Today in Digital Marketing - Beer Company + Twitter API = Awesome

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Amazon's ad business is much bigger than you ever thought. Why Google will keep reviews up even if an employee writes it. Reddit launches a resource site for digital marketers. Facebook's clone of Clubhouse is now in the wild. And the top gifts B2B companies sent their clients. It's Wednesday, April 7th, 2021. Happy Journalists Day, Brazil. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

Starting point is 00:00:23 and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Amazon is certainly a powerhouse in e-commerce, and you might also know they have an ads platform where you can run ad campaigns. But did you know just how big that ads business is for them? New numbers from eMarketer reveal that Amazon's share of the U.S. digital advertising market last year surpassed 10% for the first time. Yes, Amazon now takes one out of every $10 spent on digital ads in the U.S. They also say if trend lines continue, Amazon's ad business will grow another 30% this year. That would give it $20 billion in ad revenue alone. And in two years, $30 billion. And remember, it's not just product ads on the shopping site here. Amazon's ad dashboard has a number of placements, like FireTV,

Starting point is 00:01:13 the game streaming site Twitch, and IMDbTV. Just two months ago, they bought the podcast production company Wondery. In case you're curious how that stands up, Google's current share of the U.S. market is 29%. eMarketer expects that to slip to 27% within two years. If you work in social media community management, you've probably had your fair share of headaches from Google reviews. Either it's a negative review from someone who's clearly never done business with you, or it's a review that's not even about your business at all. This actually happens a lot with my agency's shopping center clients. If people are mad at a store in a mall, for some reason, many people post a review on the mall's profile, not on that store's profile.

Starting point is 00:01:58 And then there are the positive reviews on your competitors' profiles that seem, as the kids would say today, a little sus. Take, for instance, the fellow who noticed that the reviewers of a local church bore the same names as staff members on the church's website. He reported them, and at first, local SEO expert Joy Hawkins suggested, quote, if the staff actually attend the church, they are technically customers as well, so Google likely won't do anything here, unquote. After double checking with Google's policy people, Joy came back to report that, quote, because the people don't say I work here in the review, Google is refusing to remove

Starting point is 00:02:36 it, unquote. Indeed, the direct quote from the Google rep was, quote, any reported review that specifies the experience of an ex-employee for a particular business is a violation, as per our review policy guidelines. However, this only applies when the reviewer's comment clearly indicates that he or she is an ex-employee, unquote. Pretty sad, said Joy today on Twitter. Google can do better. Facebook has pushed out its first version of its Clubhouse clone. They call it Hotline, sort of a mashup between Instagram Live and Clubhouse as room hosts can turn on their camera.

Starting point is 00:03:15 So instead of a static avatar in a circle, they're now a live video avatar in a circle. Just a place to ask a question and the host can pull you into the broadcast, blah, blah, blah. Quoting TechCrunch.com, quote, What's weird here is that there seem to be two different teams at Facebook competing to be the Clubhouse clone of choice. In addition to this mobile app done by their new product team, Facebook also confirmed there's a team trying to make a Clubhouse rival within Messenger Rooms. So, yay for innovation? Reddit has launched a new resource for digital marketers called the Reddit Ads Formula. It's

Starting point is 00:04:15 about what you'd expect. Some guides, tips, case studies, that sort of thing. Quoting a Reddit executive, Reddit Ads Formula features the latest on our ad solutions, industry insights, creative best practices, seasonal moments, and more. On-demand courses will be launching in the coming months to take our education efforts to the next level, unquote. There's actually some decent guides about Reddit's ad targeting options and campaign tools in there. Anyone can register. Here's the URL, redditadsformula.workramp.io. Reddit ads formula dot work ramp dot IO. Oddly, you can't use your existing Reddit account,

