Topic: Facebook Announces Libra

We got three pretty exciting topics to cover today! First up is Facebook and their announcement of the launch of Calibra. So it’s basically a digital currency wallet that is going to work in correlation with the Libra network which is Facebooks cryptocurrency project.

It’s going to integrate with the Messenger app, WhatsApp and also with a standalone FB app. In the simplest terms, it is a cryptocurrency wallet that makes it easier to transfer money between you and your friends. Not much more details on this except that it will be released in 2020 and the fees involved there is either going to be no fee at all or really low fees. This is a pretty big announcement for those of us who love cryptocurrency and the direction that’s all moving very cool to see such a big platform get behind it. We are very interested to see what happens in 2020 with this and we will keep you posted as we learn more of course.

Topic: Pinterest Announces Further Development of Marketing Partners Program

This next one is for Ecommerce marketers and this was a pretty big announcement by Pinterest who has been moving in this direction for a while but they have had an API out for some time where products could be sent to Pinterest.

For example, if you have a product catalog on Shopify you could pass that data to Pinterest, creating a pin and that can pass the pricing and all sorts of information. Typical of what you’d see would like a product feed like if you’re advertising in Google or Amazon or anywhere like that. The big news is that the API is now going to be wide open at this point so good news if you’re hosting a site on a platform like WordPress or Magento.

For the first time now they are saying there’s going to be direct integrations available for those platforms using third-party feed management companies godatafeed, feedonomics and that sort of thing. They’re also going to be able to integrate other tag management providers so other shopping experience providers are all going to gain additional access to the API.

The long-term vision here I guess is to get more and more products to Pinterest and quite probably purchasing directly through Pinterest. For a long-time Pinterest has been such a great place to promote products in quite a few verticals, it’s been a great tool to drive traffic to e-commerce sites and their just kind of making it easier and easier. This is really exciting to see in the e-commerce space, we’ll keep you posted as we learn more on that.

Topic: Google Showing YouTube Video TimeStamps in SERPs

Anyone into producing video or SEO can be affected by this and according to Android Police Google will change the way it sees and interprets video content by including timestamps. This is really interesting Google via YouTube is sort of algorithmically coming up a time stamps for videos within the app. So what that’s basically doing is say for example you have a 10-minute video and maybe there are three or four pauses inside of it. Google’s algorithm is trying to figure out what those timestamps should be to allow users to jump right to a certain piece of content.

Now, this is really interesting for a few reasons first long-form video content creators cover many topics in one video so ranking well for a specific topic might be tougher. So conventional wisdom leads to create shorter videos that are about sort of specific topics, but now Google is starting to unveil a little bit their knowledge about how topics get broken up within long videos.

When you search for a topic now you should be seeing a section of a video that addresses the search. Super cool, and goes to show the power of machine learning.