Digital Debrief: January 2020

The Digital Debrief is a monthly digest of the top digital marketing news. My goal in creating it is to give professionals a "by marketers, for marketers" download of what's happening in social, websites, SEO and tech. If you have thoughts or feedback, please drop me a line.

Enjoy! 

Twitter moves to monetize Trends and gives users more control over conversations.

Twitter’s newest takeover ad product is a spotlight on trends. The Promoted Trend Spotlight ad unit allows brands to take up “premium real estate” in the top section of Twitter’s Explore tab.

Twitter will now give users four options to “tailor” their replies:

1. Anyone can reply
2. Only those whom a user follows can reply
3. Only those tagged can reply
4. No replies at all

Additional Twitter product updates discussed at CES 2020 were a focus on Topics and the ability to create and share lists. Twitter execs also discussed that the platform is building out more analytics and expanding Twitter Surveys globally. They are also developing a new platform called “Launch” which marketers can use to roll out new products and services.

Facebook shares 2020 vision + administrator updates.

Facebook page administers can now access their page management history. The new overview allows visibility into all actions taken by all other page admins including page role allocations, contact information, business manager relationships, changes to page settings and more.

Video creators can now access traffic source insights. Facebook added a new set of video insights for managing, monetizing and tracking video content including traffic sources that tell creators were their views came from like recommendations, shares, followers or paid efforts.

Mark Zuckerberg also shared his vision for 2020 and the next decade, get the scoop here.

TikTok’s leap in advertising is well received.

Digiday reported in January that beta access to TikTok’s self-serve ad platform is reported to be “easy to use and increasing brand awareness.”

Financial times reported that TikTok is reportedly developing a curated feed of “carefully selected content” from popular creators and videos from professional publishers. It sounds a lot like Snapchat’s Discover feature where paid content lives.

Snap Inc. CEO stated that TikTok could “become bigger than Instagram.” At the Digital Life Design Conference. He cited TikTok’s highly creative nature and reliance on talent over status, which differentiates it from other social platforms.

What’s new in search? Voice navigation, desktop search design, popular product listings + more.

For users who prefer to navigate via voice, the Bing Search app now provides direct site navigation via voice arrives and other options for iOS. 

Google has rolled out organic ‘popular product listings’ in mobile search results. This is a way for Google to service products in organic results that are defined by the merchant in popular product lists.

Google is acquiring Pointy, a start-up that supports bringing small, independent retailer inventory online. This acquisition will help Google offer more local inventory data in Google My Business (GMB) listings, knowledge panels and ads especially.

Google is rolling out a desktop search redesign with black “ad” label to replace the green label that was rolled out in 2017 and favicons for organic results.