Today in Digital Marketing - 114: Everything Is Down ⬇

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Has Facebook removed an important part of their ad denial appeals process? The Coronavirus could spell VERY bad news for Facebook and Google TikTok throws open its doors to content moderation experts And when is a Click not a Click. An important look at the most important metric you might be getting wrong. 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://www.rivaliq.com/blog/social-media-industry-benchmark-report/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-facebook-ban-ads-for-face-masks-as-coronavirus-spreads/354402/#close https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/resource https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-to-open-a-transparency-center-where-outside-experts-can-examine-its-moderation-practices/ https://www.marketingdive.com/news/hershey-coors-pull-ads-to-avoid-coronavirus-insensitivities/573927/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Wednesday, March the 11th, 2020. Happy Independence Restoration Day, Lithuania. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, has Facebook removed an important part of their ad denial appeals process? The coronavirus could spell very bad news for Facebook and Google. TikTok throws open its doors to content moderation experts.

And when is a click not a click? An important look at the most important metric that you might be getting wrong. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Every day there's some kind of study out about social media content or online advertising or so on. And I'm careful to only report on the ones with a big sample size or a really strong methodology. And one of the best, I think, is Rival IQ's annual Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. They get social performance data from more than 2,100 brands, encompassing 5 million posts and tweets,

all to try to understand where the social algorithm is going. Well, that report has come out now for this year, and the summary? Everything is either flatlining or down. So let's start with the top level. Facebook page engagement rate. That has held steady from its report last year. That rate is, by the way, 0.09%.

Yes, less than one-tenth of one percent. That's Facebook page engagement rate for you these days. Remember, though, that is an average, and a lot of the brands in the study are large brands. Generally, the larger the brand, the less engagement you get. But if you're looking for a benchmark, there it is. There were some industry-specific increases in brand engagement rates in the higher education category, among influencers, and on the Facebook pages of sports teams. As for frequency, the average Facebook posts per day across all sectors went down. Brands are posting less on Facebook, down by about 14%.

What's behind that drop? Could be any number of things, but my guess is that brands are finding more success on other platforms like Instagram, maybe even TikTok, and so are spreading their resources across multiple platforms. So then we might expect to see engagement on Instagram up this year, especially with the growing success of Instagram Stories, right? Well, no. The engagement rate for brands on Instagram has dropped by 23% since last year. Now, 23% sounds like a lot, and it is, but remember the actual numbers here is that the engagement rate dropped from 1.6% last year

to just over 1.2% this year. And not just for a handful of industries, every single sector took a hit. That said, 1.2% is a hell of a lot higher than Facebook's 0.09%. And like Facebook, brands are posting less on Instagram, though down only by about 5% compared to 2019. But that data does not include Instagram stories for some reason. One interesting thing that the study noted, Instagram carousels seem to be driving high engagement across industries.

And that's probably because, and maybe you didn't know this, but carousels actually will get re-served to users who don't engage with them the first time. Over on Twitter, average tweet engagement is still holding steady at about half of 1%. It's been around there for the last three years now. And in terms of frequency, brands were posting about 10% less there as well. Quoting social media today, this isn't a major surprise, with Twitter's algorithm now highlighting tweets of interest

to each individual user, that's lessened the impetus to tweet so often to a degree, while in some ways it also acts as a disincentive to such, as your tweets from the previous day can get clustered together in the listing and potentially overwhelm followers. Anyway, the full report is linked in this episode's description, and they break down all the results by industry,

including the top hashtags by engagement rate per industry, so it is definitely worth a read. You know, I swear, sometimes I think Facebook doesn't even want us to run ads. Not a day goes by at our agency when we run into something broken or a policy that's suddenly different. And that happened again yesterday. One of our clients is in the medical space, and we were running ads for migraine treatment. And the creative we are using is, as you would expect,

a man holding his head with migraine pain, or a woman doing the same thing for the ad set targeting women. You probably see that image in your head right now, right? It's like literally every headache medication on TV, on TV ads, right? It's a guy holding his head in pain. But on Facebook, those ads of ours got denied. The faceless ad rep who denied it said it ran afoul of their policy showing an unreasonable connection between before and after. Now, that policy is normally applied to diet programs showing a larger person on the left and the same person but less large on the right.

