THE NEWS ON TUES #5: WORKING FROM HOME, MOVING ON FROM COVID, SUPPORTING SMB’S.

May 12, 2020
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Patricia Morris

The Popcorn team understands the importance of ensuring that we’re up to date with emerging trends, digital marketing news stories and platform updates. During our weekly team meeting we each highlight an interesting article or news story. In this weekly blog feature, we’ll share our exciting findings of the week with you.

THE NEWS ON TUES #5

Sampathkumar, M. (2020, May 12), “Twitter is letting some employees work from home forever” – DigitalTrends.com.

In a progressive, forward-thinking move, Twitter enables some employees in their workforce the opportunity to work from home FOREVER. In the words of Twitter exec Jennifer Christie: “If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen”. Twitter is the first major social media platform to make this post-pandemic announcement, could this be the start of a trend? Maybe this is an indication of what the future of work could look like?

Have you been working from home since the beginning of the lockdown? What are your productivity top tips?

Christie, D. (2020, May 7) “Consumers tire of COVID-19-related ads, survey finds” – Marketing Dive.

A survey of 7,000 consumers across seven countries in April found that 41% are now ready to hear about non-COVID related topics. A key takeaway from the research is that consumers have appreciated COVID-19-related marketing messages but now appear ready to move on. In a related article, a study found that Gen Z wants fun, exciting ads among pandemic boredom.

Patel, N. (2020, May 12) “The Future of Blogging as a Marketing Channel Ep: #1380” – Neil Patel Blog

This podcast episode focuses on the future of blogging as a marketing channel. There are millions of blog posts shared a day, and understandably the online space is becoming increasingly saturated. It’s crucial to stand out and diversify the content. A top takeaway from this podcast is to repurpose blog information into infographics. These shareable images are easy to consume information and can be repurposed into carousel post content for Instagram and LinkedIn.

Hutchinson, A. (2020, May 11) “Facebook Launches New Support Tools for SMBs in Both Facebook and Instagram” – Social Media Today

Facebook has unveiled a new set of features to support SMBs impacted by COVID-19, including a ‘Support Small Business’ sticker for Instagram and an update to Messenger to help streamline direct response. Users can share Instagram stories featuring a three-post preview and a link to the businesses Instagram profile.

Have you been supporting local businesses in your area? Other than showing support online, what other efforts have you gone to give them your support?

Marvin, G., (2020, May 8) “Now, Shopify merchants can quickly turn their catalogs into shoppable Pins” – Search Engine Land.

Pinterest has launched a new app that makes it much easier for Shopify merchants to create shoppable Product Pins on Pinterest. This app automatically updates product information on Product Pins on Pinterest To try it out, after installing the Pinterest app, add a tag to your Shopify site, upload the product catalog then publish, to post in-stock items to Pinterest.

To summarise: nurturing community is still essential at this time, as is streamlining e-commerce and making online shopping easier. After weeks of COVID-19 messaging, are we almost ready to move onto different topics and fresh content? What is this content going to look like and when should brands start implementing this?