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A plethora of new video tools and capabilities announced
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a bunch of new video tools across Facebook’s family of apps to meet the increased demand and usage during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Here’s what’s coming to Facebook’s various video tools:
+ Bigger group calls on WhatsApp: Video calling has been the most used type of video interaction in its apps around the world. So, to handle this demand Facebook is going to double the capacity of WhatsApp group video calls from four to eight participants.
+ New Effects: It is also adding new “mood lightening effects” tools to improve or alter your video chat presentation.
+ Virtual Date in Facebook Dating: Facebook’s also looking to assist singles during the COVID-19 lockdown with a new tool that will enable Facebook Dating users to invite potential matches into video chats.
+ Messenger Rooms: You can now create a room right within Messenger or Facebook and invite anyone to join your video call, even if they don’t have a Facebook account. Rooms will soon hold up to 50 people and have no time limit.
You can start and share rooms on Facebook through News Feed, Groups and Events. They are also adding more ways to create rooms from Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal.
At the moment, Rooms will not be available to Facebook Pages, so you can only use them via your personal account.
+ Live With: In December, Facebook removed the option to go live with a guest. However, it is now bringing its Live guests option back to Facebook Live. They are also working to make live videos useful for events by adding new features and experiences, including the ability to charge fees for viewers to join live video functions.
+ Instagram Live for desktop: You can now view Instagram Live streams via the web by logging in on the desktop site.
Well, that’s a lot of video updates to take in, and we won’t know the full details of each new addition until they get released. In any case, you’ll soon have a lot more video options to consider.
ADVERTISING
Scaling your campaigns without running out of trout
Once again, Savannah Sanchez has made it into our newsletter. This time it’s all about growing a brand with paid social ads while reducing creative fatigue.
The problem: If you’re spending at high budgets on social media, at a certain point you’ll hit plateaus. Your audience will start to saturate, and your metrics will fall as a result.
What’s the solution? Simple – open up new audiences. Easier said than done, right?
What Savannah Sanchez suggests is opening up new audiences inside the broad one you’re already targeting by hitting them with different motivators.
In other words, customers have different reasons for buying, and leveraging different angles in a single broad audience helps you unlock new customers. It’s basically like putting several fishing baits in the same lake.
If you target a broad audience, chances are you’re targeting different archetypes of buyers. You can unlock the buying potential of these pools of buyers by proposing multiple different reasons to buy.
“Once your creative starts to fatigue, discover new motivators/barriers to address. See if the change in messaging strategy unlocks a new part of the broad testing audience. If performance metrics are acceptable, time to scale!”
Finally, Savannah also featured a simple frame you can use to build motivation-based creatives:
- Capture all possible reasons that would either encourage or prevent consumers from buying. To do this, consider all the different types of people in your audience, as well as different times of the year, week and day.
- Pick the top three barriers or motivators.
- Make sure these three angles do not hit the same people.
- Build your creatives based on these three motivators/barriers.
Finito! However, the original thread comes with different examples of creatives used, so you might want to check them out!
SPONSORED
🖼 A big, new affiliate offer featured in Forbes, NYT, WSJ, and more, is looking for unconventional marketers
We‘re sure that you’ve never seen an affiliate offer like this one. Honestly, neither did we before we discovered Masterworks.
What do they do? They’re an exclusive members-only platform that allows anyone to invest in 7-figure masterpiece paintings. We are talking about works by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet, among other household names.
Since 2000, blue-chip art has outperformed the S&P 500 by a ridiculous 250%. Maybe that’s why this offer converts so well.
Now Masterworks is opening its doors to more affiliates who can generate quality leads. This is your chance to partner with an established, VC-backed brand that has already been featured in Forbes, CNN, CNBC, and The New York Times.
Yeah, those trust badges there are the real deal.
Masterworks is so hot they already have 50k users signed up since officially launching last year. And unlike just about every other investment product, they are ramping up their affiliate programs, not cutting them.
So, if you can find the right audience, you can create a Picasso-level affiliate masterpiece that will make everyone jealous!
And if you feel like adding blue-chip art that has outperformed the S&P 500 by ~250% to your own portfolio, create an account here.
SEO
Four new Shopify edge SEO possibilities with Cloudflare
Shopify has always seen mixed reactions from the SEO community.
There are certain elements of the platform that either don’t meet the best practices or just can’t be updated due to platform restrictions.
However, thanks to this latest orange cloud integration by Cloudflare’s Matt Prince, things are looking up for Shopify store owners.
With this relationship change from “grey cloud” to “orange cloud”, you can now request Cloudflare to enable “orange cloud” for the integration and make it stackable. This is more about the technical aspects of SEO and coding, so you might need some professional help with this.
But here’s what that translates into:
+ Modifying the Shopify robots.txt file You will now be able to modify the Robots.txt file through edge SEO and add in additional lines.
+ Changing the URL structure. You will now be able to change the URL structure of all pages, including the product pages. Though remember that having a forced URL structure such as /pages/ and /collections/ might not be a totally clean structure, but it’s better than having all URLs off of the root domain, like on Wix.
+ Log files from Shopify: Due to the shared hosting situation, it isn’t possible to collect log files. However, through Cloudflare Workers, you can now do that by using filter chains or by integration with a third-party application such as Loggly, or an owned Amazon S3 bucket.
+ Implementing hreflang: Hreflang tags are a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multi-language stores. Generally, hreflang on Shopify requires a cron job to run, so there is always a period of a few hours where one store may not necessarily reflect the data from another.
This causes Google (and other search engines) to find an error and flag it via a webmaster tools platform.
Using tools like Sloth, hreflang can be mapped in a CSV and converted into Cloudflare Worker code and then deployed via the CDN. As you’re deploying and updating the cache on Cloudflare this change gets reflected on the live site within seconds.
Well, as we said this can get a bit technical. You might want to bounce it off your web developer or someone with more technical know-how.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- TIKTOK: Introducing Small Gestures. This feature helps users send free virtual gifts to their friends. A good move to spark positivity during this time, but also another push into the e-commerce industry by TikTok.
- AMAZON: Once again, Amazon is accused of scooping sellers’ data to determine which private label product to launch.
- SEO: Here are 44 SEO tools shared by Ahrefs. Some of them are paid ones, but most of them aren’t. Have fun!
- PRIVACY: The Apple+Google COVID-19 tracking app raised many privacy-related concerns. For the curious ones, the two firms released a more detailed FAQ document.
BRAIN TEASER
I have four legs but never walk, I may be covered in flowers but have no soil, I hold food three times a day but never eat a meal.
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Adapt and thrive or watch it happen and die
The lockdown has pushed many companies to the brink of survival, especially those businesses operating offline.
However, every now and then you come across a successful story that really puts a smile on your face.
This is the story of Florent Schmahl. His parents sell fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets in the mountains of France.
Obviously, the quarantine should have meant only one thing for them: Zero revenue.
However, Florent and his brother helped their parents to adapt and pivot in order to survive.
Basically, they started advertising their fresh goods on Facebook. And yes, the story does have a happy ending.
They got 146 orders in the first two days alone. This matches a whole week of revenue for the two farmers. However, there was a bottleneck: Shipping the fruits and vegetables.
So, they adapted again by partnering with some local businesses to use their parking lots as pickup points. In exchange, the businesses received more traffic to their stores.
Problem solved!
And because of this, Stripe used Florent’s parents’ story as a case study!
Such a nice story during these times!
For the nerds curious about the tools and gimmicks used to “scale”, head to Florent Schmahl’s thread. He is also updating everyone on his adventure.