Starting point is 00:04:50 and they don't have any Google or Apple or other single logins, so you will be creating yet another account there. There may be a faster way to collect payments coming from customers on Facebook's platform. Facebook testing out a new QR code option for Facebook Pay. That platform, so far, has primarily been used between family and friends, but of course, if it's solid enough, there's no reason why they wouldn't adapt that to businesses and take a cut. The way it works, in testing so far at least,

Starting point is 00:05:20 is you pop a QR code up into a messenger chat, then the person on the other end scans it to begin the transfer from their Facebook Pay wallet. Facebook's used QR codes before, even when they fell out of fashion elsewhere. There were QR codes that would open a messenger conversation with you. There were QR codes for Facebook business pages that they hoped store owners would put in Windows. But as Social Media Today noted, quote, none of these experiments has actually ever caught on. And while Facebook has maintained the capacity to scan QR codes within its apps, QR codes haven't helped make Facebook into a more critical, connective tool in our day-to-day lives.

Starting point is 00:05:54 Well, at least not via QR codes anyway. Will that change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, where QR codes have once again been highlighted as a valuable, simple tool for connection? Unquote. So no direct use for us as a valuable, simple tool for connection. Unquote. So no direct use for us digital marketers yet, but watch this space. Here at Today in Digital Marketing, we try hard to make sure that we are giving you the very latest data you need for your online advertising campaigns, your SEO efforts, your e-commerce work.

Starting point is 00:06:23 But now, friends, I present to you perhaps the single most important study we have ever reported on. The top gifts that B2B firms sent to customers in 2020. Laugh if you will, but I guarantee there are about 100 of you that just leaned forward and went, eh, what's that now? So the data comes from 750 B2B executives. The study was done by Sendoso, which is a gifting platform.

Starting point is 00:06:48 So this only tracks the gifts that they ship from their catalog, but it's a pretty big catalog. The top gifts, cookies, wine tasting packages. Those are virtual wine tasting packages. And Yeti tumblers. Premium newsletter subscribers are getting the full list today, as well as the top gift card brands. Six of the eight most popular gifts overall

Starting point is 00:07:09 could be sent electronically. We have a lot of acronyms in our business. Tofu, ROAS, PETA, that's pain in the ass, usually shows up on internal client notes. But other industries are just as... uh... abbreviatory?

Starting point is 00:07:30 For instance, did you know that the beer industry has a scale called IBU, the International Bitterness Units Scale? It calculates bitterness by the amount of iso-alpha acids the beer contains. So 50 points to the Hop Valley Brewing Company in Oregon, which has adapted the IBU scale to people's Twitter accounts. This is genius. They built out a web app using Twitter's API

Starting point is 00:07:55 that will get someone's username, pull their most recent 100 tweets, and figure out how bitter they are. Apparently, I'm 41% bitter. Seems about right. And their analysis said, quote, floral and earthy. Your tweets are, how do we say it, like that freshly mowed lawn taste. It's not bad, but it could be better. Hear us out. You had quite a few bitter moments, but you also had some positive moments too. Crack open a cold one and let's channel those good vibes together. They claim

Starting point is 00:08:26 they actually built a machine learning algorithm for this and trained it on a set of historical tweets. Who knows if that's true or not. One thing that is true, with the page being full of branding for their products and a click to tweet your results button, we all should have thought of this first. And finally, one small item. Google says you can now enable continuous audience sharing from your sub-accounts. This builds on the ability that your manager accounts got a year ago. So my thanks to those of you who answered the podcast audio quality survey yesterday.

Starting point is 00:09:05 Sounds like almost all of you either couldn't notice a difference or said it actually sounded better. I know the levels are a little low. I'm still trying to figure out where the LUS setting is in the app. Hopefully by the time I get this mixed and recorded and sent out, I will have fixed that. But I'm glad it's working.

Starting point is 00:09:18 Hindenburg so far seems to be pretty good. So that's about it. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. I want to waste my time travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca.

Starting point is 00:10:16 R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Beer Company + Twitter API = Awesome

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.