Today in Digital Marketing - Doofus.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Instagram giveth and Instagram taketh away, Adobe's big social media addition is a little underwhelming, Twitter goes back to the old days, and LinkedIn reports a bug that may have big consequences for your brand's reputation. It's Thursday, December 17th, 2020. Happy National Maple Syrup Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So you may know that Walmart is part of the group trying to buy the U.S. part of TikTok. Now we are starting to see some of those, oh God, I'm going to say it, synergies kick in. Walmart will be hosting a shoppable live stream on TikTok, the first of its kind. It happens tomorrow. Ten of TikTok's top influencers will participate in a one-hour variety show called the Holiday Shop Along Spectacular. They'll be featuring private label and national brands, mostly clothing. Of course, viewers will be able to tap the videos

Starting point is 00:00:56 to go directly to a product page and complete their purchase right inside the TikTok app. That's right, they never get sent over to, like, a Walmart.com page to finish up. Meanwhile, upstart competitor Triller is doing a brand activation pop-up store. And you might be thinking, nice job marketing doofus right in the middle of a pandemic. It turns out this will be an augmented reality pop-up right in the app. Who's the doofus now? The virtual store will also host a virtual concert. We may not hear a lot about Triller, but they are getting stuff done. Brands like Manscaped, L'Oreal, and Pepsi recently all developed campaigns for the app.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Earlier this year, it briefly cracked the top five most downloaded apps list, especially when it wasn't clear if the Trump administration would kick TikTok out of the country. How does this affect you and your work? Well, if you haven't downloaded Triller, it's probably time to figure out how that app works. Another digital campaign using a popular platform is running on Twitch, the live streaming platform that most people use for gaming, but I use to live stream the production of this podcast every day, and also sometimes for gaming. Link to that is in the episode notes. The campaign is a running series that Pizza Hut started last month called Friday Night Bites, described as a variety show where celebrities, influencers, and gamers play video games on stream and compete in pizza-themed challenges,

Starting point is 00:02:25 like using pizza toppings to describe themselves. In reality, it's a little less than that. Honestly, it's just the one streamer they hired for this playing Rocket League and occasionally talking about pizza with his gaming buddies who you only hear and never see. Quoting MarketingDive.com, each of the show's first five episodes received over a million live viewers for more than 5.4 million total views.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Select viewers who participated in the Twitch chat received Pizza Hut gift cards. The viewership statistics for Friday Night Bytes demonstrate how Twitch can serve as a platform for engagement with branded content. Twitch viewership surged this year as homebound consumers searched for new sources of entertainment. And after a summer decline, total minutes watched on the platform is on the rise again as temperatures drop. Two Instagram updates for you today. First, Instagram giveth.

Starting point is 00:03:19 They've added new audio mix and voiceover options to Reels. Reels, of course, their TikTok clone. This lets you add more audio tracks and adjust the levels a little bit better, bringing it in line with TikTok's functionality. You'll find these new options under the microphone at the top of the composer screen. They're also adding a new Reels watermark to the corner of clips. Again, just like TikTok's watermark. And the edit clips option got an upgrade too,

Starting point is 00:03:43 with better ways to change each of the video elements. Some people apparently are also seeing a multi-capture mode which will fire off a bunch of still images in a series. All of this still rolling out. So that's giveth. As for taketh away, polls on Instagram are now gone as are some stickers.

Starting point is 00:04:05 This appears to only be for European users. Privacy legislation, blah, blah, blah. Messenger also got a hit. Apparently, polls are gone there too, as well as personalized replies and the uploading of some file types. Now, we've known for like a week or two that Messenger will limit file uploads with brands in Europe to comply with the legislation. But this seems to be affecting person-to-person conversations as well. Well, lucky for us, Facebook has published a detailed list of all the changes it's made.

Starting point is 00:04:33 No, I'm kidding. They haven't said squat about this because of course they haven't. Actually, turns out this might be a bug. We are sm.com reporting today. There's no word as to when the situation will normalize, but all we know for now is that Facebook is working on it. Some good news for content managers. Adobe has upgraded its social media design tool called Spark, adding more than 20,000 new design assets. Back in September,

Starting point is 00:04:59 they added animations. These design assets are just like adding icons in the past. Adobe pulled these together both from their own in-house designers and licensed some other work and then tagged them all individually so they should be fairly easy to search for. TechCrunch reports that Adobe is working on a way to use AI to personalize asset recommendations for each project. As with everything Adobe these days, I remain underwhelmed. I just tried searching for wheelchair in the design assets section. Nothing. I tried Canada and the only hit was a black and white outline of the CN Tower in Toronto. That was it. Like really? Not even a flag? Canva, by comparison, had more wheelchair design elements

Starting point is 00:05:41 than I could scroll through. Easily two or three hundred more. Stencil, which we also use, had a bunch of photos and also easily a couple of hundred wheelchair icons. Spark does have icons and photos too, but this new design assets section seems a little anemic. Twitter is going back to the old school retweet. You may recall, leading up to the U.S. federal election that they changed the way retweets work in an attempt to slow down amplification of misinformation. The way it worked was rather than just retweeting it right away,

Starting point is 00:06:15 it popped up a dialogue box for you to add some text to ride along, something Twitter used to call retweet with comment, but now calls a quote tweet. You could have just published it anyway without a comment, but this gave you a chance to add something. So did it work? Yeah, not really. Twitter says use of quote tweets did increase, but almost half of them only had one word added. Hardly the increase in discourse quality I think they were hoping for. And worse, the use of retweets dropped by 20%. Less platform engagement makes investors feel nervous, so they will be reverting back to the way it always worked. One other small Twitter change this afternoon,

Starting point is 00:06:52 they updated fleet notifications. Now, when someone shares your tweet in a fleet, you will receive a push notification, just like when someone at mentions you in a fleet, a fleet, of course, being Twitter's version of the vertical story format. Finally, Hootsuite said today that LinkedIn reached out to them to let them know of a big gap in LinkedIn's data stream. Apparently, the LinkedIn API may not have published comments or replies

Starting point is 00:07:21 on LinkedIn pages between December 10th and December 15th. If this was indeed an API problem, then this probably also happened with all the other third-party tools that you may be using as well. So probably best to double-check your LinkedIn page comments natively on LinkedIn.com to make sure you didn't miss anything potentially damaging. If you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people

Starting point is 00:07:47 rated and reviewed the show. If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You will find a link in this episode's description that makes it a simple

Starting point is 00:07:58 one-click process. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Doofus.

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