Today in Digital Marketing - 203: Does Facebook Even WANT Our Money?! 😡

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, digital agencies are pivoting because of the pandemic, at zensurance.com. Happy Independence Day, Peru. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. In yet another apparent attempt at alienating every single brand advertiser, Facebook has once again changed its ads manager.

Starting point is 00:01:05 And I know this will shock you, but that change is not for the better. This is a minor thing to be sure, but it's something that most digital marketers who run Facebook ads do every single day, sometimes several times a day. I'm talking about using the links that say moderate Facebook comments and moderate Instagram comments. Those links are still there, but, and here's the change, they no longer open in a new tab. You can't copy the URL, you can't right-click it, you can't command or control click it. No, once you click, you are going to lose your position in the ads manager. Or I guess you could click the link, wait for the page to load, copy the URL, close the tab, reload ads manager, open a second tab, and then manually paste the moderation link. In case you've run across this, there is a workaround, but of course, it's a little hidden.

Starting point is 00:01:48 What you do is open the ad in question in the full screen panel, and at the very top right, you will see three dots. Click those, go to more options, and you'll find the moderation links again, but these will open up in a new tab. At least for now, don't tell Facebook we found these. They're liable to screw with those too. On the bright side, custom metrics are now available in the ads manager. So if you'd rather see your numbers like the clicks to purchase ratio or average order value, you can now create those special metrics and drop them into your regular ads dashboard. To say that digital marketing agencies have had to pivot in the last few months is, well,

Starting point is 00:02:29 an understatement. At my agency, we worked with a number of shopping centers and single-day sport events, both of which completely shut down, which meant no revenue for partners like us. We were lucky in that our bread and butter has always been handling the engagement and moderation for small and medium-sized brands, but not all agencies were as lucky. A new study from IPV shows how some other digital agencies are repositioning, and most of them are doing it with video. 62% of creative agencies polled told IPV they expect to ramp up the number of video productions in the near future, which, as Marketing Dive noted this morning,

Starting point is 00:03:09 should be welcome news for brands as consumers' video viewership grows during the lockdown. One agency did this pivot by buying professional lighting rigs for their staff members, signed up for a cloud video service as well so everyone could share their work. It's not just agencies. Brand marketers have had to rethink how they do video as well. In the case of Chrysler, they had an actress shoot her parts on her iPhone as she was being given instructions from the director back in their office. I've always really liked Agorapulse. Reasonable pricing, a pretty full set of features, clear user interface, and the customer service is pretty quick. One of the big gaps they've always had, though, has been in their reporting. For the longest time, you couldn't even get a PDF report. It would only generate PowerPoint files. But worse, there was no way to see channel data in a single aggregated form. After all,

Starting point is 00:03:54 if you want to get a snapshot of your brand's fan growth across your social media channels, you kind of want to see that as a single chart showing your overall fan growth. Well, they've improved that reporting now, but there's a catch. First, the details. Yes, you can now see data across all of your social channels in a single chart, which is great. This is something that other platforms have, of course. Sprout Social calls this their cross-channel profile performance report. And you can schedule those reports now to be automatically sent weekly or monthly. One especially nice improvement is you can compare time periods now beyond the standard last month or last seven days. There's a custom option now. What's the catch?

Starting point is 00:04:31 Sadly, this doesn't appear to be part of their main package. This will be an add-on called Power Reports. They say you can use it for free now until this September when I assume you'll have to pay if you want to use them after that. I reached out to the company for clarity on what that pricing will be and have not yet heard back. Still ahead, Facebook makes it easier for brands to broadcast live shows, a new Google feature that will showcase your products much more prominently, and another strike against TikTok. Is the end coming? That's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues.

Starting point is 00:05:13 So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm, a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. And that is where my agency, EngageQ, can come in. We've handled the social engagement for dozens of brands. We start with a brand briefing to collect the info we need, answers to the most common questions, and an escalation path. Thank you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's

Starting point is 00:06:11 engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast section. LinkedIn has a new resource out for business owners with some ideas of how companies can set themselves up for recovery post-pandemic. The resource is a 12-page e-book. It contains five sections, brand building, strategic planning, change management, media planning, and message planning. For each section, they detail some steps you can take with the tips based on what brands have learned from past economic downturns. Facebook is continuing to nip at the heels of Zoom, now with a new feature that digital marketers could use for their brands or clients if they wanted to do a live broadcast. Now you can go live directly from Messenger rooms.

Starting point is 00:06:59 Facebook's content suggestions include a book club, or an interview of a panel of experts, a live fitness class, and so on. To make this work, if you want to, just create a room from Facebook or Messenger on desktop and invite up to 50 guests. Then you get a special link that will let people watch that broadcast, even if they don't have a Facebook account. The company says live broadcasts have doubled in the last year, most of that growth coming since the start of the pandemic lockdowns in the spring. This is still rolling out, so you might not have it yet, but it is coming. Really interesting test underway right now with Google results. You know when people search for a type of business and then they get that map pack at the top that has four or five different company results?

Starting point is 00:07:43 The test that some people are seeing is adding one very nice new feature to those company results. If the company has uploaded products through Google My Business, those products appear to the right of their listing as cards. And if a mobile user grabs the cards and pulls them out to the left, they get to see your products. It's a little thing, but it looks really quite nice. And I'll bet a lot of people will pull that product tray out when they see it.

Starting point is 00:08:05 All that to say, if you sell products, make sure you've added them to Google My Business. It's pretty easy. You just need an image and a little bit of text. Finally, more bad PR for TikTok. The Joe Biden campaign has told its staff members to delete the app from their personal and work phones. This, of course, because of fears that the app, which is majority owned by a Chinese national company, could be sending information back to the supreme great and benevolent leader. TikTok, for its part, says it never has, never will. You can imagine the Democratic Party is a little touchy over electronic things. If you recall, hackers got into the email of Hillary Clinton's

Starting point is 00:08:45 campaign chairman in the last election. That data got into the hands of Wikipedia, who leaked it. Many people think that was at least partly why she lost the election. Yes, it is Independence Day in Peru today. And tomorrow, they celebrate the establishment of the republic. Together, these two days are the most important national holidays in Peru today. And tomorrow, they celebrate the establishment of the republic. Together, these two days are the most important national holidays in Peru. Again, welcome to those of you who are new.

Starting point is 00:09:11 I do this podcast every weekday. If you are just listening to an episode now and you want to get this in your regular podcast app, be sure to subscribe. The full transcripts

Starting point is 00:09:19 to each episode are at todayindigital.com. Links to more information about each story are in this episode's notes. And follow me on social media. All my links are also in this episode's description. I'm Todd Baffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 203: Does Facebook Even WANT Our Money?! 😡

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