Today in Digital Marketing - A HUGE Change to Twitter is Coming

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Wednesday, January 8th, 2020. Happy Orthodox Christmas Day, Moldova. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, the biggest change to Twitter since its launch. A great walkthrough of Facebook's learning phase. Good news for digital marketers in creative roles.

Starting point is 00:00:55 And handle all your brand's social engagement through Slack? Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Twitter is making a huge change to the way tweet replies will be handled. They are working on, and plan to release sometime this year, a way for you to restrict who can reply to your brand's tweets. A product manager at CES this morning showed off the new UI, quoting The Verge, it has four options, global, group, panel, and statement. Global lets anybody reply, much as it is now. Group is for people you follow and mention.

Starting point is 00:01:34 Panel is for people you specifically mention in the tweet. And statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies. This really is a big deal, though probably more for personal Twitter accounts than the brand accounts you and I work on. For instance, I'll be more free to call politicians asshats without their minions coming to roast me, although I have to say some of their roasts were pretty solid. Twitter says they are going to start experimenting with this in the next couple of months and plan to launch it globally later this year. As cool as that new Twitter feature is, it wouldn't have helped Teen Vogue, who found

Starting point is 00:02:12 themselves in a miserable tweet storm this morning. They'd published a piece about Facebook's efforts to protect its platform for the upcoming US election. Only the piece was what some old-school journalists would have called a puff piece. In other words, noticeably unjournalistic, with no byline. That prompted someone on Twitter to tweet, and I'm paraphrasing here, what the fuck? It became clear that the poor sod running Teen Vogue's Twitter account also wasn't in the loop, replying, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:45 literally IDK. That was the entire tweet reply from the Teen Vogue Twitter account. That's all it said. In other words, literally, I don't know. And then that reply was deleted. Then things got weird. First, the article got a this is sponsored content tag added to it, which I think everyone assumed anyway. Then Facebook said, wait, wait, wait, hold up. We didn't buy any sponsored content. This is editorial. So that tag was then taken off the piece.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Then the whole piece was pulled. Then their head of digital editorial tweeted an apology, throwing the entire sales and marketing team under the bus, calling them, quote, irresponsible. Oh, and then, just to put the nail in the coffin, he continued, quote, Oh, and fuck Facebook and Facebook Newsroom for using their billions earned from deceitful politicians and misinformation campaigns to attempt to buy their way into publications at Condé Nast, unquote. Dude, point made. Stop. All this happened this morning while you were at work. See what you miss?

Starting point is 00:03:53 Heads up if you run Facebook ads and find yourself in the special ad categories like housing, employment, credit, and the likes. Facebook has now set definitive deadlines for you to comply with their new process. On March 31st, all brands, either located in the U.S. or targeting Americans, that create ads about housing, employment, or credit opportunities must indicate whether their ads fit into those categories or the ad won't run at all.

Starting point is 00:04:20 This really shouldn't be a surprise to you. Facebook has had this as a checkbox on both the main ad manager and boost screens for months now. The main difference here is that once you check that box, some targeting options will disappear, even if you are using a third-party tool to run your ads. Another big change coming to Facebook, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've been paying attention to this podcast in the last few weeks, campaign-based optimization, sometimes known as CBO, will become mandatory starting next month. If you run small budget campaigns, say under a couple thousand a month, this really shouldn't have a huge impact on you. But if you're in direct response or you deal with large budgets, you will have to start thinking of things differently.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Andrew Foxwell has a course now available that can walk you through why Facebook is making this change, how your budgets will probably need to change, some advice as well on bidding, scaling, and creative optimization. There's a link to his course in this episode's description. There is no affiliate link, and this was not a sponsored mention. Among the other Facebook ad pros I trust, John Loomer has a great piece on his blog this morning about the all-important learning phase. That's the first chunk of any Facebook platform ad campaign where the algorithm tries to figure out who best to show your ad to.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Remember that in all optimizations, except reach, I suppose, Facebook is going to show your ad to a subset of your audience. The subset it figures is most likely to do what your optimization goal is, whether that's buy something, engage with the post, send you a private message or whatever. The learning phase is where Facebook figures all that out. Quoting John's piece, Facebook typically requires 50 desired actions, the action you are optimizing for, within an ad set during a seven-day period to exit the learning phase. Sometimes it happens faster. If you're optimizing for conversions, for example, your ad set will need to generate around 50 conversions during the initial seven-day period to exit the learning phase. While Facebook is in the process of learning, your results may be suboptimal.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Your cost per action won't be great, unless it's a situation where your results are so poor that you don't expect to exit the learning phase. Let it ride, unquote. Lots of really solid information here that Facebook itself doesn't do a great job explaining, so if you do really any Facebook advertising, John's piece is definitely worth a read. And there's a link in this episode's description.

Starting point is 00:06:53 Good news for those of you looking to switch jobs sometime soon. A study of 400 marketing managers of midsize companies show most plan to hire more people in a creative role in the first half of this year. That is to say, non-technical roles. Sorry, database admins. Only 2% of those polls say they're planning to freeze hiring or reduce the headcount. And what sort of skills are those firms looking for from you? The big ones mentioned were digital strategy, content creation, and social media management. By the way, literally the three things we do here at EngageQ. So I guess that's good. Anyway, a couple of random

Starting point is 00:07:36 things in the lightning round today. I found an interesting little app that claims to let you engage with people on your brand's Facebook and Twitter channels through Slack. Yes, the same process you're doing with any number of tools like Sprout Social or Buffer or Go or Pulse. Now this app will let you do through Slack. I have not tried it, so your mileage may vary. It is at shieldapp.io if you want to check it out. Daddy Facebook's at it again, knowing better than we do. We've noticed that Facebook now forces targeting expansion on for campaigns in which you optimize for value. Targeting expansion has been really hit or miss for us. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn't. But here is yet another example, like CBO, of Facebook just forcing things on us.

Starting point is 00:08:21 And finally, Google is testing user comments in search results about live TV shows, similar to how it currently does for live sport events. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to review this podcast. It only takes a second. It really does help, I promise. Quick instructions over at ratethispodcast.com slash today. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social links to my channels

Starting point is 00:08:53 and our agencies. And for the first time, this episode's full script and sources are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - A HUGE Change to Twitter is Coming

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