Today in Digital Marketing - Are Instagram Carousel Posts Driving Your Metrics Down?

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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. Today is Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019. Happy National Nut Day. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, do Instagram carousel posts still drive your metrics down? We have some new data. The AMP format moves to email and it could usher in higher email engagement rates for your campaigns.

Starting point is 00:00:55 Another day, another new ad format from Google. And is Facebook recommending your competitors on your brand page? Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Matthew Kobach, who is head of social for the New York Stock Exchange, tweeted a clever little hack for increasing your numbers on Instagram story engagement. Rather than post a single photo, he's created a series of blurred images and posted them as a kind of keep on tapping forward to reveal the image series. With each image, up pops a slightly less blurry version,

Starting point is 00:01:27 then of course the reveal is the regular full photo at the end. It's a little gimmicky, but I think he's actually tapped into a really key part of the human condition here. Stories, and I'm talking about broad narrative stories here, stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. And when we are told the beginning and the middle, no matter how pointless the actual story is, we need to know how it ends. So there you go, a little hack. You can follow Matthew on Twitter. His handle is M-K-O-B-A-C-H. Okay, if you're using carousels on Instagram, that's the post type where you can add multiple images and users swipe to see them all,

Starting point is 00:02:11 Agorapulse has some very interesting data on their performance. Back in 2017, they analyzed carousel performance with a control group, and they found that carousels underperform, when compared to single image posts, in reach, impressions, and engagement. Back then, they tested with a set of accounts that they used for this kind of research, but they also looked at the Instagram profiles of large brands and big personalities, even the account of Instagram itself, and found that in all these cases, carousels underperformed. A 26% drop in likes and a 37% drop in comments. Then they did the study again last year and found the same thing. You see where I'm going with this? Yes, they just recently tested carousels again. And the result? I'll tell you at the end of today's

Starting point is 00:03:00 show. See what I mean about humans needing to know the ending to a story? While it has been implied up until now, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has explicitly said now that it considers the publication of fake reviews on an e-commerce site to be illegal. Also illegal, according to the FTC, buying and selling fake followers. And they've actually taken action now. In one case, the FTC nailed a company that sold, quote, fake indicators of social media influence. And in another case, they said a skincare company got its employees to post fake reviews at the CEO's direction. I know, I know, you wouldn't do that. You'd never do that.

Starting point is 00:03:42 Nice new functionality here if you do email marketing. The marketing platform MessageGears now supports Google's AMP for email. AMP, of course, is the pre-loading of mobile scaled web pages on the platform side. You see them often on news stories from Facebook or Google News, and they load pretty much instantly because they don't have to go back to the source website to grab the content. But this is one of the first times it's been used inside an email. How it works is people who get the email will be able to do things like RSVP to an event right inside the email without clicking a call to action button or a link that takes them off to an external website.

Starting point is 00:04:20 AMP for email was released earlier in the year for Gmail users. In time, we may all be browsing catalogs, replying to comments, or completing forms right in the email. This, of course, is big news for digital marketers like you and me. If consumers know the experience will be simpler and faster, they are more likely to do whatever we're after. Google is launching a new kind of banner ad format, one that it says will eventually replace the standardized banner dimensions on even its so-called smart banner format. The new Adaptive Anchor Banner format can adjust itself to show the creative the way it's meant to be shown and without any custom code. Quoting WeRSM.com, We are SM dot com. Adaptive anchor banners will consider the device that's being used as well as the ad width that a publisher wants to use and the aspect ratios and performance of all available demand. Adaptive anchor banners will then show creatives with the best height and aspect ratio for each device.

Starting point is 00:05:18 This is to prevent the wrong sizes from being served. Unquote. They're still in beta, but if you want to kick the tires, contact your ad account manager or support. Okay, lightning round, this time no rapping. Some people are noticing that on brands' photos on Facebook, like, you know, when people click to zoom in on the photo, that Facebook is offering suggested photos. And among the photos the algorithm is suggesting, photos from your competitors. I haven't seen this myself, but something to check for perhaps if you use a lot of visual imagery. Is website builder Squarespace moving into social? Maybe. This morning they've announced they've acquired Unfold, a mobile app that creates vertical stories

Starting point is 00:06:00 format videos. Facebook's VP of advertising and pages announced this morning he is leaving the company after seven years there. No word where he's off to. Instagram is adding notifications for new IGTV episodes. So if you are one of the three or four brands there, it may be something you want to prompt your viewers about. Hopefully this won't end up like YouTube, where the first 20 minutes of every damn video is the creator telling you to smash that button and subscribe and hit the bell and comment below and insert more algorithmic signals here.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And if you're keeping score, almost every state attorney general in the U.S. is now investigating Facebook. 47 in total and counting. Oh, and as for Instagram carousel performance, Agora Pulse's social media lab tested it and found that this year, carousels are actually now outperforming single image posts, at least when it comes to engagement. 29% more likes and a whopping 72% more comments. That said, reach, which is a measure of how many unique people saw the post, and a whopping 72% more comments. That said, reach, which is a measure of how many unique people saw the post, was a bit down, 4.5% lower on carousels. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in the podcast,

Starting point is 00:07:20 just tweet with the hashtag TIDM. That is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by EngageQ.com. Oh, hey, if you have Alexa, now you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for today in digital marketing on the skill store. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of today in digital.com.

Starting point is 00:07:38 And I will see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Are Instagram Carousel Posts Driving Your Metrics Down?

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