Today in Digital Marketing - Everything’s Turning TikTok

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Spotlight, Reels, Shorts — they’re all coming for TikTok. Twitter’s betting its UI on Spaces. Facebook finally gets serious about security. And here come the deepfake marketing campaigns! Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:NEW! Podcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. 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

Today, spotlight, reels, shorts, they're all coming for TikTok. Twitter is betting its UI on spaces. Facebook finally gets serious about security. And here come the deepfake marketing campaigns. It's Thursday, March 18th, 2021. Happy Aruba Independence Day, Netherlands. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

I started my marketing career about 25 years ago at a small ad agency. The internet was too young for commercial use back then, so most of the campaigns we did were radio ads, newspaper ads, and so on. Whenever my boss saw a newspaper ad that he liked, maybe the copy or the design, he'd snip it out and put it in the top drawer of a filing cabinet. I didn't know it at the time, but this was a very common practice. So common, it even had a name, a swipe file. Facebook has had its own swipe file called the ads library. I'm sure you know about it already. You can search for a specific country or brand to see the ads that are running. The intention there isn't to use it as marketing inspiration. Facebook put it there for transparency reasons, but we can still use it

as a swipe file. Twitter had one, but closed it down a couple of months ago. Now, TikTok has added an ads library of its own. You can search by industry and country to see the kinds of ads being run. That's the good news. The bad news is it's not particularly deep. You couldn't find a single ad running in Canada for a clothing brand, for example. No Australian sports brands. And only one ad in the UK travel section, and it wasn't even for travel. It was for a college. This presumably because TikTok says brands have to give permission for their videos to

appear there. Still, it'll probably grow. They have a section to see what's trending, though I found the trending section in their actual mobile app to be way more on point with what's actually popular. One interesting thing I spotted, in addition to the country and industry, there's a selector for media type. The only thing you can select is video,

which makes sense given that TikTok is all video. But why put this there at all? Is it possible they will add image-only options or audio options? Perhaps the best part is the showcase section, which provides a few dozen brief case studies on what was behind some campaigns. Still with TikTok for a moment, they are adding a new reply bot for brands. This would be when a user DMs your brand's TikTok account, you'll be able to have it start with a welcome message. And this is interesting, customized responses based on keywords people use in their DMs. So if they use the word shipping, they'll get one reply, use the word refund, they'll get another and so on the word refund, they'll get

another, and so on. You will need a business account for this, which, like Instagram, you just flick a switch to change to. One thing that seems to be different here between TikTok and other platforms' implementations of this, TikTok says all automated response messages will be reviewed by a TikTok employee before going live. As popular as TikTok is getting, you might work for a more conservative brand, one that prefers to stick with what it already knows. So some brands are trying to compromise by putting TikTok-style videos on Instagram's clone of the platform, which they call Reels. You may be wondering how videos on Reels perform compared to videos on TikTok. The influencer marketing factory looked at 60 profiles that were active on both TikTok and Instagram Reels

and compared their overall performance. These profiles ranged anywhere from 20,000 followers to 50 million followers. The number of views was basically identical, but it was where those views came from that was striking. On Instagram, 144% of the views came from their own followers. That's more than 100% because of rewatches. On TikTok, though, just under a quarter of views came from followers of the account. In other words, 75% of people who saw the TikTok video had not been following that account. Quoting the study,

Instagram is network-based, while TikTok is content-oriented. This means that Instagram users will mostly see content posted by their family, friends, and anyone somehow related to people they know. On the other side, TikTok users will see a lot of content from people they don't know, but based on their interest and on previous videos they may have engaged with, unquote. So, if you're trying to get new customers, match point TikTok. TikTok also got significantly more comments by a factor of nearly three to one

and more than twice as many likes. The study also noted that Reels doesn't really provide any accounts with metrics, like how many shares they got and all the main numbers, whereas TikTok has lots of metrics available. So that's Instagram's take on TikTok. How about YouTube's? This afternoon, they announced they'll be expanding the test of their version.

They call them Shorts, and that expansion will be in the US. So some of you in America will see a new shorts row in the main feed of the YouTube app. If you're in that test group, you'll also get access to the shorts camera, which is like a very scaled down TikTok editing space, albeit with a more conventional video editing timeline. The premium newsletter today has screenshots of what this test looks like. So that's Instagram and YouTube. But wait, there are more apps trying desperately to carve some of their own numbers out of TikTok. Snapchat says it has launched its version. It calls that Spotlight to more countries, this time to India, Mexico and Brazil. Spotlight is said to have had about 100 million monthly

active users in January. No numbers on daily actives, which, let's face it, is a much more accurate view of things. Company also would not say when they would start letting us digital marketers run ads between Spotlight videos. They say they are first focused on building engagement. All right, enough TikTok. Let's get to some other digital marketing news today. Twitter is apparently set to put its Clubhouse clone, which it calls Spaces, front and center in their mobile app, devoting a new tab across the bottom to it.

