Today in Digital Marketing - Creating a TikTok UGC Ad... Without Creative
Episode Date: June 29, 2021Facebook is off the anti-trust hook — but Instagram isn't... Spotify opens podcast ads up more widely... PayPal will charge you more to collect payments from customers.... And the mobile app tha...t tricked ad agency people into giving up their Facebook credentials.Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletter ADVERTISING:- Ads: b.link/pod-ads- Classifieds: b.link/pod-classifieds- Brand Takeovers: b.link/pod-takeover JOIN THE COMMUNITY:- Slack: b.link/pod-slack- Discord: b.link/pod-discord- Podcast Perks: b.link/pod-perks ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Rate and review: b.link/pod-rate- Leave a voicemail: b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- Twitter: b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: b.link/pod-linkedin- TikTok: b.link/pod-tiktok Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Today, Facebook is off the antitrust hook, but Instagram isn't.
Spotify opens podcast ads up more widely.
PayPal will charge you more to collect payments from customers.
And the mobile app that tricked ad agency people into giving up their Facebook credentials.
It's Tuesday, June 29th, 2021.
Happy National Statistics Day, India.
I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital.
Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
An antitrust suit against Facebook by the American trade regulator in several states was shot down yesterday by a federal judge
who said there wasn't enough evidence presented
that the company has a monopoly on social media.
The bar for monopoly, said the judge,
was Facebook controlling 60% of the market.
But it may not be the end of that story.
The judge said Facebook's motion to dismiss the allegations
around its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp
weren't strong enough for him to grant them dismissal on those.
Even Facebook seemed to sort of agree that things were fishy there.
Rather than arguing that those purchases didn't make things worse for consumers,
they said it happened too far in the past for the FTC to prosecute it.
The judge said that may be true for the state's lawsuits and dismissed those,
but said the FTC could prosecute it as late as they want.
So we may yet see some action around there.
As TechCrunch noted, Facebook should put the champagne back in the fridge, at least for now.
How did the market react?
Yesterday, the day of the ruling, Facebook hit its highest market value ever.
It is now one of the few companies worth more than $1 trillion.
The third-party social media platform Sprout Social said today it has a new integration
for both Shopify and Facebook Shops, giving you a way to connect your product catalogs.
Their blog post about it today was a little vague and light on details, mostly rambled on about how
consumers expect more, blah blah, highly engaged audiences, blah blah blah. But as far as I can
tell, this lets you schedule products from your catalog as content to publish
or drop specific products into a chat with a potential customer alongside their order
history.
A new report out from eMarketers shows the U.S. social commerce market is projected to
grow by nearly 36% year over year in 2021.
But that's still only one-tenth the size of the social commerce space in China.
Full disclosure,
our agency is a Sprout Social customer. Spotify has opened up ads for Canada, Australia, and the UK. They launched in the US this past February. And like most other platforms, you will buy based
on the person, not the product. Quoting the company, network. Advertisers also have a broad range of easy-to-use, audience-based targeting tools,
including demographic targeting, geographic targeting, and even audience segment targeting,
unquote. The ads will run on podcasts both on and off Spotify. Their in-house network
includes shows from The Ringer, Gimlet, and Parcast, as well as third-party publishers
like ViacomCBS and The Wall Street Journal.
TikTok has rolled out its promoted post feature more fully along with a new name.
They call them Spark Ads.
And DTC advertiser David Herman tweeted out a brilliant mini-strategy for running Spark Ads without having to generate your own creative.
He says there are six steps.
First, if you see an amazing user-generated
content post about your brand on TikTok, reach out to the creator. Get them to go into settings
under privacy and turn on ad authorization. Then tell them to go to their individual post.
Click on the three dots at the bottom of the post. They'll see the share to icons top and
underneath the ad to favorites line.
On the second line, scroll to add settings.
Follow the prompts there.
They will receive a code.
Take that code, send it to you, the brand, and put in apply authorization.
And boom, you have a boosted TikTok.
David's Twitter account is always full of great gems.
Definitely worth a follow.
He's at Herman Digital.
That's H-E-R-R-M-A-N-N Digital. Some potentially bad news for people with e-commerce stores. PayPal
is increasing its flat rate fees and commissions for some transactions. This will affect U.S.
payments and will start August 2nd. And why? Well, in a surprisingly honest quote from one of their senior VPs, the company basically
says, well, you get a lot of value from it, so we think you should pay more.
