WebProNews

Author: Chris Crum

  • Instagram Adds Video Channels To Explore

    Instagram Adds Video Channels To Explore

    Instagram announced the launch of new video channels in its Explore feature, which should greatly open up the platform to better video discovery.

    As it stands, videos aren’t posted nearly as frequently as images, but making videos more discoverable could certainly help narrow the gap a bit.

    According to the latest report from Locowise on Instagram follower growth and engagement, 91.23% of all posts in March were images, which engaged 1.13% of total followers, while videos engaged 0.91%.

    “As people share more videos than ever before, we’re making it easier to discover the ones you’ll love,” says Instagram. “To begin, you’ll find a personalized channel called ‘Videos You Might Like’ that collects videos from across Instagram’s global community into a seamless viewing experience. And as you scroll through the Explore grid, you may also see ‘Featured’ channels filled with videos on specific topics.”

    A couple weeks ago, Instagram announced that users would be able to share videos up to sixty seconds in length compared to the fifteen-second limit previously available. This was announced as a slow roll-out that would take months to complete.

    “Even with these changes, Explore still works the same way,” Instagram says. “It connects you to posts about your interests from people you don’t yet follow. The more you like, the better Explore gets, adjusting to your preferences and showing you more of the stuff you enjoy. And if you see something you don’t like, tap ‘See Fewer Posts Like This’ in the ‘…’ menu to make your Explore experience even better.”

    The updates are only hitting the U.S. for now. The new app update is available today for both iOS and Android.

    In semi-related news, Vine also announced an update that enhances its video experience, enabling users to watch entire channels at once.

    Image via Instagram

  • Here’s Bing’s Mother’s Day Guide For Marketers

    Here’s Bing’s Mother’s Day Guide For Marketers

    Bing is sharing some Mother’s Day search insights to help advertisers better plan for the holiday, which will be here in just over three weeks, meaning shopping time is from now and until then.

    According to Microsoft’s search team, Mother’s Day mobile searches grew by more than a third from 2014 to 2015. Mother’s Day searches begin in April, but users are most active seven days before the holiday.

    The top searches, according to Bing, are for generic “gifts” (43%), flowers (31%), jewelry (13%), cards (7%), and chocolate or other foods (6%).

    Product ads via Bing Shopping campaigns saw “across the board increases” the week of Mothers Day with jewelry showing the biggest percentage gains.

    “Insights gained from Bing Ads give advertisers the tools they need to decide when to increase the intensity of their Mother’s Day campaigns and across which devices,” said Bing Global Marketing Manager Frances Donegan-Ryan. “This helps ensure to ensure their campaigns are having the most impact while delivering the best value.”

    “Data from Bing Ads also help shed light on some of the differences between Bing and Google audiences ­– including the fact Bing users are more likely to have spent money on jewelry, greeting cards or flowers in the last six months,” a spokesperson for Bing tells us. “This data is essential for advertisers looking to optimize their approach to a Bing Ads campaign over a one-size-fits-all approach.”

    Bing Network’s market share is at close to a third in the U.S. Here’s a a Slideshare presentation Bing is sharing with additional Mother’s Day findings.

  • Twitter Hasn’t Been A Great Traffic Source For Publishers

    Twitter Hasn’t Been A Great Traffic Source For Publishers

    Twitter, compared to Facebook, Google, and even Yahoo, really isn’t very good for driving referral traffic. This is at least the case when it comes to news publishers as new data from Parse.ly finds.

    This week, Nieman Lab shared data from the company, which looked at 200 of its client websites. These include Upworthy, Slate, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider. While Twitter’s value for breaking news is certainly acknowledged, it concludes that Twitter is a small source of traffic for most publishers with less than 5% of referrals coming from Twitter in January and February.

    The following chart illustrates how Facebook and Google completely dominate referrals compared to everything else. It’s not as if Twitter is the only small piece of the pie here. It’s just that you might expect it to be bigger considering its place in the media. It certainly doesn’t help that the company continues to struggle to grow its user base.

    twitter-traffic

    Of course there are exceptions. Some publishers are able to squeeze more out of Twitter than their peers. In fact, Nieman Lab says about 15% of its traffic comes from Twitter, pointing to its “digitally savvy journalists” audience.

    The very nature of the Twitter timeline is likely a major obstacle for referral traffic though. It’s often a case of information overload and excessive noise. Twitter’s recently introduced algorithmic timeline changes could help in that department for those that manage to cut through. This only became the default in March (after the Parse.ly data was recorded).

