Today in Digital Marketing - 98: Will Users Be Able to Opt-OUT of Facebook’s Algorithm Soon?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. One quick note before we get started on the podcast today. There is some profanity in here, more than my usual smattering. So heads up if there are some ears that shouldn't hear those words. It is Tuesday, February 18th, 2020. Happy American Wine Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, wait, we can jam more into H1 tags? Is Facebook backing off their algorithm? And did your Facebook ad account get shut down on the weekend? You are not alone. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Last week, I reported on Google's changes to their partners program, changes that will probably make it harder for most agencies to qualify. There was, as you'd expect, some blowback, and so Google has now tweeted a

Starting point is 00:00:45 kind of retraction. They said, quote, it's clear our announcement on changes to the Google Partners program didn't fully address all the questions and concerns from our partner community, so we've provided more information in this article, unquote. So you click the link, you expect a more clear and perhaps more accessible program prerequisites, and you would be disappointed. The link was basically just reiterating the same stringent requirements only in a pretty table this time. Although they do seem to have made one welcome change, they have lowered the performance requirements to 70%, meaning partners only need to adopt 70% of the recommended performance changes. That's down from 100%, so still not great, but I suppose better than nothing.

Starting point is 00:01:38 Still on Google for a while, and I recognize this is a little nerdy, but it's quite important, actually, if you do any SEO. Google's John Mueller, who is the answer bot for the search engine, John this weekend said on Twitter that text within an image's alt attribute generally adopts whatever tag it happens to be in. We're talking about a tag other than image, of course. Why is this a big deal? Because it seems to be the first time that Google is confirming that any header tags you apply to an image that has some alt text in it, those header tags pass on to the alt text. So if you've got an H1 header, which is of course a highly ranked bit of text, and you want to get a couple of more keywords in there, John, at least to the way I'm reading this, seems to be suggesting that putting the image code inside the H1 header tag and using some alt text that that alt text would also rank as H1. Very interesting. Either way, it is something you can play with.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Reports are surfacing that there is a new ransomware scheme out there. This one targeting AdSense publishers. Those are the websites that display your display ads. It comes in an email, of course, saying that you have 72 hours to pay $5,000 in Bitcoins or else they will send random fake traffic to the website, thus denying the AdSense earnings that they would have made. There are easy ways to see if this is a hoax. For one, the email doesn't come from a Google.com address. It comes from like protomail or

Starting point is 00:03:06 protomail or something like that. If you happen to get one of these, just delete it. An interesting test apparently underway in the Facebook mobile app shows that they are experimenting with letting people change the way they view the news feed. This could change up whether people see their feed through the standard Facebook algorithm or kind of bypass it. And it has potentially big implications for you and me as a digital marketer. In addition to a feed called Most Relevant, which is all that we have today, apparently they are testing adding a most recent stream so you can view them in reverse chronological format, and a stream called Already Seen, which you can use to check out a post that has already been shown on your feed.

Starting point is 00:03:52 By the way, that latter stream, Already Seen, actually has been available on desktop since forever at the URL facebook.com slash seen. Just most people don't know that that ever existed. This sounds a lot like Twitter's implementation. The official mobile Twitter app lets you select home, which is the algorithm, or latest tweets, which seems to have no algorithmic influence and just simply the tweets from the accounts you follow in reverse chronological order. This is the one that I have mine set to. Sadly, on the Twitter app, even if you select latest tweets, it only stays like that for about a day or two.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Eventually, it pops you back onto the algorithmic feed. But if Facebook does launch this, this could have an impact on digital marketing. For the last couple of years, the time of day that you publish content on Facebook hasn't really been a huge deal because Facebook will show it when it thinks it should appear in the news feed. And that time was selected based on a whole bunch of algorithmic stuff like engagement levels and so on. But if people can select a purely reverse chronological feed, we may be back to the days of making sure that you can pinpoint when most of your audience is online, because in that scenario, there won't be much of an algorithm to control it. And your post times may change, perhaps dramatically.

