New Features Make Lives More Interactive – Facebook launched a variety of features to improve engagements with live broadcasts. The new features include sharing featured links, polls, going live with multiple guests, live in stories, badges, front row, and more.
Meta Make Horizon Worlds Available to Everyone – As Meta looks to expand users in the metaverse they are making their VR world platform available to everyone. It reminds many users of Second Life as users can explore worlds and interact in the platform.
Facebook Simplifies Ad Objectives – Facebook is reducing the number of ad objectives available and streamlining the options. Objectives will be reduced from 11 to 6 making it easier for businesses to determine what they want to achieve.
Facebook Launches Professional Mode for Creators – This is only available to “eligible creators” to provide their profiles with additional features. The updates include new monetization features, analytics for the profile (similar to Pages) and opportunities to increase reach with public content.
Instagram News Updates
Reply to Comments with Reels – This new feature allows users to respond to comments with Reels videos. As Instagram continues to push this feature we expect to see more interactive video.
LinkedIn Beefs Up Data Privacy – As privacy becomes a bigger concern for advertisers LinkedIn announced their plans to enhance their first-party data. In a cookieless future this will be key and LinkedIn is working proactively on this.
Twitter News Updates
All Tweet Videos will have Captions Added – As social platforms aim to make their content more mobile-friendly, Twitter will automatically add captions. It is important to note that you CAN NOT edit the captions at this point, but presumably that will come soon.
Google News Updates
Google Loses Top Domain Spot to TikTok – TikTok has officially overtaken Google as the most popular domain! This shows the consistently strong growth of the platform.
Google Ad Insights Includes Prediction Tools – These are customized for your business and you’ll be able to see the specific insights and trends that Google sees based on their data. This is valuable even if you don’t run Google Ads.
Local Search Updates – Google made an update back in November, but this article does a nice job of laying out the specific things that impact your local ranking. Google looks at Relevance, Distance, and Prominence.
Industry News Updates
Social Video Gets as much Time as TV – This new report shows that social video is overtaking traditional TV. Also keep in mind that this DOESN’T include online streaming – it is only social video. TV ads are clearly becoming less effective in driving mass reach.
Ad Trends for 2022 – This study shows the advertising trends that most marketers are thinking about for 2022. There is a lot of percieved risk in social media and programmatic appears to have dodged the scrutiny.
NFT Guide – As NFTs are becoming bigger (and linked to the Meta Verse) this is a great beginners guide to them – what they are, what they mean and why you should care.
