Today in Digital Marketing - 102: Facebook’s New App for Brand Managers is Stupid

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Monday, February 24th, 2020. Happy Central Excise Day, India. I'm Todd Mathen from EngageQ Digital. Today, how to get a brand monitoring service for pennies on the dollar. Google is exposing some sensitive WhatsApp data. Soon, it'll be easier to use pictures you just find on Google Images.

Starting point is 00:00:59 And TikTok, banned by another government agency, but not for the reason you think. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. There are really two types of social media content managers. Those who are mobile first, and those who are desktop first. I'm talking in terms of how they produce content. I'm firmly in the latter. I prefer desktop tools for creating social content. I like to design things with a mouse and keyboard,

Starting point is 00:01:25 email them to clients or team members, put files into shared folders, that kind of thing. But there are people who prefer to use mobile apps on their phones. And so you would think those people would be thrilled with Facebook's release today of the new Creator Studio app on mobile. You'd think. But those people will be sorely disappointed. Because despite its name, the new Creator Studio doesn't actually let you create anything.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Unlike Creator Studio on Facebook's desktop site, you can't compose or post content. You can't schedule posts in advance. You can't upload videos to your library. You can't go live. You can't make a poll. Nothing. What can you do? Well, you can look at your insights in your Pages Messenger inbox, and that's it. That's all you can do. If this sounds familiar, yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff in their existing Pages app. Like, are these teams even talking to each other? Did the Creator Studio app team not even download Pages? And it gets worse, because when we had a look at a few of our clients' insights in the new app, it showed things like zero comments in the last month, when we know for a fact they've had thousands. And oh yeah, there's not even any Instagram support. Unlike, again, Creator Studio on desktop. Really, the only thing of note in this new Creator Studio mobile app is a kind of

Starting point is 00:02:53 funnel graphic that shows you how many people watch two seconds of a video, then 15, and then 60 seconds of your videos. So anyway, in case you saw headlines about this today and thought, hey, I should download this and try it out. Nah, don't bother. Whether you work for an agency or client side, one of the challenges of being a digital marketer or social media manager is keeping track of all the mentions your brand gets. Sure, you might be tracking Twitter or your own branded Instagram hashtags, but are you monitoring Reddit or Pinterest or just regular websites? I've mentioned AppSumo before. They're a lifetime deal site that usually has some pretty solid digital marketing tools.

Starting point is 00:03:37 So I thought I'd mention one that popped up today because it's actually quite a really good deal. The offer is on BrandMentions.com. That is a mid-tier web and social monitoring and reporting platform. So you give it your brand's name, its channels, and it scours the web looking for mentions, ranking them by sentiment, sending you alerts, and so on. For the general public, right, their regular pricing, they have a tier at about $300 US per month. It gets you agency-wide labeling, five years of historical storage, real-time alerts, and so on. However, until Friday,

Starting point is 00:04:13 they are selling that plan on AppSumo for $98 for a lifetime account. You pay $98 one time, and you can use that plan forever. Remember, this is the plan they sell for $300 per month. I have bought a lot of AppSumo's deals before, and I can vouch that they are legit. They really are lifetime deals. They even have a super easy refund process. You have 60 days to try it out, and if you decide it's not for you, you can actually refund it yourself on AppSumo's website. No talking to anyone, no support tickets, no emails. You literally just click refund this on their website and your money is returned to you right away.

Starting point is 00:04:52 There's actually a $49 version of this. It has some feature limitations, but it is still lifetime use. This is not an ad. They didn't pay me to do this. However, there is an affiliate link in this episode's description. If you'd like to try this out, it is called Brand Mentions on AppSumo. I can't imagine there are many use cases for this in digital marketing, but just in case this applies to you, if your brand uses private groups on WhatsApp for some reason, a journalist has discovered that Google has been indexing and

Starting point is 00:05:23 making searchable invitations to those private groups. This is through the feature called Invite to Group via Link. A Google spokesperson said, Search engines like Google and others list pages from the open web. That's what's happening here. It's no different than any case where a site allows URLs to be publicly listed. The spokesperson reminded us that there are tools available to block content from being listed in Google search results if you want,

Starting point is 00:05:49 which is true, but if this is an issue for you, make sure you're also blocking them on Bing and DuckDuckGo and all the other major search engines. I'm sure you've had this experience before. Your marketing team brings on a junior intern fresh out of college, and she creates a post using an image she, quote, just found on Google. And then you have to explain that you can't just use any image you find, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, Google has released a small but helpful new feature

Starting point is 00:06:18 that should make it easier to understand which images can be used and which can't. Now, to be clear, for years now, you've been able to do a custom search for images that are in the public domain or have some Creative Commons licensing attached to them. Heck, if the stock photo banks that we subscribe to don't have a decent pick, occasionally we turn to Google, using a Creative Commons search for images that can be used commercially and modified. Well now, images can have more clear licensing information on them, even if you're just doing an unfiltered Google Images search. When the webmaster uses the right markup or metadata,

Starting point is 00:06:54 that's the key here, there's some work that has to be done on the server side, but when that data is there, a caption will appear right on the image that says Licensable, and there's a new link that has those license details. Of course, just because an image is licensable doesn't mean you can license it for free in any way you want. That license might cost money or have restrictions, but at least this makes it easier to track down that information. And finally, the Transportation Security Administration has become the latest American government division to ban TikTok from employees' phones. The TSA are those people at airport security that check your bags.

Starting point is 00:07:34 But this TikTok ban is not for the reason you might think. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security banned the mobile app from government phones because of the app's Chinese ownership and fears of security being compromised. This time, it's not about the Chinese angle at all. It's because apparently some TSA agents have been making TikToks. Can I use this as a noun? TikToks? Anyway, they've been posting on TikTok and explaining some of the agency's boarding processes and rules. The TSA itself has never actually published anything to TikTok, but they made this demand of their employees after lawmaker Chuck Schumer sent them a letter. TikTok is trying desperately to stop being typecast as the risky Chinese-owned app,

Starting point is 00:08:20 even though they are Chinese-owned. They're trying to hire an American CEO and a director of content moderation policy, both jobs to be stationed in the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C. Yes, it really is Central Excise Day in India today. Every February 24th is Central Excise Day in India. And what does it commemorate, you ask? It is meant to encourage employees of the excise department in India to prevent corruption in the goods manufacturing businesses. They have a holiday

Starting point is 00:08:52 for this. Okay, strange, but okay. If you get value from this daily show, please rate and review this podcast. You will find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one click. Joe Huber reviewed us saying the podcast content is specific and works in a strong manner for anyone looking to stay relevant in an always evolving marketplace. Thank you very much, Joe. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 102: Facebook’s New App for Brand Managers is Stupid

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