Today in Digital Marketing - 123: Square or Wide? Which Performs Better?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, April 1st, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, square or wide, which image performs better on Twitter? Slack adds support for a competitor of theirs. Chief marketing officers not bullish about the near future. And how one brand adapted April Fool's Day brilliantly in light of the pandemic. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook this week released some enhancements to its Facebook Watch product

Starting point is 00:00:29 with features that used to only be available to a select list of partners. Here's what's new, quoting social media today. Playlist names will now appear on related video updates so users can click or tap through to see the rest of the videos in a thematic collection. Playlists also now have a unique URL so you can share them on or off Facebook to help maximize interests. Organizing your videos into playlists will better enable its systems to suggest related content to

Starting point is 00:00:56 viewers. Another key benefit of playlists is that they present your content in the order that you dictate, helping to guide your users through your related updates. Facebook is also adding an expansion of playlists called Series, which is geared more towards scripted, episodic content. Essentially, it's a juiced-up version of playlists with additional branding and promotional elements. Facebook's also launching a new Videos tab for Pages, which will put more focus on playlists and series listings by separating your videos into groups. Finally, Facebook is rolling out an update to its bulk uploader for videos, which will now let you upload up to 50 videos in a single action.

Starting point is 00:01:38 You will find all these new tools inside Creator Studio. Not that it's a surprise, but a new Gartner study has now confirmed what I think we have all been expecting. Marketing budgets will be slashed soon because of the pandemic. Gartner polled chief marketing officers. Two-thirds of them said they are already preparing for budget cuts. This study was done about 11 days ago, so honestly, I can only imagine that number going up since then. 34% of CMOs polled expect business operations to dip, with 10% of them expecting severe outcomes. 2% said they will simply shut down altogether.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Back in the day, there used to be much angst and mashing of teeth among digital marketers around getting the dimensions of your image just right for each platform. Because each platform had their own preferred dimensions. And for the record, they still do. But nearly all of them now will adapt on the fly and post pretty much any dimension that you upload. At our agency here, EngageQ, for more than a year now, we've generally designed square images for almost all uses. We found that it performs best both with organic reach and in the ad market. Twitter is a little different in that they still somewhat aggressively crop images when displayed on their website or in TweetDeck and so on. So what works best on Twitter?

Starting point is 00:03:02 Wide images or square images? The folks at Agorapulse's social media lab tested both with a $1,000 media spend budget, and they found square image ads outperformed wide or landscape image ads. And not by a little. Wide images averaged a $4.62 cost per click, and square images averaged just under $3. Square images also got more clicks, even though the square image ad set actually had fewer impressions. So, doing the math in their study, square image ads resulted in 45% more clicks

Starting point is 00:03:39 and a 36% lower cost per click. Not that you're going to be in violation of it with your brand's ads, but just so you know, Google Ads has updated its inappropriate content policy. Effective as of yesterday, the policy refers specifically to public health emergencies now, including, quote, keywords related to a sensitive event to attempt to gain additional traffic. And Google's also added some new structured data options specific to COVID-19 announcements. The data is not visible yet in search results.

Starting point is 00:04:12 That'll come soon, but Google says you can add your data now to prepare. To be clear, you don't have to do this. In fact, most brands won't need to do this at all. It's really meant for organizations like governments, healthcare providers, schools, and so on. But if you are a marketer in one of those organizations, among the structured data fields that are set up for you now, announcement of a shelter-in-place directive, a closure notice, like closing a school or public transportation, quarantine guidelines, travel restrictions, or notification of a new drive-through testing center.

Starting point is 00:04:51 Who would have thought? There's a link in this episode's description with sample code, use cases, and guidelines. With much of business moving online, the team chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams are getting a lot of use. Now, an interesting integration, Slack has released a new app that will integrate your Microsoft Teams calls. Interesting because Slack and Teams are basically direct competitors. For now, the app will only let you launch Teams calls. You can't actually participate in them directly within Slack, but Slack says it's working on making that happen too. You'll be able to set Microsoft Teams as the default calling provider. Other integrations they've launched, Zoom, WebEx, Jabber, RingCentral, and Dialpad. So if you use those VoIP providers, you will be able to dial phone numbers directly from within the Slack app.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Today is April Fool's Day. Please tell me you didn't do a prank. I know you worked hard on it. We had a few ourselves lined up for clients, but obviously this is not the year. Even Google placed an internal moratorium on them. But I guess K-pop star Jaejoong didn't get the memo. Today he announced on Instagram that he had contracted COVID-19 and was in the hospital, saying, quote,

Starting point is 00:06:13 It was careless of me to live disregarding all of the cautions provided by the government. Jackass. T-Mobile, on the other hand, launched a fundraising campaign called Give Thanks, not pranks. For the next seven days, they will donate $1 to a pandemic relief fund every time a Twitter user tweets a story expressing gratitude for any kind of helper, a doctor, a nurse, or other aid worker, and uses that hashtag. Finally, I've been trying for months now to acquire the legal right to play commercial music on this podcast. The theme that you hear at the start and end of this show, I commissioned that from a musician, and he created them specifically for this podcast. Same with the little stings that you hear between each story.

Starting point is 00:07:00 But I'd like to occasionally be able to play something that I find on Spotify, you know, something commercial that would probably fall outside of fair comment or fair use, as it's known in the U.S. I'm in Canada. One of the many licensing bodies here is called SoCan. And here is how SoCan calculates fees. Are you ready? A times B times 1 minus C times D, where A is 1.5% of the site's internet-related revenues, if SOCAN repertoire is 20% or less,

Starting point is 00:07:31 4.2% of the uses between 20% and 80%, and 5.3% of the uses 80% or more. B is the ratio of audio page impressions, excluding audiovisual page impressions, to all page impressions, including audiovisual page impressions, on the site, if that ratio is provided to SOCAN, and 0.5, if not C is 0.95 for a Canadian site and 1.0 for any other site. D is the ratio of a non-Canadian page impressions to all page impressions on the

Starting point is 00:07:54 site, if that ratio is provided to SOCAN and 2, if not 0 for a Canadian site and 0.9 for any other site. That's Canada. In the US, how do you get rights? Through a different organization called ASCAP and BMI. Here's their process. Go to their website, pay them $266. End of process. There is a lot of things I love about Canada, but our clusterfuck spaghetti music licensing scene is not one of those things.

Starting point is 00:08:21 I hope you're well. I hope you're staying at home. Yes, even you people in Florida, even though the governor has said you don't have to. Breaking news, the governor just said you people have to as well. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 123: Square or Wide? Which Performs Better?

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