    Twitter made another recent change that will only make it harder to track referrals though. Earlier this month, Twitter announced the launch of a new message button it actually pre-announced two years ago. The button appears on tweets to let users share the tweet via direct message.

    “Every day, millions of people send Direct Messages to communicate privately with friends, family, experts, brands, and anyone else they find interesting on Twitter,” says product manager Somas Thyagaraja. “In fact, we’ve seen the number of messages sent grow over 60% in 2015. And the number of Tweets shared privately has grown even faster, at 200% in just the second half of last year.”

    “With all this interest, we’ve also heard from many of you that it could be easier to share a Tweet using Direct Message,” adds Thyagaraja. “So now — in just a few taps — you can share unique Twitter content from your timeline right into your private conversation.”

    According to Patricio Robles at Econsultancy, referrals from these private tweets will fall under “dark social,” meaning you’ll not be able to track their source. Dark social traffic shows up as “direct” in analytics tools like Google Analytics. Simply Measured has a great explainer on this here.

    Image via Parse.ly/Nieman Lab

  • Study Analyzes Facebook Page Performance Trends

    Study Analyzes Facebook Page Performance Trends

    RivalIQ published findings from a study of 8.1 million Facebook posts from brand pages that saw 11.5 billion interactions (likes, comments, and shares).

    Brand pages grew 27.8% from February through December 2015, or an average of 2.26% per month, it found. The largest pages saw the least amount of growth while the smallest saw the most. The study shows a dip in growth in March 2015 due to changes Facebook announced that changed the way page likes are counted. Over the course of the year, however, the study shows consistent growth for pages, though it’s fairly slow growth. This, the firm says, is a sign that Facebook is a “mature platform,” offering consistency and predictable performance.

    The study found that the bigger the page audience is, the more posts are coming from those pages. For every 10x increase in page fans, they saw an increase of 0.4 posts per day. Pages with under 6,000 fans posted about 12 times per month while pages with over a million fans posted about 46 times per month (which still seems low if you ask me). Interestingly, engagement rate per post falls as pages get larger. This chart from the study looks at average engagement rate per post, average audience size, and average total engagement per post plotted against posts per day.

    engagement-per-post

    “You can see that engagement by audience is consistent but the total engagement drops,” the report says. “In short, posting volume is what drives down engagement rate per post, not just page size. The takeaway is that each extra post per day gets incremental engagement, but with diminishing returns. Those returns vary by audience size, with larger pages generally having smaller per-post engagement rates. Said differently, it can be worth it to post more frequently. But, don’t expect to maintain your engagement rate on a per-post basis.”

    Of course the type of page likely plays a significant role in this. Here’s a look at posts per day by category. Media pages post more frequently than other non-media categories, unsurprisingly.

    Overall, the study found that bigger pages, on average, have a smaller engagement rate per post (0.22% for smaller pages and 0.06% for larger pages).

    It also found that likes and comments are down while shares are up. It posits that Facebook algorithm changes contributed to this as well as marketers getting better at learning what users want to share, an iOS sharing extension, new sharing features in messenger, and the way Facebook displays shared posts in the News Feed, which encourages mores sharing.

    The study found that shares occur more than twice as frequently as comments on an average per post basis. The average post gets 83.4% of interactions in the form of likes while 11.2% come from shares and 5.4% from comments.

    engagement-by-type

    The picture is fairly consistent across audience sizes:

    engagement-breakdown

    “Engagement in the form of likes and comments did decrease in 2015, but it was up in regards to shares. The cause for both the decline in likes and comments and the increase in shares likely has to do with Facebook’s ever-changing newsfeed algorithms,” the report concludes. “Additionally, fans are twice as likely to share a brand’s content than comment on it. But, likes were still likely to account for over 80% of all engagement. Though the like/comment/share ratio was consistent across audience sizes, these ratios vary depending on page category.”

    Our summary of RivalIQ’s findings here is really just the tip of the ice berg. Check out the full report (via Marketing Land) for lots more data and analysis of brand performance on Facebook.

    Images via Facebook, RivalIQ

  • Instagram Sees Uptick in Engagement, Follower Growth (Still Way Down From A Year Ago)

    Instagram Sees Uptick in Engagement, Follower Growth (Still Way Down From A Year Ago)

    For months, we’ve been looking at Locowise’s monthly Instagram engagement and growth reports, and things haven’t looked good for quite a while. This week, they released their look at March finding follower growth to be down 83.59% year-over-year, though it did increase by 50% compared to February.

