Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Scares the Crap Out of Social Media Managers

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

One huge brand removes tracking pixels entirely from their site Why you shouldn’t trust Facebook’s suggested post times Snapchat now allows much longer video ads And learn from the big mistake we made at MY agency this morning The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, November 19th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy World Toilet Day. Today, one huge brand removes tracking pixels entirely from their site. Why you shouldn't trust Facebook's suggested post times. Snapchat now allows much longer video ads. And learn from the big mistake we made at my agency just this morning. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So imagine walking into your office this morning and because you're a social media manager for your brand, you check your Facebook page's quality section and there is a huge red exclamation mark icon with this message.

Your page is at risk of being restricted or unpublished for repeated violations against our standards on inauthentic behavior. Holy crap. Well, that happened this morning for a whole whack of people. Turns out it was a site-wide bug. It should be fixed now by the time you're listening to this. That said, some sites jumped the gun this morning, got their knickers in quite the twist One site published a blog post saying they thought it was, quote, the start of an imminently completely unacceptable purge of unwanted voices, unquote People, chill, it's a bug

Facebook bugs happen, a lot Mari Smith says a member of her community had her brand page just taken offline Apparently for no reason, a page with 188,000 fans. Eventually she got her page back, but it took countless appeals over six weeks to get things back in order. Here is the easy way to check your brand's page quality ranking. Just add the word quality at the end of your Facebook brand page's URL. So if your URL is facebook.com slash abc, you would type in facebook.com slash abc slash quality. The New York Times says it will no longer use tracking pixels from Facebook or Twitter

to track their users' browser histories. They'll still have a small number of other pixels, but told Axios Media Trends this week that they hope to rid themselves entirely of tracking codes on their site. Chris Wiggins from The Times explained the decision rather bluntly, quote, most websites are giving up all their users' browser history to Facebook. The Times no longer does that. If you're listening to this podcast, my guess is you understand the importance of these tracking pixels in everything from future ad campaign targeting to understanding the funnel demographics better and a lot more.

The Times, though, will use a new AI-based tool to figure out which promoted articles on social media are expected to result in an increase in subscribers. Facebook continues to move publishing tools out of your page and into its new creator studio. First, they took scheduling out of the main page interface. Everyone thought it was just a bug at first, but no, they did that on purpose. Now it looks like Facebook is testing suggested times for scheduled posts. When you set up a post for later distribution, some people are seeing Facebook's recommendation for the day and time to schedule it for, presumably for maximum eyeballs.

One fellow on Twitter reported that it was telling him his page's best time was 4 a.m. for a business that is not open at 4 a.m. Creator Studio, honestly, is a bit of a clusterfuck still. It's pretty, for sure, but, you know, like, real talk here. Who asked for this? Like, really, like, who was Facebook talking to when they came up with this? It's certainly not big brands, not agencies.

We all use third-party tools like Sprout Social or Sprinkler or Buffer or Agorapulse or whatever. Honestly, I wish Facebook would spend its time putting some of that Creator Studio functionality into its API so that those third-party tools can use them. Things like, I don't know, the time and date to stop distribution in the news feed. That would be nice in the API. Or, hey, how about this?

Letting third-party tools access Instagram DMs. Then again, I switched to decaf this week, so maybe it's just the caffeine withdrawal talking. Buffer has added a few new features to its platform. You can now select a specific post and quickly answer all of your comments with the same one-click emoji or the same text reply. Not necessarily a good idea, content managers, but it's there if you want it. You can also add user tags for Instagram photos directly on their published

platform now, complete with clicking right on the person or product that you want to tag. That's available on all their paid plans. They also have added a basic contest manager. It lets you see all your giveaway promotions in one place, lets you pick winners and engage with participants. You know, for all Mark Zuckerberg's talk that he's not threatened by the new apps out there like TikTok, Facebook sure does seem panicky these days. Let's not forget that anytime any app starts nipping at Facebook heels, they race out a clone app. Snapchat? Here's Poke. Nah, forget Poke. Here's Slingshot. House Party? Try our Bonfire app. TikTok? Have you seen Lasso? You like DMs and Snapchat? Well, check out our Threads app. Please. Well, hey, surprise. Guess what Facebook launched this week?

Another app. This one is called Whale. It lets people create their own memes with templates and some design tools. Comes with some free stock images. It lets people create their own memes with templates and some design tools. It comes with some free stock images. It's only available in Canada right now. If you are in Canada, you need to search for Whale NPE in the App Store, not just Whale. NPE stands for New Product Experimentation. It's not really clear to me why this is a standalone app. Nearly all these design tools are already in Instagram.

But hey, points for effort, right? Snapchat has expanded the time limitation for brands to tell their stories in mid-roll position. Now you can have a video ad that is up to three minutes long. Users will be able to skip past it, but only after they've seen six seconds of it. Which means, and I've said this before, one of the best skills a digital marketing manager needs to have now is to be able to capture the attention and emotion of a user in the first six seconds of a video. If you've been following the news lately around the upcoming American election, you'll know that the different social platforms have very different rules

around running political or issue-based ad campaigns. Facebook says they'll let pretty much anything run. Hey, even if it's not factual. Twitter took the complete opposite approach. They said they won't let any political ads run. And today, Snapchat announced it will let political ads run and they will fact-check them. them for real. Apparently they have a special team set up at Snap HQ to research the ad contents and determine if they are in fact factual. What could go wrong with that, right? I know you'll appreciate this. We had a massive panic here at our agency this morning when we checked in on the campaign of a client, a big client that spends a lot of money on Facebook ads and saw to our horror that the campaign that had been running for a week had zero reach.

Not a single impression. And it was a critical ad, too, leading up to Black Friday. The campaign took, like, days to set up with very finely tuned ad sets based on ATC lookalikes and more. The creative was highly produced. It looked amazing. But after running for a full seven days, Facebook hadn't shown it to anyone.

And the campaign was due to end tomorrow. It turns out we had the date selector wrong and were looking at last month's numbers when, of course, the campaign wasn't running. So, a little PSA here. Check your date selectors, people. Which brings us to the lightning round. You can now design and schedule Instagram stories in Stencil. Just design images as you normally would. When you share it through their buffer integration,

you'll see the option to schedule it as an Instagram story. More bad news for newspapers. Some of the largest local newspaper chains have had their stocks crash in the last few weeks. You might not know the name McClatchy, but they are now the second largest newspaper chain in the US. Its share price all but collapsed last week, falling more than 60% after it told investors that it couldn't pay a $124 million IRS bill on time.

The Conservative Party is playing a little fast and loose with their Twitter account, renaming it from the initials of their organization to Fact Check UK. Okay, probably more a marketing stunt than anything. Spotify is testing personalized podcast recommendations via a daily podcast playlist. It plays episodes of podcasts you've subscribed to and will throw in a handful of those it thinks you might be interested in. Twitter says starting today, they'll send out push notifications in addition to emails for any suspicious logons to your brand's account. And reports say Apple will be coming out with its own augmented reality glasses in 2022. And finally, an American lobby group for the beef and cattle industry has come out with a two-hour holiday video, like those holiday log fire videos and TV channels that pop up this time of year. This one is similar,

but instead features a giant slab of beef cooking over an open fire. Brilliant, right? But wait, it gets better. Not only is this going to YouTube, they're also opening it in theaters. Hundreds of theaters across 10 U.S. states. The full two-hour video of a giant slab of beef cooking over an open fire. Actually, I predict reasonably good ticket sales. Well, that is what you missed today in digital marketing. Follow me on social. All my links are in the episode descriptions or at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin.

I will see you tomorrow.