Facebook is reportedly planning to introduce paid ads to its messaging platform within the next few months. Tech website TechCrunch claims the social media giant has already distributed a document to businesses stating that they will have the ability to message customers directly from around April onwards.

Google has confirmed that it will be removing AdWords ads located on the right-hand side of search results in favour of a new layout, where ads will be placed at the top and bottom of a page. It has already begun rolling out the changes in all languages for desktop searches worldwide as it continues to bring SERPs closer to the mobile experience.

Google is making it easier for advertisers to make multiple changes to their campaigns without implementing or publishing them via new Drafts and Experiments options in AdWords, which will be rolled out during the coming weeks.

Microsoft has updated its Bing Ads app for iOS and Android, bringing a range of new features. These include a pie chart visualisation for Share of Voice and a Quality Score metric that provides a weighted 1-10 numeric value for the performance of changes made to ad copy and landing pages.

A new infographic posted by Salesforce has highlighted the importance of investing in quality content marketing. Its own stats show that 70% of consumers now like to get to know a company via articles rather than ads, while 85% seek trusted content as part of the decision-making process.

Google is rolling out several changes to AdWords that promise to improve the workflow and make it easier to set up automated bidding. This means that marketers will not have to venture to the Shared Library and will be able to create and add items to automated, goal-driven bid strategies via the Campaigns Setting tab.

Facebook is releasing a new tool to make it much easier for marketers to add captions to video ads. The social media giant claims that captions are a great way to capture the attention of consumers, with its own internal tests showing that their use increases video view time by around 12 per cent.

Instagram is starting to rollout view counts for all of its videos in an attempt to draw more content creators away from rival social media sites. Over the next few weeks, Instagram will replace the “like” number located below a video with a number for the amount of views it has generated. As with Facebook, a view will be counted after three seconds.

Twitter is launching a First View feature that will allow marketers to place a video advert at the top of every user’s timeline for 24 hours. The new feature is part of a major overhaul for the social media site that will also see the introduction of prioritised tweets ahead of the current reverse chronological order.