    According to the firm, post engagement in March was 1.1% of the total followers, which is a 30.95% increase from February, but still a 60.71% decline from April 2015.

    It found that 91.23% of all posts in March were images and that images engaged 1.13% of the total followers. Videos engaged 0.91%, it found.

    “You get a 24.18% boost in engagement by posting images rather than videos,” says Locowise’s Marko Saric (via SocialTimes).

    His report references Instagram’s proposed algorithmic feed changes that have had so many people in a panic.

    “Algorithm should be a good move for the platform. It will hopefully bring new life, and more growth and engagement for those that publish great content that people want,” he says. “We can expect something like the Facebook algorithm. Some factors that will impact it would be the format of the post, the organic engagement on the post and the amount of time people spend on the post.”

    The whole point of the changes is to increase engagement, so those who are able to cut through should benefit greatly. Make no mistake though. You’re going to have to spend money to really get ahead.

    Image via Instagram

  • Yahoo Mail Adds GIF, Google Drive, Dropbox Access

    Yahoo Mail Adds GIF, Google Drive, Dropbox Access

    Yahoo announced two updates for the Yahoo Mail app, which the company says makes “sending compelling, creative emails” easier. These include access to files from Google Drive and Dropbox and the ability to add GIFs from Tumblr into your email.

    “With these updates, you can quickly send spring break photos, that important presentation, the perfect GIF that describes your excitement, and more,” a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

    “We not only display the most popular GIFs of the moment, but you can also select from categories including Love, LOL, Cute, Cheers, Fail, Happy, or search for the perfect GIF. Tap on the GIF or GIFs you like and they will be added into your email,” the company adds.

    When you tap on the cloud icon in compose, you’ll be able to connect your Google Drive or Dropbox account and access your files.

    Other updates are the ability to preview large files instantly, delete drafts right away, and three Android home screen widgets.

    Earlier this week, Yahoo announced the ability to sync and match mobile contacts instantly in Yahoo Messenger so you can find and chat with friends faster. Messenger also now supports non-English languages for the first time. Support includes Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Spanish, and more.

    Images via Yahoo

  • DoubleClick Expands First Look, Tests Bidding in Dynamic Allocation

    DoubleClick Expands First Look, Tests Bidding in Dynamic Allocation

    Google announced that First Look is now available to all DoubleClick for Publishers clients around the world and that it has begun testing exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation.

    DoubleClick for Publishers First Look was first announced in beta several months ago, and in the meantime, the company has accumulated over 200 partners to test it. Publishers have seen their programmatic revenue increase by double-digit percentages, Google says.

    “While First Look makes it easy for publishers to capture new revenue from high-paying buyers, we are also testing a new technology to help publishers manage yield between multiple exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs),” says director of product management Jonathan Bellack.

    “Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls,” he explains. “These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad. Exchange bidding also empowers publishers with unified and accurate reporting on the revenue they are earning from each exchange/SSP. And just like First Look, exchange bidding works with no additional client-side code.”

    The company is working with Index Exchange and Rubicon Project as well as About.com, Hearst, Meredith Corporation, and Zillow on the new technology. They’ll be testing this before rolling it out to more partners.

    Image via DoubleClick

  • Google Announces Efforts to Combat Display Ad Clickjacking

    Google Announces Efforts to Combat Display Ad Clickjacking

    Google announced that it has rolled out new defenses to protect advertisers against clickjacking, which it has identified as an emerging threat to CPC display ads.

    Clickjacking is where the appearance of a site is changed so a victim doesn’t realize they’re taking an action like clicking an ad. A users could click on a play button or menu item which actually clicks on an invisible ad unit, for example.

    “Earlier this year when our operations team identified Clickjacking activity on our display network, they moved swiftly to terminate accounts, removing entities involved in or attempting to use this technique to trick users,” says Andres Ferrate, Chief Advocate of Ad Traffic Quality at Google. “Our engineering team worked in parallel to quickly release a filter to automatically exclude this type of invalid traffic across display ads.”

    “This approach delivered a one-two punch to publishers who violated our policies: our operations team, which forms an early line of defense against invalid traffic, cleaned out publishers from our ad systems, while engineers built a new filter as a durable defense to protect against Clickjacking traffic,” he adds.

    When Google detects a clickjacking attempt, it finds the traffic attributed to the ad placement and removes it from upcoming payment reports so advertisers are not charged for clicks.

