Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Want to Give Your Business Cash (Fee: 1%)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, LinkedIn wants you to drop your company blog, Be protected. Be Zen. lip now. It's Tuesday, September 14th, 2021. Happy Dia Cochabamba, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 467. Let's start with the bad news. This might be a harder holiday season for bricks and mortar stores than we first thought. In the last month or so, we've seen studies point to a stronger Black Friday and Christmas, but now that the Delta variant is out there, that changes things in terms of buyer confidence. Quoting MarketingDive.com,

Starting point is 00:01:12 Consumers are retrenching, with only 20% highly optimistic about a return to normal, down from a third at the beginning of the summer, according to numerator research. Nearly 60% are very or somewhat concerned about holiday plans being disrupted by the pandemic. The comfort level of shopping without a mask dropped 15 percentage points from July to August, with 34% preferring to go in stores with mask requirements, and 36% having a higher level of respect for businesses that enforce mask wearing. Many consumers are falling back into their cautious pandemic ways that include shopping online more.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Nearly 60% say they'll use a mix of online and in-person shopping for the holidays, but just 13% plan to shop entirely in physical stores. 24% plan to shop entirely online. That's from the Berkeley Research Group, unquote. The study also found that travel and tourism were declining, as per the first couple of waves, and people are back working at home. The number of employees telecommuting due to COVID-19 rose 400,000 in August. That's the first increase in work from home since late last year. From consumer marketing to business marketing now and a number of big changes at LinkedIn. First, new long-form posts are available. They're calling them articles for pages.

Starting point is 00:02:41 They're an organic post type and can handle many more characters than a regular post. LinkedIn says they're hoping organizations use it to publish blog posts or news releases in full there, rather than having users click a link to go off-platform to the blog post on your brand's website. Good for LinkedIn on-platform engagement, I guess, but bad if you're hoping to pixel those people who come to your site. Apparently they also have some insights ready to go so you can see how those articles are performing. Second, there is a new live events platform which lets their scheduled LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events products work better together. They've now combined them into something called LinkedIn Live Events. in live events. This lets you sponsor your stream in advance to a targeted audience, automatically notify event registrants, and a subset of page followers when your event goes live.

Starting point is 00:03:32 Amass views on your public live event post from anyone on LinkedIn, whether they've hit attend or not during and after the show, and share the replay of your live event content. A few things to note about the new system. Fewer followers are required to access it. There will apparently be an automated and expedited review process for applications. All page admins now can go live once a page is approved. And they've got a Zapier integration now to connect lead management platforms. And third, some welcome improvements to brand awareness campaigns. Brand lift testing.

Starting point is 00:04:06 This will get you a baseline of your brand's perception and then test the impact of those ads against key metrics. Reach optimization. You can now optimize toward the number of unique member accounts that are shown ads. And you can now see the predicted reach and frequency for your brand awareness campaigns within the forecasting tool. Here's how I think the meeting at Instagram's offices went. Okay, Dave, how are reels doing? Uh, not so good. People are just repurposing their TikToks. Well, we can't have that. What can we do? I know. How about we repurpose stories? And that, friends, is probably how we got Instagram's latest Frankenstein UI change,

Starting point is 00:04:52 something they're calling a montage. It converts Instagram stories into reels because that's totally in line with the culture TikTok inspired, right? The new process puts your story frames up on the screen. You tap the ones you want to turn into a reel. You can add some music and presto, completely original content. It's a weird decision given that until now, Instagram has tried to point people away from repurposing. Here's socialmediatoday.com's take on it.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Quote, it is a little strange to see Instagram seeking to merge two functionalities on one hand and discourage the same on another, with the platform still working on ways to stop users resharing regular feed posts to stories. The latest update on this front comes in the form of its Reshare sticker, which enables users to share feed posts to stories in a more creative way. Instagram has experimented with blocking feed posts resharing to stories entirely and other options, with the platform's execs repeatedly noting that while users may be keen to reshare their feed posts to stories, their audiences are not so keen on seeing them.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Unquote. So rather than encouraging people to create unique content, the short-term future of your Instagram experience will be stories and reels duplicated. So far, this is only in test, but the good money is on it being put out publicly very soon. You know, we poke fun at Instagram's seeming inability to launch genuinely new ideas. But here's one people in Australia and New Zealand have spotted, Map Search.

Starting point is 00:06:33 This lets users discover businesses on a new in-app map and find information on each listed business, as well as public posts tagged with that location. It's basically identical to... Hang on a second. Oh, to Snapchat's map. Can we rewrite that intro? People in the test have a new map icon at the top right of the Discover tab. Then the map pops up cafes, restaurants, some shops, entertainment venues, and so on.

