Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s New Algorithm Looks for “Good” in the World

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Today, Snapchat has a million dollars to give you and your brand. All you need to do, use its TikTok clone. Buffer adds a long-missing channel to its analytics product. Twitter is going to start handing out blue checkmarks again. And good news for you Google Workspace people who work with partners that are in Microsoft shops. It's Tuesday, November 24th, 2020.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Happy National Sardines Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. We don't often get an inside look at the specific factors that go into the Facebook content algorithm. For obvious reasons, Facebook likes to keep that stuff close to its chest, lest filthy digital marketers like you and I exploit that information for profit. But we have some insight now into some changes the company made in the days following the U.S. presidential election. New York Times reporting that Facebook changed which posts were promoted and which were demoted after Facebook employees noticed a lot of misinformation spreading. And so, the changes

Starting point is 00:01:35 were apparently made to give more weight to articles from mainstream news outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and NPR, and less weight to the more partisan sites like Breitbart. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg himself personally signed off on the changes. This all came as part of research they were doing on the spread of certain types of content. Specifically, they were showing users an article with a small poll under it. Is this content predominantly good for the world or bad for the world? What did they find?

Starting point is 00:02:04 Well, this won't shock you, but apparently there was a correlation between posts that got a lot of views and those that people said were bad for the world. Facebook then adjusted its algorithm to predict what content users would say was bad for the world and demote them. Apparently, this worked, but a little too well, because one side effect was that people spent less time on Facebook. So, you know, can't have that. So they toned down the algorithmic changes so that the content demotions were less aggressive. Facebook hasn't commented on any of this reporting, of course. But what does this mean for you and me in our work as digital marketers? Well, it could mean that the

Starting point is 00:02:40 days of using deliberately inflammatory posts to juice engagement are ending. I know, I know, you never did that. At the very least, try lining up a handful of organic posts that are the good news kind and see how they perform. Snapchat's new TikTok features, which it calls Spotlight, has rolled out. I guess we can't fault them for copying an app, given that a whole whack of others copied them when they were pretty much inventing the Stories format. But not being first to market with this TikTok format

Starting point is 00:03:11 means they've got some catching up to do. How to fix this? Why money, of course. Snapchat is giving away a million dollars to users or brands that submit the best content. That's not a million dollars for the run of a period of time. That's a million dollars a day. So stop everything. Stop listening to this podcast and go develop some content for your brand that you can send them. I'm only partly kidding here.

Starting point is 00:03:38 If you do want to get into this, you'd create a snap like you always do. And then in the send to section, there will be a new option to send it to spotlight hit send in the bottom right corner and presto you have submitted it you may also want to add a topic to your snap before submitting it that'll help it get to the right people speaking of content algorithms we do know a little bit about what factors are in there watch time likes and shares all contribute positively bounce rate of course will pull your score down. Now, you're not going to get all $1 million.

Starting point is 00:04:11 That money is divvied up, of course, based on how many unique views a qualifying video got compared to all the other content out there that day. But if you do earn some cash, you will get a DM from the company. Doesn't appear as if there's any limit as to how many submissions you can make. And Snapchat says they will keep this up until the end of the year, maybe even longer if it's working out. Spotlight is still rolling out, so you may not have it yet as a send-to option, but the first countries to get it will be Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and yes, the US. The social media tool Buffer has added analytics for LinkedIn pages to its standalone analytics product. Basic insights for social channels used to be available in its published tool.

Starting point is 00:04:56 A few top-level items are still there, but like most of the social tools these days, their good analytics is held behind a separate product. It is affordable, $35 a month for eight channels, $50 a month for 10 channels, plus white labeling and Instagram stories data. But two big things are still missing. Things that I think should be part of any analytics tool you separate off as its own paid product. First, there's no combined channel reporting. So if you want a single chart showing your community growth across all your channels, you are out of luck. Also not there, time period comparisons. They did change their time windows from last 7 days and last 30 days to last week and last month,

Starting point is 00:05:33 which, you know, is more what we're after as marketers anyway, but there's no way to compare that performance to a previous period. These are things that both Sprout Social and Agorapulse's premium analytics products do. Agorapulse's version, they call it Power Reports, is actually cheaper, kind of. 10 social channels is $19 a month, but you do need a base plan to use Power Reports, unlike Buffer's analytics, which is actually separate. Twitter is bringing back the blue checkmark. Well, the checkmark never went away,

