Today in Digital Marketing - 95: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Facebook?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 TV's Wednesday, February 12th, 2020. Happy Darwin Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, will the next TV show you watch be in vertical format? A powerful YouTube discovery tool launches for social media content managers, but it is not for the faint of budget. WhatsApp is way, way bigger than you think. And Facebook plans to launch a satellite into

Starting point is 00:00:26 orbit next month in a move that is totally not creepy am i right here's what you missed today in digital marketing when mark zuckerberg bought instagram a few years back and paid a billion dollars for it a lot of people thought that's way too much money. But looking at that acquisition through today's lens, it seems to be the deal of the decade. Especially now with word that Instagram now attracts a larger audience than Facebook among the world's top 50 brands. The data was released by Socialbakers yesterday. They also found that engagement on both Instagram and Facebook posts actually dropped last holiday season. So maybe those brands haven't quite figured out yet how to break through the clutter in that busy period. Mobile Marketer has a great breakdown of the study.

Starting point is 00:01:17 They say ad spend on Instagram stories rose 40% from a year earlier to reach 10% of Instagram's total ad spend at the end of Q4. Spending on Facebook Stories also grew, but by less than half of 1%. Facebook's core news feed still leads with about 58% of total ad spend. As for formats, about 70% of brand videos on Facebook were horizontal. This I find strange strange to be honest. Here at my agency at least we switched to almost everything square videos on all channels except stories obviously and continue to see great results from those. Really the only time we use a horizontal video is if the creative insists on it like there's important stuff to see on the extreme left and right.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Anyway, a link to the full report is in this episode's description. BuzzSumo, the content discovery tool, has added YouTube content and discovery data to its site. BuzzSumo is a great resource for social media content people. You basically type in a search term like your city name

Starting point is 00:02:23 or your product category, and it will return a list of content about that topic that has gone viral recently or gotten a lot of engagement. It's not the cheapest in the world, 79 bucks for the basic and quite limited package, but they do let you do a very simple search and get three results for free on their website, buzzsumo.com. As for this new YouTube feature, you input a keyword or phrase, it will then return the top content for that keyword, which you can sort by views, upvotes, downvotes, engagement, and a lot more videos

Starting point is 00:02:55 to excite and engage your community, or I suppose if you want to piss them off. But beyond that, you can also analyze the data to uncover things like how video length affects reach. And you can also search for YouTube influencers on any topic. But none of this is available at that basic pricing package I mentioned. You will need to pony up $300 a month US if you want that stuff. I probably don't have to tell you that the world is going vertical.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Smartphones are forcing a lot of things into the vertical format. In the last day or two, I've noticed a couple of interesting spin-outs from that trend. A web app called Once will let you create stories with interactive elements. We're talking the interactive tools you see on Instagram stories, like polls and countdowns and sliders. Yes, I said a web app. You create this on a desktop, but sadly, you can't export to Instagram and get those interactive elements. This app is only for the web. So the stories you create will appear on a web page. Not entirely clear to me

Starting point is 00:04:02 why you'd want that, but once you go to once.app You will be able to see what it looks like And a company called Queeby says it wants to become the Netflix of vertical They are signing content deals with TV producers To make episodes that will be viewed vertically But here's the cool part You can also flip your phone around and watch it in the traditional landscape Yes, they're essentially producing two dynamic versions of each episode.

Starting point is 00:04:28 So no matter what way you hold your phone, it will still look good. Quibi says it plans to launch April 6th. And a few platform updates in the lightning round today. Hootsuite has added auto-boosting for all Facebook posts. Automatically boosting ads without your intervention is, of course, a horrible idea, but it's there if you want it. Buffer has added Shopify reporting in their Analyze product. It's still pretty basic, but interesting to see them expand beyond the social channels. WhatsApp says it now has 2 billion users worldwide. For comparison, that puts it within spitting range

Starting point is 00:05:06 of Facebook's 2.5 billion users and more than double Instagram's following. And hey, this isn't creepy at all. Facebook says it will launch its own satellite into space next month. It has tried this before back in 2016, but the rocket exploded on the launch pad before takeoff. Why satellites?

Starting point is 00:05:25 They say that they will provide internet access to parts of the world with poor connectivity. Cool. I'm sure that's the only thing they'll use them for, right? Right? Well, Valentine's Day is coming Friday. I personally think Burger King has already won. They say that they will give a free burger to anyone who brings in a photo of their ex. Participating restaurants in four major American cities will have a breakup box into which you drop your photo and collect your Whopper.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Genius. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. Genius.

Today in Digital Marketing - 95: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Facebook?!

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