Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 10 — How to Run Ads in Facebook Groups (Ep 211)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Twitter partially changes its mind on the inability to edit tweets. You can now run ad campaigns inside Facebook groups. Google's popular SEO conference is now free and you can attend from home. And we compare the 404 error pages of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Here's a hint. One's really rude and the other has public health advice. It's Monday, August 10th, and the other has public health advice. It's Monday, August 10th, 2020. Happy Independence Day, Ecuador. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:39 And before we begin, a small apology for the audio quality today. I know it's really echoey. I am in the final stage of building my voice booth, and hopefully it will be finished in time for tomorrow's episode. For you audio nerds, I will ramble about this in more detail at the end and why it's so echoey here today. That's where you will also learn about this podcast's new Slack group. But let's get to the news. And big news it is, you can now finally, miraculously edit tweets. Yes, the single most requested function is here, but as you might expect, there is a catch. Sadly, the edit tweet button will not be available for tweets that you publish.

Starting point is 00:01:23 They're only for replies to tweets, and even then, only certain types of replies. Specifically, offensive and harmful replies. The way it works is if Twitter's algorithm finds words on its naughty list, then it will give you the option to delete it, send it, or revise it. It's currently testing on both web and mobile. This whole edit tweet thing has been an issue because every other platform lets you. I mean, on Facebook, you can edit a post anytime you like, although it will add a little edited line to show people, which people can then click to see what that post used to say before the edit. But Twitter, no, not Twitter,

Starting point is 00:01:56 Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, has always hated the idea of an edit button. The reason there's no edit button, there hasn't been an edit button traditionally, is we started as a SMS text messaging service. So as you all know, when you send a text, you can't really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling. You might send a tweet, and then someone might retweet that, and then an hour later, you completely change the content of that tweet, and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting

Starting point is 00:02:25 and rebroadcasting something completely different. So these are all the considerations. It's just work, but we'll probably never do it. If you spend a lot of time running Facebook ad campaigns, you might be one of the many, many marketers who are experiencing a terrible bug on the platform right now. The bug is an error message that says, we limit how often you can post, comment, or do other things in a given time in order to help protect the community from spam. It's intended to stop people from spamming the same text as a comment to multiple posts on a brand page or prevent someone from submitting reviews too fast. You know, the spammy stuff. Except some digital marketers are seeing this no matter what they do,

Starting point is 00:03:11 whether they're trying to create or edit an ad campaign or just access someone's personal profile, like literally anything. David Herman, who runs millions of dollars of campaigns for his clients through Facebook, has been unable to work now because this is the third week where this bug is preventing him from accessing the ads platform or being able to do anything on Facebook. No matter what he clicks or where he goes, up pops this message. Remember, this is a guy who spends a lot. He's a premium partner.

Starting point is 00:03:42 He has personal contacts inside Facebook and even they can't fix this. And as I mentioned last week, when you can't get in to edit your ad campaign, that means you can't turn them off either. Literally, you can't turn an ad campaign that's spending off. If you have this bug, it's just spending money against your will. So word to the wise, never run a campaign which is set to keep running this indefinitely until I turn it off. Always put an end date on them, especially on Facebook. And yes, there is a link in that error message that says,

Starting point is 00:04:15 if you think this doesn't go against our community standards, let us know. But that either links to a form that goes nowhere, or you can't even let them know because that stupid error message pops up again when you try to click it. This morning, David did a poll among his Twitter followers, most of whom are digital marketers. And at the time I'm recording this, more than a third of the 68 people who voted so far say the same thing is happening to them too. A third. I, for one, last week removed Facebook from my phone and all but stopped using it for anything personal. It's not a privacy thing. I know I give up a lot of that just to be on Facebook, but I am terrified that if the algorithm somehow

Starting point is 00:04:57 mistakenly thinks I'm spamming too, it will do the same to me. And I'm the top level admin for our agency, an agency with dozens of clients, all of whom do something on Facebook, meaning our agency would not be able to work. All because of a bug apparently targeting people randomly. So heads up, if Facebook is critical to your business, maybe back off your personal use of it for a while, because who knows when this will get fixed

Starting point is 00:05:26 you probably know microsoft is in talks to buy the u.s side of tiktok a word this weekend that twitter is also talking about buying it that seems less likely given that twitter's market cap is about 29 billion which is roughly the same as the parts of tiktok that are for sale here. I'm no banker, but they'd have to find a way to raise a crapload of money to pull that off. There were also some reports that Apple was interested, and Apple said categorically that wasn't true. That's especially interesting because, almost without exception, Apple's stock answer to are you going to buy X, Y, and Z is we don't comment on any future plans. Here, they went out of their way to comment.

Starting point is 00:06:09 Nope, not us. So it'll probably be Microsoft. That's actually good news for us digital marketers. Microsoft does have a reasonably robust ads manager. Side note, if you do want to run ads there, change your ad account to expert mode immediately because their default, ironically named smart campaigns aren't so smart. In fact, in the setup, they never actually ask what keywords you want to target. So, I mean, who knows where those ads would go? Anyway, other than that and a couple of smaller things, it's basically a clone of the Google

Starting point is 00:06:41 Ads interface. And if TikTok lands in there in a UI we're already familiar with, using bidding methods we already understand, that's probably a good thing for us. Google's next webmaster conference, where many digital marketers flock to learn the latest in SEO, is going online for the first time ever, meaning you can attend without any airfare or hotel costs.

Starting point is 00:07:06 In the past, registrations have been hard to come by, mostly because of room size limitations, but of course they can have more people now. That said, it's not infinite. Spots are still limited because Google tries to balance out people by demographics and background. It's using an unconference model similar to South by Southwest. Here's Google's Martin Split explaining more.

