Today in Digital Marketing - 136: [PODCAST HOST BASED IN CANADA]

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Everything’s coming up TikTok. So… how’s Snapchat doing? What Instagram’s cofounders have been working on since they left Facebook And the clever hack to make the CTA Button in your Facebook ad say ANYTHING you want it to. Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today Or click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com 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://clickthrough.marketing/facebook-custom-cta-buttons-ads/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/snapchat-posts-increases-in-both-users-and-revenue-in-q1-2020-report/576493/ https://wersm.com/the-co-founders-of-instagram-reunited-to-build-a-covid19-tracker/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020. Happy Earth Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, everything is coming up TikTok. So how's Snapchat doing? What Instagram's co-founders have been working on since they left Facebook? And the clever hack to make the CTA button

in your Facebook ad say anything you want it to. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. TikTok gets lots of buzz these days, which might make you wonder how Snapchat is doing. And the answer, surprisingly well, actually. They just reported their Q1 results and said they added 11 million daily active users. That brings them to nearly 230 million. Most importantly, that's a jump of 20% in active users year over year. That is impressive as hell, considering how popular TikTok has become.

But that growth may not have come from where they wanted it to come from, most of it originating outside North America and Europe in a category they call rest of world. India was a big chunk of that. While they'll obviously take new users anywhere they can, it should be noted that Snapchat gets three and a half times more revenue per user from Americans. A couple of other interesting items. More than 75% of daily users use augmented reality in some form each day on the app, and total time spent watching content found in Discover has increased by over 35% year over year.

Let's not leave TikTok entirely out of this episode. I saw on Twitter someone reporting that TikTok account analytics are now available on their website. I checked, by the way. I couldn't find it on mine, so perhaps they're still rolling it out. This is great, of course, although not a huge surprise. TikTok has always been pretty friendly with the web. You can see any video or profile on the web,

something it took other mobile apps a while to get around to doing. So log in on the web, check your own account if your brand has a TikTok account, and see if you have analytics on the web, check your own account if your brand has a TikTok account, and see if you have analytics on the web. If your brand's Facebook or Instagram account is managed by several people, some of those people might be in a different country than you. You might have a designer or a community manager on the other side of the globe. If that's you, you should know that this morning, Facebook announced a change to the way it will display your brand's Facebook and Instagram posts. Here's how it'll work. Let's say you have 10 admins on your Facebook page.

One of them is in Brazil. If that Brazilian admin posts something directly on your brand's Facebook page, Facebook will add a line of text under your brand name that says, Poster based in Brazil. And if people tap or click that line, a little window pops up that says, The person who posted this and many of this page's followers are based in different locations. The page manager who posted this is based in Brazil. Page managers are often based in a country or region that's different from many of their followers. Facebook is providing this information because in rare cases, the person posting may be trying to mislead people about where they're based, unquote. They are piloting this feature in the US, starting specifically with Facebook pages and Instagram accounts that are based outside the US,

but reach large audiences based primarily in the US. And kind of a funny side note that's related to this, I was poking around the ads library the other day, and just for, you know, a reference point, I put in my city's Facebook page and looked up there, and I saw that they had a whole bunch of admins in Canada, as you would expect, as that's where I am, and one based in Nigeria, because the Facebook ads library will expose the countries.

And so I tweeted them, and I said, did you know that one of your, I mean, maybe, maybe you know this, maybe you have a Nigerian designer and he's fantastic and that's cool. But, you know, on the off chance that you're not aware that one of your admins in your Facebook business manager is based in Nigeria, maybe check that out. And they tweeted back and they said, no, no, no, it's all good. You know, we're everyone who is an admin on our page is based in Canada. So I checked the ads library thing again, and it still said Nigeria. And I said, you know, like, listen, I'm not trying to call you out here or anything, but I promise one of your admins is based in Nigeria right now.

And that could be a hacker just kind of waiting for a good opportunity. So they tweeted back and they said, we're going to look into this. And then about an hour later, they said, thanks very much. We have fixed the issue. And I went and checked the ads library

and the Nigerian admin was gone. So I expect a reward, city of Nanaimo. If you're like me, you've had this experience at least once while setting up a Facebook ad campaign. You're ready to put out a really compelling call to action button in it, and you look through their pull down menu of options and let's see, learn more. No, see menu, download now. No, see, none of these are exactly right. Wouldn't it be cool if rather than selecting from a predetermined list of call to action buttons, you could just type in a custom call to action like stream now or subscribe to the podcast? Well, now you can, sort of.

Lachlan Kirkwood, I hope I'm not mispronouncing your name, Lachlan, is a listener of this podcast. And he DM'd me to let me know that he'd found a way to kind of hack the call to action button. Now, normally, as you probably know, the ad format includes a headline, description, and call to action button. Recently, though, Facebook has been choosing to not show that description field to people, and a new design that he spotted doesn't have a call to action button either. So how is there a CTA? And a new design that he spotted doesn't have a call to action button either. So how is there a CTA? Because what's left is the headline field.

And in recent designs of this on mobile, a short headline is placed centered in a gray box. This makes it look like a call to action button. So instead of using a headline you might normally use, like find out why millions of people trust our product, you could use that space for your button, like maybe peek at reviews or whatever you want. Anyway, nice little hack there. Thank you for letting me know about it. There is a link to his full blog post about this in this episode's notes. And my DMs are open if you too have something you'd like to share.

All this week I've been reporting on what the various digital marketing platforms are doing to help their customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Agora Pulse's CEO emailed me to report on their efforts. Quote, we're offering to pause the payments, but not the subscriptions for those whose businesses are affected. A lot of them are agencies. Then, with certain partners, we've done three months for free to help social media managers reduce costs while having a tool to use. We didn't make a fancy landing page about this like others have done, because this is not a marketing play for us. This is just us trying to help our customers in need. Unquote. Finally, he said, they are also working on a freemium version of Agorapulse.

The last time Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tweeted was about a year and a half ago, when he either left or was dumped from Facebook in what everyone agrees was a messy divorce. Until, that is, this week, when he and Instagram's other co-founder Mike Krieger RT.Live, a COVID-19 tracking dashboard. I know, I know, God, the world does not need yet another coronavirus tracking dashboard, but this one is different. Rather than reporting how many cases each state has, this one tracks the metric that scientists use to determine how infectious it is. In other words, whether the spread of the virus is accelerating on a per-state basis. Again, it is at RT.live. The dashboard only contains American data.

Oh hey, and that podcast chaptering thing I tried yesterday actually worked. So if you use a podcast app that supports it, now you can skip between stories. If you use Overcast, you just swipe a couple of times to the right on the big block there and you'll see it. This now makes four programs, though, that I use to produce this. QuickTime to record my voice, Auphonic to process the levels, Logic to mix, and now Forecast to chapter. Yes, this episode is out earlier than usual. Quite earlier, actually. Thank you, Insomnia. And a big project that I was planning on working on today

just got postponed to next week. So I am going to let the team handle today's client work and I am off to play video games all day long. If you would like to watch live, I will be at mixer.com slash happy radio guy. Warning, I swear a lot when I play video games. Or follow me on my other social media. My tweets are about the industry,

my TikToks about my cat, and my Instagram is just kind of a hot mess right now. Links to all of them are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.