In a company blog post, VP Dan Lieberman said the reason behind the increase was, quote,
to better align our pricing with the value that our products and services provide.
Consumers are nearly three times more likely to complete their purchase
when PayPal is available at checkout, unquote.
The numbers he quotes are a little strange.
He's apparently referring to a Comscore survey that PayPal commissioned back in late 2017.
Yes, it found that consumers who chose PayPal as a payment method
are 60% more likely to convert than those who do not.
But, like, why quote from 2017?
Anyway, the fee increase affects the following payment products.
PayPal Checkout, Pay with Venmo, PayPal Credit, Pay in 4, Pay with Rewards, and Checkout with
Crypto.
These move from 2.9% to 3.49%.
Also, the per-transaction flat fee is jumping from 30 cents to 49 cents.
When you do the math, this will actually hurt sellers of cheaper items.
Quoting WeRSM.com, for example, selling a $10 item will cost an extra 2.5% just to process the payment.
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Facebook has shut down a mobile app disguised as an ad manager
that was secretly stealing the login credentials of digital agency employees.
It was an Android app called Ad Manager for Facebook, but of course it wasn't from Facebook
at all.
Facebook says it was actually made by a small group in Vietnam who used it to compromise
accounts of ad agency employees and then ran unauthorized ads.
$36 million in unauthorized ads, all paid for by whatever client's ad account these guys got
access to. Facebook says it has refunded these people, helped them secure their accounts,
and today announced they were taking that group to court.
Social platforms are fond of limiting their best features to accounts with lots of followers.
You want to go live on TikTok? You need 1,000 followers.
You want Twitter's super followers?
You need 10,000 followers.
One of the most desired follower-gated features is the swipe-up link on Instagram Stories.
For that, you either need to be verified on the platform
or have 10,000 followers.
Now, Instagram is testing letting anyone have that feature,
sort of.
Rather than a swipe up, it'll be a sticker.
When people tap your link sticker, they'll go directly to the website you specify.
I don't need to tell you what a big deal this could potentially be for people who sell things.
The test group is quite small for now, and they wouldn't commit to any wider rollout.
The only thing they did say for sure is that this is only for the vertical format.
They have no plans to let people tap links in feed posts.
And finally, today, Facebook, still unable to come up with any original ideas of its own,
launched yet another clone of a successful online business, this time copying Substack,
the newsletter subscription service. They call theirs Bulletin and say, for the time being,
they're not going to take a cut off of the subscription fees.
Also, they're not accepting any signups.
They've got a stable of big names and nobody can start or move their newsletter there yet.
Twitter is in this game too, having bought the newsletter platform Review.
Full disclosure, we use Substack for our daily email newsletter.
What's that you say? What newsletter? Well, I'll tell you. It comes out every day, contains
everything you hear in the podcast and more videos, links, images, newsletter
exclusive content. It costs five bucks a month for the daily edition, or you can choose to pay
nothing and get a basic issue every Friday. You can find it at
todayindigital.com slash newsletter
or tap the link in today's episode notes.
So yeah, hot again yesterday.
Lytton, BC did actually crack the Las Vegas all-time heat record.
I went to my optometrist for my two-year appointment.
She was looking deep into my eyes with my contact lenses in
and she said, you know you have these in backwards?
I guess on the very, very edge of them when you're looking closely, looking deep into my eyes with my contact lenses in, and she said, you know you have these in backwards?
I guess on the very, very edge of them when you're looking closely,
they've got a little notification of what type it was.
And I said, I'm pretty sure I didn't put them in backwards.
I usually, like you guys, put a left sticker on the box
for the left eyes and a right sticker on the box
for the right eyes.
And I follow that really closely.
And she said, is there anyone at home
who could take a picture of those stickers with the prescription?
So I texted my wife.
She did that.
I showed the pictures to the optometrist.
The optometrist staff, two years ago, put the wrong stickers on the wrong boxes.
They put left eye on the right eye box and right eye on the left eye box.
For two years
I have been wearing my contact lenses backwards
Two years
And I was getting eye strain
And I could not figure out for the life of me why
Well
Just to show you
Like everything in life
Trust but verify.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Leave all your business.
Take all your business.
And grab a witness.
And grab a witness.
We got no limitations.
We got no.
And we got no time to waste.
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