Today in Digital Marketing - Are All Your FB/IG Stories About to Be Cropped?

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Google tries its hand at social media again, if only barely Facebook’s change to vertical videos will impact a LOT of marketers Is TikTok about to change its name? A warning for those of you using Facebook’s dynamic ads The Premium feed, with exclusive 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. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] --- 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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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Monday, November 18th, 2019. Happy Mexican Revolution Day. Today, Google tries its hand at social media again, if only barely. Facebook's change to vertical videos may impact a lot of marketers. Is TikTok about to change its name? And a warning for those of you using Facebook's dynamic creative ads.

Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. It looks like Google is dipping its toes back into the social networking world, even if only for a little bit. They are testing the ability to be able to follow local guides. That's Google speak for people who leave reviews on business pages, mostly on Google Maps. I'm not really sure why this is something they're working on. I guess they're thinking that it might drive traffic back to their platforms. But honestly, the last thing I need is yet another email notification that someone I don't know did something I don't care about.

Important change on Facebook, if you post a lot of vertical videos or run vertical video ads, they have changed the dimensions to what is increasingly becoming the standard of 4 by 5. What that means is if you're posting or uploading video that is more vertical, in other words, taller than 4x5, your image will be cropped at the top and the bottom. This change starts January 6th, so still a bit of time here, but important to know as you plan for next year's video content. Facebook is putting more of its machine learning chops to the test,

this time with dynamic formats. We already know that Facebook can test different carousel card positions based on how it thinks someone will respond. We recently learned that they'll choose whether or not to show a link description, again, based on if they think that'll help make a click or not. Well, now they're putting that kind of personalization into the ad formats themselves. Quoting Marketing Land, from the Facebook Dynamic Ad Unit when creating ads for the catalog sales,

traffic, and conversions objectives in Ads Manager or the API. The Wall Street Journal reported today that TikTok is trying to distance itself from its Chinese ownership. They've been doing this a while now with, I'd say, not much success. They've said, well, we have autonomous teams all around the world, but of course, they're still mostly owned by Chinese interests. Now, says the Wall Street Journal, TikTok is considering rebranding itself in Western countries and perhaps even moving to Singapore. ByteDance, the company that owns the TikTok brand, denied the report. Meanwhile, TikTok has hit 1.5 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play.

That puts them just behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger at the top of the most downloaded non-gaming apps for 2019. And that is it. No lightning around today. I'm a little bit under the weather, actually. Except this one note, you might be experiencing delays getting your Facebook ads approved. This is normal around Black Friday, but it seems particularly bad this year. Apparently, dynamic creative ads are taking the biggest hit here for some reason in terms of time delays. So if you need to push ads out quickly and they are dynamic catalogs, maybe consider a different ad format. If you value a short and ad-free daily marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to it.

It really does help. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com, or you can find them in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ. I'll see you tomorrow.