64: [Ep64/5Jul21] – HTTPS boost: Google’s Magic Signal to Break Tie & Rank Higher on SEO & Other Digital Marketing Updates from the Week of Jul 5, 2021

 Introduction] – 00:00

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Episode 64 of This Week In Marketing Show. This is your host Sajid Islam, and today I’ll be going over the notable news and updates in the digital marketing space from the week of July 5th through 10th 2021.

[Update 1 – YouTube’s “New To You” Feature Will Help Viewers Discover New Content] – 00:40

So today, first off, we’re gonna start off with this new feature that You Tube is rolling out. It’s called New To You. And let me explain to you what this is. This is actually a feature that will help viewers on YouTube find new content, right? And this is not a change that’s happening on the YouTube studio side, but this is happening on the app side as well as the YouTube browser side. So the way new to you is going to work is that it’s going to help viewers who are getting like tired of watching the same type of content. Every day and you know the same type of recommendations and they want something different. But along the lines of what they are interested in, but a little bit outside of their regular. Circle of things that they watch. I need you tab. New to you. Tab is for them. And for creators, this is good. It’s because now they are able to reach audiences or viewers that they were they were previously not able to reach right. Right. So it’s a win win situation, at least from the from the presentation that I’ve seen from YouTube that makes really great compelling case. And now if you are wondering how is this new feature different from that? Explore page that YouTube has well YouTube explaining that you know you explore helps viewers find content in particular verticals such as gaming or content that is trending worldwide, but this is content that is not that is not necessarily personalized to the viewer. In other words, it doesn’t take their specific. Interesting to account, but new to you is personalized to the viewers, so they take a balanced approach to things they think you might be interested to watch, plus things that are further afield from things you typically watch. Well, it’s rolling out this month in July, so check it out. I’m sure you’re gonna like it. I know I’m going to like it because sometimes, you know, when I go to my YouTube app, all I say are things that I have watched and along the same lines. Yeah, I mean, I. But, you know, I would really like You Tube to kind of in and say, hey, you were watching videos on personal development and you kind of following, say, Tony Robbins, so why not? A little bit further and see maybe you will like these two as well ’cause that would really help me. With that, let’s move on to the next update, which is TikTok, so.

[Update 2 – TikTok Introduces ‘Shoutouts’ – A Clone of Cameo] – 03:10

As competition rises for top creators, TikTok is working very hard to provide more revenue generation options to their creators. At least the top creators and to keep them on the platform and not moving to the new platform. Right. And you’ve kind of if you’re following a show, you know we’ve covered like you know how. Snapchat has some program. Instagram has programs with delivering creators to and paying them money. You know, quoting creators to kind of keep, you know, creating content that is gonna go viral, keep their audiences engaged and whatnot, right. No. Uh, TikTok realize you know what? We need to allow creators to make more money. And that’s a theme like even on Instagram we we saw a few weeks ago like, you know, a couple of weeks ago in fact last week also we covered Instagram kind of set the strategy. We want creators to be able to make money from our platform. If not there, why are they going to stay because at the. Free content only works so far before they kind of, you know, get tired of it. So what TikTok is doing is copying cameo and introduced a rule or a new feature called Shout Out if you’re not sure what cameo is, let me explain to you what cameo is and what shadows are they pretty much the same. It’s basically cameo it’s CAMEO. Find it. You will see. It’s basically you can pay some celebrity or someone to say something. Wish someone a particularly any pay for it. Right? So it’s hiring. Say, I mean, again, I’m not gonna say. I mean, there are pretty interesting people on cameo but basically It’s a way for you to find someone new, interesting person or model or, you know, influencer to be able to, you know, record a message for you and then give it to you and things like that. So. Shorter feature is going to be just like that where you can find a creator and you can send them a message and you can just say hey, I want you to record this and they have three days I think to accept it that request and when they when they accept it, obviously you have to pay them through TikTok coins. Which is actually of TikTok virtual currency we covered about that in our podcast show in the past as well. But just to let you know it’s there and then you know, if if both parties agree, they accept the gig and you pay them the money and then, you know, they record it and send it to you. No. How much are these people gonna charge? Well, it depends from creators to creators, so maybe you wanna, you know, for example, you want to. If you want to reach us a audience in, let’s just say I don’t know Turkey, right? So then you probably better off finding an influencer in Turkey and you know, hiring that person and things like that. I think it’s a great option because working in marketing, you know, I will tell you, I’ve seen people say, hey, how do I find influencers? How do I? The work with them. How do I do these things? And there have been third party sites and third party influencer platforms. But you know, if the platforms themselves can do something to allow this become a marketplace, this is a win win. I mean obviously the platforms are not really taking a corner but. I can see in the future they’re gonna do it. Not tomorrow or next year. Maybe five years from today. Mark my words. Come back to this broadcast and you will listen to it and you will be like I predicted this. But for now, they just want that momentum, right? That’s how Silicon Valley works, right? Give it out for free game momentum and then charge them up. Fee. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, right? They’re in a business to make money and so. It’s great. Yeah. So, you know, I think TikTok shoutouts is going to solve a real problem as well. As you know, it’s a kind of a, you know, business hit for cameo and let’s wait and watch. I think Instagram is gonna copy that as well. Mark, my word as well, OK. Then let’s go to the next stop.

