Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s New Thing Might Do Something to Help With…. Uh… Things.

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Your engagement levels suck? You’re not alone… Google’s new reputation management tool lauches… Facebook’s director of agencies tries and fails to announce a new advertising option… and how a 40-second TikTok video paid for an entire studio set. In fact, MY 40-second TikTok video.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterTODAY’S LINKS:Engagement StudyGoogle Answers Advertisers’ Burning Questions About FLoCHow to avoid 'clout-chasing' accusations in influencer marketingMORE: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, your engagement levels suck, you're not alone, Google's new reputation management tool launches, Facebook's director of agencies tries and fails to announce a new advertising option, and how a 40-second TikTok video paid for an entire studio set. In fact, my entire studio set. It's Wednesday, March 17th, 2021. Happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Every day in our business, there are hundreds of studies put out, survey results from SEO experts, polls of marketing executives, research on the best time of day to post. Most of the time, we don't cover these because they've got a low sample size or the sponsoring organization clearly has a result they want to get out. But every year, Social Insider puts out a study of engagement data. This study we do cover because they use a pool of 22 million

posts broken down by industry. The top line, average engagement rate per post in 2020 was much higher on Instagram than on Facebook and Twitter. But what is that rate? Just over 1%. And that was the good result. 1.16% engagement rate on Instagram, to be precise. On Facebook, it was 0.27. On Twitter, 0.07%. So, next time your client or boss complains that your Facebook organic post only got 2% engagement, you can tell them that's more than seven times the average.

When broken down by industry, politics, education organizations, and airline brands had the highest engagement per post on Instagram last year. But even so, not one industry cracked 3% engagement on Instagram. One big caveat with this research, they only checked engagement on those three platforms. There was no mention of Snapchat or TikTok or YouTube or Pinterest and all of those. That's a big gap there. A couple of other interesting tidbits. Instagram is really the only platform of the three that increased engagement by a non-trivial amount. That increase was about 6.4% over 2019.

But even so, posting frequency on Instagram's main feed declined by more than 6%. The study suggested that some of that effort went to the stories section, which I guess makes sense. On Facebook and Twitter, the engagement rate didn't really change. Images remain the most popular post type. There is a link to the study in the show notes. Google has launched a new tool to let you check the status of reviews you've disputed. Actually, it's part of a broader overhaul of their review setup. You can also see the reviews and report them there too. But this new edition of being able to check what's happened with a review that you've disputed is quite nice. If Google doesn't remove something that you think they should have, you can appeal there too. Some people say it only seems to work

right now for Google My Business accounts that have a small number of listings in them. Also in Google News, today the company reported it disabled 1.7 million ad accounts last year for policy violations. That number was 1 million the previous year. Facebook's never been one to be clear about, well, anything. Even when they announce something significant, like they're changing how pixel events work, they bury it under 42 paragraphs about how they're supporting small businesses and they're being transparent and, oh, by the way, you can't use your pixel anymore. Even then, we never get an email from them. Their communication strategies with digital marketers appears to be to put a pop-up window

in the ads manager of like eight people and hope that those eight people screenshot it and post it on Twitter. So imagine my surprise when Facebook's director of agencies popped up on a recent episode of the Otherwise Excellent Strategy Sessions podcast. His name is Nick Bond. He spent most of the hour talking about the usual things

that Facebook executives obsess over, regulation, competition, and so on. But for one brief shining moment, he actually announced something of relevance to agencies and brand advertisers, which brings us to today's quiz. What the hell is he talking about here? I'm going to play you a clip from the podcast and your job is to figure out what he actually is trying to say here. Ready?

So for certain placements, generally the more contextual ones like instant articles, audience network, in-stream, We have a very standard and sophisticated suite of tools to allow for exclusion lists and contextual limitations that other platforms offer as well. We work with a range of third parties in this space, and it's yeah it's it's overall a very sophisticated brand safety uh environment and we continue to evolve that over time for feed um so that the feed portion of our ads business um historically that has absolutely been governed by community standards we are uh in the process of running a very limited test with a very small group of advertisers for brand contextual controls in feed. Now, it's a very significant engineering task because we classify content by feed and everybody's feed is completely different.

So this is a, you know, it's a trial that we're taking incredibly seriously. And therefore, there's a lot of scrutiny will roll out, you know, reasonably slowly over the next 12 to 18 months. But that is something that we are exploring, as I say, with a small group of control advertisers to begin with. Okay, here's my guess on what he means. It sounds like they're going to let us advertisers specify what topics of organic posts we do not want our ads to be next to. Presumably, there'll be a kind of block list for certain organic topics like gambling and sex and maybe even politics.

And we'll be able to tell Facebook to not put our ad near those kinds of posts in people's feed. But honestly, that's just a guess. I suppose we'll have to wait for the Twitter screenshots to be sure. A few small items today. First, two good reads that I want to point you to. A Google rep did an interview with searchenginejournal.com to answer a whole bunch of questions that digital marketers commonly ask about FLOC, F-L-O-C. That's Google's plan to let us still target by interest, but without needing individual user profiles. And a great piece this morning on marketing dive about

how brands and agencies can avoid clout-chasing accusations in influencer marketing. Links to both of those are in today's show notes. And the popular local service site Angie's List has rebranded to Angie. That's A-N-G-I dot com. So this was a nice surprise. Yesterday I talked about a lifetime deal on AppSumo for Stencil. That's the design tool, like Canva. I also did a TikTok video about it.

And, like the mention in the podcast, included the affiliate link. I'm not going to reveal how much money we made off that one 40-second video. But I will tell you, it was in the low four figures and paid for an entire studio setup. So now I've got two professional lights, tripods, diffusers, a better backdrop, a special wide-angle lens for my iPhone, a high-end studio lapel mic, all from one 40-second TikTok video. You can see a photo of the new set on my Twitter account. Link in the notes. Honestly, I thought affiliate marketing was dead. Guess not.

Talk to you tomorrow.