Today in Digital Marketing - 103: TikTok Porn?!

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Vimeo's video creation tool is mediocre and its pricing is disappointing Twitter explains why you should stop using hashtags Google can help alert you to your brand going viral A charity is using Twitter’s new Hide Replies feature in a devastatingly effective way And TikTok Porn? Oh yes, friend, oh yes. Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@todmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCES: https://vimeo.com/blog/post/vimeo-create-make-videos-mobile-desktop/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-console-sending-email-alerts-for-spikes-in-search-traffic/351112/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/25/youporn-launches-tiktok-inspired-video-app-that-learns-when-you-swipe/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-shares-some-simple-tweet-copy-tips-to-improve-campaign-performance/572849 https://twitter.com/SolaceWomensAid/status/1232004949942423558 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, February 25th, 2020. Happy National Pancake Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Twitter explains why you should stop using hashtags. Google can help alert you to your brand going viral. A charity is using Twitter's new Hide Replies feature in a devastatingly effective way. And did you read that episode title right?

TikTok porn? Oh, yes, friend. Oh, yes. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. More and more social media content is moving to video, not just because it's more compelling with the potential to tell a more engaging or emotional story, but also for the algorithmic benefits that come along with it. In most cases, you'll get more reach

simply because it's a video instead of an image, which is partly why many web-based video production tools are popping up. We use one here at EngageQ called Promo, which we like. Well, now video veteran Vimeo has released their Create tool publicly. It's been in beta for a while. It's essentially like the others.

There's a timeline. There are templates you can customize. You can pop in a stock video, add music from their library, and so on. The downside, they won't let you pay monthly. It's an annual subscription or no subscription at all. Actually, I'm a little disappointed in Vimeo because their pricing page actually shows the price per month, but you can't buy it per month because in small light print, of course, it says build annually. Come on, Vimeo. Are we still using these bullshit tactics?

I did try it out. I didn't really find it as intuitive as promo. Clips appear as blocks, all the same size, regardless of their length. The rendering time was pretty long. They didn't have many text animation options. But on the other hand, promo limits you each month to a certain number of what they call premium stock videos. And honestly, nearly all of them are premium, whereas Vimeo claims you can use as many stock videos as you want. Anyway, there is a link in the description of this episode if you'd like to try it out for yourself. Twitter has come out with an excellent short video that does a sort of makeover on a typical sales-focused tweet. And one of their suggestions, remove the hashtags.

Yeah, it seems a little surprising coming from the platform where hashtags were first used. But, and I think they're right here, there's too much clutter on social media feeds. And if you have a sales-focused message, best to not gum it up with unnecessary text. Other tips? They say studies show percentages work better than dollar amounts. So, in other words, say it's 10% off, not $10 off. Don't use all caps and enable Twitter web cards on your website. There's a tiny bit of code that enables this on your brand's website, or sometimes plugins like Yoast will do this for you, but it makes your link much more enticing with a preview and image and so on. Just remember, website cards only work when the URL is at the very end of your tweet. A brilliant ad campaign is out on Twitter right now for a charity called Soulless Women's Aid. This is a London-based organization

that helps women in domestic trouble. The campaign cleverly uses Twitter's new hidden replies control. So this is a feature that Twitter released a little while ago that lets account owners hide replies that they don't want prominent in the discussion thread. Those replies are still visible, but you have to click a button to unhide them. Quoting the charity, to demonstrate the hidden story behind domestic abuse, Twitter users will see a tweet from

Solace Women's Aid that will show a photo of a seemingly happy couple accompanied by the contrasting phrase, This is what domestic abuse looks like. Intrigued users will then be challenged to find the hidden story, discovering the true reality behind the picture, by clicking into the tweet and on the hidden replies button. The feature will then reveal a video that plays out the controlling and abusive conversation between the couple, revealing a very different story to the happy selfie, unquote. You know, too many so-called groundbreaking ad campaigns these days seem designed only to win marketing awards, not to get your message out. I'm thinking in particular of the moldy Burger King burger ad that's out now. The only people talking positively about that campaign are other marketers. But this

campaign, this campaign truly is amazing. Not only the creative use of the hidden replies feature, but also the follow-up creative you get to see once you get to the hidden reply, which is set up as a literal reply from a woman's abusive partner. Anyway, highly recommend you go check it out. There's a link in the description of this episode. Sometimes it happens, your brand starts to go viral, maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but it's important to get a heads up when there is dramatically increased activity. Google says it will help by now sending an email to search console managers when there's sudden spikes

in search activity for specific web pages that you own. The email reads, your page is trending up, and then it shows the page's average daily clicks over the past day or two. Google actually has had this sort of for a while now, but until now they haven't really had it working in real-time mode. You always got it a few days later. It was reported as kind of like a, hey, your site was searched a lot this past week.

Quoting Search Engine Journal, what makes these new emails different is that they alert site owners to traffic spikes much faster. In one example, the measurement period is only three days compared to a week. This gives site owners an opportunity to capitalize on the traffic surge with greater immediacy, unquote. Incidentally, these alerts will only apply to organic search results. So not to worry if you dump a million bucks into an ad campaign, you won't get flooded with alerts saying your traffic is way up. Also means you won't get email alerts about traffic spikes from things like social media referral traffic. Well, I don't know why we didn't see this coming, but a popular porn website has now developed a TikTok clone for easier porn surfing. It's called YouPorn Swipe, and you swipe up and down to see a preview and then swipe left to watch the full video.

And how, you ask? Are they getting the app into places like Google Play or Apple's App Store, both of which ban adult content apps? Well, by not being an app at all. It's all done as a mobile web page, one that you can make an app-like shortcut on your phone's home screen. Of course, it's not as smooth as TikTok, graphically speaking, but it does work. Or, you know, so I'm told. Well, this is kind of funny, of course. It's important to understand the significance here. For better or worse, porn has been one of the leading technology drivers of the internet. Streaming videos' first mass usage was porn. Hey, even before the internet, some people believe the reason VHS won the video wars was because Sony, which

partially owned the competing Betamax format, refused to allow porn on their cassettes. So a porn site making its content in a TikTok swipe format is actually a big deal and says a lot about the future of that vertical swipe format. Well, if you get value from this daily news show, please rate and review this podcast. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one click.

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.