Today in Digital Marketing - Four Reasons Brands Should Use Facebook's New Messaging Feature

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

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. It is Thursday, October 19th. Today, Amazon's new Call a Friend feature arrives just in time for Q4. Why marketers might want to consider Facebook's new messaging upgrade. Behind the scenes of Meta's struggle to make Reels ads relevant. And oops, Instagram apologizes for labeling Palestinians as terrorists. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today, Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:01:14 In November 1999, an American tax agent named John Carpenter was on the TV game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He was good. He kept answering questions correctly, all the way to the final question. Which of these U.S. presidents appeared on the television series Laugh-In? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon? Answer this one right, and he'd be the show's first ever million-dollar winner. If you're familiar with the show, it offers contestants what it calls lifelines, things to use if you're stuck on an answer. One of those lifelines is called Call a Friend. The show connects you to your friend, you ask them the question,

Starting point is 00:01:44 they tell you what they think the answer is, and you can go with The show connects you to your friend. You ask them the question. They tell you what they think the answer is, and you can go with that one or go on your own. On that last question, Carpenter cashed in that call to phone his dad. Hi, Dad. Hi.

Starting point is 00:02:01 I don't really need your help, but I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to win the million dollars. While not quite as flashy, Amazon is launching a sort of similar thing this week, though without the million dollar prize. It's called Consult a Friend and lets shoppers send a message to people whose advice they want on a product. The message goes out from a mobile phone's share sheet, so presumably most people will send it out as a text message. But this is more like a poll than a request for comment. The recipient gets three icons to choose from, good, meh, or bad.

Starting point is 00:02:38 They can also add some notes if they want. Amazon says they're adding this because people already do this all the time, ask their contacts for advice. They say shoppers pressed the share button billions of times last year. And I know what you're thinking, you filthy marketer, you. This is a clever way to collect contact information for non-Amazon customers. But no, Amazon says recipients must already have an Amazon account and be logged into it to provide any feedback. This will roll out tomorrow in a handful of countries,

Starting point is 00:03:09 including the US, Australia, France, Germany, and the UK. If you've been following the social media landscape for the last year or so, you'll know that one of the big trends has been away from large platform sharing, like posting to your Facebook or Instagram feed, and a move toward closed circle sharing, group DMs, Discord channels, and so on. One of the most popular closed circle platforms is one that marketers haven't really availed themselves of, WhatsApp channels. These look a lot like DM threads, but only the organizer can post to it. It's often used to distribute news or links of interest to a small group.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Users can follow the channel, react with an emoji, and that's it. They can't post or add a reply. Met has obviously taken note of this social trend and yesterday announced that they will be adding these one-way broadcast channels to Facebook and Messenger. They say it'll take a few weeks to get out, but there are already some brands using it. Netflix, for instance, has one such channel where they post basically what they post on other social media, some random text updates and some memes. There are a couple of updates for marketers using these channels. First, not many do. So if your brand's positioning has some first mover energy in it, this might be a great addition to prove your early adopter cred.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Second, there's no algorithm controlling what order people see their messages in. They're just in order of recency. That might be great for people who only end up following a few of these channels, less helpful if consumers end up following hundreds. Third, because these messages live in people's messaging app, there's a feeling of closer connection than just seeing content on a feed. And finally, notifications. Again, as long as people aren't signing up to every channel they see, you as the marketer will be able to pop up a notification on someone's phone when you post there. Just don't post too often or

Starting point is 00:05:05 those people will end up muting or unfollowing your account. This is rolling out now, but it's not clear which business categories are getting them first. Once your page gets them, you should see a message on your brand page. I should note this is something that's been available on Instagram for some time now and has been extraordinarily popular with some of its biggest channels having millions of members. Other than broadcast channels, WhatsApp does have a pretty extensive business platform. It's also owned by Meta,

Starting point is 00:05:37 so their whole ad platform is connected. But WhatsApp is really best used on a phone and it only permits one account at a time. You can log out of your personal account to log into your business one, but then you have to do that all over again when you're done with your business stuff. Some marketers are so concerned about crossing the streams, as Dr. Egon Spengler once said, that they carry two phones with them. Today, Meta announced it will finally support multiple accounts in the app. But there is a big catch. Unlike the rest of its apps, WhatsApp accounts are tied to phone numbers. So to set up a second

Starting point is 00:06:12 account, you will need a second phone number and SIM card or a phone that accepts multi-SIM or eSIM. If you have these, you can open your WhatsApp settings, click on the arrow next to your name, and click Add Account. You can control your privacy and notification settings as well on each account. There is a fantastic think piece at theinformation.com today called Inside Meta's Struggles to Turn Reels into an Advertising Powerhouse. It is a great read. I thought I'd bring you a couple of notes for it. So quoting from the piece,

Starting point is 00:06:52 quote, a year after Meta began selling ads on Reels, the company is struggling to convince marketers that advertising on the TikTok rival can drive new business, ad executives say. Marketers typically view Meta's properties as venues to run ads designed to persuade people to do something like buy a product or download an app. Whereas quick video ads that run on reels are better to promote a brand. One executive at a major agency that spends hundreds of millions annually on Meta's platforms said in an interview that his clients mostly don't view reels as a strong option for direct response advertising compared to placing ads on Instagram and Facebook's feeds.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Roughly 45% of the firm's clients currently advertise on Facebook reels, which has mostly stayed flat since the beginning of the year, the executive said, indicating it's not seen as a major priority. He said he was seeing more growth on Instagram reels, where roughly 65% of his firm's clients currently advertise, compared to roughly 55% at the beginning of the year, unquote. The piece goes into a lot more depth, including how AI factors into it all. Spoiler alert, marketers think Meta is unnecessarily obsessed with AI. And the inside scoop on internal battles to find a vision for the product.

Starting point is 00:08:11 It is a bit of a long read, but well worth it. Again, you'll find it at theinformation.com. Look for the piece called Inside Meta's Struggles to Turn Reels into an Advertising Powerhouse. We also have a link in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes. Meta Today said it has changed the default comment settings on Facebook posts. Normally, as you know, when you post to your personal profile, you can choose to make it public

Starting point is 00:08:41 or just to your friends or just to a specific group of people and so on. Normally that defaults to public, but now it will default to friends and followers only. To be clear, this is for personal posts created on the site or the app. This does not apply to brand pages or posting through an API. The company says this is a temporary change brought on by the conflict in Israel and Gaza. It's not clear exactly which personal Facebook accounts will get this change, though Meta said it will apply to, quote, people in the region, unquote. It wasn't very clear on that. We've asked for clarification, but I think they mean to say users in the Middle East will be affected by this. They also didn't say how long this change would last other than to say it was temporary.

Starting point is 00:09:26 Facebook is also making it easier to bulk delete comments and has disabled the feature that normally displays the first one or two comments under posts in the feed. And finally, Meta's PR department was busy today. Much of their day spent apologizing profusely for a deeply embarrassing translation on Instagram user bios. Turns out Instagram had been translating bios that included the word Palestinian and an Arabic phrase that means praise be to God, to say Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom. People saw this mistranslation when tapping the C translation link that sometimes appears on the app. Instagram says that bug has now been fixed. I haven't been in school in 32 years when I flunked out of college.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Actually, I got kicked out of college after my first year. But now I'm back in school studying for my ham radio license. It is difficult. That's where I'm off next. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes.

Starting point is 00:11:13 You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.

Today in Digital Marketing - Four Reasons Brands Should Use Facebook's New Messaging Feature

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