Today in Digital Marketing - Are You Sitting Out on Instagram's Best Marketing Feature?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, October 6th. Today, it's the Instagram engagement tool marketers aren't using. Will its latest update change your mind? Also, Amazon brings stronger targeting to podcasts. Google's latest core update is rolling out. And here's one way to get your link headlines back on X. Give them money. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead. Today in digital marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. One of the broader trends in social media is a shift away from public posting on the large platforms and a move to smaller groups,

Starting point is 00:00:59 whether it's a close friend circle or a Discord channel or a group DM. Instagram has been trying to keep ahead of this and today announced another move in that direction with a way to let you share a story with multiple group lists at the same time. Group lists are basically additional custom lists like Instagram's close friends list, which has been around for five years now. This means you'll be able to share content

Starting point is 00:01:22 with a specific set of people and not have that post land on your main public feed. Marketers as a whole haven't really used group DMs or similar small group sharing tools, which may be a missed opportunity. You could create a group for confirmed customers only, or maybe VIPs who've spent more than X dollars, or create a contest where the prize is you get added to a custom list that gets exclusive content. Likely part of the reason marketers have been shy about using the platforms like this

Starting point is 00:01:52 is that the various APIs don't usually support that level of posting detail. Sure, you can post a story or a reel through an API, but the only distribution option is the main feed, not any lists. There's nothing to say the platforms couldn't add this to their APIs, meaning third party tools could get this functionality, but I haven't seen anything to suggest this is even something they're considering. You can add up to 250 people to an Instagram group. That ability to share stories to multiple groups at once is being rolled out starting today.

Starting point is 00:02:29 Podcast ads on Amazon DSP will now offer Amazon audiences to self-service advertisers. This gives advertisers the ability to reach audiences based on demographics like age, range and gender across all of the company's podcast supplies. And if you're thinking, wait, Amazon has podcasts? They do. They have several that are their own private label, but they also own the Wondery Network and have access to third-party publishers through their Amazon Publisher Direct. Quoting from their announcement today, quote, previously, advertisers who ran podcast ad campaigns through Amazon DSP mostly relied on contextual signals like top genres and categories to reach relevant audiences. Now we're expanding to include a pre curated exclusive catalog of Amazon audiences so advertisers can reach the right audiences based on demographics relevant to their specific campaign goals, unquote. For now, this is only in the UK, but for those media buyers,

Starting point is 00:03:30 you will now have access to targeting by demographics, geography, and genre like true crime, news, history, or sports. Another Google Core update is rolling out starting today. These are roughly quarterly now and tweak the search engine to provide better results. This year we had one in March and another one in August. Google used to tell us all specifically what was changing, but now they just point to a generic help page. This is their explanation on how these work. Quote, one way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2021. A few years later, in 2024, you refresh the list. It's going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion.

Starting point is 00:04:17 You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before. The list will change, and films previously higher on the list that moved down aren't bad. They're simply more deserving films that are coming before them, unquote. The only advice that Google offers if your site's ranking drops is, as gamers would say, get good. They suggest making your content genuinely helpful, trustworthy, and original. Also, by the way, at the same time this core update is rolling out,

Starting point is 00:04:48 they're also doing a separate spam update to clean up spam in languages like Turkish, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. This will take about three weeks to fully roll out. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters.

Starting point is 00:05:18 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Besides the search updates, there are also four tiny updates about Google. And so let us do a special Google-themed lightning round. Google Analytics 4 now lets marketers redact specific client-side text, like email addresses, to minimize the inadvertent transmission of personally identifiable information. You can also now exclude certain demographic and interest data from your reports, especially

Starting point is 00:05:49 data from signed in users. Google acknowledged last night that there was a delay in indexing newly published content. Google said it was an indexing problem. Barry Schwartz at SE Roundtable thought it was a serving issue. Either way, that appears to have been fixed now. Google Ads has stopped maintaining the keyword planners, individual and ad group keyword forecasting data. A Google rep said only a few advertisers use those specific forecasts. However, campaign level forecasts and historical keyword level data remain accessible. And Google Business Profiles now lets you edit your social media profile directly. If you manage your brand on GBP, you can add, edit, or remove links to your social media profiles. And those updates reflect pretty quickly in the search results. And finally,

Starting point is 00:06:39 an update on our story yesterday about X removing headlines from link posts. Basically, links now just look like an image post. There's no full URL, no headline, no description text. Elon Musk said he did it because he thinks it looks better. I think it's fair to say the overwhelming opinion is that it's a horrible idea. We wondered if this change would affect links on ads as well. We reached out to X for clarification, but the company almost never responds to media inquiries. As of this morning, though, ads on Twitter do still have headlines. This past Monday was a holiday here in Canada, a stat holiday. That is why there was no episode.

Starting point is 00:07:22 It was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. I think it was actually the Sunday, but you know how stats work. It fell on the Monday. And this Monday is also a stat holiday in Canada. I swear I'm not making this up. I think October, I think this is the only month where this happens, where we have two like back-to-back stat holidays.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Anyway, this weekend is Thanksgiving weekend. I know Americans, you celebrate it on a different day, or as we say here in Canada, the wrong day. But this weekend is a stat holiday. Excuse me, this Monday is a stat holiday. So there'll be no episode on Monday. And that will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Thank you so much for listening. Have a restful long weekend. See you on Tuesday. I'm steady on my gliss and busy trying to get this up. Pop champagne in case they try some. I'm steady on my gliss and busy trying to get this up. Friday night, me and my boys rolling. Keep moving every day and every other night.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Flow with that. Flow with that.

Today in Digital Marketing - Are You Sitting Out on Instagram's Best Marketing Feature?

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