Today in Digital Marketing - 198: Immoral, Obscene, and Vulgar.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, the Facebook ad boycott is bigger than we thought. How to get your brand's website content in the search engine the second it goes live. Pinterest may subsidize your ad campaigns. And guess which country is pissed at TikTok now? It's Tuesday, July 21st, 2020. Happy National Day, Belgium. I'm Todd Mathven from EngageQ Digital. And here is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by TrendHackers.co.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Last month, a number of brands announced that they would be participating in a boycott of Facebook advertising this month. For some, it was a response to what they saw as Facebook's refusal to take down U.S. President Donald Trump's incendiary posts. For others, it was a way to jump on board a growing social movement. And a handful of those saying they wouldn't advertise in July didn't advertise anyway in the summer usually. And what many media reported, including myself, was that most of the big advertisers, the ones that make up a significant chunk of Facebook's revenues,

Starting point is 00:01:01 were not participating. Now, it appears it wasn't that simple. An analysis by Media Matters for America says they found a number of brands did halt all Facebook ads this month without coming out with an announcement about it. Those brands include Disney, Walmart, McDonald's, Kellogg's, Allstate, Dell, Geico, Ikea, Kohl's, and Peloton. Those brands spent more than $335 million on Facebook ads last year. Walmart alone spent $145 million of that. Altogether, it's estimated that more than 400 companies are boycotting Facebook this month. Perhaps not coincidentally, just today, for the

Starting point is 00:01:40 first time, Facebook put a note at the bottom of one of Trump's posts. The post claimed the upcoming American election in November would be corrupted by mail-in ballots. Under that post, Facebook added a note saying, Get official voting info on how to vote in the 2020 U.S. election at USA.gov. But the real question, is the boycott hurting Facebook? You tell me. This week, the company's stock hit a record high. Well, here's the WordPress plugin we all want. The second you hit publish on a new web page,

Starting point is 00:02:21 it gets indexed in the search engine immediately. No waiting for the bot to crawl your site map, nothing. Just publish and it's there. And as of today, that plugin exists. But it's not for Google. It's for Bing, Microsoft's competitor to Google. Still, Bing is not insignificant. A couple of years ago, Microsoft claimed it had a 33% share, which, well, nobody believed. This year, the estimates are around 5%. But that's still a lot of searches. And this WordPress extension really is plug-and-play. Of course, you need your Bing API key, but then anything that you publish on your site goes directly into Bing's search engine,

Starting point is 00:02:51 making it searchable immediately. You can submit up to 10,000 URLs per day. If for some reason you need more than that, you can manually request more. Still ahead, a big part of Google, the one that the SEO industry relies on, is broken today. Thank you. continues. Studies show the most important factor for a successful business is timing, launching the right product or idea at the right time. Well, now there's a way to do just that. Trendhackers.co provides you trends and opportunities before others spot them and

Starting point is 00:03:42 tells you how to make money capitalizing on those trends. Get new trending products, services, and ideas at trendhackers.co for free to launch your next business or product. The service was launched by a serial entrepreneur who's bootstrapped multiple companies to the millions through finding trends. So check out trendhackers.co. That's trendhackers.co. That's trendhackers.co. You won't regret it. There's a big bug today in Google. The site search operator, that's S-I-T-E, appears to be broken. You use this when you're trying to restrict search results to a specific website.

Starting point is 00:04:21 So if you were looking for references to TikTok on this podcast's website, you might search for TikTok site colon todayindigital.com. This is particularly troublesome to digital marketers who spend a lot of time in SEO, since this command is used a whole lot for doing that kind of work. To be clear, only search results that use that operator are potentially affected here. Your web pages are still in the index just fine, and other search parameters can bring them up. Google says they're aware of the issue and are working on a fix now. With much of the U.S. going back into pandemic lockdown, Pinterest is launching a new content stream for consumers and a new advertising program for digital brand marketers.

Starting point is 00:05:03 The consumer side is called the Chefs at Home initiative. They've hired 30 professional chefs to share their recipes and walk people through creating a meal. They say searches for easy at-home recipes are up 12-fold. And for us digital marketers, $300,000 in free advertising. No, you don't get all of it, of course. That's the total pool that people will share, obviously. And there is a catch, of course. It is only for the restaurant industry. But if that's you, you will want to apply to either the National Restaurant Association or the Relief Opportunities for All Restaurants industry group, as that is where Pinterest is sending its money. Which brings us to the lightning round.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Instagram today began testing personal fundraisers. People will be able to either start a cause or support an existing one and promote it as a special link on their bio. Another country is pissed off at TikTok, this time Pakistan, which has issued what they call a final warning because of, quote, immoral, obscene and vulgar content, unquote. For its part, TikTok says, hey, we're trying. We've already removed more than three and a half million videos from Pakistan in the last half of 2019. Neighboring India has already straight up banned the app over security concerns. Last year, TikTok was the most downloaded app in Pakistan. Oh, they also banned the popular mobile game PUBG, saying Pakistani youth were wasting their time. Google has brought back the Twitter carousel to its search engine result pages.

Starting point is 00:06:31 They had disabled it during the high profile hack last week. And if you run ads on Microsoft's Bing, you can now use any of Shutterstock's 320 million images as part of your campaign. Two companies have a new partnership that makes the stock image library available inside the Microsoft ad interface. This will show up first for US and UK marketers who are in Microsoft's audience network beta. If you found

Starting point is 00:06:56 this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. Special thanks to trendhackers.co

Starting point is 00:07:14 for sponsoring today's episode. I'm Todd Maffin. More from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then. It didn't take more than a second For you to turn a whole world upside down. Turn this big boat back around.

Today in Digital Marketing - 198: Immoral, Obscene, and Vulgar.

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