Today in Digital Marketing - 200: The End of Likes on Facebook Brand Pages?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, some great news for e-commerce marketers who sell on Google Shopping. Facebook is testing removing the ability to like a brand page. TikTok adds a new interactive brand experience tool for marketers. Why you probably shouldn't use the next big WordPress feature. And a clever social media campaign based around three small lines. It's Thursday, July 23rd, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Some good news for e-commerce marketers who have their stuff listed on Google's shopping tab.

Starting point is 00:00:37 Google today announcing they are dropping their commission fees. Not dropping as in reducing, dropping as in eliminating. Quoting the company, in April, we made it free to list your products on the shopping tab. And last month, we announced that free listings are coming soon to Google search in the US. Now we're making it free to sell your products directly on Google. Google will no longer charge you commission fees for purchases made through shopping actions. This new model will allow you to use your own payment provider, manage your customer service, and manage more of your processes, like returns. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:01:17 For now, they are handing out invitations to sellers on a case-by-case basis, and you might be in that group. They will email you if you are. Regardless, this should be available to everyone later in the year. Until you're in there, starting one week from today, your commission rate will be automatically capped at 5% or less. One other nice announcement for sellers outside the U.S., once you link your payment service account, a U.S. bank account will no longer be required.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Some huge news late yesterday in the podcast space. The New York Times announced it was buying Serial Productions, the production company that produced the podcast base's first true mainstream breakout hit. Besides the incredibly popular Serial, the company also produced Shit Town, which also drew rave reviews. Serial Productions is a spinoff from the long-running American public radio show This American Life, which the Times says it also has an ongoing creative and strategic alliance. The deal will give Serial more resources to produce more shows, one of which they announced today. It's called Nice White Parents. It is about the American education system.

Starting point is 00:02:24 Podcast space is getting busy. Just last week, SiriusXM bought podcast platform Stitcher for up to $325 million. Facebook is testing a new design for brand pages. Lots of little tweaks. It's cleaner, makes the posts easier to get to, but the change that most people are talking about, there's no like count. And for that matter, not even a like button. So far, the test has been seen only on a small number of public figure pages, including actors and authors, but also a small number of English language business pages.

Starting point is 00:03:00 This is different than Instagram's test earlier this year, eliminating like counts. There, the likes they stopped displaying were the likes on each post. In this test, we're talking about the total number of likes on a page. This is sometimes called the fan count. In its place, a follow button and the number of followers. And though the numbers between likes and follows are usually pretty close, you can like a page and then later unfollow it, which means that you won't see that brand's post in your feed, but you're still technically connected to it in your social graph. And there's also one new metric, one that shows the brand scrambled to lock down their brand's Twitter account. And one of the unanswered questions was, did the hackers get into any of the DMs in those accounts? Well, the answer came today.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Uh, yeah, they did. Twitter says about 36 of the 130 hacked accounts had their DMs viewed, including those of an elected official in the Netherlands. But they say that's the only instance of any current or former elected official having their private messages compromised. Certainly good news for whoever runs the accounts of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both of which were part of the hack. Twitter says the hack happened because someone got into Twitter's company account on Slack, got the credentials to an internal management tool, and took control of accounts with that tool. No passwords were compromised, so still no reason for you to change the password of your brand's account. The company reported its Q2 results today and posted ad revenues that were down almost a quarter on a year ago. They blame the pandemic and civil unrest in the U.S. for why many brands paused advertising. That's partly why Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey told

Starting point is 00:04:52 investors today they are planning to test a subscription model soon. He didn't say what new features would be in any kind of paid subscription. That said, in terms of users, Twitter actually had its fastest growing quarter ever, up 34%. The highest quarter growth before this one was 24%. Seems like every day TikTok is pushing out news, probably to try to stave off a nationwide ban on its app that the Trump administration said it was considering. And today's announcement is related to digital marketing. They're adding a new kind of interactive brand promotion called Gamified Branded Effects. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Gamified Branded Effects enables brands to build branded games into their TikTok clips with more than 20 templates available, which can be customized

Starting point is 00:05:43 with various brand elements. The option will be made available within TikTok's self-service ad platform, which had opened up to all businesses earlier this month. If a lot of brands end up using certain templates, the process could start to feel stale pretty quickly. But through specific audience targeting and customization, there ideally won't be significant crossover with similar campaigns, unquote. Just a note here, by the way, great news that this is certainly coming to the self-serve ad platform, but despite what social media today reported, the TikTok self-service ad platform is not available

Starting point is 00:06:15 to everyone right now. It appears to only be available to companies in the U.S. and some other countries. I'm in Canada, still not available there. Their piece also notes that this is sort of like Snapchat's lens web builder, which lets marketers create augmented reality effects also based on templates. And hey, if a new brand campaign option doesn't entice you, TikTok will just straight up give you cash money. Today announcing a $200 million fund. Sadly though, it's not for you or me. It's not an ad credit.