[Update 3 – TikTok Launches New ‘Unplugged’ Info Sessions to Share Insights Into How Marketers Can Succeed] – 07:21

Next up is TikTok is launches new unplugged info sessions to share insights on how to market, how marketers can succeed. Basically it’s a free unplugged business info sessions where platforms biggest success is our success. The biggest creators share. There are secrets and tips on how to grow your brand with TikTok marketing, right. Again, TikToks being like you know actually have a multi prong approach where they’re creating in revenue option for creators. They’re educating you know people as well as the creating ads for businesses. So basically they’re like, you know keeping make sure that. Everyone is taken care of as they move forward because they realize that you know. You know, they cannot really grow without, you know, quoting the creators as well as the businesses and the viewers, right at the end of the day, you know, if creators are creating content and they’re not creating good content, they will get like, you know, they will have this fatigue and they will check out of the platform. So I like what TikTok is doing over here. Again, I’m pretty sure you know other platforms are going to copy already. Facebook and Instagram does this as well not to take a swipe at them, but it is what it is, OK.

 

[Update 4 -TikTok Copies LinkedIn – Launches “TikTok Resumes”] – 08:40

The third thing that came out of TikTok this week is TikTok copies LinkedIn and launches Tiktok resumes. The platforms are all copying each other right, but this thing is actually a little bit on the testing it out. It’s a pilot program, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to expand. Just cause viewed video is the future, right? How this will workout in you know recruiting in the future remains to be seen because you know in the past you know or at least right now what happens is when you send the resume its they have the system called ATS Auto applicant tracking system which is basically. You know, a system that takes your resume and it’s gonna scan it and it’s gonna look for words and it’s going to rank your words, and then it’s gonna tell two people to the hiring manager or human resources manager that, you know, if they should look at this resume or not. Now, if you tell me, hey, that’s. Sucks. This is not good. Well, it is what it is, right? That’s how companies are recruiting like, you know, they’re recruiting like, you know, they’re in 1980s and they’re just like, you know. Here’s this funnel. Drop all your resumes and then you know you might be the best candidate, but if your resume is not ranked or SCO or ATS friendly, or ATS, if this is rank higher net, yes, you will never get seen, but coming back to the video resume so you know it’s a great thing to talk is trying out. You know there is a dedicated Tiktok resumes website we’re gonna put. I’m gonna put the link in the show notes. Check it out if you want to, to help you get inspiration and tips for your personal video page, search through this such openings. You know, if I if you ask me personally as well as a small business owner who hires you know, I’d like it, this could actually work out pretty well for something like, you know, here you go apply to my job, you know? But answer, you know, give me a resume as well as upload of TikTok Video. Just to see how you are in person what kind of energy and motivation you bring to the table. ’cause you know nobody wants to work with you know, someone who is low on energy. It’s kind of, you know, probably. Not giving the right. Right. So that’s a great way. But again at the same time, if you are an introvert, you will really be not well. You know, doing well on the video. So it’s not a one size fits all. We will have to see how it all works out. But for now, TikTok copied it from LinkedIn and we’ll see how it works out. Next up, our Facebook.