And not just any tab, but the center one. Tapping it would take you to a listing of Spaces in progress. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, that would be a big move for Twitter. The app has long held that its four-tab setup is optimal. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, explore, notifications, and messages. It's moved them around a little bit, but essentially they've kept the setup the same, limiting the amount of quick access tabs, and instead adding new elements like fleets at the top of the UI, which taps into the stories trends, unquote. I don't know if people realize how big a deal this is.

Most of the large rooms on Clubhouse are started by influencer types and investors and other big names, people who have large Twitter followings of their own. Why would someone use Clubhouse if they can reach 20 times the number of people on their existing Twitter account? And a bit of late-breaking Twitter news this afternoon. The company said it's testing letting people watch YouTube videos right in stream. Currently, YouTube videos are just links.

You have to click and leave Twitter. Now you'll be able to leave Twitter. Now, you'll be able to watch it in line, at least if you're in the test groups, which are on iOS only in the US, Japan, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. They did not say if or when this would roll out more widely. YouTube is expanding the rollout of its content checking tool. Previous iterations of this would run uploaded videos against a fingerprint database in the minutes or hours after upload. This new version will do that scan between your upload and when the video goes live. This means they may hold back your video for a few minutes or up to an hour or so. It's not just checking for IP violations, it'll also look for other content issues that

break its community guidelines, including content it deems not advertiser-friendly. They teased this tool last fall and did a small test launch last month. Now it's going to the full product. Back in my keynote days, I used to sometimes get a list of attendees from the event organizer and send them short, personalized videos a list of attendees from the event organizer and send them short, personalized videos thanking them for coming to the event. They really were personalized. I'd record a different one for each person so that I could use their first name at the start. I used a tool back then called Bonjoro.

Others have popped up since then. SendSpark, the now unfortunately named Covideo. But one thing that you couldn't do with these apps was do that personalized messaging at scale. If there were 2,000 people at my keynote, I'm not going to do 2,000 separate videos. There wasn't really a solution until now because now we have deepfakes that can do this work for you.

And one brand has turned that into a clever digital marketing campaign. The potato chip brand Lays will generate a custom personalized video of soccer star Lionel Messi. People visit a website and select a few options for him to say. Then the tech will move his lips

and create what basically looks like a cameo video of him using his smartphone to send a little message. Now, there aren't many options. There's a list of names he'll say. You can't just put in butthead. Yes, I tried. And then after that, the only option is when you'll watch the game. But they say it knows thousands of names, and he can speak in 10 languages. Did you know that your Facebook account can be easily hacked even if you use two-factor authentication? It's true.

Here's one way of how they do it. They send you a Facebook private message that looks like Facebook's enforcement team notifying you that they're about to take your ad account down because you used copyrighted music. You click their link, which looks very similar to but not actually, a Facebook login page. People who are tricked log in, giving up their password, then even get prompted with that code generator window. If you then go to your Facebook app and generate the two-factor code and put it in, someone on the other side of the world will grab that six-digit code and use it to log into your account. Yes, they're that fast.

Then if you have access to ad accounts or a business manager, all hell breaks loose. There has been a access to ad accounts or a business manager, all hell breaks loose. There has been a solution to this problem for a long time, and Facebook only now has decided to support that solution. Physical hardware keys. These look like flash drives. They're small enough to fit on your keychain. And instead of using a six-digit number,

you'll need to physically hold your key up to your phone or plug it into your phone or computer. The company recommends that people and brands at high risk of being targeted by malicious hackers like politicians and journalists consider using one of these. You can buy them online or find them at any decent-sized tech store. If you get one, you can enroll your security key within the security and login section of your Facebook app's settings. And finally, just when you think the world has gone crazy with too many monthly subscriptions, comes word that Coca-Cola is moving to a subscription model. Yes, a subscription service launches today in Japan for 2,700 yen a month. That's about 25 bucks. Subscribers get one Coca-Cola from any of Japan's 340,000 vending machines per day. The company says that would save people about 8 to 10 bucks a month if you buy Coke every day.

Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well. You'll get an issue every Friday. Newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.