    Images via iStock, Google

  • New Facebook Video Crossposting Features Should Prove Helpful

    New Facebook Video Crossposting Features Should Prove Helpful

    Facebook made a ton of announcements on Tuesday. One that didn’t get quite as much as attention as some of the others could actually be one of the more useful ones for marketers.

    The company announced a new way for publishers to crosspost videos within and across Pages owned by the same Business Manager tool and total performance insights for videos. This will give you a single, aggregate view count for videos crossposted on different pages and an easy way to see the total performance of these videos.

    “Our publishing partners often like to create multiple Pages to engage different audiences on Facebook,” says product manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza. “Many of these partners reuse the same videos across different posts and Pages, and they’ve told us they’d like to see total performance insights for a single video across all the places it was used.”

    “For example, a media company might want to post a video on their main Page, their international Page, and one of their topical Pages,” Gomez-Ortigoza added. “Then they might also want to repost that same video a few weeks later.”

    In Business Manager, you can go to the new Permissions tab in the video upload or edit window to give other pages permission to reuse a video. After that, any page in that same Business Manager can create new posts with the new video without having to re-upload it.

    If a video is crossposted, the page owners of the page that initially uploaded the video will be able to see metrics for each post that included the video and aggregate metrics for the video across all posts. Page admins that reuse another page’s video will only see metrics for the posts they created and a Total Performance line that compares metrics on other posts to the video’s totals.

  • Facebook Announces More ‘Ways to Share and Engage’

    Facebook Announces More ‘Ways to Share and Engage’

    Facebook made a plethora of announcements at F8 on Tuesday. Some were bigger than others. Some of the smaller ones were packaged together as “new ways to share and engage”. These include quote sharing, hashtag sharing, an optimized mobile web share dialog, the save button, better embedded content, and the Sharing for Devices API.

    Quote Sharing lets you build a way for people to share specific quotes from an article, book, etc. or let people highlight and share any text they wish. It’s supported in the share dialog on iOS, Android, and mobile/desktop web. There’s a plugin for it here.

    Hashtag sharing lets you include a suggested and removable hashtag in the composer when people share from an app.

    Facebook’s Ming Li describes the optimized mobile web share dialog: “Before, when people clicked a Facebook Share button on a mobile website, the browser opened a new tab. Now, you have the option to open the share dialog in an iframe letting people share seamlessly without leaving the content. This only takes one additional line of code with our JS SDK, or a simple configuration change if you’re using the Share button.”

    The Save Button is a button you can place on your site or app that lets people save articles, products, videos, etc. to their Saved section on Facebook. Previously, the save feature only let users save Facebook content.

    Li says of embedded content, “Based on feedback from publishers, we revamped embedded posts with cleaner and more design options, so you can choose the type and size best for your site. For embedded live videos, people will now know that the video is live and see how many people are viewing it. We also launched embedded comments which gives you the ability to embed public comments from Facebook on your site. We’re excited that embeds now download 60% fewer bytes and initial rendering is twice as fast.”

    The new API lets people share content from devices (including IoT devices) to Facebook using a new Graph API.

    Facebook also updated its Comments plugin with improved moderation tools to better combat spam.

    More on all of this and more here.

  • Facebook Adds Features To Analytics for Apps [F8]

    Facebook Adds Features To Analytics for Apps [F8]

    Last year at its F8 developer conference, Facebook launched Analytics for Apps. At today’s event, the company announced push notifications and deeper insights for the offering as well as a new interface and better performance.

    There’s a new People Insights section that provides aggregated and anonymous demographic info for those using your app without requiring you to implement Facebook Login. This will provide insights like Page likes, education, device usage, purchase preferences, etc.

    “Push and In-App Notifications (Beta) help you reach your customers and automate your marketing campaigns with targeted messages,” says Facebook’s Josh Twist. “In addition to regular push notifications that deep link to a specific place in your app, in-app notifications give you the option to create and customize richer push experiences with photos and animated GIFs. We’ve open-sourced in-app notifications to make them fully customizable and extensible.”

    “Sharing insights help you see the most popular stories shared from your website to Facebook, the aggregatged demographics of the people who shared them, as well as a sentiment analysis, top quotes and other insights,” he says. “Breakdowns let you pivot your data across multiple dimensions including age, gender, platform, country, language, app version and more. They’re a great way to explore your data and answer questions like ‘How much of my revenue is coming from a particular platform-operating system combination in a particular country?’”

