Today in Digital Marketing - A Deep Dive Into the TikTok Algorithm

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

On today’s show: Want your brand on TikTok? We break down its algorithm today Instagram is opening the door a little more to AR ads How do you get on the Instagram Explore feed? Hubspot has a couple of nice tactics. And these two clickbait companies merged and you won’t BELIEVE what happened next!!!!! The Premium feed, with monthly deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Facebook • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, hey, happy Friday, October 4th. It's Todd Maffin, and here's what's on today's show. You want your brand on TikTok? We will break down its algorithm today. Instagram is opening the door a little to AR ads. How do you get on the Instagram Explorer feed? HubSpot has a couple of nice tactics for marketers. And these two clickbait companies merged, and you won't believe what happened next. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Just in time for the holiday season, Instagram is letting more brands into its augmented reality program.

This week, cosmetics and eyewear brands are now about to be able to use AR in ads. That's where someone could virtually try on a pair of glasses or see what a shade of lipstick would look like on them. Instagram says in time it'll roll the feature out for more verticals. But one very cool touch here. After users try on the product, they'll be able to share the results directly to an Instagram story. And that story will link back to the original product. HubSpot has a solid post on its blog breaking down the Instagram Explore algorithm. That's the Explore tab on the app, the icon's little magnifying glass.

Like most social platforms, Explore serves up things it thinks that each individual user will be interested in. Watch an Instagram video of Honda, and you'll probably see a couple of competing car brands in there within a day or so. But some other things HubSpot has noticed. Videos are getting more distribution. Reposts don't perform well. Tagging other accounts helps. And it does seem to offer up more posts that are related to trending topics or memes. You can read their full post at blog.hubspot.com slash marketing.

It looks like YouTube is testing a way for creators to block their account from marketers hoping to turn their content into an ad. Jane Wong, who reverse engineers code to track early testing among tech brands, found a new checkbox option reading only linked Google Ads accounts can use my videos as ads. Was this a problem before?

Were us dirty marketers just stealing YouTube videos to use as ads? News to me. Some good news and bad news at Facebook. First, the bad news. At our agency, we spotted a weird bug in Facebook's ad platform. When you create a messenger campaign and add some default questions like, where is your office or what are your hours, a couple of our recent campaigns have dropped the custom questions we added

and put the default ones back in. I don't know if that's just us or if it's a wider issue, but maybe if you use Messenger campaigns, give them a quick once-over before the weekend. But there is good news. David Herman spotted a new product optimization for Facebook product catalog ads. Now, right now, your options, of course, are link clicks or impressions. But David found conversion events in his ads manager, apparently focusing on people likely to take an action when they see a product from your catalog.

This could be a big deal coming up in the holiday season. Two rivals in the content recommendation space have merged, Outbrain and Taboola. You may not know those names, but you certainly know their work. They're behind the headlines on websites like, see what the cast of Full House looks like now, and you won't believe what this mango does to skin. Now that they've merged, what can us marketers expect? Well, maybe with some savings from eliminating redundancy, we might see an

upgraded media buying platform or even new products like, who knows, AR video ads. God help us all. Either way, two of the biggest players merging never seems to make prices cheaper, does it? Okay, lightning round. Social ad automation platform Revealbot has launched what it calls strategies, essentially templates like increase the budget if we've spent half and we're getting a good return, or increase my bid if the ad set steams solved. Google Shopping has added price drop alerts and filters for products and stores local to the buyer. Looks like the upgrades are only in the US for now.

I may have missed this before, so it may not actually be new, but I'd never seen it. LinkedIn now has an option in the little pull-down arrow on each post to notify your company's employees about a post. Apparently, you can only do it once a week, but if your job includes internal marketing, maybe check that out. Looks like Twitter will soon be adding a simpler way to search for tweets by engagement. You can now already search by how many retweets or likes a tweet has, but it's a little convoluted to get there. Looks like they'll be making it simpler. And finally, step aside Instagram. TikTok is capturing the hearts and minds of the planet's teens these days. But how do you as a brand content person get to the front of the algorithm?

Is there even an algorithm at all? Earlier this week, I spoke with TikTok consultant Michael Sanchez. Major brands have sought out Michael's findings on how TikTok works, and he has taken client accounts from zero to millions of followers. Our full conversation was more than 45 minutes, but here's a short clip. If you do have a lot of people come to your profile and interact and engage and stuff like that,

it can skew the algorithm. So let's say, for example, I make a TikTok- But don't we want that? No, because the thing that you really want, let's say like right now I put it out there and one of my TikTok profiles you land to, let's say 3,000 people land to and follow it. That skews my data. So here's like a really quick breakdown.

So there's almost like a personality trait for your profile. So everything that you interact with, everybody that's interacting with you, that's like a personality trait that the algorithm is building on you. But each individual profile also like a personality trait that the algorithm is building on you. But each individual profile also has a personality trait. So let's say, for example, your profile, you only interact with cars and mechanics and stuff like that. If you were to come to my profile and start interacting with my content, your attributes start to reflect onto my profile and then my content starts to go shown to your people. So that's generally why I don't say it publicly.

Like I'll say it in the Facebook group, people will ask because it's a little bit smaller. But if I was to have a rush of 5,000 entrepreneurs join it, now my content's gonna be shown to more entrepreneur or like marketing people. And maybe the profile I gave is geared towards like giving good messages or positivity or whatever. It's not gonna resonate.

And you will absolutely see either a bump if you do it to the right people or a big decline on your viewership. Like just because it's not going to resonate. And I, you will absolutely see either a bump if you do it to the right people or a big decline on your viewership. Like just cause it's like, it's starting to cause algorithm things like, Hey, 5,000 new people joined. They watched your video. Let's start showing it to their audience. They might be interested in this. And then you're like, Oh, you're a new profile. And the only thing you've interacted with is funny baby videos. And now my video that's talking about like, you know, cryptocurrency or whatever is being shown to like moms who like baby videos. In our full conversation, Michael talks about the ad pricing model TikTok uses,

what kinds of campaigns are available for brands, why ad pricing is ridiculously cheap right now. And on the organic side, he breaks down how virality works on the platform, how to control commenting and dueting. That's a thing. And we talk about where he thinks TikTok will be five years from now. The full uncut interview is on the new premium feed, which you can subscribe to at patreon.com slash today in digital. I plan to do one of these deep algorithm dives each month with experts in the platforms. And for five bucks a month, you will be in that club. You can download the MP3, play it right on the site, or get your own

personalized premium podcast feed that you can add to your podcast player just like you did for this one. Again, the premium feed is at patreon.com slash today in digital. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. If you're listening to this on the web and have not yet subscribed, you will find direct one-click links to your podcast app at bit.ly slash today in digital. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on Twitter at T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N. Have a great weekend. I'll see you on Monday.