Starting point is 00:05:13 Anyway, as I said, this is just in testing, but if Facebook does roll it out, something to pay attention to. Seeing an increase in reports of Facebook ad accounts being disabled, or pages suddenly unable to run ads. One member of a Facebook ads group I'm in said, quote, I opened up the laptop yesterday during Monday meetings and was met by the message that my advertising access was restricted. Not allowed to create, manage or run any advertisements or manage any ad resources on the Facebook platform. My campaigns were still activated and I had access to everything over the weekend. And for this very podcast, this podcast has a Facebook brand page. And really all I do with it is post the daily highlights of what's on the show.

Starting point is 00:06:04 And of course, this is the page that I run ads for the podcast on. So imagine my surprise when I checked on a campaign I have running and it had been stopped and now says this ad was turned off because this page is no longer allowed to advertise due to multiple violations of our advertising policies or other standards. Excuse me, what? There were no policy violations ever. Not one. It's a boring promotional page for an even more boring podcast. So I've appealed it and we'll see if that goes anywhere. But just a reminder, this does happen from time to time, way more on Facebook than any other platform I've seen. And usually, if you can appeal it, or talk to a rep, or chat with one of their support people,

Starting point is 00:06:51 it clears out. But it does take a couple of days. So while Facebook will shut down advertising from regular small pages like mine, one thing that they won't do is stop politicians from running ads that are factually untrue. They say they don't want to be the arbiter of truth. But in a turnaround, now they say they will crack down on, wait for it, memes. Yes, memes. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Facebook has this week updated its guidelines in order to make it compulsory for political candidates to disclose any partnerships with influencers who post memes or similar content on their behalf. On Instagram in particular, Facebook will now require that such arrangements be implemented via Instagram's branded content ads, which will add a clear paid partnership with label to those posts, unquote. It turns out this all

Starting point is 00:07:44 came about because Michael Bloomberg, who is running to be the American Democratic presidential nominee, he partnered with a group called, I kid you not, Meme 2020. This group is commissioning memes from Instagram influencers in order to maybe help connect with younger voters or something, something we're hip to the internet too. Anyway, so if you are playing the home game,

Starting point is 00:08:12 memes bad, lies fine. On Friday, I told you about 14-year-old Jalilah Harmon, the girl who came up with the choreography behind the Renegade Dance. It is incredibly popular on TikTok. Now she's not really seeing any recognition from it. Well, things have changed. Over the weekend, Jalilah performed it at the NBA All-Star Game in Chicago in front of the whole crowd. And then the cheerleaders came out and joined her.

Starting point is 00:08:40 By the way, they were not very good at it. And then she ran off court high-fiving people on her way out. It was kind of awesome. And finally, you may have heard about HQ Trivia. Coming to you live from the Big Apple, the Diet Snapple, the city so nice they named it New York. Joined by over 1.7 million HQties. A year ago, it was hugely popular. It was a game show on mobile phones, and twice a day, hundreds of thousands of people dropped what they were doing and played this game. You could win actual money by guessing right.

Starting point is 00:09:12 They gave away a lot of prize money. Too much, as it turns out. The company behind HQ Trivia shut down Friday after announcing that they had just run out of cash, and more importantly, they'd run out of people willing to give them more cash. So they had one last show. And to start it, they got hammered. We're really shutting down. It's really happening. Although we've come to the end of the world. The whole stupefyingly glorious thing is on YouTube. The two hosts basically spend 45 minutes bad-mouthing ownership,

Starting point is 00:09:55 asking people for jobs, just generally being quite entertaining, actually. My favorite quote from the night, here, by the way, is where the profanity I mentioned at the top comes in. If you just got here, this is HQ trivia. It's a live mobile game show. We're going to read about 34 questions and then you're going to win about two cents and you're going to fucking love it. What a way to go out. Well, if you get value from this daily podcast, please take a moment to rate and review it.

Starting point is 00:10:23 You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a very simple 10 second process. Irish Cham in Ireland said, informative, funny and downright fab. If you struggle to keep up to date with the almost daily changes in social media, then look no further. Thank you very much, Irish Cham. Again, no plug for my agency here as we are at max capacity right now. So follow me on social links to my channels are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Baffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 98: Will Users Be Able to Opt-OUT of Facebook’s Algorithm Soon?

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