    There are improved event trends to help you get a better handle on demographics and behavior of your audience over time and an App Events Export API to debut events and analyze data offline. This allows for access of up to the last 30 days of events.

    Over 450,000 apps have already used Analytics for Apps.

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook Instant Articles Now Officially Open To All Publishers

    Facebook Instant Articles Now Officially Open To All Publishers

    Two months ago, Facebook announced that on April 12, it would open Instant Articles to all publishers. That day has arrived, and Facebook has made good on its promise.

    With the company’s F8 developer conference underway, the company announced that publishers of any type or size can now utilize Instant Articles. You can now go to instantarticles.fb.com to join the program.

    “More than one thousand publishers worldwide are officially part of the program, and at every step of the way, we see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook,” says product manager Josh Roberts.

    “Additionally for many people around the world, it’s challenging to get news on mobile simply because it takes too long to load,” he adds. “We’ve invested heavily in optimizing performance on Android, with the goal of providing the best mobile reading experience for people everywhere, no matter where they are in the world or what connection or device they’re on. In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and others, we’ve found that people on slower connections read 20-40% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average as a result.”

    Facebook also announced new partners and tools for Instant Articles. Publishing tool partners now include WordPress, Drupal, Atavist, Medium, Perk, Distributed, RebelMouse, ShareThis, Sovrn, Steller, and Tempest. Analytics tool partners include Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, comScore, Nielsen, Parsely, and SimpleReach.

    As previously announced, Instant Articles also now support branded content as a result of Facebook’s recent policy change.

  • Facebook Gives Developers Tools To Build Messenger Chatbots, Should Change How Businesses Is Done on Facebook

    Facebook Gives Developers Tools To Build Messenger Chatbots, Should Change How Businesses Is Done on Facebook

    Well, we knew it was bound to be a big day for Messenger news with Facebook’s developer conference F8 kicking off, and it has so far been just that. Within its first hour, Facebook made a slew of announcements about Messenger and otherwise.

    In short, Messenger is about to become a lot more than most people are used to. It’s going to be a communication path for many more businesses and people are going to be interacting with artificial intelligence a whole lot more. Both of these scenarios will often be simultaneous.

    At last year’s event, Facebook announced Messenger Platform, but now it’s getting a full beta launch, and with it, businesses and developers get tools to build their own chatbots to interact with people.

    You can use bots and live-messaging tools to create custom experiences for customer service, e-commerce or whatever you come up with. These experiences can be integrated with Messenger plugins (buttons for your site, emails, etc.), or Messenger codes and links introduced last week.

    Facebook is allowing for customer matching so what you’ve been sending through SMS can now be sent through Messenger. There’s a tool that lets you match optex in customer phone numbers to a messenger account.

    Soon, there will be the ability to buy News Feed ads that will take people directly to your bot in Messenger. According to the company this will help with new users acquisition as well as retention.

    The company showed off three bots from early partners including Spring, Poncho, and CNN.

    Messenger lead David Marcus demonstrated buying a pair of shoes through Messenger with Spring. He specified what kind of shoe he wanted, his price range, and was presented with a carousel of results to choose from. This is a clear illustration of how this could be a game changer for ecommerce.

    “I can guarantee you you’re going to spend way more than you want with this,” Marcus said. “It’s really addictive.”

    He demonstrated Poncho the weather cat, a bot that has a “dry and witty” sense of humor that it uses to give you weather info in a fun way. He says it feels like a real conversation.

    They’re experimenting with ways businesses can reconnect with people, but are giving users the ability to block businesses as well.

    The company launched a new Send/Receive API that’s available today to help you build bots. For more complex bots, they’re opening up a tool called Bot Engine based on what it has learned from “M” to enable you to build high-end self-learning bots.

    Some companies are already announcing their new offerings resulting from all of this. SparkCentral announced a customer care agent, for example. Salesforce announced the Salesforce for Messenger Platform.

    “Together, the companies are empowering companies to engage their customers through dynamic experiences around products, brands and moments—all connected to their business,” the company said. “Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the proven platform for more than 150,000 companies and millions of users, Salesforce for Messenger will deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data.”

    You can get started building your bot with the documentation and resources available here. There will of course be sessions on all of this at the conference, and Facebook is making some sessions available online at the F8 site.

    Facebook also discusses the news more in a blog post here.

  • Facebook Opens Live API To Let Developers Build Ability To Stream to FB Live From Any Device [F8]

    Facebook Opens Live API To Let Developers Build Ability To Stream to FB Live From Any Device [F8]

    At F8, Facebook announced that it is opening up the Live API, which will let developers build the ability to stream to Facebook Live from any device.

