Month: January 2017

It’s reported that Facebook is going to introduce Snapchat like stories into their main app.Adding new stories option within Facebook itself will be a new experience for its 1.179 billion daily active users.

Though Instagram and Snapchat had introduced stories to its users earlier, with Facebook Stories, it is going to introduce Stories feature to a lot of people who aren’t aware of it. It’s because the total users of Snapchat and Instagram together is only less than half of Facebook’s 1.8 billion total active audience.

This clearly shows that there are audience who’ve never been exposed to Stories feature before. So, this would be an amazing experience for Facebook users.

It’s expected that Stories function would increase sharing activity on the platform. This feature could offer a new possibility for brands to generate reach on the platform.

Currently, Facebook Stories function is only available in Ireland as part of a trial.

 

According to Google’s 2016 bad ads report, it has banned 200 websites from its ad networks for promoting fake news. Reports show that Google’s recent policy against ‘misrepresentative content’ is affecting publishers.

It was Google’s Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, revealed in a blog post that it has banned 200 advertisers from accessing its AdSense service for posting fake news.

Google added that it had banned websites which included content such as:

• Ads for illegal products
• Misleading ads
• Bad ads on mobile
• Ads trying to deceive Google
• Ads promoting and profiting from bad sites

The report also reveals that approximately 1.7 billion ads were removed in 2016 for violating Google’s policies, which is twice the number of bad ads removed in 2015.

 

 

 

You might have seen the “book preview” feature on Google desktop search. Now, the company has introduced this feature to its mobile search as well. It was Google’s Satyajit Salgar who announced the new updation via Twitter. Google will display the “preview book” link, if a book has previews available within Google Book search.

Here is a screen shot of the book preview icon:

This is possible for every query done on a book/title that has a book preview available in Google’s index.

If you click on the preview icon, it instantly direct you into the Google Book search preview mode. So, it is very mobile friendly as well.

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It has been predicted that Facebook News Feed would become “all video” in five years. Then Facebook likely needs more ads to make money off those videos.

According to recent reports, Facebook is testing new mid-roll video ads. The new ads will be displayed after a user has watched a video for 20 seconds. The new mid-roll ads will not appear unless the videos have duration of 90 seconds.

In order to encourage publishers to create compelling and longer videos, Facebook had offered 55 percent of ad sales to them. This is equivalent to the revenue split that YouTube offers.

As per the report by Marketing Land, the new mid-roll ads will be tagged as “In- Stream Videos”. Advertisers will be allowed to select categories of videos where they need their ads to appear.

According to marketing experts, mid- roll videos will be one of the trends in social media in 2017.

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Google has officially announced that their link command no longer works. They advised SEOs and webmasters to stop using the link operator as it is officially dead and not functioning properly.

Google added that as the feature is officially dead, if you use a link: www.domain.com will likely show inappropriate results.

It was a year ago , Google affirmed that the link command “is not dead”. Now, it officially saying the link command is essentially dead.

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Google announced that it has upgraded its beta app for Android. With this upgrade new shortcuts have been added for frequently used features to the Google Now home screen.

Now, when you tap inside the Google Search box, you can view widgets for the weather, nearby restaurants and more features. A report from Venture Beat explains it in detail.

According to their report, a user with Google’s new Pixel or Pixel XL phone can swipe right on the home screen to display the shortcuts, since it is updated on frequency of use.

The updates are only available for Android users, who have the beta version of the Google app.

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Google has officially informed advertisers that call extensions would begin to generate automatically in Mobile Ads on February 6, 2017.

According to Google, call extensions will automatically pull phone numbers featured on landing pages. This update would be useful for those advertisers using landing pages featuring a phone number.

Here is a copy of the email sent to the advertisers

 

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Google has recently updated its iOS app with version 22. With this upgrade, the app has become more user friendly.

According to Google, the upgraded app includes features such as Native Youtube Support, Built-in Gboard and many more.

Here are some of the some of the benefits of the upgraded app:

• Native Youtube support allows you to play Youtube videos instantly from cards in your news feed. So, you don’t need to open the Youtube app or a new web page.
• Booking info and rates can be seen right in search results for hotels.
• Instant view of open restaurant menus from restaurant search results.

Built –in Gboard is an unannounced feature. With this feature of Google’s iOS app, users are able to change their keyboard to Google’s Gboard without having the third-party keyboard installed on their phone.

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Google has launched a new mobile interface for recipe search results done over a smartphone device. Google adds this new mobile interface on December 29, 2016.

When you search for a recipe, it shows a variety of recipe cards, with a link to “view all.” A list of tappable keywords can be viewed at the top of the search results after searching for a particular dish. When the users click on the link “view all”, they will get the view on the basis of the selected filter.

Here are the screenshots of the mobile search results page:

 

This update will be useful for finding new ways of putting a twist to good old recipes. Currently this feature is available only for US mobile searches.

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