[Update 5 – Facebook Outlines 4 Key Areas of Focus for the Platform Moving Forward] – 11:25

Facebook’s vice president has actually rolled off key four key areas of focus for the platform moving forward and basically at a high level, they’re focusing on privacy enhancing technologies because it’s like. They want to minimize the amount of personal information the platform takes in while still enabling advertisers to focus the promotions with optimal efficiency. Yeah, I mean, they didn’t have a choice, but they have to do that next. They’re gonna work on product and business discovery. You know, they’re trying new option in new, new in user news feeds, which enables people to. Tap to browse content from business on businesses on topics such as fitness, fit, beauty or clothing, and explore content from relative business. This is very similar to what You Tube is doing with new to you as well as this is very similar to actually an existing feature of YouTube which is explored again. I covered this on the first update so. Nothing new there. They’re focusing on commerce, so that’s one of the features for Facebook. Basically, they’ve launched Facebook marketplace and you know Facebook and Instagram shops, Facebook and Instagram shops, sees about 300 million monthly visitors. How many of them actually buy? They didn’t share. That basically means. People are checking it out, but the conversion is really crap. Shrink between the lines like, imagine if they were having a phenomenal conversion. Let’s just say 30% converse. They would have put that number in, but at the same time they may not want to share it because they want to keep the numbers secret so that the computers do not like, you know, chase after them. But at the same time I will tell you. Knowing Facebook and knowing how these companies work, they’re not telling the numbers. They’re reporting the numbers that are very like oh! 300 people visit this shops. Let me just run to it like for example, a billion people now visit Facebook marketplace each month. What does that mean? I have no idea, you know, so how many of them are actually transacting? How many of them are actually closing deals? I do not know. I’ve tried on Facebook marketplace myself. And you know, I I didn’t like it, but that’s just me. OK. The fourth point that Facebook is focusing on is they’re looking at business tools beyond marketing. Basically. They are continuing to work on business management tools such as job listings and resume uploads and profile, as well as improve messaging and digital education tools since. Every all these platforms, whether it’s TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, are realizing, you know, jobs are the place. Dude, I do not feel comfortable posting about jobs on Facebook, just ’cause. You know, I think for that we have LinkedIn, but you know, hey, sometimes when we are hiring, we might want to reach through all the avenues and get the best candidate we can from wherever possible. So maybe that will workout. OK.

[Update 6 – Facebook Launches ‘Creative Guidance Navigator’ for Marketing Stats and Tips] – 14:25

The next thing that Facebook announced this week is that they are launching. This thing called Creative Guidance Navigator for marketing stats and tips, and it’s basically it’s a mini site, just fairly straightforward it basically displays a range of Facebook ad tips one by one with you know. So basically what you do is you select the site what you wanna go and you want Facebook or Instagram, you know, where do you want the what type of add it is and then it just gives you some ideas, creative ideas. I think this is to me this is going towards from people. We’re just getting started on Facebook ads to get them started and like what kind of adds to create, what to do and things like that. This is all great. You know what Facebook should fix? Is there automatic or row banning? Yes, I think that’s what it’s called. It’s called Robo Banning, where they ban. Add accounts across the board for whatever reasons, and then you have to go through this process of, you know, begging them and you know, pleading to their, you know, pleading to them in terms of why you are not a scammer, yur, legitimate business, and why maybe you have refused to words that you were not supposed to use. Hey, everyone has one of those days, right? Everyone makes screws up, but for in Facebook word, if you use a word that they don’t like, guess what? You’re banned for life and then you know all these things doesn’t really matter. But with that check it out. I’m gonna put the link to the creative guidance navigator in the show nodes. If you wanna play around with it, play around with it. I mean, I didn’t really like it. Hopefully maybe they would add more examples to it in the future, but then again, I’m not a Facebook advertisers at this point.

[Update 7 – Facebook Updates Conversion Modeling and Events to Tackle ATT Changes] – 16:08

Last update from Facebook is Facebook Appearing conversion, modeling and events to tackle ATT. ATT is basically apples privacy changes. That has affected Facebook significantly. In fact, in those Facebook groups that I mean, and I don’t run Facebook ads, but I am part of Facebook ad groups where, you know, masterminds where I kind of hear what people are doing because, you know, if ATT is affecting Facebook users, it’s got also effect. Google users and Pinterest and LinkedIn. Just good to be, you know, in different circles and hear different things. And so Facebook is now adding estimated conversions into The seven day attribution things like that and you know they’re just trying to help you feel better ’cause all the marketers. If you go to all these groups that I talked about complaining about how their conversions have been really crap performance have been super crap and so forth because what’s happening is like, you know. Win with Apple’s iOS 14.6 or 14.5 and onwards, you know. People are not allowing Facebook to track only 42% of the people. That said, yes, you can Facebook contract. That basically means on the other end there’s 58% of the people who are saying to Facebook, including myself. This is Facebook. Don’t track me. So as I am scrolling through news feed, Facebook is not getting the data in terms of what I’m liking, what I’m doing, what I’m transacting on and basically. This whole Facebook ecosystem is at like, you know, it’s a crapshoot right now. It’s like growing the lice. So people are complaining they add cost has gone up. You know, Facebook doesn’t know it’s a machine language, so it cannot learn what you like and dislike. There’s no things anymore. I will. We’ll see how this all works out, but basically as a work around, Facebook is saying now they’re like, you know, focusing on Android and they will allow you to basically help give you more options on Android. But you know, this is a very short term thing, a couple of reasons. Number one is Google has also signaled that. They will also implement something like ATT on Android just ’cause you know Google doesn’t wanna be the bad guy that says, oh, we don’t care about privacy and Apple only cares and lose a lot of users to Apple. So but for now. If you are concerned about, you know ATT performance and things like that go to Android, but keep in mind. Maybe that uses your targeting our Apple users iOS users, so that’s it. Next up, we have Microsoft.

