March 2021 Digital Marketing News Updates

Facebook News Updates

1.8 Billion People use Facebook Groups – Announced at the Facebook Communities Summit.
New Groups Features – Facebook announced MANY new features for groups including monetization, moderation, and content curation options.

Shopify Integrates with Facebook and Instagram Shopping – If you use Shopify, this means that you can instantly be integrated. This includes catalog synch and shopping features.

LinkedIn Adds 3 New Features for Pages – The first allows businesses to build community among their employees. The second is product pages which now can include lead forms. The third is stories for Pages.
LinkedIn Guide on Engaging Content – LinkedIn shares their guide on how to create engaging content for B2B. The best content is disruptive, interactive and inspiring.

Twitter Launches SuperFollow – This allows users to pay $4.99 to “super follow” accounts and access special content. This is a way for Twitter users to financially support other users. It could be a monetization path for those with large Twitter followings.
Twitter Launches Communities – Twitter communities are their take on groups, allowing users to join communities based on topics of interest.

Snapchat Reaches 70% of 13 – 24-Year-Olds – Making it a huge platform to reach younger audiences. They also project 50% revenue growth for years to come based on their investor day conference.

YouTube Launches Shorts in March – This is the YouTube version of TikTok. It will allow for short-form content.
YouTube Gives Creators More Data – Get more data around your video performance and the other channels your audience watches.

Google My Business Adds Desktop Messaging – You can now participate in messages from your computer 😉
Google Launched In-Results Lead Ads – Lead forms can be directly integrated into search ads. Users can complete the form without even leaving search results. This sends them to a lead form instead of a landing page, so it will negatively impact your traffic from search ads.
Google Says Word Count Isn’t a Quality Factor – Word count doesn’t directly link to quality. It is more about usefulness. This further confirms that Google is focused on user experience instead of arbitrary metrics.
Google Updates Boundaries for Web Core Vitals – If you aren’t thinking about your Web Core Vitals yet – you should be. These will be used by Google for ranking soon. Google recently updated their boundaries (what counts as good, ok, or bad). Most businesses are struggling to achieve acceptable scores here and it could hurt your rankings later this year.

Global Digital Ad Spend up 58% in Q4 2020 – This is HUGE growth. As people are at home more it makes sense that budgets are shifting to digital. This is also leading to higher costs (14% higher CPC in the US).
We Are Social State of Digital 2021 – I look forward to this report every year. It is the most comprehensive global report on digital marketing and internet usage trends by country. Check it out to see how your market is changing.
Social Media Benchmark Study – Want to know how you stack up on social? Check out this study with metrics from over 22 million posts. It has great benchmarks on things like engagement rates and more.
TikTok Trend Report – This shows you what is trending on the platform. You can even search by country. Even if you aren’t on TikTok, this is worth looking at for content inspiration.