Today in Digital Marketing - 109: Twitter’s new Stories are out. And they’re called...

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, March the 4th, 2020, and there are only 16 days left until spring. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, who is fact-checking Facebook's fact-checkers? Twitter's got Stories now, only they're not called Stories. CBO is on hold, and a new Instagram sticker might just help you blow out your next product launch. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Well, that was fast. Just a couple of weeks after announcing that they'd bought Chroma Labs

Starting point is 00:00:33 to possibly build out the Stories format, Twitter is launching a Stories format. Because the world is going to hell, friends, and apparently it will go to hell in vertical format. But Twitter's not calling them stories. No, they have a new name for us. Ready? Fleets.

Starting point is 00:00:54 F-L-E-E-T. A fleet. I guess maybe a play on something being fleeting? As in lasting for a short time? Alright, whatever. Don't go scrambling to your Twitter app to see it. It's in very limited testing and only in Brazil. And so far, unlike stories on other platforms, these new fleets can't receive likes, at least for now. Like all the rest though, they do

Starting point is 00:01:18 disappear after 24 hours and you can run videos actually up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds long, or even up to 10 minutes if you're manually whitelisted by Twitter. But they're a little bit less discoverable. So far, they're not showing up in search or moments. You can't embed them on a website. They really only show up if you're looking at someone's profile. And the gestures kind of break from the usual stories protocol that we've all been trained on. To swipe through someone's Twitter stories, excuse me, fleeks, you swipe down.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Everywhere else, you tap to the right on the screen to advance through someone's stories. So everyone is doing it now. Hell, Spotify recently announced they were testing stories. Skype's tried it out. Fellow old people, we have lost the battle. I, for one, welcome our new vertical overlords. Finally, one thing, speaking of Twitter, if you rely on the Twitter firehose API, you may have noticed it was down yesterday. Twitter says, yes, they know about it. It was a bug. Things should be back to normal today. We've got some cool toys as digital marketers.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Cool analytics toys. One of my personal favorites are website heat maps. So you can see where people click based on things like what site did they come from? And what country are they from? Heat maps are cool, but they only track mouse movement and clicks. They don't, and can't of course, track your user's actual eyeballs, exactly where they were looking before they moved the mouse or made that click. Well now, there is a reasonably priced tool that will let you do just that.

Starting point is 00:03:01 The Re-Eye Tracker will give you results from 20 eye-tracked surveys of your brand's own website for $49 US. You get the results in real time, so as soon as one of the testers finishes, they send you the recording right away, and they promise you'll get all 20 within 8 hours. You can also invite up to 200 of your customers, friends, colleagues, and so on to participate. They say their testing is accurate to within 100 pixels, which should be enough to tell the difference between several medium-sized buttons right beside each other.

Starting point is 00:03:26 What you end up with is a heat map, like the mouse movement version, and an overlay showing where on your website most of the eyeballs lingered to for the longest amount of time. Interesting idea, and there is a link to it in this episode's description. Breathe easy, fellow digital marketers. Facebook is postponing the rollout of CBO. That's Campaign Budget Optimization. No real word on why it's being postponed or even until when. And this is peculiar for a bunch of reasons.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Most notably, this was one of Facebook's biggest and most well-communicated changes to the ads platform in the last year. They told everyone, hey, we're switching everyone over to the campaign-based optimization at the end of February 2020. So, you know, it's just odd to me that they're delaying it for no reason. If you don't know what CBO is, it means that Facebook's algorithm would control the budget distribution between your ad sets. Currently, you can use CBO if you choose to, but you can also use ad set budget optimization where you assign a specific budget to each ad set and not let Facebook dynamically change that based on whatever its AI thinks you should spend.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Instagram now has reminder stickers for some brands. Stickers. Those are the little graphics and tiny interactive elements that you can drop onto an Instagram story. Everything from simple GIFs to polls or comment boxes. There's been a countdown sticker for a while now, but this new feature operates a little bit like the reminder button you get if you tap one of the countdown stickers. In the case of these new reminder stickers, you can add product detail and launch dates to a photo on your feed. That's

Starting point is 00:05:12 important. These are feed images we're talking about here. After someone taps on them, they'll be able to sign up for a push notification either one day before your selected date or 15 minutes before the selected date, ideally your product drop. If they tap the reminder notification, they are then taken to Instagram's built-in checkout. So just to walk you through how powerful this could potentially be for product releases, a customer sees a photo of your soon-to-be-launched product in their Instagram feed. They tap to get a reminder, and then 15 minutes before your product launches, this customer gets notified and taken directly to

Starting point is 00:05:52 the product purchase page. Now for the bad news. So far, this only works in the U.S., and it's only turned on for about 20 brands like Adidas and Levi's. But if things go well, expect this to roll out more widely. Okay, big breath. I'm going to talk about two things that I have vowed I would never talk about on this podcast. Here is the first, American presidential politics. And more to the point of the work you and I do, Facebook's use of their recently upgraded fact-check feature.

