Today in Digital Marketing - 107: Hey LinkedIn. Do You Even WANT Advertisers?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you. way too expensive to advertise on. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The Verge has done an interesting study asking people how a variety of media brands have an impact on society. In other words, is YouTube generally positive for society or negative? How about Amazon or Instagram? This year's study found that, perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook generated a large chunk of negative reports. But there was one major media outlet that actually scored worse this year. Any ideas which one? It's a social media platform.

Starting point is 00:00:56 Hang on till the end of the episode and I'll tell you. So you are a new social media platform and you want to grow. For that, you need content. and good viral content at that. How do you get it? If you're most platforms, you pay people to make it. YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Instagram, they all pay in one way or another for large influencers to make content that draws people to their platform. And the latest upstart to try this?

Starting point is 00:01:24 Byte. That's B-Y-T-E, founded by the former creator of Vine. Byte basically is Vine, just in a vertical format. They still use the old six-second format, which, I don't know, to my eyes seems a little hokey now that we're used to longer form stories formats like Instagram stories and TikTok. But anyway, they are launching a partner program with $250,000. But you don't get all that. That's basically a pot of money that will be shared between 100 creators. And the more views you get on your Byte videos, the more of that pot you'll get. For now, honestly, probably too early for most brands to do much there other than create a placeholder account to keep your brand name reserved. You have done that, haven't you?

Starting point is 00:02:08 And monitor its popularity. But this could give Byte the jumpstart they need in a clearly busy space. Speaking of brands on new bleeding edge channels, flipping through TikTok over the weekend and up popped the World Health Organization. Yeah, they joined TikTok to make videos about COVID-19, which some people call the coronavirus. I think this is a textbook perfect example of a brand understanding that you have to go where the eyeballs are. TikTok has a lot of eyeballs,

Starting point is 00:02:37 and it makes sense for the World Health Organization to be there. That said, the videos aren't particularly compelling. They're about what you would expect from the WHO, an expert looking at the camera, talking about the virus and common myths. I mean, not that that's the wrong play. I mean, they certainly don't want the director of immunology spending an hour learning the renegade dance, but I don't know, maybe something in the middle. But what do I know? They only have two videos up, but so far those videos are past 20 million views. Expect some turbulence ahead for Twitter. An investment firm has bought a big stake in the company and wants three or four seats on the board.

Starting point is 00:03:18 They've already said part of why they're being so aggressive is they want to fire Jack Dorsey from his CEO role. They're concerned Dorsey has too many side projects, which might be fair. He's also the CEO of Square, the payment system, and has a bunch of extracurricular stuff on the go. Quoting TechCrunch, big changes will likely be coming to Twitter, and that could involve the user experience, new products, and very likely more advertising, as the new boss looks to unlock the financial potential in the platform. A nice change to the content publishing workflow over at Sprout Social, and I'm not quite sure how I missed this.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Here at EngageQ, we use Sprout for engagement and moderation and for its reporting, but we have historically used Buffer for publishing because Buffer's workflow was just simpler and easier for our clients to understand. Plus, until now, creating posts on multiple channels on Sprout was kind of a janky process of creating a post and duplicating it to another channel, then duplicating that one and so on. And that seems to be mostly fixed now. And like the major platforms like Buffer and Agorapulse, there's now a single compose window where you can create the post one time and have it go out on multiple channels with one click. Plus, they've got some publishing features that Buffer doesn't have, like the ability to promote the post as soon as it's published, a nice preview view to see what the post will look like on each channel, and a way to target the content to specific organic audiences on Facebook like a particular country or gender. Buffer's single page queue is certainly simpler than Sprout's. And for now, if you give a client access to their

Starting point is 00:04:55 Sprout publishing queue to approve content, I'm pretty sure that that client also gets access to some parts of their channels that an agency might not want to expose them to, like their reporting or their inbox. But either way, it's still nice to see this update. Last week I mentioned that Facebook has banned my brand page for this podcast from ever running ads on it again. Somehow they think I've run ads that have violated policy multiple times, which, of course, I never have.

Starting point is 00:05:24 It's just a boring business podcast page, after all. And they've even barely ever run ads on it. But whatever, if they don't want to take my money, maybe LinkedIn will take it. We've usually shied away from LinkedIn ad campaigns because they've been pretty expensive, but I thought we'd try again, and now it's even more expensive than I remember.

Starting point is 00:05:40 I spent $105 and got, guess how many clicks? Guess, guess, guess. Five. Five clicks for $105. That's a cost per click of $21. CPM was nearly 90 bucks, so nope. No thanks, LinkedIn. Oh, and at the top, I mentioned the Virgis study about which brands people think have a good or bad influence on society.

Starting point is 00:06:08 Facebook was second worst, with 25% of people saying it was negative. One social media platform, though, scored worse at 26% negative. And that platform was Twitter. Yeah, that one surprised me, too. In third place was Facebook-owned Instagram. Those were the three standout negatives. As for positives, Google is at number one, Amazon at number two, and Microsoft at number three. The Verge also asked people if they would be disappointed if certain companies disappeared.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Once again, Twitter was at the bottom of that list. Only 33% would be disappointed. But in second place, Slack. What the hell? Slack? The team chat system, which a lot of companies find indispensable? Slack's whole marketing was centered around, hey, you get too much email, let's lighten that load. I don't know, maybe now we're all getting too many Slack notifications. date, I feel super confident coming into work and understanding what's going on in digital marketing and social. And sometimes I am the one letting my team know what's happening or what has happened. That's awesome. Thank you, Tanya. 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

Starting point is 00:07:40 links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Baffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 107: Hey LinkedIn. Do You Even WANT Advertisers?!

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