Hey everyone,  

Welcome to the second episode of This week in Marketing. I'm your host Sajid Islam 

Today we'll be covering all the updates in the Digital Marketing Space from the Week of April 27, 2020. 

 
Facebook Plans To Let Page Owners Charge For Access To Events With Live Videos.   

In a bid to support creators and small businesses, Facebook is planning to let Pages and Page Owners charge for access to events with Live videos. Facebook also announced that Page Owners will soon be able to mark Facebook Events as online only.  

 

Furthermore, in the next few weeks, Pages will be able to integrate Facebook Live so that they can broadcast to their guests.  

 

With this integration, Facebook plans to also “add the ability for Pages to charge for access to events with Live videos.” Facebook says that the feature would apply to anything “from online performances to classes to professional conferences,” and is part of the company’s bid to support creators and small businesses on its platform. 

 

Pages that want to raise money for the causes they care about can already add the donate button to live videos wherever nonprofit fundraisers are available, but the new feature will also allow Pages to charge for Events at this difficult time. 

 

In case you missed it earlier, last month, Facebook also announced a bunch of new features for Live, including automatic closed captioning and an audio-only mode that lets users just listen to a live video stream. 

 

Both features, especially the latter, will help more people who have slower connections take part. Other features include a logged-out mode, letting people who don’t even have a Facebook account watch or listen to content. 

 
In a direct challenge to Amazon, Shopify launches Shop, a new mobile app  

While Shopify is best-known for powering the online stores of more than 1 million businesses, the company is launching a consumer shopping app of its own today, simply called Shop.  

 

The app is actually an update and rebrand of Arrive, an app for tracking packages from Shopify merchants and other retailers, which the company says has been used by 16 million consumers already. Shop includes those same package tracking capabilities, but it also allows consumers to browse a feed of recommended products, learn more about each brand and make purchases using the one-click Shop Pay checkout process. 

 

 

Shop provides customized product recommendations to each shopper, but these recommendations all come from brands that you’ve already shown an interested in, either by purchasing a product from their Shopify  store or by following their profiles in the app. 

 

In contrast the product recommendations on other online stores, which offer a feed of products from brands you don’t know, brands you don’t care about — most these platforms driven by advertising.  

 

Shopify is not planning to include any ads, and it will be available for free to both shoppers and brands.  

 

Note that in November 2019 Shopify had launched an email marketing for shopify store owners . 

 

 Google will now let any business list products on Google Shopping for free 

Google is making a significant change to its Google Shopping platform by letting any business owner that sells products online list their inventory for free. Usually, an e-commerce operation would need to pay for ad placement on Google Shopping. But the company says it will now let anyone who operates a website or manages a store on a marketplace platform list without paying. Google still plans to charge companies for top placement as promoted listings 

 
Google Meet On Apr29, 2020 Javier Soltero Vice President & GM, G Suite wrote in a blog post that Google Meet premium video meetings—free for everyone. Previously it was facebook who launched a competing product called "rooms". It seems that everyone took Zoom's exponential growth as a sign to jump in and offer a competing product. While this is a great news for consumers – yay more choices, it is a lot of competition for Zoom.

Now on to the last update for this week: Microsoft Team. This week, I had a chance to test drive Microsoft Team this week – a direct competitor to Slack. What is impressive about Microsoft Team (which is included in the Microsoft 365 Business Standard) is that you can replace both slack and zoom and just use Team for communication and webinars. At $15/month per user if on a month to month subscription (or $12.50/per month / per user if on an annual subscription) Microsoft Team is super inexpensive for a small business owner to jump in 
 
So if you haven't considered Microsoft Team and is looking to save a few dollars then it is worth checking it out. 

 

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