Today in Digital Marketing - 100: ONE HUNDRED EPISODES (and counting) 😊

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, February 20th, 2020. Happy National Love Your Pet Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, another day, another Facebook ads bug. Snapchat adds swipe up to call, but will any of their users actually use it? Photoshop adds some tools, which you should then ignore. And T-minus 10 days before Google starts ignoring your no-follow tags. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 So Twitter is rolling out a new way to link your brand's tweets together into a thread, even your past tweets, retroactively. This is in the mobile app, and how it works is you pull down as you're composing a tweet to attach that one to a previous one. Before this, you had to manually search your feed for the tweet you wanted to jump onto and then reply to it. It was a little bit janky. This is part of Twitter's focus on what they call threads, although most people out there call these tweet storms. In reality, brands don't seem to be using this function very often, although I'm sure there

Starting point is 00:01:05 is a business use case for them somehow. What we all really want, of course, is an edit button so we can fix typos that made it out instead of deleting and reposting. So far, though, Twitter has given every indication that they actually hate the idea of an edit button. So don't hold your breath. People who run a lot of Facebook ads may have noticed a nasty glitch yesterday that seemed to last for pretty much the whole day. Error said things like invalid field data for custom audiences and normalization does not allow for converted lookalike status, whatever the heck that means. Facebook ads guru John Loomer alerted me to this first saying, quote, this seems to be an issue with all custom audiences. It doesn't matter what custom audience I use. Objective doesn't seem to matter. The audiences themselves don't show errors. It's not a pixel thing since it applies to page engagement and data files too.

Starting point is 00:02:00 John even removed and started over. He created new ad campaigns. He reset Ads Manager. Nothing seemed to help. In John's subscription-based Power Hitters Club, which I highly recommend, by the way, others weighed is huge and complex, and as a result, often buggy. So it is worth being a member of at least one or two Facebook groups that are about online ads. So you can pop in with a, hey, is this happening to you guys too? Snapchat is introducing a new swipe up to call ad format in the US. This launched at the end of last year, actually, in the Middle East. As much as you may think that it's a pretty obvious thing, swipe up to call, especially given that Snapchat is really only on smartphones, it actually struck me as a tiny bit odd.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Snapchat's largest audience, of course, are young people. And I don't know how often you've asked someone under 22 or so to phone someone, but it's kind of not their thing. I know, I know, I know, shut up. That is a massive generalization, but massive generalizations are mostly generally true. That generation definitely prefers to text, which is why this swipe up to call format actually has a text the business option if you want to use that instead of call the business option. But then again, how many large brands are set up

Starting point is 00:03:37 to accept incoming SMS messages? None of the social platforms natively support them. I'm not saying this new ad format is a bad thing, not at all. The more options we digital marketers have, the better. But it might be a good reminder that just because you can doesn't always mean you should. There are not many digital marketers who do not have Photoshop loaded on their system. So if that's you, you may want to know they've added a few nice touches like content aware fill improvements, improvements to lens blur and dark mode support on Macs. But Photoshop a while back switched to a subscription model,

Starting point is 00:04:16 meaning you have to pay every month for every seat, no matter how much you use or don't use it. I don't know about you, but I hate monthly recurring fees. So shout out to Pixelmator Pro, which I switched over to when our Adobe subscription expired. And let me tell you, Pixelmator Pro is freaking amazing. It's better. Yes, it's actually better than Photoshop. The selection tools it has are more accurate. It'll upscale an image without turning it into a pixelated mess like Photoshop does. Even its automated just fix everything button is breathtakingly helpful. Photoshop's, by comparison, just seems to, I don't know, it's like it slaps some contrast in and calls it a day.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Pixelmator Pro is $39. One time. Once you buy it, that's it. No more license fees or subscription fees. I should say that's $39 Canadian. It's probably buy it, that's it. No more license fees or subscription fees. I should say that's $39 Canadian. It's probably cheaper in the US. This, by the way, is not an ad. Pixelmator didn't pay me for this. I just really, really love it. And if you would like to cut your Adobe ties loose, Pixelmator Pro is definitely worth looking into. It is only on the Mac platform, however. One of the handy little shortcuts you can add into your brand's web pages is the meta tag nofollow. It tells Google and other search engines that they shouldn't click on any of the links you have on their page because they're either of poor quality or they're just areas that you don't want

Starting point is 00:05:42 Google to index, like user profiles or pages with thin content. Now, listen up. If your website uses these meta tags, right, the page tag nofollow, then you should know that come March 1st, that's in just 10 days, Google will basically ignore these tags. Well, not ignore exactly. Previously, Google took these as a directive when it spotted one in your page's code. Now it says it will consider it not a directive, but quote, a hint, which they may or may not ignore. Of course, there are much better ways to prevent Google from indexing parts of your website using the no index tag, for instance, in your server's robot.txt file. Or better yet, just don't put those parts of your website online at all.

Starting point is 00:06:32 But just a heads up that if your website relies on these page-based tags, that is to say the tags are in the code at the page level, the no follow tags, that Google and perhaps the others may stop paying attention to them come March 1st. Just before I go, I want to note a bit of an anniversary here. This is episode 100. I started this last September, mostly as a bit of an experiment to see if people could use this kind of bite-sized podcast in their daily listening. And I've been really surprised, actually, by how many people have subscribed. We shot up past 1,000 listeners a couple of months ago, and it just keeps on growing. So thank you so much. If you like this podcast and find its short

Starting point is 00:07:14 runtime a good use of your time, please take a moment to rate and review it. You will find a link in this episode's description that makes this a simple one click. Follow me on social media. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 100: ONE HUNDRED EPISODES (and counting) 😊

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