    As part of the announcement, which came from Mark Zuckerberg himself, a drone floated above the stage. It’s using the API to stream from the conference to Facebook Live as the event goes on.

    Facebook has already announced a ton of new Facebook Live-related features over the past week, and as the streaming service becomes integrated with more and more apps and devices, these (particularly the discoverability features) will become significantly more important.

    Kurt Wagner makes a great point in that the API could “help entice bigger media players to go live, those that are used to producing video with a little more production power than a smartphone can capture.”

    Product manager Daniel Danker discusses the API in a blog post:

    Publishers with verified pages can get started with the Live API via Publishing Tools or by contacting one of our Media Solutions partners. These partners have built video production, editing, and streaming products that publish directly to Facebook Live and bring live video to life with features like camera switching, instant replay, on-screen graphics and special effects.

    Developers can learn how to integrate directly with Facebook Live using the Live API Documentation. The Go Live Dialog makes it particularly easy to get started. If you’re a developer and would like to integrate Facebook Live directly with your app or device, sign up to request access.

    The API can be used to build video streams that mix multiple video and audio sources and special effects. These can include programmatic sources including games and screencasts.

    The API can also be used in combination with Facebook’s Graph API to reflect viewer engagement in real time and create on-screen graphics that show poll results, analyze comments, or enable comment moderation.

    More here.

  • Facebook Messenger Gets Video Chat Heads

    Facebook Messenger Gets Video Chat Heads

    Facebook introduced Chat Heads for Messenger a few years ago. These are images of your friends that appear on your device when you get a Facebook message from them. They appear regardless of what app you’re currently using. The feature is optional.

    Facebook announced Video Chat Heads for Messenger on Monday.

    In a post on the Messenger page, the company said, “With Video Chat Heads, you can talk to your friends from a smaller chat head instead of using your full phone screen. This allows you to continue a video call while you’re messaging other people, or – on Android – even while you are using other apps.”

    This way you don’t have to completely pay attention to the person you’re talking to face to face. How convenient!

    The feature will be available for both iOS and Android users around the world in the coming days.

    Last week, Facebook announced some additional new feature for Messenger including Messenger Codes, Usernames, and Links with a m.me[youusername] URL for people and businesses. It also announced that Messenger has surpassed 900 million monthly active users.

    Image via Facebook

  • Search Bing For Code, Edit It Right In Search Results

    Search Bing For Code, Edit It Right In Search Results

    Bing has teamed up with HackerRank on a new way to search code and see it run in a live coded editor within Bing’s search results.

    Rather than looking through sites like Stackoverflow, Stackexchange, and blogs, you can search from Bing and save a great deal of time. At least that’s what they’re promising. Just search a query, hit enter, and get a solution along with the ability to edit the code in real time.

    Bing Group Engineering Manager Marcelo De Barros and HackerRank CEO and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar wrote a joint blog post announcing the news (h/t: Search Engine Journal). They said:

    It’s a typical night. You’re in the zone with a half-full Red Bull by your side. You’ve come a long way in learning a brand new programming language when—bam—you run into problem you’re not quite sure about. So, you do what any programmer would do in your situation: You search for the solution.

    This is one of the most common productivity pitfalls for programmers today. If you want to improve on or learn a new algorithm, you search in engines and figure out which blue link to click. Then, you have to transfer all of this into your editor. You trial and error until you find the right solution. If only there was a way to search a function and immediately see the solution in one step.

    This is the type of scenario they’re aiming to help with.

    The functionality is live now C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Java are supported. Just go to Bing and search accordingly.

    Image via HackerRank/Bing

  • Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    As previously reported, Google handed out a bunch of penalties over the weekend for unnatural outbound links. Now, the company has clarified that this is directly tied to product reviews that violate its guidelines.

    If you were affected by this, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Beyond this being pretty much common knowledge for years, Google posted a warning of sorts to its webmaster blog last month. In that, it laid out “best practices” for bloggers and companies when it comes to the latter giving the former free products, and the former reviewing them.

    It was this post Google’s John Mueller referenced in response to people complaining in the Google forums (via Search Engine Roundtable). In one thread, he said:

    In particular, if a post was made because of a free product (or free service, or just paid, etc), then any links placed there because of that need to have a rel=nofollow attached to them. This includes links to the product itself, any sales pages (such as on Amazon), affiliate links, social media profiles, etc. that are associated with that post. Additionally, I imagine your readers would also appreciate it if those posts were labeled appropriately. It’s fine to keep these kinds of posts up, sometimes there’s a lot of useful information in them! However, the links in those posts specifically need to be modified so that they don’t pass PageRank (by using the rel=nofollow).