[Update 8 – Microsoft Advertising Updates] – 18:39

Microsoft has basically rolled out a bunch of updates. I mean off like about 6-7 updates, but they The one thing I would really quickly touch on is multimedia ads for search. I will add the other updates in our show nose, check them out. These ads will combine advertisers, images, headlines and description. Using machine learning to create engaging attention, grabbing ads, multimedia ads will be delivered on bing.com search pages and will be featured prominently in the the main line at the top of this search engine results page or on the right trail, right? It’s a great ad, so it’s going a little bit towards the direction of, you know, Facebook ads where now when you search, you can have images. Google also and also a couple of weeks. Three weeks ago that you actually maybe a few more weeks ago where you can have images with your search ads. So this is pretty good. OK.
[Update 9 – Machine Learning Will Not Replace Search Engine Optimization (SEO)] – 19:36
The next update we have is from Google on search engine optimization is It’s basically someone asked during a Q&A session to Google John Mueller, who is basically Google’s face when it comes to SCO and he says, you know, hey, the way Google is focusing on machine language, artificial intelligence will be dead and he’s like, no, I don’t think you will be dead. But it’s just that SCO hasn’t place and a need, and we think you know it’s gonna be there. So sterile. But then again, you know, this kind of people, they cannot really give a whole lot of bad news ahead of time, because if they do that, it’s gonna, people are gonna run for the hills. People are gonna be like, you know, coming up with pitchforks and, you know, basically. ’cause, if I go right. So they have to balance, but keep in between between the lines. My advice to you all is that, you know, if you have a website focus on SCO, really focus on SCO, you’ll be glad you did because everything else you know paid traffic is like, you know, buying water from your. You know, bottled water from your grocery store, which can get very expensive. It’s always good to build in SCO, which is like, you know, pulling the water from the ground and not having to pay for it for a long period of time. And it’s cheaper, right?

[Update 10 – HTTPS boost: Google’s Magic Signal to Break Tie & Rank Higher on SEO] – 20:57

OK. Next up, the last one is again on the SEO is that you know we have something called. Logic signal. Google has this podcast called Search of The Record podcast where Gary from Google explain how Google does ranking, they go into a lot of different things. If you really want to geek out I am going to bold. Basically, go ahead and put the podcast in the show notes. Check it out, but basically, Long story short, what it comes down to is that Google does a lot of stuff when behind the scenes when someone searches for content and how they show it up and what the one thing that really gives you an edge. Besides, you know, content, good content. And you know, good information is that you need to have SSL turned on for your website. If you do not know what SSL is, find someone who knows. Talk to your webhost company and basically say SSL stands for secure socket layer layer. It’s basically private, it’s it’s something that encrypts the communication. Between two endpoints on the web, I don’t want to really go too deep on technical on you, but basically having an SSL does give you a little bit of boost on ranking in Google, so you definitely want that. You don’t want to lose that because remember the difference between a page 2 and Page 1. Could be that SSL. It should be both slash SSL being turned on OK so definitely check it out. It’s something that’s very important that even Google usually doesn’t like to give advice on. You know what you should do or how they do search queries and what magic things to do, but they went to the extent or explaining why. They need you to turn on itself.

[Closing] – 22:38

Ok, with that, folks, that’s it for this week in marketing. Now you know everything that you need to know if you’d like to read more, make sure you visit our show page where you’ll find the links to the articles. Once again, this is your host Sajid Islam signing off until next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thank you for tuning in this week. It was a pleasure to serve you all. Hit the subscribe button so that you remember to sign on next week. Same place, same time for another round of This Week In Marketing.