Today in Digital Marketing - 129: Why I Rage-Quit Social Media Yesterday

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, April 8th, 2020. Happy Unicorn Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, some good news for agencies that were about to be cut from Google's partner program. The one ad placement on Facebook you've probably ignored for years is apparently killing it right now. And Instagram makes DMs easier to reply to for brand managers, but still fails to implement the one thing that we are all asking for. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by the Personal Revolution podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Some good news for, well, pretty much all digital agencies. Google says that they are postponing changes to their partner's program until next year. This is a welcome stay of execution, given that the program changes were almost certainly going to disqualify a whole bunch of agencies, mainly because membership was going to be tied to whether or not accounts followed Google's optimization score recommendations. There was also a minimum Google ad spend in the previous 90 days of $20,000, and at least half of an agency's users needed to have active certification in Google ads. Yeah, half of the users. Those changes have been scheduled to start in June. They're still coming, but not until 2021. So where does

Starting point is 00:01:18 your agency stand with all this? If you are a current partner, you just retain your status for now. If you haven't yet earned partner status for this year, you are still eligible under the current eligibility requirements. And if you lost your status because of these new requirements, you will be grandfathered your former status until next year. Incidentally, for developers out there, Google is also postponing the retirement of their first version ads API. The new sunset date for that API is July 29th. Microsoft search engine Bing has launched new tools for you to control how your brand's website listing looks like in their search results. You probably know about the so-called snippets.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Those are those little blocks of text and information that show up, usually in a box during a search. Now you can control things like the maximum text length in your snippet, the maximum size of an image preview, or the maximum number of seconds in a video preview. This is just adding to what you've been able to control there for a while. You've even been able to opt out of your brand showing up in a snippet box if you wanted. But either way, some nice changes. Instagram is rolling out direct messages for the web. They've been working on it for more than a year now, but soon everyone will be able to read and reply to Instagram DMs via the desktop. But to be honest, this is not really as

Starting point is 00:02:39 big a deal as it seems. Facebook put Instagram DMs into its inbox a while back, and I suspect still to this day, most brand managers either have to just ignore Instagram DMs or they reply on their own personal mobile devices. Why? Because Instagram DMs are still not in the one place the digital marketers need them to be in an API. That way, third-party platforms like Agora Pulse or Sprout Social or Buffer Reply or any of them can access Instagram DMs. Those DMs are still a massive gaping hole in the messaging ecosystem. We have Facebook private messages. We have Twitter direct messages all in the API.

Starting point is 00:03:18 I simply do not understand why Instagram is so opposed to putting those into an API as well so we can see them and respond to them using the third-party platforms that we already use. Anyway, back to Instagram DMs on the web. Not everybody has this yet. I don't. But apparently, it's on the way soon. Still ahead, the old-school Facebook ad placement that is seeing a huge resurgence since this whole pandemic stuff started. And why I deleted every single social media app on my smartphone last night.

Starting point is 00:03:49 That's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues. This episode is sponsored by Personal Revolution Podcast. Have you been stuck inside, wondering how to take charge of your life? Is there something you want to do but haven't been able to do yet? In Personal Revolution, bestselling author and life coach Alison Task helps you take control of your life with inspiration and humor so that you move from where you are now to where you want to be and have fun doing it.

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Starting point is 00:05:18 Direct-to-consumer marketer David Herman spends his days buried in the Facebook ads manager, running campaigns for many large brands, and every so often on Twitter, he'll report what he's finding at that scale. And apparently, ads where the placement is Facebook desktop is crushing it. He thinks it's because people no longer need to surf the web on their phones when they're working on home networks. They are not being monitored, he said in a tweet today, and humans will do what humans do. And you know, it makes sense when you think about it. While they're at work with their computers, they're probably not spending a ton of time on Facebook. Partially, as David mentioned,

Starting point is 00:05:53 they're afraid IT will notice. But also for most jobs, Facebook is just not part of their day. But at home with these work computers, hey, nobody's watching and maybe with less work to do overall. Makes sense that he's seeing this. For the record, this does track with what we are seeing with our clients' campaigns. I wouldn't say crushing it like his campaigns apparently are seeing, but desktop as a placement certainly seems to be on the upswing. If you are using Zoom to meet with your team remotely now or meet with clients or whatever, you might want to be aware that at least one large company has banned its desktop client entirely.

Starting point is 00:06:31 That company? Google. They say security concerns led them to the decision. And it's more than a request. Zoom will just straight up stop working on all of Google's computers later this week. This applies to the desktop version. Googlers are still allowed to use Zoom through a web browser or the mobile app. All that said, let's not forget that Google owns a direct competitor to Zoom, which they call Hangouts, or sometimes they call it Meets,

Starting point is 00:07:00 or sometimes, I kid you not, Hangout Meets. Totally by coincidence, I'm sure, Hangouts added a gallery view last week, which was one of the main reasons that users were choosing Zoom over their product. If you've logged into Twitter recently, you may have seen a pop-up box that says, an update to your data sharing settings, and then, underneath that headline, a paragraph of small gray text. Did you read that text? If not, let me give you the highlight. Quote, your ability to control mobile app advertising measurements has been removed. And then later on, they played the, well, you're not paying to tweet card saying, these changes help Twitter continue operating as a free service. So what exactly did they do? Quoting social media today, the specific

Starting point is 00:07:44 detail data that Twitter's looking to use here is information like the ads that you've seen in the app and the unique ID of your device. Twitter then provides this data to other ad platforms in order to help optimize ad performance. Specifically, Twitter shares this info with Google and Facebook, unquote. So Twitter uses Facebook's SDK as well as Google tracking,

Starting point is 00:08:09 which can trace this information. The information then can be used in Twitter's own analytics to help understand and optimize for audience behavior. Twitter says that users will retain some control over this information, but it will be tracked in some capacity, even if users opt to turn data tracking off in their settings, except for those living in the EU where they come under the EU Cybersecurity Act. How does this affect us digital marketers? The Verge says the update

Starting point is 00:08:37 will help Twitter address problems with its usage tracking, which recently led to a major miss in its earnings. Finally, if you are having problems posting a video on Facebook through a third-party tool, it does seem to be a thing right now. It's not just you. So far, Hootsuite has reported that they are having problems with that. I rage quit social media last night. No, for real, I rage quit it. I deleted every app on my phone that has

Starting point is 00:09:06 any kind of comment section. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, all of them gone. Truth is, I am not a strong enough person to keep myself from replying to complete morons who think that 5G is causing COVID-19 or that rubbing crystals on your throat will prevent it. I end up replying, and they reply, and I reply back, and then it basically goes to hell pretty quickly. They call me a libtard, I tell them to get more news sources than Fox News, and then boom, I'm removed from the Facebook group. I mean, I still want to be in Facebook groups when this is all over, and apparently I am simply not capable of ignoring these people.

Starting point is 00:09:46 So any hap with the comment section is gone from my phone. And I'll be honest, so far, kind of a nice break. Don't forget to check out the Personal Revolution podcast and use their code REVOLUTION to get your first month free. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 129: Why I Rage-Quit Social Media Yesterday

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