Today in Digital Marketing - 141: togethertogethertogethertogethertogethertogether

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Wednesday, April 29th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Ads are coming to Facebook Live broadcasts. Google is considering delaying mobile-first indexing. The speed of your brand's website is not as big a deal to Google as we thought. Facebook brings back one of its most popular features and oh, to be a copywriter in the

Starting point is 00:00:59 age of the pandemic. If you manage the content strategy for your brand, there's actually a great website that will let you search Google's backend to find out what topics are trending. And you can compare them to other topics and change the date range. And it's free. And actually, it's been there all along. You might have figured out I'm talking about Google Trends here. Honestly, sometimes we forget about the free tools out there that are quite good, like Facebook's ad library for competitor research. One of the benefits to Google Trends is you can use it to understand consumer behavior and perhaps in a post-pandemic world, even forecast how that behavior will have changed.

Starting point is 00:01:38 This impacts more than your brand's content strategy, of course. It could influence product decisions, pricing, and so on. But from a content point of view, there are some interesting things trending that you might want to take advantage of as you are lining up your social media posts. Quoting Search Engine Watch, leisure wear is king, and we have seen an abnormal increase in demand for sweatpants over the last month. Consumers also want to know how to look good on Zoom. That's actually the search term, how to look good on Zoom. That term has increased from zero to 100 from March 14th onward. As a topic, interest in instrument playing tutorials has increased by 72%, and small business loans are seeing more search demand than ever before. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:26 So there you have it, friends, sweatpants, zoom, makeup, and clarinet lessons. See how easy content management is. You may be seeing a new placement in the Facebook ads manager soon inside live

Starting point is 00:02:41 broadcasts. Facebook has been testing this with a small handful of brands so far. Today they announced they are expanding that group to more organizations, though mostly news and entertainment sites, and it's still a small group. Here's how it'll work, quoting Marketingland.com. When watching live content from a creator included in the test, viewers might see a range of ad formats, including a pre-roll ad that runs really the only way to handle actual interruptive mid-rolls.

Starting point is 00:03:27 A similar comparison might be Twitch, where broadcasters there have ads that just straight up interrupt their live stream, although some partnered streamers can trigger an ad whenever they want. Facebook says advertisers will be able to opt out of certain brand page live streams if they are concerned about being put alongside questionable content. You may be aware of Google's plan to move to mobile-first indexing in the fall. First, what is that? It means that Google's Crawl Robot, that's the software that collects all the content on your webpages and puts them in Google's index, that robot will now first request a mobile version of your website

Starting point is 00:04:06 and index that. It'll only fall back to the desktop version if it has trouble finding a mobile-specific version of your brand's website. And that could be a big deal. One of the clients that we have, we noticed, had some menu links that just would not show up when you were viewing from a smartphone. In a mobile-first world, the content behind those links simply would not be indexed. Anyway, mobile-first was scheduled to start in September, but how has COVID-19 affected that? Here's Google search engineer John Mueller. So far, we're still seeing lots of sites shifting over and getting ready for mobile-first indexing. So we haven't completely made up our mind

Starting point is 00:04:47 that we will stick with this date, but we want to give it a little bit more time to settle down and see how it works out. My guess is within the next month or so, we'll make that call and go one way or the other. Google says if web admins are going to have trouble meeting that deadline because of the pandemic, they should send them that feedback. Another Google item, an important one. As you may know, Google factors the speed of your website into your ranking in the index. In simpler terms, it was always thought that the faster your web

Starting point is 00:05:21 pages, the higher up in the results your brand's website would appear. And that is still true, but it's not as big a deal as previously thought. Google engineer Gary Ilyas on Twitter said, quote, ranking wise, it's a teeny tiny factor, unquote. Apparently, the speed of your site holds about the same weight as whether or not your site is HTTPS as opposed to HTTP. In a blog post, seoroundtable.com said they thought only really slow pages would be impacted negatively. All that said, site speed is still a critical factor in the non-Google things like, for instance, your conversion rate. If you've ever used Facebook Live for your brand or client, you may have noticed that back in November, they took that live with feature out of the functionality. That was the way

Starting point is 00:06:13 you could bring viewers on camera as a kind of guest or co-host. Nobody's quite clear why they removed that, but that's Facebook for you. But now it's back. A couple of things to note here. First, this only works with mobile live broadcasts. so you'll need to be using an actual smartphone to do this. You can't use their backend API live video feed for it. And you can only bring in a person who is using a profile. In other words, you cannot add another brand page to the stream. The return of Live With should be fully rolled out within the next few days. They also teased some new features they say will be making the experience more interactive, which will be coming out as well. All right, time for the lightning round. Twitter had some trouble delivering DMs last night. Apparently that is all fixed now, but maybe go in manually, double check you've seen them all. Google has made its Meet video conferencing service free.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Previously, you had to be a G Suite customer. The meetings can have 100 people in them and, for now, have no time limitation. This is obviously a shot across the bow at Zoom, whose free meetings are limited to 40 minutes. One catch, you will need a Google account to host a meeting. It should be rolled out fully in the next one or two weeks. Facebook says it's working on a way to allow users to charge money to attend live streams, so good news for musicians and other performance artists.

Starting point is 00:07:31 And Microsoft has changed the UI of its ads manager. If you are a little confused about the changes, there is a link in the notes with a breakdown of what's new. And finally, it must be hard to be a copywriter these days. Buick and GMC are here to help. Con Edison is here to help. Here to help. Our teams are here.

Starting point is 00:07:51 We are here. We're here. We're here. Here for you. Here for you. This is from a hilarious video that is out circulating today. Someone has put together a mega cut of like 100 TV ads to point out how everyone's changed their ads and how everyone is basically saying exactly the same thing in the copy.

Starting point is 00:08:09 We're here for you. We're here for you. We are here for you. We'll be here for you. Runnings is here for you. We're still here for you. Not saying that messaging is a bad thing, but maybe step up your copy just a notch. Well, if you'd like to reach nearly a thousand digital marketers, check the link in this episode's notes for some advertising options.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Classified ads are just 20 bucks. And remember, this podcast is chaptered. So if your podcast app supports it, you can jump right to specific stories if you want. Links to my own personal social media, as always, in the episode notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. And we'll get through this. Together. Together. the episode notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 141: togethertogethertogethertogethertogethertogether

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