Today in Digital Marketing - All Your Video Timestamps Are Belong to Us

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

On today’s show: A BIG opportunity in video SEO comes to YouTube Adobe’s new artificial intelligence tool may make lives easier for social media content managers And some good news coming for brand managers who use Instagram.. And make a lot of typos. Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. 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. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's Tuesday, September 17th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, a big opportunity in video SEO comes to YouTube. Adobe's new artificial intelligence tool may make lives easier for social media content managers. And some good news coming for brand managers who use Instagram and make a lot of typos. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So do you make a lot of YouTube videos. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So do you make a lot of YouTube videos for your brands or clients? If so, there may be a huge new SEO opportunity opening up, but it'll take a little bit of work on your part, of course. Google announced this morning that it will start showing YouTube results a little differently. Now, below the main YouTube video

listing, users will see shortcuts to specific moments within a video, so they can jump in midway if they want. This could be huge for brands that make step-by-step videos or other content that has well-defined segments. This won't happen automatically, though. You'll need to create timestamped bookmarks for it to work. And it's not just on YouTube. The company says it's working with publishers like CBS Sports and NDTV to have their videos show up like that too. This, of course, potentially huge to marketers also in that it dramatically increases the real estate their listing takes up on the Google search results page, especially on mobile. And speaking of YouTube, we all know the YouTube comments section is pretty cancerous. Now the company says the solution is to show you more comments.

Sort of. From YouTube, quote, we're testing out a new feature where if you're reading a comment on a video, you can learn more about the commenter. It'll include recent comments left by this commenter on the channel within the last 12 months. It will not show comments that a viewer has left on other channels, but it will help you get a sense of what this person is writing. Unquote. You may recognize this as something Reddit does. You can see all an account's common history, though on Reddit, you can see all of them, no matter what subreddit they come from. Pinterest is quietly getting smarter. This morning, the company revealed it can now identify more than 2.5 billion fashion and home products. Why?

All to add the so-called shoppable pins to its visual search results. That's where users snap a picture of something, then Pinterest's AI goes out and finds that product in its index. This may not be great news for us product marketers, though, since the technology will also show potential shoppers items that are visually similar to your product. You know, your competitors. The updated lens camera search was released on Android this morning and will launch on iOS in the coming weeks.

Okay, lots of Facebook and Instagram news today. Big changes to Facebook's live video tool. They're adding rehearsals, essentially live videos that only page admins can see. That'll work even via third-party tools that use the live video API. They're also adding a trimming feature, thank God. This will let you chop off the start and ends of live videos before the replay is posted online. This is a great way to get rid of those 15 seconds of every damn Facebook live video in which the host stares blankly at the camera saying,

Are we live? Is this thing working? And in case this matters for you, you can now broadcast up to 8 hours live instead of the previous 4. Only a few select brands can do continuously live broadcasts. Live video, of course, continues to outperform pretty much all other types of posts in terms of engagements. And Facebook also updated its Creator Studio. Does anyone use this thing? Anyway, now you can schedule Instagram and IGTV posts in there, though I think most marketers these days are using third-party tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to do this.

And they've added a pretty chart showing you which of your videos are driving returning viewers. The big news, though, I thought, was mentioned only as an afterthought, and that's that Facebook says they're working on a way for you to edit live Instagram posts in the Creator Studio. So hopefully no more needing to pull out your smartphone to fix a typo on a client's account. Speaking of Instagram, don't worry if your brand has been ignoring IGTV. That's Instagram's in-app answer to YouTube. Monthly active user base there is about 1.3 million, and that hasn't really gone up or down.

Remember, Instagram as a whole has more than 1 billion monthly active users, meaning only about 1 in 1,000 Instagrammers ever check IGTV. This morning, I noticed Facebook rolled out a new page setting in case you care about this level of minutia. Now, when your brand's account is tagged in an Instagram story that's shared to Facebook, the Facebook story can automatically link to your page. You can turn that off if you want in page settings. This, of course, is only available for pages that are linked to a business profile or create an account on Instagram.

And finally, for Facebook Instagram news, are you ready for a new post type on Facebook? They are testing out a new chat post, which is essentially a shortcut to an existing group messenger chat. Sort of a, hey, we're chatting over here, get in here. So far, it's just being tested on personal pages, but if it makes its way to brand pages, it could provide a new opportunity for brands to start conversations around products with their customers. This is all still in testing, though. It may never see the light of day. Hey, some cool news. If you or your colleagues use Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe's launched a new auto reframe feature.

This lets you crop and resize videos for use on the different platforms. And it is AI driven. So it'll take its best guess at the crop you want and do it for you. Quoting WeAreSM.com, quote, it'll automatically identify the main action within a video, cropping and panning around the original footage to fit within social media's square, vertical or widescreen ratios, unquote. Pretty cool. Hey, agencies, don't be surprised if on your next client call they tell you they want to renegotiate your contract. The Association of National Advertisers says one third of advertisers

changed their agency contracts in the last year. Why? To tighten up language around whether the agency takes a commission on media buys like Facebook ads. About a quarter of agencies who responded to the ANA survey said they do mark up ad buys.

Social platform Agorapulse this morning released an ads reporting tool that can analyze the performance of your Facebook ad account and campaigns. They say the data is in real time. I've got my doubts about that, but we'll see. But the service is free. You don't need an Agorapulse account. I know what you're thinking. No way am I going to give you all my brand's account metrics and data. Agorapulse says they don't store any of your ad accounts data.

You can try it out for yourself if you're brave at adsreport.agorapulse.com. And finally, rumors are floating around Twitter today that Sprout Social has confidentially filed to go public. If it's true, it could happen before the end of the year. On the show tomorrow, a major study reveals that brands like you are overspending on Facebook and sometimes by a lot. And just a reminder, it's been 4,812 days since Twitter launched, and we still can't edit a damn tweet. That's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, brought to you by EngageQ. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.