    Once these links are cleaned up appropriately, feel free to submit a reconsideration request, so that the webspam team can double-check and remove the manual action.

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable links you to several separate threads in which Mueller responds similarly, but you get the gist.

    Image via iStock

  • Google Will Show Users Warnings About Your Site If It Detects ‘Social Engineering’ Content

    Google Will Show Users Warnings About Your Site If It Detects ‘Social Engineering’ Content

    Google announced the expansion of the Safe Browsing protection efforts it discussed back in November. These involve protecting users from installing unwanted software or revealing personal info due to tactics like deceptive download buttons or images ads that falsely tell users their system is out of date.

    The efforts are being expanded to deceptive embedded content like “social engineering” ads. Social engineering is described as a broader category than phishing, encompassing more types of deceptive web content. Such attacks are when content emulates a trusted entity (like a bank or government) or when it tries to trick you into doing something you’d only do for a trusted entity (such as sharing a password or calling tech support).

    Here’s an example of a warning users might see when they visit a site that Google has flagged for containing social engineering content.

    Here, Google shares several examples of such deceptive content shown via ads. These include an image that claims software is out-of-date, one that mimics a dialogue from a software developer (but doesn’t originate from that developer), and fake “download” and “play” buttons.

    Google says if your site is flagged, you should troubleshoot with Search Console. There’a also a help center section for webmasters here.

    Image via Google

  • eBay Improves Search For Product Identifiers

    eBay Improves Search For Product Identifiers

    eBay announced improvements to its product identifier search experience in an effort to help sellers make it easier for buyers to find the right items.

    Now, buyers can search for items by entering their GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN, or MPN directly in the search bar. Listings that include these identifiers will of course get better search visibility.

    eBay is telling sellers to make sure and add this info to any listings that are missing them ASAP.

    “Now, when buyers use a product identifier to search for an item, their results will include all the listings matching that item,” eBay says in an announcement. “To better streamline the search experience, we’re also changing the way eBay item number search works. Now, when you search for an item by its unique eBay item number, only active items that match will show up in the results.”

    It adds, “To search for sold or completed items that are no longer active, you can:
    Search for the item number and then click on Completed Listings in the left hand pane; Or look up your items in My eBay (or the Seller Hub when it becomes available later this summer); Or you can navigate to any eBay item by going directly to this URL by putting your eBay item number at the end of it.”

    eBay discusses the changes here.

    Last week, eBay announced its Spring Seller Update, which has a lot of big changes for sellers. Read all about those here.

  • Facebook Gives Marketers More Reasons To Take Live Video Seriously

    Facebook Gives Marketers More Reasons To Take Live Video Seriously

    Facebook announced some major changes in recent days that will greatly impact how people consume video and how businesses and marketers will use it to their advantage. Facebook videos (especially live videos) will be more discoverable than ever, and will also provide new monetization paths.

    For one, users can now broadcast live videos that are specifically limited to Groups and Events. This is great news for those who want to make sure certain people see the videos. This feature could present some very interesting ideas particularly in sale groups.

    “Live in Groups allows you to broadcast to just the people in the Facebook Group – so you can go live in your family group, or share a workout plan in a fitness group,” Facebook says. “Live in Events means you can go live from a birthday…to allow those that can’t make it to join the fun, and a performer can go live backstage to the people who’ve RSVP-ed to the event to give them a sneak peak. You can even use Events to schedule a live Q&A session. We hope this new ability to both broadcast and watch live video within Groups and Events enables people to connect more deeply with their closest friends, family and the communities of people who share their interests.”

    Facebook also added live reactions to live videos, which gives it more Periscope-esque functionality and should lead to further audience engagement. Broadcasters also gained the ability to draw or doodle on the live video while live, and since the announcement, Periscope has already been reported to be testing similar functionality. Look for more and more feature crossover between Facebook and Periscope as time goes on.

    Also new to Facebook live video are filters and a Replay Comments feature.

    “People comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular video,” a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. “If you’re watching a live video after the fact, you’ll be able to see comments as they occurred during the live broadcast, so you feel “in” on the action.”

    In the discovery department, there’s a new Invite Friends feature as well as a Live Video Destination and a Live Map.

