What has been happening in the marketing world this week? Let The Zen Media Group fill you in on the latest and greatest of online marketing news in our MZ Weekly News Round-Up, published every Friday!
Social Media
About a year after Facebook initially announced plans for a redesign of its News Feed feature, implementation of an overhaul is set to begin this week. The updated look includes font changes, prominent photos that span the entire News Feed, and other subtle stylistic improvements, such as larger buttons in certain spots. Important to note, too, is that the update will not affect ad specs, ads performance, or optimization, which a company spokesperson was quick to clarify.
For Amtrak, the interface design updates to Facebook are coming just in time for their latest social media marketing campaign.
It may seem odd at first, but Amtrak has a fairly prominent presence across the social media spectrum: their Facebook page has over 377,000 likes, and the #Amtrak hashtag on Instagram receives over 1,000 photos each week. This month, in honor of Austin, Texas’ SXSW festival, the company will be sending a train from Los Angeles to Austin carrying 30 entrepreneurs and digital thought leaders. While in the specially-reserved observation car, these passengers will be live-tweeting the 33-hour journey using the #AmtrakLIVE tag.
The hope is that the beautiful scenery and collaboration involved with this campaign will make younger people consider taking Amtrak, rather than a flight, when they travel.
And, to round out this big week for Facebook, the company just released the first episode of their new Speaker Series, which featured Javier Olivan, the VP of growth and analytics. Olivan explained about the skill sets needed to build a product’s growth, and talked a bit about the story of the growth of Facebook itself. In an interesting point, he also deconstructed the definition of “marketing” to apply it to his field of growth and analytics, illustrating the company’s continuous innovations. Upcoming talk topics will include more about marketing, growth, analytics, and SEO.
SEO
This week, Moz released a mobile site audit checklist, which can serve businesses as a helpful guide for building a high-quality, optimized mobile website. The list of things to look for includes aspects of mobile sites that are often broken yet overlooked, and optimization options that are easily missed. Categories of steps include connecting a mobile site with a desktop site, technical issues, design, navigation, content, video, and SERP differences. To get the most out of your mobile SEO, this guide is not one to miss.
Content
Research is in: 73 percent of B2B content marketers are producing more content than they did a year ago. However, keeping up with this output is not just a matter of accelerating content creation—staying successful will depend on the robustness of a business’ content marketing strategy.
The advice of building a solid team, establishing a robust content management system, and making time for promotion and measurement is worth repeating: as the amount of content on the Internet continues to rapidly increase, it is more necessary than ever for companies to implement a marketing strategy that’s geared toward success.
Sources:
- Olivan, Javier. Speaker Series #1 Facebook
- Morrison, Kimberlee. #AmtrakLIVE courts Social Media Insiders With a Trip to SXSW SocialTimes
- Wagner, Kurt. Facebook Unveils News Feed Redesign, One Year Later Mashable
- Kledzik, Kristina. Mobile Site Audit Checklist The Moz Blog
- Gerard, Michael. Keep Your Content From Getting Lost in the Stampede Content Marketing Institute