Starting point is 00:07:03 No doubt when they launch this, we will soon see a placement in ads manager to highlight your business on the map. No word, though, on when this will launch elsewhere. Facebook is a lot of things, a social media site, an e-commerce platform, a live streaming broadcast tool, a gaming platform. But did you know it's also in the debt collection business? It's true. And today Facebook announced it would be expanding that program. It's called Invoice Fast Track. And the way it works is that approved small businesses

Starting point is 00:07:37 can sell their unpaid invoices to Facebook. The business gets the invoice value almost immediately rather than having to wait 60 or 90 days or gets the invoice value almost immediately, rather than having to wait 60 or 90 days or whatever the invoice terms were. Well, almost all of the invoice value. Facebook takes 1% as its fee. Then Facebook emails the customer, tells them they own the invoice now, and the customer will need to pay Facebook once the original invoice terms come due. The expansion announced today was that more businesses will be able to apply. Which businesses qualify?

Starting point is 00:08:09 U.S. for-profit companies that are majority-owned, operated and controlled by racial or ethnic minorities, women, U.S. military veterans, LGBTQ plus people, or people with disabilities. Also, the company needs to be certified by an arm's length partner organization like the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, the National Veteran Business Development Council and so on. And eligible companies must also have invoices with corporate or government customers that have an investment grade rating. In other words, low-risk clients,

Starting point is 00:08:48 if you want to apply and you're a page admin on your business, go to facebook.com slash hubs slash economic underscore portal. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Be protected. Be Zen. 27 years ago, it was big news when network television lost the rights to broadcast National Football League games in the U.S. The rights went to direct TV. People thought, a satellite provider? That's dumb. Why wouldn't it just be

Starting point is 00:09:40 on regular TV? But change was in the wind in those early days and this week comes word of another significant possible shift in the television landscape. CNBC is reporting that DirecTV might lose the contract, which expires in 2023, and it might go to Amazon. Amazon is said to be the frontrunner in negotiations to buy the rights to the Sunday ticket package. DirecTV has been paying $1.5 billion a year for that. The new contract is reported to cost between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year.

Starting point is 00:10:14 If you think that'll never happen, though, consider this. It already has, in some respect. This past March, Amazon successfully won the rights to Thursday Night Football. Those games will air exclusively on Amazon Prime Video starting next year. Also, in case you missed it, this past May, Amazon bought MGM Studios for $8.5 billion. That gave them access to 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows. Speaking of acquisition deals, after we put out the show yesterday, MailChimp announced they would be acquired by Intuit,

Starting point is 00:10:52 which also owns QuickBooks and TurboTax. Quoting their announcement, Together with Intuit, we'll deliver an innovative small business growth engine powered by marketing automation, customer relationship management, accounting and compliance, payments and expense, and e-commerce solutions, I don't think I've heard this phrase before. A single source of truth for your business, whatever that means, will also be able to offer more personalized support and onboarding, expand our international footprint and scale our teams to innovate

Starting point is 00:11:25 faster and deliver the solutions you want and need, unquote. MailChimp says nothing much will change. The brand name will stay. The features will stay. Then again, every new owner promises that, not all deliver. MailChimp has never taken any investor money and says it's been profitable since day one. By the way, news about this was first posted in our Slack community by a member. You'd have seen it before anyone else.

Starting point is 00:11:51 And you can join our community of more than 500 digital marketers at todayindigital.com slash slack or by tapping the link in today's episode notes. Social media content managers rejoice. More emoji are coming. 37 new ones plus 75 skin tone additions. What are the new ones? Melting face, saluting face, face with eyes open and hand over mouth, face with peeking eye, face with diagonal mouth and dotted line face.

Starting point is 00:12:24 There's also a new biting lip emoji and several new hand emojis such as hand hearts, you know, where you form your hand in the shape of a heart. Palm down, palm up, hand with index finger and thumb crossed, and index finger pointing at the viewer. The non-human emoji coming include a nest with eggs, an empty nest, x-ray, crutch, playground slide, an identification card, and a low battery icon. There are also some new plants, animals, and a handful of new food icons. It's expected most platforms like smartphones and desktop OSes will add these later in the year.

Starting point is 00:13:01 It's been a bad day. It's been a bad day. Not for any business reason, but I have a new keyboard. I used to have Apple's compact version of their keyboard, which required you to do some sort of calisthenics around your finger placement to get all the right keys. So I got a full keyboard thinking that it would be, you know, better. So now I have regular up, down, left, right. I have a full numeric keypad on the right. But years and years of muscle memory, it's hard to retrain. You know, the keys are slightly bigger,

Starting point is 00:13:31 which is great in theory, but my brain is just not able to process it. I have typed easily 200,000 apostrophes today by accident. You know, my emails are full of apostrophes. So if you get an email from me and it looks a little weird, that's what's happening. Talk to you tomorrow. My spirit is free. I rise from the ashes into the sky. With fire in my spirit, stars in my eyes.

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Want to Give Your Business Cash (Fee: 1%)

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