You are listening to digital drop. Our monthly round-up of digital trends to keep you and your digital up-to-date.

LinkedIn advertising and page management has never been the easiest of tasks, but get ready for that to change as LinkedIn are introducing a new Business Manager. 

The new digital asset should make managing multiple assets easier. This will give you the ability to view and manage teams, ad accounts, pages and business partners from the dashboard as well as being able to undertake management tasks much easier like permissions and billing. 

LinkedIn have said: “We built Business Manager with you, our B2B customers, in mind to help you maximize efficiencies, so you can create and execute engaging campaigns that cut through a crowded market with no added cost.”

Whilst it hasn’t been released to the general public yet, it is rumoured to be coming to market in the next few weeks. People who have already seen the dashboard have described it as clean to look at and easy to use – unlike its Facebook counterpart…

Speaking of Facebook, in May they announced a number of messaging tools aimed at helping small to medium businesses to manage conversations and ads to help generate leads and increase brand awareness.

Businesses using the inbox section in the Business Suite can already manage messages from Facebook and Instagram in one place and Facebook announced that they have started to test bringing WhatsApp messages to the inbox too. 

It allows multiple users to manage communications from one phone number but across various different devices – at last a benefit of the 2014 purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook. 

Mark Zuckerberg and his team also announced that they will be testing marketing messages directly into consumers inboxes. It means that businesses will be able to send promotional message campaigns via Messenger to those customers that have opted in.

If a customer opts into receiving notifications from the business, then the business will then be able to target that audience with messages directly into their inbox.

Finally, if you haven’t heard very soon Google will be removing your ability to create and edit their expanded text ads. 

In August 2021, the search engine giant confirmed they would be getting rid of the expanded text ads this year, and as of June 30th 2022 you will no longer be able to create new expanded text ads OR edit your current ones. 

Now, I am not one to panic you so let me tell you what this means for your business and how you can respond to this news. Basically, if you have any expanded text ads in use at the moment, it is suggested that sooner rather than later you should do some work creating some responsive search ads to be able to continue to advertise on Google Ads in place of your expanded text ads. 

The sooner you do it the better as you’ll be able to collect more data. But what is important is this shouldn’t change your Paid Search strategy – Google have positioned this change as one that will save businesses time so hopefully, you’ll only see the positive results from this change.

That’s all for this month, but keep your eye on the Starbots Creative website for more digital updates to keep you in the loop of what’s going in the digital universe, thanks for listening!