Hump Day Headlines: GoPro-stealing Dog, Facebook Outages and More!

Welcome to today's Hump Day Headlines! We're really excited to talk about today’s topics, including a dog stealing a GoPro, Facebook outages, Instagram ad updates, and a few local optimization tips!

You can either watch the video or read the transcript below. Plan to join us live each Wednesday on Facebook.

Being Social with Social Media - Woof woof!

Here’s what happened with the dog and the GoPro. For starters, watch this if you need a smile today! This pooch stole his owner's GoPro camera and ran around the yard, and in the video we see all the other dogs frantically chasing him, and the owner too! It made us laugh, so we thought everyone should see it.

Of course, we are dog lovers, so that may have influenced our excitement about the video, but it makes a good point for businesses on social media too! We find with our clients that they forget to capture those crazy, funny moments, and they think of social media as a sharing platform for business opportunities or generating leads. Really though, we’re on social media to learn more about our friends, their family members, and just to connect. So, don't forget to share those funny moments with the individuals who are following your pages.

For example, we posted a video of us having a cheeseball eating contest, and people have watched it for over four hours! (It’s three minutes long). And we love cheese balls, but it wasn’t a polished video by any means. But those are the types of things that people really like to watch! Okay, enough about the cheeseball.

Why Did Facebook Cut Out?

Alright so next on our agenda today: Facebook had outages. We experienced them here over the holiday weekend, but it wasn't localized to our region. In fact, it covered quite a bit of Europe as well as the East Coast down into Florida, and along Washington DC and a bit of Canada, also the Midwest and some of the southern Americas. So it was pretty widespread. They were addressing it pretty rapidly, so if you did notice some outages or some glitches in Facebook, that was why.

Facebook Ads are Now In Instagram Stories

Next on our agenda, we have Instagram and Facebook. Obviously they're very closely connected, but when we were creating ads this morning, we noticed that you can now put your page’s Facebook ads in the Instagram Stories without altering them.

So, a lot of people are watching and looking at Stories, and so now when you go to look at stories, intermittently you're going to see some ads that came right from Facebook located within that story carousel.

So, if that's something that you're interested in, let our team know, we can help you out, or check it out yourself. We would assume that Facebook will be following as well; Facebook does have Stories, so we wouldn't be surprised to see that rolling out on Facebook soon.

SSL is Essential for Your Website!

Now this is one thing that I've been running into with a lot of clients calling in; we've notified our clients that they need to do this, but then new customers contact us because they've lost ranking or traffic, or just because business is slow. And one of the key reasons that business might be slow for you is if you have not put an SSL certificate on your website—that is key to helping you get found! So check it out! you should have HTTPS at the beginning of your URL when you load your website. And if you don't, contact us!

Just be aware that SSL's are right now at a premium and it is taking quite a bit of work and back-end development time for our team to acquire those because they are in high demand right now. So, if you're calling and wondering about that and talking with your website development team it will take time if you're behind the wall.

Local Optimization Tips from the UnBounce CTA Conference

Beth is finally back from Vancouver! You may have seen her broadcast live with Anna at the UnBounce conference. Rob Bucci gave a great presentation about local optimization, and these are some of our key takeaways: Watch your ratings online! Specifically, in Google, your ratings and reviews do influence your overall search engine rank. So, if you do not have ratings or if you have low ratings, that will influence your organic rank. And rank is the determining factor of where your website shows up in the search engine results, so you want to be at the top!

So, make sure you're working on your five-star Google ratings and other platforms as well. It's Influencing your rank directly. Another interesting tip from Mr. Bucci is to make sure you’re doing local content audits. Be sure you're aware not only of your physical geolocation competitors, but also your online competitors, and make sure you're auditing them on a regular basis.

Our clients receive this as part of their ongoing package; we're always looking at their online competitors, but make sure you're doing due diligence on your side and taking a look at those as well and reporting back to your marketing team and/or your in-house facilitation.

Well, thanks so much for joining us this week. Elizabeth and Anna are glad you tuned in! Have a great rest of your week and we'll see you back next Wednesday! If you need any help with Facebook ads, SSLs, local optimization or anything else marketing in the meantime, get in touch with us at Art Unlimited!