Starting point is 00:07:25 You know, instead of just listening to speakers giving presentations, we have a few Googlers in the community propose topics for discussions that then everyone attending the event can vote on. And then they participate in the discussions which have received the most votes. I know I actually didn't need to use that clip. I only put it there so that I can tell you that in this video, Martin has his usual glorious long purple and blue hair. And in this video, he's in a turquoise dinosaur onesie. You can't say Google forces its people to be corporate clones. Link in this episode's notes if you want to see it.

Starting point is 00:07:58 The proposed sessions include ads and SEO myth-busting, tips to get your content displayed in the Discover feed, best practices for optimizing online stores for SEO, and how to prepare for mobile-first indexing. Some, but not all, sessions will be recorded. Registrations are open until the 19th. It happens on the 26th. Link to the registration form in this episode's notes. Facebook has a lot of placements. Those are the places on its platforms where your ads can appear. Common placements include the newsfeed, the right-hand

Starting point is 00:08:33 column, inside Instagram Explorer, and so on. But one placement that many digital marketers have wanted in on has been missing. Inside Facebook groups. And that appears to be changing, sort of. The company has now added brand partnerships to groups. So this would let group admins partner with your brand to publish content. You've probably seen these formats before. They're labeled with a line that says paid partnership with and then the advertising brand's name. So to be clear, this is not yet a direct placement. You can't just check off Facebook groups in the ads manager and have your campaign run there. Rather, you'd connect with the admins of the group you want to be in on and manually cut a deal with them to run content. So it's still organic content, but organic content you'd either

Starting point is 00:09:20 pay for or find some other quid pro quo like giving the admin some free product. This is most commonly used with influencers. One of the big benefits, of course, is you get access to the analytics of those posts. So if you think there's a group that your brand would be a good fit with, check with that group's administrator and see if they have the branded tag option rolled out to their group yet. Speaking of influencer marketing, a short little item here, the startup you and Mr. Jones last week acquired collectively an influencer marketing agency. They are doubling down on that space. A couple of years ago, they bought another influencer agency called the Amplify, the new company, which will all rebrand as collectively has clients like Adobe, HP, Intuit, LinkedIn, and the NFL. The company is almost entirely female-led.

Starting point is 00:10:14 If you spend any amount of time on YouTube, you've probably heard the creator say, and click the bell so you can get email notifications whenever I publish a video. Well, as of this Thursday, those email notifications will no longer show up. Google says they will stop sending out email for new YouTube video notifications. Why? Google says the open rates on them were abysmal, less than one-tenth of one percent.

Starting point is 00:10:38 If your brand has a YouTube channel and relies on those emails to get more views, it's not all bad news. There will still be notifications in people's mobile apps or on the web. The company says it tested this a while back and found that when they didn't send emails, more people engaged with their subscriptions feed. One more time for the people in the back. Links from guest blog posts have zero value. Zero. They won't help you if they're your links. They won't help you if it's your site doing the linking. They do nothing. Google spokesperson John Mueller has said this again. This has been known for many years and yet every day I get three or four spam emails offering to write guest blog posts so they can

Starting point is 00:11:23 jam their spammy links in. He couldn't have made it more clear when this weekend he tweeted, it's a waste of time. If you do have these on your sites, it's important that you make them nofollow links or else Google could penalize your brand's website ranking because of them. And finally, whether you are a supporter of US President Donald Trump or not, you've got to appreciate their clever use of a 404 error.

Starting point is 00:11:57 As you probably know, when you try to access a webpage that isn't there, the server will send you to a 404 error page. In most cases, they're pretty basic. They just say, 404 file not found. And if you're lucky, give you an abbreviated site map or a home button so you can find your way around. Not at DonaldJTrump.com, though. When you get a 404 error there, you get a photo of Joe Biden looking confused with the headline. It appears you are as lost as me. For the record, the Joe Biden website has also made a custom 404. Theirs has a photo of

Starting point is 00:12:29 Biden wearing a mask with the headline, we couldn't mask this error, but you should mask yourself. So I started a bit of an experiment. I have created a Slack group for the podcast in case any of you would like to hang out during the day, get help from the community, or I don't know, bitch about the Facebook ad platform. God, I'll do that all day with you. You can get there by going to todayindigital.com slash Slack, or click the link in this episode's notes. I will be in there all day long, even if you just want to pop in from time to time and say hi. Again, that's todayindigital.com slash slack or click the link in this episode's notes. Okay, audio nerds, hopefully you're all still with me. Yes, it's echoey as hell. My apologies for that. So here's what happens. My office is quite expansive, but it's really,

Starting point is 00:13:18 really echoey. And so what I had done was I had glued, big mistake, I had glued, you know, audio baffling material to the walls. And then behind me, I had hung two rugs, two giant commercial rugs, the kind that you, you know, have a rubber back and then it's kind of a low pile. And it sort of worked. It sort of worked keeping the echo down. But I have been building out a proper voicing booth in the studio for the last month or so, and it is almost ready. I'm waiting now for, what am I waiting for? Oh, an extension USB and a shelf to put the microphone on. But the booth itself is done. I'm very excited about it.

Starting point is 00:13:56 I will take a picture of it and tweet it out tomorrow when I have it ready. So that's why it's echoey today is that I've actually taken those rugs down and all of the baffling that was on the walls are also down. All of that's been moved into the booth. So yeah, it's like, yeah, it is, as we would have said in radio, very bright. As always, full transcripts to each episode are at todayindigital.com. Don't forget, check out the Slack group todayindigital.com slash Slack. There's also a link inside this episode's notes and you can follow me on social media. All my links are in those notes as well. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow, hopefully from the very cool audio booth. Bye for now.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 10 — How to Run Ads in Facebook Groups (Ep 211)

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