to social media, the campaigns with the highest ROI are usually the ones with the highest engagement.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for engaging campaigns, this Search Engine Journal article outlined 15 examples of awesome social media campaigns.
Let’s have a look at them and see why they worked.
Great social media marketing examples
+ Gillette: The campaign here is named “The Best Men Can Be.” and it was launched in 2019 on YouTube. The video is a short film showing a modern interpretation of manhood.
The results:
- The short film got over 30M views on YouTube (but with a whopping 1.6M dislikes).
- The #GilletteAd hashtag reached more than 150M people in one month.
Why it worked: The campaign taps into a discussed and relevant issue, and it also painted a new figure of men different from the one usually shown by the company.
What we can learn: Touching such topics is always a risk and it always comes with controversy. The reach this campaign had was still massive and while it gathered both positive and negative reactions, this only spurred on its reach.
+ Greggs’ #vegansausageroll: Greggs is a popular British bakery chain. In January 2019 they introduced a vegan sausage roll, and they announced it by sharing an Apple-style video on Twitter.
What made this campaign memorable, though, wasn’t the ad itself. Piers Morgan, a controversial public figure, retweeted Greggs’ announcement and expressed irritation at the existence of a vegan sausage roll.
This unleashed a social media battle between vegans and anti-vegans on Twitter. And, it also spiked Greggs’ sales by 9.6% in the first seven weeks of the launch.
What we can learn: Unfortunately, getting a shoutout from a celebrity isn’t replicable, whether it be in a positive or negative context. However, Greggs was still smart by following up and taking part in the conversation, increasing engagement even further.
+ BuzzFeed’s Tasty campaign: You have likely seen one of those recipe videos from Tasty in your Facebook feed. More than just a campaign, this has been the launch of a new business by BuzzFeed:
- In its first 15 months, Tasty shared over 2000 recipe videos.
- The videos reach around 500M users every month.
- BuzzFeed has now a team of 75 people dedicated to producing content for Tasty.
Why it worked: Despite the fact that people love food… Tasty has exploded on Facebook because the videos are tailor-made for the platform. They’re optimized for the Facebook autoplay feature and you don’t need to turn on audio to watch the video.
+ L’Oreal’s Beauty Squad: In this campaign, the beauty brand teamed up with 5 British beauty YouTubers to promote their products.
Why it worked: Rather than just hiring influencers, L’Oreal went one step further and created a team of influencers that share the brand’s core values and promoted its products. It’s the same concept we talked about in this Gymshark case study.
Well, we’ve reached the finish line.
However, these are just four of the fifteen examples you can find in this post from SEJ. Give it a look!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Google just dropped a new Search Off the Record episode, and it’s all about the Honest Results policy. Dive in with Gary, John, and Martin for some useful SEO info!
TWITTER: Some people are reporting an Instagram-style carousel of recommended accounts on Twitter. Are social media platforms all going to look the same at some point?
MARKETING: Rodric Bradford just put together a thoughtful piece for Marketing Land about how the Minnesota Vikings implemented a successful digital transformation strategy.
SEO: Have you ever heard of an authority profile? This blog post at Search Engine Land breaks down what the term means, and how Google uses different factors to determine authority in SERPs.
BRAIN TEASER
If you break me I do not stop working, but if you lose me nothing will matter. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
You could be anywhere
How well do you know the world?
As well-traveled as you might be, there’s only one way to find out – and that’s by playing a round of GeoGuessr. It’s a game that puts you down in a random Google Street View location, and you have to guess where you think you are.
If you’ve never heard of this game, it’s a unique way to see the world in a time where most of us aren’t doing much travel to other countries.
We’re not just here to give GeoGuessr a shout, though – the game’s success is also a great example of how platforms like YouTube and Twitch can be a massive boost for a product’s popularity.
Over the past year, channels – primarily GeoWizard on YouTube and Twitch – have racked up millions of views with GeoGuessr content, making the game so popular that it’s had to implement a subscription model to cover the cost of using Google’s Street View technology. And, if we had to guess, it’s more profitable now than ever.
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