That's the thing with our ad. There was no after. There was just imagery that's, you know, marketing 101. Show them the problem and then offer a solution to the problem. And fine. Sometimes Facebook's ad reps get it wrong. That's why we have an appeal process. But, and here's the point to all this whining, something's changed with that appeal

process. At least it is for us. Something very important to that process. Apparently, Facebook no longer offers the ability for advertisers to explain the context or the rationale for the appeal. Normally there's a little form and you can type something in like, this is not against policy because there's no after imagery in the before and after. But now, there's no form at all. There's only a button that basically says, do you want us to take a second look at it? No longer can you explain why you want them to take a second look, or what part of the ruling you think is incorrect.

You just send it back for review without any context. And, of course, without that context, they just deny it again. Facebook, do you actually want us to run ads or not? Okay, coronavirus news. Google has now banned ads for medical face masks. Google actually has a wider policy that restricts ads that aim to capitalize on the coronavirus panic. But face masks are singled out with an outright ban. This is something Facebook did Friday.

And today, Facebook launched a business resource hub around the virus. It has a really nice business resiliency checklist and some not so nice, somewhat weak recommendations about how to adapt your business. Well, more to the point, how to adapt Facebook around your business. One of their tips was basically, hey, you should use Facebook Live to connect with people away from the office. And remember Messenger? We have that too. You can totally use that during a virus outbreak. Meanwhile, marketers are rethinking creative for campaigns that had long been planned. Hershey's had a campaign focusing on hugs and handshakes as strangers reacted to getting candy. Those ads were actually already out in the market. They have now been pulled and replaced by spots featuring simple shots of chocolate bars with some voiceover. Coors, too, the beer company, is backing away from a campaign they had planned called the Official Beer of Working Remotely.

This was a huge campaign and had all sorts of extras like coasters and banners and stuff. All that is being pulled. The coronavirus could spell very bad news for the major digital ad platforms. Analysts expect Google will see a 15% year-over-year decline in travel ad revenue in the first quarter and a 20% drop in the second quarter. Some experts are already tracking lower spending in travel, retail, consumer packaged goods, and entertainment on Facebook. Those industries represent somewhere between 30% and 45% of Facebook's total revenue. As TikTok tries to position itself as the app for young people, the Chinese-owned firm has been under fire for its moderation and content policies.

At one time, it actually shadow banned posts from LGBT people and people with disabilities. Their posts just wouldn't show up at all in the all-important-for-you feed. TikTok says it was trying to keep them safe from bullying or some nonsense like that. More than that, some people think the Chinese government has directed TikTok to keep certain content off the platform, something TikTok denies. Although last year, the Washington Post found TikTok had far fewer posts about the Hong Kong protest than other platforms. Now, they say that they will be opening a special office for outside experts to come in and examine their policies and practices. They're calling it a transparency center. They plan to show people how their staff moderate content day to day and how they will handle concerns from creators.

Yesterday, I covered a study from Agora Pulse that found clicks on Twitter cost less than clicks on Instagram. Twitter clicks cost, in their study, about $1.20 on average. I said at the time I was skeptical, since clicks on Twitter have always seemed to cost way, way more than that when we've run them for clients. But I do generally trust their social media lab studies. So for the hell of it, I tried a campaign yesterday afternoon to promote this podcast, and after $100 in spend, I got 10 clicks. Yes, clicks were $10 each when I tried. Still a discount compared to the ridiculous $21 per click I was getting on LinkedIn,

but much, much more than what Agorapulse found in their study of $1.20. And then it struck me. The platforms report clicks as a metric, but that may not be what you expect a click to be. To the platforms, a click is any click. Click to zoom the photo, click to retweet, click to visit the linked website, click to like the tweet, click to pause the video. Literally, anytime anyone makes the click or tap gesture on any part of the post or tweet, all of the platforms consider that a click. And that is often different than what you might think a click is. In other words, a click

on a link that goes to your website. No, no, no. The platforms call those link clicks. And you really do have to check both because when I first looked at that Twitter campaign I ran yesterday, I saw that clicks were about $1.10, more or less in line with Agorapulse's finding. But then look a little deeper and you discover that link clicks, probably the clicks you care about, are quite a bit more expensive. It wasn't clear to me which version of clicks the Agorapulse study was talking about. I reached out to their social media lab yesterday to ask for clarification. They have not yet gotten back to me. Apologies for the crackling voice. I had a horrible sleep last night. I swear I'm coming down with something. And I think I've

given up on that farm together game. It's starting to turn into this hour-long daily chore, and that is not what I bought the Xbox for. I do have an Overwatch squad that I'm in now, so I'll probably go back to that. After all, 1,200 hours on support, 700 of which on mercy. It's got to be good for something, right? If you get value from this daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to 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 Mathen. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy.

And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.