Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 11 — The Facebook Announcement We Didn’t Want (Ep 212)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Facebook is doubling down on the use of AI to make content decisions, so that'll be awesome. Plus, Twitter tweet restrictions are now available, people who market news aren't going to like what Apple's planning, the jury is not out yet on whether or not guest posts work, and wait, was that a huge algorithm update to Google yesterday? It's Tuesday, August 11th, 2020. Happy day of the Latvian freedom fighters. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. So here's a sentence from a Facebook news release that I didn't want

Starting point is 00:00:37 to wake up to today. Quote, moving forward, we're going to use our automated systems first to review more content. Well, shit. A bit of background. Facebook for years has used AI to track down content that violates its community standards. That AI has been applied to the content in ads and sometimes the standing of an ad account or personal profile or business manager. And here's the thing with AI. It's frequently wrong. And on Facebook, if you're a digital marketer, having the AI make the wrong decision can be the difference of being able to run ads or not. This wouldn't be a problem if there were a human being we could appeal these robot-generated rulings to. But no, anytime you hit the appeal button, that gets sent to a different

Starting point is 00:01:25 AI tool that all it seems to do is wait 48 hours and then send you back a message saying we've reviewed the content and stand by our ruling. Again, this can have significant consequences. Many Facebook advertisers have been locked out of their personal accounts because the AI made a mistake. This even happened to me. I have two podcasts, the one you're listening to right now, and one about my hometown. I have run very basic ads for both, and for months now, across the top of each page, there's a big red banner saying,

Starting point is 00:01:58 this page isn't allowed to advertise, active ads for this page have been turned off, and new ads won't run. This is due to multiple violations of our advertising policies or other standards. Which is ridiculous, of course. There were no violations, and I've appealed it, and I got the robot answer. Anyway, that brings us to today. Facebook Today publishing a news release titled How We Review Content, quoting from their document. Moving forward, we're going to use our automated systems first to review more content across all types of violations. With this change, our teams will be less likely to review lower severity reports that aren't being seen or shared widely on our platforms, and critically, they will also spend more time reviewing user appeals, unquote. So while they're talking about organic content here, we know now that they apply

Starting point is 00:02:46 the same tech to ad accounts, ad campaigns, brand pages, and more. Maybe I'm jaded, but that part about this letting them have more time to review user appeals, I just straight up don't believe it. Anyway, all that to say, if you're seeing an increase in robots pulling your ad campaign down or blocking your brand from marketing, now you know why. Facebook. Do you actually want our money or not? One group Facebook might not want money from? Business coaches and people

Starting point is 00:03:18 who market their own training programs. Now, there's nothing formal from Facebook. I only picked this up from one person inside a Facebook ads group. But that person posted part of an email exchange she had with a Facebook manager in a department that oversees account integrity. The email said, there have been some recent policy and enforcement changes in the coaching space over the past few weeks. My understanding is that the platform is moving away from supporting business creation, education, and coaching models, unquote. So a couple of things here.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Given that you are in the digital marketing space, I'm sure you get countless ads from some Yahoo who screencast an hour of basic tips and now sells that for $499. We can all do with fewer of those. But there are some legit practitioners out there. The John Loomers of the world, the Andrew Foxwells of the world, people who run million-dollar campaigns for clients or spend their entire day studying the always-changing Facebook ads landscape. Again, there's nothing official from Facebook, but if this message is to be believed, it might become harder for the training and coaching space to advertise on Facebook. Contrast all that to Twitter, which today released a feature that people have wanted for some time.

Starting point is 00:04:34 They've been testing it for a while now. Today, it rolled out to everyone, and that feature is being able to limit who can reply to your tweets. You will see a small globe icon at the bottom of the tweet compose window, and hitting it lets you limit replies to only your followers, only people who you at mention in the tweet, or nobody gets to reply. To people seeing one of these tweets, they just get a grayed out reply button that can't be clicked, but they can still see it, they can still retweet it with or without a comment, and they can still like your tweet. Some brands have used this in very clever ways, the first of which was Twitter itself, which back in May tweeted this, reply if there's a better app. And then, of course, they turned off the ability to reply.

