Today in Digital Marketing - 96: 🍸 Your Social Media Manager Needs a Stiff Drink.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, February 13th, 2020. Happy World Radio Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Agora Pulse adds a nice new feature for agencies, but there's a catch. Google will be making it harder to maintain your partner status soon, and Facebook adds some tools for groups, but not the one tool we all actually want.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you are a social media community manager, well, it's been a day, hasn't it? Late yesterday afternoon, a big chunk of Facebook's API went down, specifically the part that allows third-party tools to reply to Facebook comments. So whether you're on Buffer Reply or Agorapulse or Hootsuite or Sprout Social or really any service like that, you weren't able to reply to comments. At all. And as of the time I'm taping this, about 3 o'clock Pacific time, it's still out. You know, it's times like this that you really learn about these third-party providers. How timely and honest are they with their status updates?

Starting point is 00:01:13 We use Sprout Social here at our agency for engagement and moderation. We got their alert pretty much right at the start of it all. It read, Facebook is currently experiencing difficulties with posting replies to messages in the inbox. We are monitoring the situation. All that is true. Compare that to Hootsuite, which, as far as I was able to tell, didn't even note on their status page that there were problems until late this morning. And, gotta be honest, I find their update a little disingenuous. It says, in part,

Starting point is 00:01:42 Our teams are working with Facebook to determine a solution. No, they're not. That's not how these bugs work. Facebook doesn't crash, then the first thing they do is call Hootsuite to ask for help. No, Hootsuite, like everyone else, is monitoring the bug report thread on Facebook's developer site. I have it up in a tab. And we're all waiting. That's all any of us can do. In the meantime, if you are stuck in this bug, remember you can always click the timestamp in your tool's comment inbox to jump to that comment on the Facebook platform and respond there.

Starting point is 00:02:18 If you manage social media profiles for agency clients, or maybe your boomer boss, how do you currently collaborate on social content? By sending spreadsheets back and forth? Emailing screenshots? Agorapulse has launched a better way, one that doesn't give your clients access to your whole dashboard. They're called shared calendars. Each of these new calendars has a URL where your clients or boss can view all your scheduled, published, to approve and rejected content. They've given all their users a chance to try a demo version of a shared calendar. The demo

Starting point is 00:02:52 version gives you one social profile and one calendar user. You'll find it in your organization settings. There's no time restriction on this demo calendar, so you can use it as long as you like. But there is a catch. This is not going to be part of your subscription fee. If you want these shared calendars, you've got to pay extra. 19 bucks US or 19 euros per month. That does give you unlimited users and as many social profiles as your main plan allows for. And these users don't count against the user limits of your Agorapulse subscription. But I'm a little disappointed by Agorapulse here.

Starting point is 00:03:31 What digital marketers want are consistency in their costs, and nobody likes to feel like they're being nickel-and-dimed. Why isn't this just bundled into their main service as a way to distinguish themselves from pretty much the rest of the crowd that doesn't have this actually quite awesome feature. Or, hey, even kick it up to their mid or high price tiers. Also, and I don't mean to piss all over Hootsuite today, but this reminds me of Hootsuite's reporting and analytics system. Back in the day, you'd get like really basic analytics. And you wanted to add say a chart of some other numbers you had to buy analytics points so one report might end up costing you like 30 or 40

Starting point is 00:04:11 or 50 bucks in these points in fact this may still be the way it is over there i really have no idea because we don't use them agorapulse's new shared calendars look really solid and it's definitely going to be nice for agencies i just wish they hadn't made it an add-on cost. Another thing for agencies, the requirements for being a Google partner are changing come June, and it's not changing for the better. They're launching a whole new partners program, in fact, and some of these new requirements will be harder to get. Quoting WeAreSM.com, performance will be based on whether an account adopts the optimization score recommendations, as opposed to retention of a company's clients or a company's growth

Starting point is 00:04:56 in revenue and the number of advertisers. Many professionals prefer not to follow score recommendations, so this is going to be a problem for them. The minimum ad spend for partners doubles to $20,000 from $10,000 in the last 90 days. For some, this is not going to be an issue, but it makes it more difficult for companies that are just starting out to enter the partner program. And at least 50% of users must have updated their Google Ads certifications in search, display, video, and shopping. 50% of users.

Starting point is 00:05:31 It used to be one affiliate user certified. Yikes. I suppose if you're a big agency, those hurdles aren't very high for you. This is probably good news, as it'll almost certainly winnow down the number of competing partner agencies. But if you're a small group like we are here, definitely not what we all wanted to hear. Over on the ads side of Google, you can now see annotations in your change history report and reporting data within Google Ads. This is actually really cool. You'll find little cards pop up when you hover over, and clicking the link inside those cards will highlight additional information.

Starting point is 00:06:08 You might use this to indicate when a complimentary or supporting campaign kicked in, or something like that. There's also new highlighted audience lists, optimization goals, and asset changes. You'll find that under the performance charts. If your brand runs a Facebook group, and it has a lot of moderators and admins, Facebook is adding some tools to make all that more manageable. They're testing a new stream called Top Admins and Moderators. Facebook says, Many of you have shared that you utilize the admin activity log

Starting point is 00:06:45 to see which admin and moderator has done what, but that there was not really an easy way to see the number of actions taken by each team member. To help admins more easily understand how their teams are contributing to daily tasks in their groups, we are introducing a new admin and moderator detail section within Group Insights. Again, this is mostly for large groups, but it's a nice touch.

Starting point is 00:07:08 All that said, if anyone from Facebook is listening, let me speak on behalf of my entire listenership here when I say the only thing we really need from Facebook groups is their inclusion in your comments API. Let third-party tools surface,, reply and react to comments and posts inside groups. And for that matter, events just like we can on pages. That is all we want. Also, please put Instagram DMs in the API while you're at it. Okay, thanks. Bye. So after I crowed rather arrogantly yesterday

Starting point is 00:07:46 about how I've kept this podcast ad free, except for a single ad that I used mostly to show you how this new podcast advertising market Podcorn worked, right after I published yesterday, I got a pitch. An agency had a couple of clients in mind for running ads here. I'm a little conflicted. Like, I want to keep this podcast short and punchy and a really good use of your time. I mean, we all know there are plenty of, I call them ramble casts, you know, those podcasts that just go on forever and ever. And I don't want to be that. But these people have money and it's in American currency, which for us Canadians is especially nice. If I do go the ad route, though, I really

Starting point is 00:08:25 want to try to make it affordable for really small upstart services, not the big, big, big names. So I'm giving thought to doing these as classified ads. So for like, I don't know, 50 bucks, you get up to 75 words or something that I read out at the end of an episode. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Please tweet me. Let me know if you think that's an okay idea. I really haven't made up my mind yet, but I promise you one thing. I will only allow ads on for services that I have used or I believe in, and I will never plug a mobile game unless they have a lot of money. If you get value from this daily news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple 10-second process. Radio personality Buzz Bishop from Calgary used that process yesterday and reviewed us saying, it's an informative and clever rundown of digital marketing news. Thank you, Buzz. Happy World Radio Day, my friend.

Starting point is 00:09:21 No plug for my agency as we are still at max client capacity for now. So follow me on social. Links to my channel are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 96: 🍸 Your Social Media Manager Needs a Stiff Drink.

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