    To invite friends to watch a live video, you can tap on the Invite icon to the right of a live video and they’ll get a notification.

    The live video destination is a place to find live videos the world is talking about, live video from friends and creators you care about, and live video on topics you’re interested in. This means people will be seeking out videos more rather than just checking them out as they appear in the News Feed. There’s also a search function.

    “If relevant Live video is available, it will be included in the Search results pages for these topics so you can get a direct, first-hand look at what’s happening,” says Facebook. “You’ll also see a new indicator that lets you know when relevant Live video is available for a Trending topic.”

    The Live Map gives you a visual way to look at public live broadcasts that are currently happening in over 60 countries. This is rolling out gradually on desktop.

    “Expect to find Live video in a small handful of Trending topics for now,” Facebook adds. “As more people start creating and sharing Live video, we’re excited to see these perspectives make Trending topics an even better experience.”

    Obviously the implications of all of this for businesses is that your videos can potentially be easier for users to find beyond the News Feed.

    In terms of monetizing videos, Facebook also made changes to its branded content policy that may just help in that department. Verified pages can share branded content such as text, photos, videos, Instant Articles, links, 360 videos, or Live Videos that mention or feature someone else’s product, brand, or sponsor.

    As Facebook notes, this stuff is typically posted by media companies, celebrities, or other influencers. They’re also providing a new tool that makes it easy to tag a marketer when publishing branded content. Facebook says publishers and influencers must use this tag for all branded content.

    “This update is something that media companies, public figures, influencers, and marketers have been asking for, as branded content is a growing and evolving part of the media landscape,” Facebook’s Clare Rubin and Nick Grudin say in a blog post. “People will now be connected to more of the content they care most about on Facebook as publishers and influencers gain an incentive to share more quality content — of all kinds…We know that many of our partners have existing partnership deals with marketers, and this update gives them the ability to extend their branded content business onto Facebook.”

    “For brands and businesses, the new tool will introduce more transparency and allow them to better understand how their marketing initiatives are performing across Facebook,” they add. “Additionally, marketers can now leverage branded content creative for ads and actively engage in sponsorships to ensure their campaigns are useful, interesting, and entertaining to their target audiences. We are committed to ensuring that the branded content experience is engaging for people on Facebook and that the ecosystem thrives for our partners and marketers.”

    To use the new tool, you can get started here. You can view the new branded content policy here and the updated ads policy here.

    Of course Facebook has also recently provided better ways to track video performance. In February, the company launched new metrics to see the percentage of people who have viewed their videos with sound and a simplified video metrics interface. More recently, Facebook added daily breakdowns of the Minutes Viewed, Views, and 10-Second Views metrics.

    Don’t forget, Facebook also now takes live video into account when ranking content in the News Feed. Make no mistake. Facebook wants to show people video, especially when it’s live. If video makes sense for your marketing efforts, now is the time to really start taking it seriously.

    It’s worth noting that some users are annoyed by Facebook’s live video efforts, so make sure you’re putting out engaging content that people will enjoy.

    Facebook’s F8 developer conference is just about to get underway, so look for even more video news to come out of that.

  • Google Announces Full Swift Support For Mobile Ads

    Google announced that its mobile adds now fully support Swift, the iOS programming language Apple launched in 2014 and open sourced last last year.

    Google says it has seen an increase in requests from publishers to fully support Swift in the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and has responded by releasing example apps built in Swift, adding code snippets throughout its developer docs, and adding Swift API reference docs to its developer sites.

    “The Google Mobile Ads SDK team is committed to supporting Swift, and we’ll continue to update our SDK, developer docs, and example apps to ensure we provide publishers with full support for the latest version of Swift,” says Tristan Emrich with Google Mobile Ads developer relations. “Whether you currently develop your iOS apps in Swift, or have plans to do so in the future, we hope the actions we’ve taken to support Swift in our SDK will help make your experience with Swift more enjoyable and your transition to Swift a whole lot easier.”

    Emrich notes that Google’s GitHub repo now has Swift example apps for banners, interstitials, and native ads for AdMob and DFP. They’ve also added a Swift version to their API demo app.

    “The API Demo app demonstrates features of the Google Mobile Ads SDK, such as new ways to customize ad requests, experiment with multiple ad sizes, and compare AdMob and DFP technologies, to help you improve the user experience and maximize ad revenue,” says Emrich.

    They’ve also added Swift code snippets to the AdMob, DFP, and AdX developer docs and Swift API reference docs to the AdMob and DFP developer sites.

    Image via Apple