Starting point is 00:05:17 It should be working now on Twitter's web interface and mobile apps on your account. It will be coming to TweetDeck in the coming days. If you market a publishing company, you're not going to like this. Actually, even if you just read a lot of news articles, you're not going to like it. A change in the upcoming operating system for Apple's desktop and mobile devices will have news articles people click not open in a browser like they currently do, but instead open in Apple's own news app. It won't intercept all articles, just the ones that currently feed news to Apple's news app, but that's a lot. Most of the big publishers, in fact, and hundreds of magazines. This is a function you'll be able

Starting point is 00:05:56 to turn off, but it's buried in the settings and will be on by default. And for digital marketers who manage publishing brands, this can be a big problem because if someone clicks on an article of theirs and then they end up reading it in Apple's app, that means they're not going to the publisher's website to read it, which means no analytics on visitors, no ability to tag them for retargeting, no heat map analysis, nothing because they're not there. They're on Apple's app. The New York Times recently pulled its Apple News partnership entirely, saying the app and subscription service, quote, does not align with its strategy of building direct relationships with paying readers. People are seeing this in beta since the OS isn't out yet, so it may not make it to the final version, but definitely something to keep an eye on. Yesterday, I reported that a Google representative,

Starting point is 00:06:51 the guy who is more or less the unofficial voice of the search index, said that guest posts on blogs are a waste of time. They don't get you any increased ranking in Google. Well, not so fast, says Rand Fiskin. Rand is the former CEO of SEO tool Moz.com. Today he tweeted, if I were still in SEO, I'd go test this ASAP. 50 bucks says the Google rep is wrong.

Starting point is 00:07:16 I see links in guest editorial that regularly correlate with improved rankings and I doubt it's all coincidence. Worst case, you place a guest editorial in a relevant publication and only get brand lift, attention, direct traffic, prestige. Oh no, the horror. Someone else replied, I agree 100% with Rand Fish. I've seen websites rise exponentially after securing similar links. A lot of what they say gets contradicted easily with live cases defying their recommendations So, of course, with all this, your mileage may vary.

Starting point is 00:07:51 There's Google saying it's spammy and won't work. Others saying, yeah, it's a little spammy, but it still works. Honestly, I don't care which way it goes as long as I stop getting these spam emails about the spam offer to spam my agency's blog with spam. Have you got anything without spam in it? Well, spam, egg, sausage and spam. There's not got much spam in it. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Amazon is in talks with the largest owner of shopping malls in the U.S. to convert abandoned JCPenney and Sears stores into Amazon distribution hubs.

Starting point is 00:08:27 The e-commerce giant is trying to build out more regional warehouses to be able to deliver within one day. And malls, of course, are located closer to highways and residential areas than the industrial centers one usually finds warehouses. But is it a good deal for the mall owners? Sure, it'll be revenue. And God knows, after the pandemic lockdown, the malls could use that. But it won't bring in the one thing that might be even more important to malls than revenue, and that's foot traffic. A busy, bustling shopping center says something. It communicates trust and the feeling that the mall is a good place to spend your time.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Having an Amazon warehouse there won't generate crowds of people walking through the mall. Anyway, they're still in talks, but it is certainly an interesting development. Alright, a handful of things in the lightning round today. Facebook ad placements in Marketplace are now available for the post-engagement and page-like objectives. Oh, wait a minute, I left my bell outside the booth. Hang on a second. are now available for the post-engagement and page-like objectives. Oh, wait a minute. I left my bell outside the booth. Hang on a second. All right. A big shift in Google ranking.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Yesterday had a whole lot of SEO people freaked out that there was a big algorithm update. No, Google said it was just a glitch. Nothing to worry about. LinkedIn has published a new guide to help social media managers use LinkedIn more effectively. Topics in the e-book include telling a brand story, building an audience on LinkedIn, and a guide to LinkedIn's ad platform. And yesterday I reported on Google's forthcoming Webmaster Conference, its first virtual version of that event. Well, it is sold out now. Apparently all the seats went within two hours. I hope you got in.

Starting point is 00:10:09 Sadly, I did not. Our Slack group is not even a day old and already a dozen people are in there. They include some agency owners, a HubSpot onboarding specialist, an email marketing guy, and more. I'm in there all day, of course. If you want to join us, go to todayindigital.com slash slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. Oh, and this is also day one of the new voice booth. You can see a video tour of it in the Slack group, including the cool voice-activated

Starting point is 00:10:43 teleprompter. I'll be honest, I'm still not 100% happy with it. The baffling that I'm using is pretty low-pile, so I'm getting more in the mid and high range than I like, which I'm having to slap down in post-processing. USB extension cable has introduced a hum that I've mostly gated out, but it's not perfect. The motion-detecting light turns off every 20 seconds, so I have to stand here and wave my hand constantly in front of it. And it's really, really, really, really, really hot in this tiny little room, which used to be a small bedroom closet, which I have now carpeted the walls and everything. It's ridiculously hot in here. So anyway, a work in progress, but hopefully an

Starting point is 00:11:19 improvement over the previous echo chamber. As always, full transcripts to each episode are at todayindigital.com and follow me on social media. All my links are in the notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 11 — The Facebook Announcement We Didn’t Want (Ep 212)

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