Today in Digital Marketing - 111: Why is Bart Simpson Lurking Your Brand’s Instagram?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 TGIF. It is Friday, March the 6th, 2020. Happy Dentist Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, have a mobile-only website? Prepare to drop out of Google? The best time to post on Instagram is a lie? Your next ad placement might be in a push notification? And why is Bart Simpson looking at your brand's Instagram stories? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Google this week confirmed that later this year, they will be switching their indexing to mobile first. And if you have a mobile only website, this could be bad news for you. First, a bit of history. So when smartphones first started being used to browse the web, most organizations realized that their website looked just terrible on the small screens.

Starting point is 00:00:51 So many hired a web developer or used their in-house teams or whatever to create a second website, a scaled-down version of their site that was separate from that main site. Often you'd see it with the domain prefix M for mobile, like m.cnn.com or m.nike.com. And that worked as a stopgap, but it didn't take long before digital marketers realized, oh my God, now I have two websites I have to keep up with two different sets of analytics. And so the web industry moved to a web design called responsive,

Starting point is 00:01:23 meaning it's just one website, but that site would dynamically adapt to the size of the screen it was being viewed on. And that's what we have today, for the most part. Most websites, I hope yours, are responsive. But, and here's where the news this week comes in, if your brand still uses that old school method of having a separate mobile website, or worse, your website doesn't work at all on mobile, you will be at risk of being dropped from Google's indexing. For the longest time, Google's bot, that's the software robot that crawls web pages to add them to its index, that bot pretended to be a desktop computer surfing. For several years now, it's been crawling with a bot pretending to be a smartphone. But they've always maintained that pretend desktop robot as a fallback.

Starting point is 00:02:08 That is what is changing here. Come September, Google will only crawl websites with a smartphone Googlebot. So, all that to say, check your brand website on your smartphone this weekend. If there's content that's missing from the smartphone version of your site, then come September, that content may also be missing from Google's search engine. Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith, who normally I have a lot of respect for, linked to a just a terrible blog post called The Best Time to post on Instagram secrets revealed. And the author of that piece was Jeff Bullis, also a digital marketing pro, also someone I normally

Starting point is 00:02:51 have a lot of respect for, but what the hell? Look, any article you see that promises to quote, reveal the secrets of the best time to post or the best content to use or the best organic frequency to hit. It's all lies. Why? Because every social channel is different. These studies take thousands of pages, all of different follower counts, industries, engagement levels, and then lump them into one big average. So while yes, the average time to post on Instagram might be best Wednesday at 2pm, in reality, almost none of the pages in the actual survey had that as their best time. That's the problem with wide averages. And not only that, the whole concept of the best time for Facebook and Instagram is largely, well, not a myth per se, but certainly not nearly as important

Starting point is 00:03:46 a factor as it used to be. Today, those platforms' algorithms control when someone gets to see your post based on when posts have performed best with that individual person in the past. Post something at 10 a.m., some people might see it right away, others at 1, and others not until that evening. But this particular blog post, again titled The Best Time to Post on Instagram, Secrets Revealed, is even worse because nowhere in the articles does Jeff Bullis even suggest an average. It's clickbait. The worst form of clickbait. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that Jeff Bullis would write it and that Mari Smith would link out to it. But there you go. Content reader beware.

Starting point is 00:04:27 This all came the same day that the social publishing platform Buffer announced that it was working on a best time to post on Instagram feature. On Twitter, a Buffer employee said, quote, it considers your followers online activity and the performance of your previous posts. It's personalized for your Instagram account, unquote. That's good because that's the only way it should be. Facebook is rolling out a standalone messenger app for Macs. I don't mean iPhones like we've had forever. I mean the Mac desktop. But unless you're in one of the handful of countries it's launched in,

Starting point is 00:05:06 like France, Mexico, Poland, or Australia, you are just not able to see it in the Mac App Store. I'm in Canada, so here we don't have it yet. So I'm a little unclear on whether this can be used to monitor and reply to messages on your brand page. My gut tells me no. Maybe if you have it, you can tweet me and let me know. What do you think is the single most prime real estate for digital marketing these days?

Starting point is 00:05:33 A website? An Instagram account? Maybe. But I think right on the screen of your target smartphone is the ideal place. Imagine if you could push a notification to people's phones that shows up on their lock screen or pops in as a banner on the top, a notification that advertises something. This is, of course, something that Apple has banned because, well, I think we all know where that would lead us. But that's changing. Apple says it will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising. But there's a catch. Users will have to explicitly agree to opt in to get those ads first,

Starting point is 00:06:13 and there has to be a way to opt out. Why this sudden change of heart on Apple's part? Nobody's quite sure, but Apple has taken some heat in the last couple of years over their own use of notifications to advertise their own products, and some brands may have already gotten away with it on the sly. The Verge says Amazon recently used push notifications to encourage customers to buy a new phone through its app. But tread carefully, fellow digital marketer, because iPhones only have one notification setting, everything on or everything off. People can't delineate between them like important app notifications, like shipping notifications on, but advertisements

Starting point is 00:06:52 off. So if you overwhelm people with ads, they might turn off notifications entirely, even the ones you really need them to see. Also in the announcement, Apple said they will more heavily scrutinize fortune telling and dating apps and won't let them into the App Store unless they provide a, quote, unique, high-quality experience, unquote. This was the best part of the announcement. Those apps are now captured by the same spam rules as fart apps and burp apps. His name is Dan Alani. He's a 28-year-old radio host in London. The other day, he posted an Instagram story showing some musical gear from a band practice.

Starting point is 00:07:32 119 people viewed that story, including one very famous person, voice actor Nancy Cartwright. You may not know her by name. You certainly know her most famous character. Your attention, please. Your attention, please. I have an announcement to make. I'm bored. Yes, she's the voice of Bart Simpson. And that made Dan wonder, why the hell is Nancy Cartwright looking at my Instagram stories? She didn't follow his account. They'd never met. He thought, you know, I do a little bit of voiceover work. Maybe this puts us in the same circles. Well, it turns out, no, she didn't view Dan's Instagram story at all. But her account did.

Starting point is 00:08:12 She wasn't hacked. It was all the work of a marketing agency she hired. The tactic, kind of a gray hat tactic, is called mass story viewing. It often uses bots to view potentially thousands of stories of strangers per hour. Now, using a bot like this is against Instagram's terms of service, but apparently it does work. When BuzzFeed checked her Instagram account out, it found that, quote, around mid-2018, she appears to have begun posting almost exclusively polished and professional photographs shot in staged settings rather than selfies or pictures from her phone, unquote. After BuzzFeed published the story, Cartwright said yes, she used a marketing firm to, quote, find people on social media.

Starting point is 00:08:58 But didn't work for Dan Alani. He did not follow her. You know this song? Manamana from the Muppets, right? Nope. Not actually. Would you believe me if I told you that this song, one of the world's most popular children's songs, actually came from a Swedish porn film? Tomorrow, in a rare weekend edition,

Starting point is 00:09:30 and having absolutely nothing to do with digital marketing, I will tell you the deep and surprising history behind this song. Rest assured, this is a one-time thing, just for fun. We return to digital marketing as usual on Monday. 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 follow me on social links to my channels are in this episode's description i'm todd maffin have a restful weekend friends i'll see you on monday

Today in Digital Marketing - 111: Why is Bart Simpson Lurking Your Brand’s Instagram?!

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