Starting point is 00:06:06 but they stopped adding the symbol to verified accounts about three years ago after they handed one out to the fellow who organized a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which was the scene of a car attack that killed one person and injured 19. So, yeah, after that, they were like, you know what, we're just going to stop handing these out for a bit until we figure some shit out. Apparently, said shit has been figured, and they will be starting back up again early next year. They say they'll only be verifying accounts in certain categories, government officials, companies, brands, nonprofit associations, news, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers, influential individuals. So I guess all categories then Twitter.

Starting point is 00:06:43 They actually said the number of categories could expand over time, expand to what? That's, that's everybody. There is some value for brands to have this, of course, especially if you have people making fake accounts for your company and pretending to be you. The blue checkmark indicates, no, this is the real Nike, not some random account named Nike with the Nike logo on it that some 12-year-old in his basement made. Side note here, I follow this hilarious account on TikTok of a guy who makes imposter Facebook brand pages and then engages with that brand's fans under the page's name and logo and basically trolls them. It is terribly immature and shame on him.

Starting point is 00:07:22 But also it's really funny. Other than that, there's not a lot of value. I've had the blue checkmark for years now. I think my book publisher may have arranged it. But the only difference is that the Twitter app has a couple of extra and mostly meaningless options. And I get about two or three DMs a day from very nice Indian men asking me how they too can get verified. Anyway, if verification of your brand's Twitter account is something you'd like, watch for a new option on Twitter called Request Verification in the new year.

Starting point is 00:07:48 A while ago, YouTube added a great feature, Chapter Markers, which lets users skip to specific parts in the video. As a video producer, there's no backend or options page needed to make this. You just put the start time and a few words describing the chapter as a list in your description and YouTube figures out the rest. Apparently, this is going so well that YouTube is now going to try adding chapters to your videos whether you want them there or not. They will be trying their hand at auto-detecting where the content matter changes and calling that the start of a chapter. Actually, there are big benefits of chapters to us digital marketers. Mostly, an SEO play.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Videos with chapters have more opportunity to be surfaced in Google because instead of one piece of content, the video, there are now, say, 10 different regions with maybe 10 different topics, each answering one of 10 different questions that people are typing into search. So really, if you're posting videos on YouTube and they are any more than three or four minutes, manually adding chapters to the description may be something you want to do anyway. As far as I can tell, nobody's seen these auto-generated chapters in the wild yet, but YouTube says it will let you opt your channel out if you want to, for some reason. And finally, Google Workspace, that's the old G Suite, now lets you edit

Starting point is 00:09:08 Microsoft Office documents directly on iOS devices. They've had this on the web and, of course, Android for a while now. Specifically, you can edit, comment, and collaborate on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Basically, it converts the document into the corresponding Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides format and lets you go from there. Previously, it converts the document into the corresponding Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides format, unless you go from there. Previously, tapping an Office doc would just open up a preview of it, which nobody found helpful.

Starting point is 00:09:33 This also replaces their so-called Quick Office, sometimes known as Office Compatibility Mode, which had more limited functionality and collaboration capabilities. I'm still live streaming the production of this podcast every day. If you're curious about how the sausage is made, there's a camera in the studio, another one in the voicing booth where you can watch and read the script

Starting point is 00:09:54 as it runs through the teleprompter, which I write fine, is an iPad showing a Google Doc. I usually start around 12 or 1 o'clock Pacific, takes a couple of hours. Today, if you were watching, you could have seen me record this entire script again for the second time, because for some reason the first time,

Starting point is 00:10:11 maybe I forgot to hit the record button. So, yeah. A live stream pops up on my Twitter account, so be sure to follow me at Todd Maffin. There's a link to that in the notes of this episode. The stream is also simulcast on Twitch and this podcast's YouTube channel. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. You brought me here and told me that

Starting point is 00:10:37 Here all the stars will always shine so bright And in this place place the promised land everything and nothing seems to be right

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s New Algorithm Looks for “Good” in the World

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