YouTube will be following in Instagram’s footsteps and hiding subscriber counts as of next month, LinkedIn has rolled out a new hub to help marketers with their social media strategies, and Microsoft has announced the finalists in the 2019 Advertising Agency Awards.

Keep reading to find out more about these headlines and a few other top news updates in this month’s digital marketing round-up.

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On Twitter, brands need to create fresh and engaging visual content on a near-daily basis. Why? Because that’s what your audience wants. Tweets with video attract 10X more engagements than Tweets without video, Tweets with images attract 150% more Retweets than Tweets without images, and even Tweets with a GIF gain 55% more engagement than Tweets without a GIF.

Facebook is making it easier for businesses to chat with customers in Messenger

Messenger helps you simplify customer acquisition by providing a direct, conversational way for people to take action where they already spend their time. Today, August 29, we are announcing the global roll out of lead generation in Messenger, which enables businesses to set up an automated question experience. Ads that click-to-Messenger, created in the messages objective, opens a Messenger conversation between a person and business and kicks off a set of questions that can be answered through pre-filled or free form text. Businesses can then integrate with their CRM provider and continue the conversation with qualified leads through Pages Inbox, Pages Manager App or a third-party live chat provider. A timely reminder is automatically sent to people who have not yet completed questions, prompting them to respond.

Facebook makes changes to housing, employment, and credit ads

Facebook is requiring that advertisers use a new process when buying ads related to housing, employment, and credit. This new process applies to advertisers who are either based in the United States or using ads to reach US-based audiences.

Housing, employment, and credit are considered special ad categories and now have restricted targeting options in Ads Manager.

Now you can see and control the data that apps and websites share with Facebook

To help shed more light on these practices that are common yet not always well understood, today we’re introducing a new way to view and control your off-Facebook activity. Off-Facebook Activity lets you see a summary of the apps and websites that send us information about your activity, and clear this information from your account if you want to. This is another way to give people more transparency and control on Facebook, along with recent updates to our Ad Library, updates to “Why am I seeing this ad?” and the launch of a new feature called “Why am I seeing this post?”.

Facebook lets users share music from Spotify to Stories

Facebook has gained another popular Instagram feature, the ability to share songs from Spotify to stories.

This feature builds off of Instagram’s capabilities as users will now hear a 15-second clip of a song before tapping to listen to the full version. When sharing Spotify songs to Instagram stories, users only see the album art with no audio at all.

Google My Business adds bulk review management

Google has added the ability to see all your reviews across multiple listings on a single page. You can see this within Google My Business reviews section at https://business.google.com/reviews.

Google announced it over here saying “Businesses can view reviews for multiple listings at once. With bulk reviews, you’ll be able to view, reply to, and flag reviews for multiple listings from one place.”

This is available in location groups with 500 or fewer locations, but is not available for organization accounts.

The 2019 Microsoft Advertising Agency Awards: The finalists

In honor of the powerful partners who help make Microsoft Advertising successful, we are delighted to announce the finalists for the 2019 Microsoft Advertising Agency Awards. This year our recognition includes our technology and channel partners as well as agency partners. These key groups deliver outstanding, effective, creative and passionate work for their clients in the Americas. As Microsoft Advertising evolves, these partners are demonstrating what’s possible, to ensure their clients are showing up in all the right places, in the most impactful ways.

Thanks for checking out August’s Digital Marketing Round-up.

We’ll see you next month!

Photo Source: Raphael Biscaldi on Unsplash