Starting point is 00:06:47 It's not going to digital marketers. This fund is aimed at the popular creators on their platform, kind of a bit of extra cash to help convince them that they can make a living on TikTok if they wanted to. Hey, laugh if you like, but we all laughed when YouTube said this a decade ago. And now YouTuber is at the top of children's most desired occupations list. Not a lot of detail on this TikTok fund, and as TechCrunch noted today, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:11 TikTok already helps its creators sign brand partnerships and sponsorship deals, and it provides monetization for live streams. It also has a creator marketplace that connects brands to creators to collaborate on paid campaigns, unquote. TikTok currently employs about 1,400 people in the U.S. It says it plans to add 10,000 more in the coming year or two. When the next version of WordPress comes out in August, version 5.5, it's going to have one new feature that a lot of web nerds will be talking about. Maybe even the web developer nerds at your company or agency. And that feature is built-in sitemaps.

Starting point is 00:07:52 A sitemap is a file on your web server that humans don't see, but bots like Google's crawler does. It's kind of like a table of contents, essentially, for search engines that shows them where to find your content. So it makes it easier for the bot to put you into the index. Until now, WordPress administrators have used a third-party SEO plugin like, say, Yoast to generate these. And while it's great that WordPress will be bundling this in, here's why you should consider not using it. For one, it's not as easy as just upgrading to the next WordPress version. You will have to get your web admin to install a PHP extension at the server level. Some hosting providers like GoDaddy say they've

Starting point is 00:08:30 pre-installed that extension for their customers, but it's still a level of complexity that some web devs just will not want to get into, especially if they have an existing sitemap plugin working just fine. Not only that, your existing plugin is probably better than what WordPress has planned. The WordPress version lacks sitemaps for images or video or Google News content. Yes, the new sitemap system will be extendable so you can add plugins to it to bolt on those additions, but my guess is most brands will just stick to Yoast or whatever they're doing now because those are working pretty damn well. By the way, Facebook is rolling out yet another design UI to its ad manager.

Starting point is 00:09:15 All the time, hey? And if you have this new version, you might have noticed that, at least for some people, the option to switch business managers is now gone. If this is happening to you, it's not actually gone. It's just kind of hidden. It'll be under a new icon on the left. You're looking on the left-hand side, third icon down. There you go. I just saved you four hours.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Oh, one more little glitchy thing. Some platforms like Hootsuite reporting this afternoon that LinkedIn targeting appears to be on the fritz right now. It's called the hamburger, and it is one of the most common website elements. I know you've seen it. It's those three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other. And it means click this to expand out a menu. The design meant to suggest a list of items on a restaurant menu.

Starting point is 00:10:06 We actually know who invented this ubiquitous little UI element. It was designed by a guy named Norm Cox back in the 80s. He worked for Xerox at the time. It wasn't called a hamburger back then. He called it a road sign in some documentation, an air vent in others. And sometimes he used the incredibly catchy container for contextual menu choices, but now we all call it the hamburger and Burger King is taking advantage of

Starting point is 00:10:32 that moniker with a clever social media campaign. They are sending a coupon for a Whopper burger and a code for free delivery to anyone who screenshots any hamburger icon they find online and DMs it to Burger King's Instagram account. This campaign, sadly for most of us, is only available in Chile. In that country, fast food sales have dropped more than 10% since the emergence of COVID-19. Well my thanks to the username Black Swan. Somewhere in Canada. Who reviewed this podcast on iTunes.

Starting point is 00:11:12 Saying straight to the latest news. That is relevant to our organization. Highly recommended. Thank you Black Swan for that review. If you'd like a shout out too. All you have to do is rate and review this podcast yourself. You'll find a link in this episode. That makes that super easy. Or just go to ratethispodcast.com slash today. And this is the 200th episode of Today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:11:33 I started it in mid-September of last year. This is what the first ever episode sounded like. It's Monday, September 16th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, Facebook may be shutting down. That opening theme music, by the way, only lasted for one episode by the next day i had already replaced it it's tuesday september 17th 2019 i'm todd maffin on today's show a big opportunity and if you get any value from this daily news show i'd really appreciate it if you would tweet or post about the show if you swipe to wherever the show notes are in your podcast app, you'll find a section there called Help Spread the Word. There's a link in there that will preview a pre-written tweet that you can post or you can edit first and post, of course. I'd really appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:12:13 Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. More breaking news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - 200: The End of Likes on Facebook Brand Pages?

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