Marketing News Round-Up

The latest instalment of our news round-ups – we’ve scoured the web for the important stories so you don’t have to…

Facebook Gets Local

In its latest release Facebook is now offering businesses the ability to target potential customers in their local area. This looks like a fantastic tool for small businesses to target their local area, but also for larger groups who are expanding into new geographical areas. As with all Facebook advertising, you specify your budget and the duration, and Facebook will estimate the reach your ad should achieve. The new part is that you select a geographical radius, as small as one mile, around your business – so your ad will only be seen by people in the local area. These ads will appear in Newsfeeds in Facebook’s mobile app – in fact tapping the ‘Get Directions’ button will provide customers with a route to your business, straight to their smartphones.

New News For Google

Google is keeping up with the times by adding new sources to its news section. Rather than solely traditional news outlets approved by the search engine, Google is now including blogs, social media and video as relevant news search results. As a Google spokesperson commented, “we are always working to give our users the best possible answer to their question” and this development certainly proves their recognition that we are consuming news in increasingly varied ways. Is a story less newsworthy or credible because you saw it on Twitter and not BBC News? Not anymore – at least by Google’s standards.

Not Another Social Network?

Well, yes, actually. Social start-up Ello is now in beta, and while you currently need to be invited to join, it may not be long until the site is open to all. But is it open to marketers? Ello continually reinforces the message that it is not a site for advertising – their tag-line is even “simple, beautiful & ad-free”. What’s more, they are extremely critical of social networks that do collect data about their users, calling them “unethical” and “intrusive”. So if advertisers are so unwelcome, is it really something marketers should worry about – it doesn’t sound like we’ll be welcome! However, if customers agree with Ello, and use it over ad-heavy sites such as Facebook, will social media marketers suddenly have a much smaller audience? We’ll just have to wait and see…