Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Has a B*tthole Problem

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, January 30th, 2020. Happy National Croissant Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook has more advertisers than ever. So why is its share price falling? Google drops a campaign setting that a lot of us use. Microsoft adds some nice AI-based text ads. And are chatbots coming back?

Starting point is 00:00:24 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you've ever reported something to Facebook, maybe a copycat brand trying to trick people into thinking they're you or tried to get a bad review for obviously some other business off your page, you may have thought, is anyone actually reading these reports? Like a human at Facebook? Usually all we get back from Facebook is an auto-generated message saying, thanks for reporting, but that content doesn't violate our policies, so get lost. Well, here's evidence that they are probably not reading those reports. Some poor woman in the U.S. has spent the past five years trying to get Facebook to take down a business page dedicated to her butthole. The page's name was, literally, Samantha Ray Anna Jesperson's

Starting point is 00:01:15 butthole. It was one of those automatically generated pages that gets created when someone tries to, sorry, check into it. Well, besides being terribly offensive, of course, this page was created when this poor woman was 17 years old. She only found out about it four years later when she noticed it was at the top of the Google results for her name. So she reported it to Facebook over and over again. Each time Facebook replied saying, No, looks fine to us.

Starting point is 00:01:44 I'm paraphrasing there. It was only when a reporter from BuzzFeed the other day asked Facebook about it when suddenly, poof, just like that, it was gone. So, seems like it's true. Even those we've reviewed this content emails aren't always true. Here's your reminder to not give up your brand's social media credentials for services that do not have a legitimate authorization app. A web service that claimed to help people grow their Instagram following was the target of a hack, but honestly it was a pretty easy hack, considering this service, called Social Captain, kept their customers' passwords in unencrypted plain text. In fact, you could see

Starting point is 00:02:26 your own username and password in the source code of the pages they served. And with only a little bit of effort, you could scrape thousands of passwords. Here's the thing to remember. Any service that asks for your Instagram password, you should avoid. The legitimate third-party services use Instagram's API. So places like Sprout Social and Buffer and Agorapulse and the likes, they don't even know your password. They just get a, yes, they're authorized message from Instagram when you log in on Instagram's site and connect your brand's account to their service. But there are so many of these bad services, especially around Instagram, that are not authorized and thus require you to give them your brand's Instagram account password. I mean, sure, you could use these and maybe it'll automatically post a story for you instead of having to manually do it.

Starting point is 00:03:17 But is it really worth having your brand's account hacked and potentially taken over? Some Facebook numbers came out yesterday, and it looks like you and me are giving them more ad money. Advertising revenue jumped 25% to almost $21 billion in the last quarter of 2019. As well, they expanded the number of us advertisers by 14%. So now there are 8 million of us. That said, that revenue climb was actually the slowest Q4 growth since Facebook started trading publicly, which was part of the reason their shares actually fell on this news yesterday. That and expenses jumped 34%, a lot of that in legal costs,

Starting point is 00:03:58 more than a half billion alone to settle a single privacy lawsuit in Illinois. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Google has announced it is ending support for accelerated campaigns. Those are those campaigns that try to spend your budget as fast as possible as opposed to evenly dripping it out across the campaign's time period. You may have heard this last September when they said they'd be doing this for search and shopping campaigns. Well, now Google says all campaigns, including display, video, app, and hotel campaigns, all of them, will be switched over to standard delivery.

Starting point is 00:04:36 This will kick in around April or May. In other words, come this spring, accelerated delivery will simply no longer be available on Google. Meanwhile, Microsoft has bolstered its advertising offering this month. They've added responsive search ads. Those have actually been in open beta since September, but now they're out for everyone. They let you have up to 15 headlines and four descriptions. Then Microsoft will pick the one it thinks will resonate best with each person it shows your ad to. Interestingly, you can actually import your responsive search ad campaigns from Google directly into Microsoft. Nice little shot across the bow there.

Starting point is 00:05:16 And they say they'll be giving advertisers more time to migrate to expanded text ads. This after they said that they would shut the standard text ad format off at the end of last year. Now that deadline is March 31st. So if you haven't migrated your standard text ads over to expanded text ads, you should probably make a plan to get on that soon. But more than that, refresh your damn creative, you lazy ass. We haven't been able to create new standard text ads for two years now. So if you still have those campaigns running, they are very old and you should be ashamed of yourself. I really don't know why I get as excited about this as I do, but every time I hear that the Un, a teapot, a piñata, and a transgender flag. Quoting the Next Web,

Starting point is 00:06:12 Thanks to proposed designs, by the end of the year there will be 62 new emoji and 55 new gender and skin tone variants, including more gender-inclusive options such as person feeding baby, person in veil, and person in tuxedo, designs typically only available in one gender. Remember when Facebook rolled out messenger bots and everyone scrambled to build one and providers like ManyChat showed up? And remember when you tried them for your brand and then realized that now you have to keep paying those providers to keep your database alive and you couldn't export them like an email provider? Yeah, fun times. True, Facebook message bots never really took off. And part of that is they're just not that good. They don't really understand a lot. And unless you're using them for basic buttons like location or store hours, most of the conversational attempts aren't really that helpful. Well, now comes word that Google is

Starting point is 00:07:10 quietly working on a new smarter chat bot called Mina, which is, I'm quoting here from Google, trained on a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model, unquote. I have no idea what that means, but Google does, and apparently is quite excited by the progress that they are making. They say the bot is actually closing in on sounding like human conversation. If it's true, it could be a big deal in the messenger bot space. So far, Google is keeping it all under wraps and has not released Mina publicly. Well, that's it for today. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review

Starting point is 00:07:50 this podcast. There's a link in this episode's description that makes that an easy one-click process. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Has a B*tthole Problem

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