Today in Digital Marketing - Another One Bytes The Dust

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Your Facebook Page’s organic impressions are about to drop Snapchat is testing Dynamic Ads A new way to control how your brand’s web site appears in Google. And another early web site heads off to the great server in the sky. The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Use the hashtag #TiDM to discuss what you hear on today's episode. 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 • Instagram • 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

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Thursday, October 17th, 2019. Happy National Pass today. Be protected. Be Zen. website appears in Google, and another early website heads off to the great server in the sky. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. All right, let us start with the bad news, social media managers. Your Facebook organic impressions may be dropping soon. Facebook saying today it is updating the way they filter repeat organic page impressions to be more aligned with how they measure ad impressions.

Quoting Facebook, We will be updating the time frame for which we filter out repeat organic impressions from the same person. As a result, you may see less organic impressions for your page and posts. It is important to note that this change does not affect distribution. Other engagement metrics, including reach and engagement, should remain the same, unquote. This change started to roll out today, and it'll keep rolling out until October 28th. Facebook says only then should you really check your metrics for any change.

If you have an e-commerce catalog and target young people, listen up. Snapchat is testing dynamic ads, and the test is open to all advertisers, although the ads will only reach American users. If you're not familiar with dynamic ads, basically you hook up your catalog with product names, descriptions, images, and prices, and Snapchat will automatically insert that data into the ad creative. Something like, hey, check out our insert product name here. On now for insert price here. These can be very powerful, and Facebook has had this as an ad product for ages now.

Snapchat already has some templates to get you started, and they say the connection to your product catalog is live, so when you update price or availability, the ad will adjust as well. Although it is open to all advertisers, you need to contact your SnapRep if you want to be part of the beta. This is the week Google's new search snippets come out. The new markup now lets you control how your brand looks in Google's search snippets. That's the small linked content under your brand's webpage listing. What can you change? How long a snippet is, how long a video preview plays for, and how big thumbnail images are.

Snippets are generated automatically, which isn't always what you want. Well, now you can also block specific text from showing up, if that's your jam. Brand managers who have already tweaked their markup will see those changes show up in Google by the end of the month. Remember, this only controls the appearance of your brand's listing in Google, not its position. Another placement added to Facebook's automatic placements, the catch-all, where it runs ads in all sorts of places, now it includes Instagram's Explorer page.

Ads that end up in Explorer will run in the feed that shows up after users tap a photo or video. I have to say, I was really skeptical of automatic placements for a long time. I figured it was more about, you know, hey, let's dump this ad where we have leftover inventory. But I have to say, I've come around on it a bit. When we use automatic placements for clients, in most cases, not all cases, but in most cases, it really does seem to first test which placement works and then spends the money in the winning places, not just the available places. Well, now there is one more place. And while it's not yet in automatic placements, Facebook is trying ads in the Groups tab. This is a very limited test.

Only a tiny number of advertisers have access to this placement. But if you have it, it's important to know that you have to select Facebook feed and group feed options. Remember, this is only about putting ads in the groups area in the app. Sadly, targeting people by their group membership is still not a thing. On LinkedIn, sure. Facebook, not yet. If you have this, it's probably worth testing, especially considering how much priority Facebook seems to be putting behind groups. Some people are noticing that Facebook is testing suggested time posts. So when you go to schedule a post, to be clear, we're talking about doing this natively on their site. More on that in a second. You can either schedule to a specific time or date, like you always have, or Facebook will try to schedule it for, quote, when your fans were most active last week. But about that schedule button, Facebook ads expert John Loomer was one of the first to notice that you can't actually schedule a post on your brand's page anymore. Now all you can do is backdate, publish

now, or save draft. So how do you schedule a post and try this suggested time thingy? Well, now you have to go into publishing tools in your Facebook page, then creator studio, and then create post. It seems Facebook really wants us to use creator studio. We get it, Zuck. We get it. And finally, one of the last granddaddies of the Web 1.0 is shutting down. Yes, Yahoo Groups is going away this Monday forever. All group content will be removed on December 14th. Travel well, sweet prince. Say hi to Friendster for me.

Wow, that got dark. Okay, time for the lightning round. Jane Wong discovered that Instagram is testing giving brands the ability to restrict people who are underage from viewing their Instagram account. Twitter is testing out emoji reactions in direct messages. And Buffer had a bug yesterday where some users couldn't tag Facebook pages or Instagram locations. Earlier this afternoon, they announced bug squashed. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in the podcast, just tweet with the hashtag TIDM. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by EngageQ.com. Thank you. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of today in digital dot com. And I'll see you tomorrow.