Weekly Digital Marketing Roundup

January 29, 2017 – By Aaron Hockel

Here are the biggest announcements, product updates, and news stories impacting the digital marketing industry last week:

Facebook Modifying Trending Topics

In the 2016 Presidential election Facebook was heavily criticized for showing bias in how it determined trending topics and what stories appeared in users News Feeds. On January 25th, Facebook announced updates to how it will deliver trending topics. The two biggest changes are that publishers names will now appear underneath topics and the same topics will trend to all users across a given region.

Below is a side by side comparison of the old and new layouts for Trending topics. To read the full announcement from Facebook’s Will Cathcart, click here.

YouTube Launching New Advertising Features

YouTube now garners more than half of its traffic from mobile devices and Google is rolling out updates to make advertising on YouTube more mobile friendly. The biggest update is new targeting options that will cross reference a viewer’s Google account information. This will provide better demographic targeting and enable targeting based on past searchers. This is a big win for advertisers.

Other new features include upgrades to insights and reporting plus giving users the ability to mute advertisers on Google and YouTube at the same time. Click here to read the full announcement from Google or checkout Matt Southern’s breakdown on Search Engine Journal.

Google Maps Rolls Out New Photo Interface

According to Mike Blumenthal, Google is rolling out a new interface for how businesses will add and manages photos within their Google My Business account. Instead of categories, such as interior, exterior, etc., the new interface will allow photos to be tagged.

Below is a screenshot of the new interface. For more information, click here to checkout Mike Blumenthal’s breakdown from his blog.

Missed last week’s roundup? Click here for the biggest digital marketing stories from last week!

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Aaron Hockel

Aaron Hockel is a Partner and the VP of Digital Marketing at AltaVista Strategic Partners. A University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) alumnus, Aaron expertly crafts digital marketing strategies that drive success for clients, leveraging his deep industry knowledge and innovative approach.