Today in Digital Marketing - Fact-Checking the "Facebook is Dying" Myth

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, February 6th. Today, if Facebook's dead, why is their user base still climbing? The answer is two letters long. Also, Microsoft beefs up its ads platform, why your brand's website may have just lost its search console connection, and LinkedIn decides what we all need is more AI-generated fake congratulatory messages. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. There are a lot of upstart platforms vying for the spot once held by Twitter.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Mastodon, Threads, Spoutable. But one fairly high-profile platform was started at Twitter itself. Blue Sky. Blue Sky was a kind of experimental project within Twitter, a kind of testing ground to see if they could build a different foundation for a microblogging network, a more decentralized one. Once Twitter started to unravel and Blue Sky was kicked out on its own, a new team there really ramped up development. Rather than being a complementary experiment to its parent, it would go head-to-head to compete against it. At first, Blue Sky was hard to get into.

Starting point is 00:01:12 It was in closed beta, and you had to track someone down who was already in and had invite codes. Even U.S. President Joe Biden, for the longest time, couldn't get in. But that changes today, with the site leaving its beta status behind and opening the doors to any brand or any person who wants an account. It'll be familiar to anyone who's used Twitter, but with a couple of key differences. One, you can choose your own algorithm. There's a kind of free store of them. You just want to see posts from accounts you follow, but not their replies to anyone? Done. You want to see only posts in your feed that have 30 retweets or more? Done. Second, you can also fine-tune the content moderation to your own preferences. You might be okay with seeing nudity, but you don't want to see anything violent. You can set

Starting point is 00:02:01 that. One big downside, though, is it's chosen to go its own way with its networking protocol. While it is more decentralized than Twitter, which is essentially one giant server, the developers chose not to adopt ActivityPub, the network that has the most traction. Mastodon works on ActivityPub. Threads will soon, and there's a whole bunch of other sites like Reddit clones that work on that protocol. Blue Sky instead is developing its own protocol that no other social platforms are using. Anyway, all that to say that it is open today. If you want to check it out or place a stake down for your brand, it's at bsky.social. This week, Microsoft is rolling out enhanced conversions in beta for advertisers in the Americas and Europe, and will be rolling out to all markets in the coming weeks.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Enhanced conversions let you supplement existing conversion measurements by using your own customer first-party data, like emails and phone numbers. This lets you improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. Also lets you track cross-device conversions, since this enables conversion attribution across multiple devices, providing, of course, a wider view of your customers' journeys. To get started, you'll need to have online or offline conversion tracking set up and ready to receive conversions. If you are using online conversions, you'll need to follow the instructions. They have a copy and paste code snippet you can put into your website, similar to instrumenting the UET tag snippet.

Starting point is 00:03:34 And if you're using offline conversions, they have some help page instructions there that'll help you format and hash the user first party data before uploading it. There are also some new targeting options. In the US and Canada, in-market audiences for company size and job titles are now available. This data comes from LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns. In-market audiences are preset buckets of people that the ad platform believes are in the market for a specific product, like travel or a car. These new options are available anywhere. You can use in-market audiences today, which includes display, native, and connected TV. Third, they have simplified the campaign setup workflow a bit.

Starting point is 00:04:15 You can switch back to the old campaign creation view if you'd prefer, but you will get one of those, please tell us why you hate our new process forms, and most likely that option to revert to the old UI will go away soon. Google is fond of killing things. And yes, I'm still bitter that they shut down their RSS reader more than a decade ago. They used to have a really good domains manager where you could change your domain settings, update the name servers, keep track of domain renewals and all that. They sold that business to Squarespace last year,

Starting point is 00:04:49 and now anyone who had their domains hosted with Google will find they're managed by Squarespace. We're also learning this week that you might be losing something else. Search console verification. Some people are getting emails saying they're about to lose access to the tools. I guess since Google won't have those domains as tightly connected as they did before, some of those things which were helpfully automated are going to disconnect. Apparently, the fix to this is to use the DNS token verification method to authenticate your domain. That should reconnect things. And to answer your next question, Google says no, this shuffling of the deck chairs will not have any effect on your SEO. And that brings us to another episode of...

Starting point is 00:05:36 Nobody asked for this. Yes, LinkedIn is rolling out a new way for people to send you well-meaning but fully AI-generated congratulatory messages, because that's what we all want, apparently. It'll be in a new section of their app called Catch Up, the idea being that you're catching up with your connection's events, like when they finish a course, or get a new job, or, and this is true if dystopian, just maintain their job for another year. That is one of the triggers. You can then send them an automatically generated message like congrats on your three-year work anniversary.

Starting point is 00:06:11 You can also like that catch-up message or start a DM thread from there. To leave space in the app, they are moving your connection requests, newsletter invitations, and recommended people to a new tab called Grow. They're also releasing a new generative AI tool that will write one of those messages.

Starting point is 00:06:27 You've seen them before. Hey, we're not connected, but I see your business also has the letter G in it, so we should be besties. Actually, it's worse than that. The example they showed read, quote, I'm very interested in Microsoft's mission to empower individuals and organizations

Starting point is 00:06:42 to achieve more as described in your company description, unquote. You can edit it if you want, though in my experience being on the receiving end of these kinds of emails, the type of person who'd use this tech is either too lazy or sending too many messages to bother editing them. This morning, Meta announced it will start labeling AI-generated images from tools like ChatGPT and Google's BARD. This comes after they started labeling content generated by their own tools. The label looks like a little stamp in the corner that reads, Quoting from Ars Technica, Quote, coming during a U.S. election year that is expected to be contentious, Meta's decision is part of a larger effort within the tech industry to establish standards for labeling content created using generative AI models, which are capable of producing fake but realistic audio images and video from written prompts, unquote. Meta can do this because there are a few industry standards that are being adopted which place invisible watermarks on the images that only special software can detect. The major players like Google, OpenAI, Microsoft,

Starting point is 00:07:51 Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock are in various stages of using this tech. This does mean it'll be harder for the tech to identify and label images that come from nefarious tools like those which generate porn. And it only covers images. Most people worried about election interference are worried more about fake audio and video. Meta says they're working on tools that will identify those as well, but they're not releasing them yet. Regardless of the type of content, if you upload it to a Meta-owned property, the platform says you must label it yourself or face penalties.

Starting point is 00:08:26 What penalties? They haven't said. And finally, Facebook, as you know, has been slowly losing users quarter after quarter. Now, wait, do you know that? Or is that just what people are saying? Because as we mark the 20th anniversary of the site this week, its most recently released numbers show that the user base keeps growing, now counting more than 3 billion monthly active users. Quoting social media today, quote, to put that in perspective, the population of the entire world is around 8 billion. And with 1.4 billion people in China, where Meta's apps are not available, and around 25% of the global population under 15, you have to be 13 years old to sign up for Facebook,

Starting point is 00:09:09 that suggests that the majority of people who can access Facebook actually do on a regular basis. What's more, Facebook's usage over time is actually increasing in terms of the amount of monthly active users who log in daily, unquote. So what is behind this increase in time spent on platform? MetaZone numbers suggest its AI-generated content recommendations are actually working. Follow us on social media. We are almost everywhere. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Post.News, Spoutable, Snapchat, and even Pinterest.

Starting point is 00:09:59 Go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link at the top of the show notes. I'm Todd Mathen. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Fact-Checking the "Facebook is Dying" Myth

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