by Josh Millar
When it comes to Internet marketing, change is the most constant thing. It seems like every time you turn around, someone is tweaking something that impacts your workflow. Social-media companies are changing the preferred size of their images, a new network comes into existence (or loses relevance), new workflow startups gain traction. It’s always something. Normally, these changes are minor, and only require a keen eye if you want to stay on top of them — but 2016 has already been a major year in terms of changes. If you manage your own Internet marketing, then here are 3 critical changes you need to factor into your planning.
Google AdWords Are Dead
Historically, any good Internet marketing campaign has included at least some amount of paid advertising. The reason is pretty straight forward — although social-media promotion is much more cost effective in the long run, it takes quite a bit of time and energy to build up a good following. So, in the short term, you can get your message out through paid promotion. It’s not as effective as pure social media, but it is much more immediate.
Well, the number one advertising platform that isn’t on social media has just changed the rules of the game. On desktop computers, Google will no longer be showing ads in the sidebar. In addition, there are changes to the ads which will be shown at the top and bottom of the page. The biggest change is that ads will now only be shown for “highly commercial” searches. It’s still unclear exactly how this will develop, and there are a couple of exceptions (as far as we can tell, product listing ad boxes will still appear, and ads in the knowledge panel will still appear), but, generally speaking, it now seems that unless you’re an ecommerce company directly selling product, AdWords won’t work for you.
What You Should Do: take your advertising budget and move it completely to the social-media networks.
Facebook Business Pages Get The Business
It’s been true for a while that it’s harder to get traction directly from posts on pages than it is from personal posts, regardless of the content. Facebook has announced that they’re making that even more true. If you were having a hard time getting views on content you post to your business page before, you’re probably doomed now. To quote from the Facebook announcement:
Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages…. if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.
As usual, the Facebook blog post is a little hard to understand completely. Fortunately, TechCrunch has provided a deeper dive.
What You Should Do: Get you and your staff more personally involved. Posts to your page won’t be showing up well in people’s news feeds; however, if you and your staff then share those posts to your personal networks, they’ll still appear fairly high on the feed.
What You Should Do, #2: Only publish shareable content. Stay away from anything spammy.
The Ghost Is Growing Up
Like it or not, video is the future of the Internet. In fact, Facebook has been saying this for a while, and they’ve been reiterating recently. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is, with Facebook Live. However, if you’re a small business owner, getting traction on Facebook can be hard — you have to compete with all the other global brands that are there. Meanwhile, Snapchat remains a relatively greenfield opportunity for small businesses.
Their recent announcement of Snapchat Memories makes the platform even more powerful — and more accessible to an older audience. SnapChat originally got its growth from a focus on ephemeral content — a place where young users don’t have to worry about their shenanigans coming back to haunt them in the future. This change is particularly appealing to their growing, older (over 25) audience. From a brand perspective, it gives you a powerful new tool for managing your content.
What You Should Do: Start using Snapchat as part of your Internet marketing campaign.
What You Should Do, #2: Start playing around with Facebook Live.