Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s Outage Today Reached Far and Wide

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Facebook's entire platform crashes and your ad campaigns may have been affected. The watch party is going away. YouTube has a new feature for digital marketers who obsess over community size. And in case this short podcast isn't enough, how you can now get a daily 60-second summary of each of these shows. It's Friday, March 19th, 2021. Happy Carpenter Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

Starting point is 00:00:27 and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The big news today, a massive outage of the Facebook platform. It didn't last long, but it affected a whole lot. For our purposes as digital marketers, the ads platform was down for more than an hour. And here at our agency, we're pretty sure it actually rolled back some changes we'd made to an ad. So if you've made some changes recently too, maybe go in and check it. Likewise, Instagram and WhatsApp were down. WhatsApp couldn't connect to

Starting point is 00:00:55 the server. Messages weren't being delivered. It wasn't clear at deadline whether this also affected messaging on Facebook and Instagram, given that those three platforms started using a single messaging foundation last year. Instagram's feed was barfing up a server error. You couldn't add Instagram as a placement on your ad campaigns, even if you could get to the ads manager at all. Anyway, it looks like things are back to normal, but definitely double check any ad campaigns that you have running. Facebook has decided to retire Watch Party, the miserably confusing dog's breakfast of a feature which nobody really understood.

Starting point is 00:01:33 In theory, it was supposed to let you watch videos with your friends. In practice, though, you'd go watch something on your feed that would accidentally create a watch party that would invite your friends, and then they'd pile in and say, like, what is going on here? What is this? There really was no practical use for it in digital marketing. They never added ad products to it, like mid-rolls.

Starting point is 00:01:54 And mercifully, they will be dropping it on April 16th. If you care, you can download a copy of your posts, comments, and reactions of watch party videos using the download your information tool. One of the things about growing my TikTok channel that I didn't expect was that I'm obsessively checking my follower count. It's around 5,800 right now. Thanks for asking. This isn't my usual behavior, but the growth on TikTok can go so fast. How can you not check it all the time? Anyway, if this describes you too, and you have a YouTube channel, you can now see how many people have subscribed with a new counter that updates in real time.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Until now, if you wanted near real-time numbers, you needed to rely on third-party tools. But now there's a section called See Live Count in the real-time card within YouTube Studios Analytics. And remember, friends, your subscriber count is not a reflection of your value as a human being. At least that's what I'm told. Short news day today, so that brings us to the lightning round. Instagram is testing a new option that would highlight when feed posts have been re-shared to stories. Twitter is planning to let you add custom visual backgrounds

Starting point is 00:03:09 when re-sharing a tweet as a fleet. Reports say Instagram is working on a separate version of the app for users under 13. And finally, nobody said anything about the littlest hobo theme I dropped in yesterday's show? Come on, Canadians. I expect

Starting point is 00:03:25 better. And finally, those of you who've been regular listeners will know that this has been quite the month for my wife and I. Our cat Pepper died earlier this month. And while we did celebrate our wedding anniversary this week, we did it in our local hospital's ER because we thought my wife had broken her leg. So suffice to say, we need a vacation. We're not going far, public health guidelines and all. I wanted to thank the people who auditioned to guest host. In the end, I realized I'm too much of a narcissistic control freak to hand the reins off. So this means no podcast or newsletter this coming Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

Starting point is 00:04:04 But I will be doing some updates on my TikTok account. So now would be a good time to follow it. Thank you. is Digital Marketing Secrets. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital, production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends,

Starting point is 00:04:40 and I will talk to you on Thursday, the 25th.

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook’s Outage Today Reached Far and Wide

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