Today in Digital Marketing - 194: 🚨BREAKING: The Biggest Hack in Twitter’s History?

Starting point is 00:00:00 3 billion monthly active users. That's what their website gets, and they're willing to give your brand ads on it for free. On today's show, what this incredible offer is, and why you will probably say no. Also, Google Ads launches some nice new dynamic text options, Snapchat tests brand profiles, and how to get much more real estate for your images on Google. It's Wednesday, July 15th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. And we're going to start today with some late-breaking news. A massive hack campaign

Starting point is 00:00:39 is happening right now all over Twitter. Kanye West, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Bill Gates, We'll be right back. part of a COVID-19 response. It's all fake, of course, but as I record this at 2.15 Pacific Time, public Bitcoin records show hackers have made more than $100,000 on this, and it hasn't even been happening for an hour now. This is absolutely unprecedented. We are certainly in the middle of the biggest hack in Twitter's history. What's especially concerning here, many, as I said, are big names. These people almost certainly had two-factor authentication on. You can't tell me that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk did not have 2FA on. Something big is going on, so stop everything, check your brand's Twitter account right now.

Starting point is 00:01:49 And for a bit of a palate cleanser from that news, let's do a quick quiz. What is the average click-through rate of the number one organic result in Google search? 15%, 28%, 44%, or 80%? The answer at the end of today's episode. Another day, another Facebook outage. Wouldn't it be nice if just one day, the thing that crashes is that Facebook marketplace auto message that makes sellers get inundated with people asking, is this still available? And then those people just ghost them. I'd like that to crash one day. Instead, what's been down today, of course, is the ad platform. Lots of people reporting that it's on every account of theirs, this bug. Some people having literally zero purchases from their

Starting point is 00:02:30 ads. Facebook says they know about it. They're looking into it. It's been a bad few days for Facebook's engineers. Yesterday, their Instagram publishing API was down most of the day, meaning most third-party tools weren't able to post scheduled content. And over the weekend, at least one platform, Buffer, said that when they sent images to be published to a brand's timeline, they wouldn't show up on the timeline, but instead only in a photo album named Timeline. Like I say, just another day. I'm sure you've seen these banner ads before. Say you live in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:03:07 The ads will say, Best credit score fix in Chicago. And date hot moms in Chicago today. And this Chicago dad blah blah blah blah blah. Of course, the ads aren't about Chicago. The ad just looks up the user's IP address, figures out where they are, and dynamically inserts their city name in there. It makes pretty spammy-looking ads,

Starting point is 00:03:26 and now one big platform will let you do the same. And that platform? Google. Yeah, Google is rolling out a geography placeholder for your ad creative based on either where the person is searching from or where they're interested in, depending on how you've set up your campaign. You can have it use a city name or a province or state name or a country name. Please, fellow digital marketers, let's not screw this up. Also added countdowns. When you're setting your campaign up, you enter an end date and it will show the user the amount of time left until that date shows up. They're both activated using a kind of special formatting

Starting point is 00:03:59 and you can get all the nitty gritty in the link in this episode's notes. Facebook is trying to get into the good graces of music marketers, rolling out officially licensed music videos on its platform in the US next month. This is of course a direct shot across the bow at YouTube, which has all but owned this space for years. Here's how it'll work. If you market a mainstream music artist and already have a page for them, you'll have to switch a brand new setting on before August 1st. Otherwise, Facebook will actually auto-generate a page for you called whatever your band name is,

Starting point is 00:04:38 and then the words official music. And you will not have admin privileges on this automatically generated page. Once you do go through this process, you won't need to manually upload music videos. That's exactly what the setting does. It lets Facebook automatically add them to your page when they get them from the music labels. It also shares some of your reach and engagement metrics with that label. Once the videos are up there, you will be able to edit the title or just straight up delete them if you want to. But again, that's only if you turn on that magic switch on your page's current settings.

Starting point is 00:05:10 If this applies to you, check the link in this episode's notes for more details. And hot on the heels of that music announcement from Facebook comes word today that YouTube has bolstered its analytics for music artists. In this new dashboard, you'll be able to see metrics for videos that you uploaded, your label uploaded, and that Vivo uploaded. By the way, you may have seen Vivo around a lot of YouTube. It's the channel where all the music videos seem to live. In case you're curious, Vivo is kind of a collective group, essentially, of Universal Music Group, Google, and Sony Music. Interesting addition to this new dashboard, artists will be able to see which other videos on the platform, not just music videos, but other videos of any kind, have been published by random people where all or nearly all of their song recording has been used.

Starting point is 00:06:03 One of the world's largest websites today announced that they are willing to give you ad space on it for free. They get 3 billion monthly active users. Not only will they give you the space, they'll also develop your campaigns creative for you. And not just you, but for 100 small businesses that apply. All you do is fill out the form, and if you're picked, you'll get a full video campaign shown to millions of people, and you won't have to pay a penny. You won't have to hire an agency or spend time developing the idea. That's the upside. The downside?

