Welcome to the first of hopefully many weekly updates from the world of Digital Marketing! Read on for all the latest industry insights and trends.
Amazon partners with Meta and Snap
Amazon has partnered with Meta and Snap to introduce in-app shopping features on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. These integrations allow users to shop Amazon products directly within the platforms, leveraging real-time pricing and Amazon account information.
This enhances Amazon’s reach in social commerce, particularly among younger audiences, and reflects a significant push into integrating e-commerce with social media. This also puts Meta and Snap into more direct competition with TikTok, and heralds an era where Social Media and Shopping are more intertwined, something any D2C brand in particular needs to be planning for.
Funnily enough, this is all remarkably close to Elon Musk’s long-held vision and plans for Twitter/X – unfortunately however for him, this is a vision more likely to be achieved by competitors.
2024: The Year of LinkedIn?
I’ve attended multiple Webinars and seen multiple trends articles over the last few weeks stating that, with Twitter/X in decline, LinkedIn is seeing a massive uplift in activity. This isn’t a new take. What is interesting this week however is research from Hootsuite indicating that LinkedIn is expected by marketers and ad buyers to be the social channel that delivers the best ROI in 2024.
The ad platform has, it’s fair to say, not always offered buyers the best experience. But after years of catching up it now offers a similar range of formats to competitors and a unique targeting setup. If you’re a B2B firm (or even a consumer brand), nailing your LinkedIn approach in 2024 is absolutely key.
Bing – Your new copilot?
While a lot of the conversation around AI focuses understandably on Chat GPT, it’s worth taking a look at what Microsoft is doing with Bing.
AI is being increasingly integrated into the search platform, and Microsoft is now rebranding Bing Chat as Copilot in its bid to take further market share – interesting, given the amount it has invested in OpenAI. Indeed, it’s working to further integrate the two, but it’s hard not to see a desired outcome of having a singular platform at some point.
Bing’s daily active users have increased since the platform was integrated with Bing Chat; still some way off Google, but they’ve gone from around 7% global market share at the beginning of 2022 to 9% now, or around 100 million daily active users (Statista).
This all has implications for marketers. While I wouldn’t be abandoning Google just yet, I would keep a close eye on Bing. If you’re looking to scale or test new ground for PPC, it’s a relatively easy integration process from Google Ads; if not, then I would at least keep an eye on developments.
Further Reading:
- A new report has found that Facebook and YouTube remain the top social sites for news, although TikTok is making inroads in the US in particular.
- Meta and TikTok both recently revealed Ad Free subscriptions. However, if you sign up to Meta’s, you then can’t run ads from the same account. Awkward.
- Not strictly digital marketing, but a bit of AI WTF… YouTube is launching a new feature that will give select users the ability to make music with the artificial intelligence-generated vocals
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