Today in Digital Marketing - 133: Campaign Review Delays Will be the New Normal for a While

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, April 17th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And normally here, I would be wishing you a happy whatever national day it is, but in the United Kingdom today, it is Bat Appreciation Day. And given that bats have been linked to the pandemic, we're not going to celebrate that. Luckily, it is also National Haiku Poetry Day in the US, Orthodox Good Friday in Serbia, and Malbec World Day in Argentina. So yeah, screw you, bats. Today,

Starting point is 00:00:33 your brand should soon be able to live stream on your Instagram and Facebook page at the same time. There's a new reaction emoji for COVID-19, and some news on when ad campaign review times might be back to normal, and you're not going to like it. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Short episode today, and for better or for worse, it is all Facebook. First, and this is pretty good news, Facebook appears to be working on a way for you to simulcast your brand's Instagram live broadcast over on your Facebook page. This is something that hasn't been possible until now, not even through third-party tools. Live simulcast tools do exist, like Restream, but while Facebook has an API for going live, Instagram does not.

Starting point is 00:01:19 So until now, what many digital marketers have done as a kind of hack is to first go live on Instagram and then save the video afterwards to their phone and finally upload that recording of the broadcast to their brand's Facebook page. Earlier this month, Instagram added the ability for brands and accounts to have their Instagram live broadcasts be viewable on desktop. Facebook is adding a new reaction to their platform. Reactions are those emojis that people use to indicate sentiment on a post or comment. You know them like love, angry, sad, laughing, wow. And coming soon, care. It will be an emoji face hugging a heart.

Starting point is 00:02:00 You've probably seen Facebook swap out reactions a couple of times, one on Mother's Day, one for Pride Week. But this is the first time they're actually adding a reaction instead of temporarily replacing one. No word yet on how the API will handle this or if it will at all. You know, for a glorious brief window a while back, Facebook put reactions into its API. So that let third party platforms like Buffer and Sprout Social and Hootsuite and so on use those reactions on people's comments. And then poof, it just disappeared one day. Anyway, these new care reactions will start appearing on Facebook's mobile app next week, and it's going to Messenger as well starting today, although the emoji there looks like a pulsing purple heart.

Starting point is 00:02:50 As you probably know, if you've tried to get an ad campaign approved over on Facebook lately, there have been a lot of delays, owing to the fact that many of Facebook's human reviewers are unable to work during the pandemic. Today comes word of a rough plan for getting their reviewers and other employees back to normal operations, and with it perhaps a return to better campaign review times. Quoting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, we will require the vast majority of our employees to work from home through at least the end of May in order to create a safer environment both for our employees doing critical jobs who must be in the office and for everyone else in our local communities.

Starting point is 00:03:30 A small percent of our critical employees who can't work remotely, like content reviewers working on counterterrorism or suicide or self-harm prevention, and engineers working on complex hardware, may be able to return sooner, but overall, we don't expect to have everyone back in our offices for some time, unquote. Well, shit. It's not just their reviewers, even their in-person events have been affected. Zuckerberg cancelling all in-person events that have more than 50 people until next June. Yes, 14 months from now. They've also extended their no-business travel policy. Back in February, when Facebook cancelled its developer conference, they said they'd replace them with a combination of locally hosted events, videos, and live-streamed content.

Starting point is 00:04:14 Now it looks like even those small local events are on ice as well. So that is it, a short episode today. I'm looking forward to diving deep into the Wastelanders DLC for Fallout 76. Really, really enjoying it so far. I don't know what the reviews are talking about. I think it's great. Actually, it's making me want to finish Outer Worlds, which has me even thinking about restarting Red Dead Redemption 2,

Starting point is 00:04:36 which I only got a couple of hours into. Anyway, have a restful and safe weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. Get the f*** out the way. Get the f*** out the way. Anyway, have a restful and safe weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - 133: Campaign Review Delays Will be the New Normal for a While

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