Starting point is 00:06:38 That site is Pornhub. Yes, they have announced a new COVID-19 relief initiative to help small businesses that have been affected by the pandemic. It's called... Why do I do this job? It's called... The Big Package. And as long as you have fewer than 100 employees,

Starting point is 00:06:58 you could qualify, but you'll be giving away control of your messaging. As the fine print reads, Pornhub may freely and in its sole discretion establish the creative parameters. Unquote. In other words, they'll decide how you're shown on their site. Although I have to say, the examples that they showed in a promotional video absolutely were on brand. Problem is, they were on brand for Pornhub. A florist's video led with the phrase, do you like Bush? A butcher's ad? Craving a big juicy piece of meat? And a barber? Well, I'll let you guess that one. If you'd still like to give

Starting point is 00:07:34 it a shot, there is a link to the application form in this episode's notes. Today, Snapchat announced a new closed beta test of brand profiles. Kind of a single home where brands can assemble all their various Snapchat-related things in one place. What sort of things? Any branded AR lenses you've made, past story highlights, all your current story posts, and, here's the big deal of course, an integrated e-commerce store which lets users browse and buy things right inside the Snapchat app. And as a side note, this may be one of the bigger decisions that you as a digital marketer will be making in the next year if you sell anything online. It's certainly a better user experience to buy through these apps directly.

Starting point is 00:08:19 I mean, if a potential customer of yours is on Instagram and sees your shoes and can buy it right there, that's good, right? More impulse buys, more tight integration on the ads that brought them there. But you as a marketer will give up a lot for that money, for one, since most of these platforms plan to take a cut of those sales if you use their direct platform, but also a lot of the important but behind the scenes things like pixel traffic, which gives you the ability to control retargeting. Or like presenting a branded shopping experience with your colors and your font and your layout. That will be a big decision for sure. Anyway, back to this Snapchat thing. These new brand profiles come with better user management.

Starting point is 00:09:00 You'll get access to some broader analytics. If you want to see what they look like, check out any of the existing creator profiles, which are basically the same thing, but for major influencers. For now, only a handful of brands have been invited to be part of this beta, but they say they'll open it up to more in the coming months. Google has fixed a bug that prevented large image thumbnails from showing up in Google Discover. That's the content feed underneath Google's search bar. It's prime space, of course, and if you'd like your website result to show up as a big image instead of a tiny one, here is how. First, your web page has to contain an image at least 1,200 pixels wide.

Starting point is 00:09:42 Plus, if your page is non-AMP, that is to say it does not have an AMP mobile version, then you will have to add this metadata, max image preview colon large. If your site does push out AMP versions, you don't need to do that last step. And no, Google says you cannot use your company's logo as that big image if you want to show up there. Your image should be distinct and unique and eye-catching. And I'm sorry, I know you spent a lot of money on it, but your logo ain't that. I spotted an interesting marketing campaign today. Cheez-It, the snack food, has a deal with Amazon, a kind of binge-watching promotion. Here's the way it works.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Each month, there's a theme, and with that theme, there's a list of shows on Amazon Prime. That's their Netflix competitor. This month's theme is gutsy sports heroes. And the more sports movies that you watch from this curated list, the more points you get. Points which can then be turned into $5 Amazon gift cards. But there's a catch. You can only spend those Amazon gift cards on Cheez-It products on Amazon. And it's only available in the US. Which brings us to the lightning round. The SEO tool semrush.com has created a new agency referral site. So if you do SEO, you may want to get yourself listed there. Reddit says it will now let users add up to 20 images in a single post.

Starting point is 00:11:12 They'll show up in a kind of image gallery. Honestly, it's bizarre to me that it took them this long to let people upload more than one image at a time, but hey, we'll take it. And Spotify today has launched two podcast charts, Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts. You'll see it in their mobile app as long as you're in one of the lucky 26 countries which get it. And seven of those lucky countries will get even luckier with separate charts available for each podcast genre.

Starting point is 00:11:39 Oh, and for the quiz that I mentioned at the top of the episode. What is the average click-through rate of the number one organic result in Google search? 28.5%. This is from new data from Systrix, which analyzed 80 million keywords and billions of search results. If you are in the number two position on Google, your click-through rate falls to 15%. Number three position, 11%. If you are unlucky enough to be in the 10th position, that's usually the bottom of the first page,

Starting point is 00:12:11 only 2.5% of searchers will click you. And if you're not on the front page at all, you basically don't exist. Page two results have a CTR of less than 1% for each position. How can you improve your ranking? Systrix noted that listings that had sitelinks extensions did much better. Those are those little subpages that Google automatically puts there under your listing. You don't have direct control over these, sadly,

Starting point is 00:12:38 but having a well-organized sitemap XML will help. They found about a 12% increase in CTR for results that had those extensions. However, if you're unlucky enough to land on a page where Google has put one of its knowledge panels, the top CTR drops by about 12%. What's National Secretary Day in Mexico today? I, for one, will be keeping an eye on the convenience store chain Circle K, because last year they ran an ad for Secretary Day that just showed a woman's legs and the phrase,

Starting point is 00:13:14 if you know what I mean, with a winking emoji. They were promoting a package of wine, a chocolate bar, and condoms bundled together for 199 pesos. They later apologized, saying they, quote, didn't intend to promote any stereotype. Yep. Got it. Okay, listen, Fallout 76 people, where do I get acid? Not the drug, literally acid.

Starting point is 00:13:40 I am burning through ammo, and I cannot make enough gunpowder, and none of the robot vendors, none of the settlers, nobody will sell me any, not even that f***ing Sunnybot in Foundation. Please help me. I'm on Xbox, radio 9573. Until then, I'm Todd Maffin. More news from the digital marketing front tomorrow. Talk to you then. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.

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Today in Digital Marketing - 194: 🚨BREAKING: The Biggest Hack in Twitter’s History?

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