Starting point is 00:06:25 As you may know, Facebook has contracted with a number of news outlets to check the accuracy of claims being made in Facebook posts and ads. But how do they decide which news outlets? Like, you know, I personally think that CNN is pretty accurate. But then again, I'm a bleeding heart pink, pinko-lib-tard commie. I'm wearing Birkenstocks right now, for God's sakes. I think we can all agree that MSNBC leans left and Fox News leans right. So do those guys get to fact-check Facebook posts?

Starting point is 00:06:57 Maybe not them, per se, but one of Facebook's fact-checking partners is the right-wing publisher, The Daily Caller. And now, Facebook is facing tough questions. One of Facebook's fact-checking partners is the right-wing publisher, The Daily Caller. And now, Facebook is facing tough questions after The Daily Caller slapped a false label on some news stories by NBC and Politico. Getting that label isn't just cosmetic, right? This is why I thought I would mention it here on a digital marketing podcast, because if a post of yours gets flagged as false, not only does your post get demoted in the news feed, your whole page gets a demotion. So any of your brand's future posts will get less reach. So what was that post in question? It revolves around whether U.S. President Donald Trump called the coronavirus the Democrats' quote, new hoax. The articles reported that, based on a speech he gave at a rally, Facebook, well, the Daily Caller,

Starting point is 00:07:54 applied a false label to that. So, judge for yourself. Here is the relevant section from that rally. So what do we make of that? Quoting TechCrunch, It's hard to tell exactly what Trump means here. He could be calling the coronavirus a hoax, concerns about its severity a hoax, or the Democrats' criticism of his response is a hoax. Reputable fact-checking institution Snopes rated the claim that Trump called coronavirus a hoax as a mixture of true and false. Noting, despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax, unquote. So perhaps the headlines went too far.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Perhaps they didn't. Fact checkers do have a kind of in-between. They could label something as partly false or just false headline. But the Daily Caller didn't. It used the most severe label. In case you're curious, and this happens to a post that your brand uses, there is an appeals process where you can appeal it. If you think that a post has been labeled incorrectly, you can dispute that rating, but you don't get to appeal to Facebook. You can only appeal to the organization that rated your post, and there is no mechanism for an audit of the original decision or a second opinion. One thing is certain, when Facebook decided that they would be the arbiter of truth online,

Starting point is 00:09:30 they bit off a lot to chew on. All right, story number two that I really don't want to talk about, but it does have some impact in our space. Yes, the COVID-19 coronavirus. A few interesting developments in our space. Yes, the COVID-19 coronavirus. A few interesting developments in our space. First of all, Google says it will provide free access to advanced video conferencing capabilities in Hangouts Meet. That comes as more employers consider whether their people should work from home to avoid spreading the illness. One of our clients here at EngageQ is a large bank, and today they have been telling their employees to test their VPNs on their laptops in case they all need to send them home.

Starting point is 00:10:09 This Google change, making advanced features free, affects all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers around the globe, and it will last until July 1st. So what do we get? Larger meetings for one, up to 250 people in a call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive. Meanwhile, Facebook announced today that it will be providing the World Health Organization with as many free ads as it needs to get accurate information about the virus out there. Finally, in virus news, many people, yourself possibly included, use a smartphone that unlocks from facial recognition. The newer iPhones do that. So what happens if you're wearing a medical face mask? One enterprising company based in, of course, San Francisco, is working on custom printed N95 medical masks that will let you unlock your phone while wearing your mask. How, you ask, do they do that? They plan to custom print the bottom half

Starting point is 00:11:14 of your face on the front of the mask itself. Honestly, you need to click the link in this episode's description to see these. They are creepy looking. They're not available right now because, well, there's a big virus out there causing a global mask shortage. So, I don't know, maybe for the next big virus? But here's the bigger question. Will these even work? Maybe not. Quoting face to match. Therefore, it's highly improbable that a 2D image of your face as a 3D photo on a mask will do the trick. As Resting Risk Face explains, yes, that's the name of the company,

Starting point is 00:11:56 a contoured version has been developed that they say is compatible with depth sensors. This is the world we live in now. Okay, back on track a little bit. A really nice feature update over at Sprout Social. Now you can publish videos to your brand's YouTube channel or even directly to a playlist on your channel. That's great, of course. I am a little disappointed they didn't launch YouTube comment moderation at the same time.

Starting point is 00:12:24 Both Agorapulse and Hootsuite have that. I assume it's coming soon. But either way, the publishing part is up now. Speaking of Hootsuite, they had a nasty bug today with their inbox. Apparently, brand managers were getting errors when trying to reply to Facebook private messages. It looks like that is fixed now. Well, if you get value from this daily digital marketing 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. Follow me on social.

Starting point is 00:12:53 Links to my channels are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. I have moved on from eggplants to cabbages now. Thanks for asking. And tonight is the first episode of Big Brother Canada, which I am way more excited about than an adult should be. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 109: Twitter’s new Stories are out. And they’re called...

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