1. LinkedIn Launches ‘LinkedIn Collective’ For B2B Marketers - LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Collective, a community designed for and by B2B marketers to inspire excellence and success for all of us. Per LinkedIn:

“The Collective will offer groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts, and leaders across the B2B marketing industry. 

With the Collective, we want to showcase what it looks like to build a content brand on LinkedIn, proper. Though we will continue to provide the excellent and resourceful content that you’ve come to expect on this blog, our new content brand is platform-first and will live and grow on LinkedIn.”

2. YouTube Update: New Metrics, Copyrighted Music.. - For creators, YouTube has added a number of new capabilities, including more data on their subscriber growth.

3. Google Added Structured Data For Product Pros And Cons - Google has added structured data support to read and potentially use pros and cons for product review snippet in the Google Search results. Google said you can now “tell Google about your pros and cons by supplying pros and cons structured data on editorial review pages.”  Even if you don't use this markup, Google may still show pros and cons in the product search result snippets. 

So take actions and do not rely on Google.

4. Google Changed Search Result For Queries With Quotes - Now if you do a search such as [“google search”], the search results page will show the snippet where the quoted text appears.

According to Google, prior to this update, the quoted search term was not always displayed in the Google Search result snippet because sometimes the quoted text exists in portions of a document that don't lend itself to making helpful snippets. For instance, a word or phrase might be present as a menu item on a page where you can access the site's many sections. Such portions might not result in a snippet that produces a readily accessible description. And now Google says that they made this change due to user feedback - “We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this.”

P.S: This is not a ranking change but rather a user interface change on how Google Search will show some searches, searches that use quotes. This may impact your click-through rate from the Google search results but will have no impact on how you rank for those types of queries.

5. Google Launched A New Version Of Google Tag - The Google tag (gtag.js) is a single tag you can add to your website to use a variety of Google products and services. Instead of managing multiple tags for different Google product accounts, it lets you send data from your website to linked Google product destinations to help you measure the effectiveness of your website and ads.

The new Google tag (currently only accessible and configurable from Google Ads and Google Analytics 4), which was shared at Google Marketing Live, is rolling out. The aim is to make tagging easier to ensure reliable measurement for the long-term. If you’re already using the global site tag (gtag.js), you don’t need to take any action, but here are some things to know:

For more information, you can read the Google announcement here. To see all the tags you have access to, go to Google Tag Manager and click the “Google tags” tab on the Accounts table.

6. Google Keyword Planner Now Allows You To Organize Keyword InTo Ad Groups - This “Organize keywords into ad groups”  feature was released in 2021, only to a small number of users. And now Google is slowly rolling out this feature to global user base . Here is what Google had to say:

"You could always manually choose to add keywords to ad groups (manually picking which ones to add where). This feature adds the ability to use an automated machine learning system where we suggest which ad groups are the best ones for the keywords, instead of you manually doing the placement. 

This should hopefully save advertisers time and effort if they have thousands of keywords/ad groups to sift through. The ability to manually add keywords still exists."

FYI: Just like with most automation, use with caution. Test, analyze, and adjust as necessary.

7. New Features In Google Discovery Ad - The new features are:

You can read the full announcement from Google in their help guide.

8. Facebook Shutting Down Live Commerce On October 1, 2022 - Over the past few years, Facebook has been experimenting with live shopping implementations as part of a larger effort to capitalize on growing eCommerce trends.  And now the company has announced that it’s shutting down its experiments with live shopping in the app, as of October 1st this year.

However, it is not completely abandoning live shopping; Instagram will continue to host it and expand it. Mark just did not see a future for it on Facebook, which is understandable. And it also reflects the generally unfavorable reception to live shopping in western markets. Plus e-commerce is slowing down in the US. Remember in episode#119, we covered the 10% headcount reduction at Shopify. 

9. Twitter ‘Location Spotlight’ Is Now Available To All Businesses - Initially launched to selected businesses earlier in the year, now, all businesses that have switched to a Professional Profile can add the module, which displays your physical business location on a map within your Twitter profile presence.

You can read more about how to convert your Twitter account to a Professional Profile at this link.

10. New Workshops Added To Twitter Flight School - Twitter’s Flight School is a free education element, which provides you with a Twitter accreditation, and covers all the basics of tweeting and tweet strategy - which is worth taking to ensure that you’re across all the various opportunities of the app.

Now, Twitter is launching a new ‘Taking Care of Business’ workshop series, which is designed to help professionals starting out on Twitter gain a better understanding of its latest products and offerings.

“The workshops will cover how to set up your Professional Account, how to activate an appropriate spotlight for your business and how to tweet confidently and engage with your audience.”

You can register for the workshops, run via Twitter Flight School, here.

Twitter is also launching additional business courses in its Flight School education platform. Here is what Twitter said:

“We’ll be rolling out 10 a la carte courses on Twitter Flight School that will cover several topics that are top of mind for professionals on how to leverage Twitter to drive customers to buy. Our #TweetLikeAPro coursework will be designed specifically for small to medium businesses and will cover topics like how to Up Your Tweet Game, Creating a Community of Engaged Followers and Keeping it Simple: The 4 Cs of Content Strategy.”

You can find more about the latest Flight School courses here. 

11. Pinterest Reports 9% Revenue Increase In Q2’22 With Errors In Their Quarterly Report - Pinterest published its Q2 2022 results with some mistakes. In their quarterly results they state that they have 433 million DAU - same as Q1.) However when I sum up the breakdown, I see the number at 432 million in Q2 and they lost 2 million actives in US. Meanwhile they had 434 million actives in Q1 while they reported 433 million. Also they had lower than expected revenue though they earned $665.9 million (a 9% year-over-year). 

Also their revenue per user is off since you divide the total revenue by active users. So I will not cover it here and I plan to blog + tweet about it to Pinterest later this week.

FYI: Elliott Management has a track record of buying up assets in companies that it believes could be performing better has recently purchased a 9% stake in Pinterest.