Today in Digital Marketing - Goodbye, Grey Checkmark. We Hardly Knew You.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, October 16th, 2019. Happy Ride to Work Day, Australia. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, kiss your pretty Facebook verified badge goodbye. YouTube is ending support for third party pixels, what that means for your campaigns. And TikTok is gunning hard for Facebook now. Plus a whole lot more.

Starting point is 00:00:22 It was a busy day, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Remember a couple of years ago when Facebook came out with that gray verified check mark badge for brands and your marketing VP was like, hey, we got to get verified. So you jumped through all the stupid hoops to get your little gray check mark. Yeah. Oh, hey, guess what Facebook's taking away now? Yeah. Bye bye badge. Why? Facebook says users weren't clear on what it meant, which to me sounds more like a problem with Facebook, not the users, but whatever. So the gray badges will start disappearing from brand pages like yours starting at the end of this month.

Starting point is 00:00:55 What does Facebook suggest you do to prove that you are the real brand you claim to be? Post more? Fill out your About page and use a profile picture. Yeah, that's about all they've got. The real takeaway here, of course, is if you are working for a big brand, get your media monitoring services tightened up. This will make it easier for counterfeits to confuse people. Instagram now lets you review and delete app connections from your account.

Starting point is 00:01:26 What does that mean? You know, you were trying out cool-looking analytics app last year, or you hooked up a contest picker app a while back and never deleted that app authorization. Those apps still have access to your account. You've been able to review and delete these connections on the website for a while now. Now you will be able to do it from the app itself. Some people have this, some don't. Instagram says it may take up to six months to get to everyone. I have it, and it is buggy as hell. I had 42 apps connected to my account. Shut up, I know, I know.

Starting point is 00:02:00 So many, in fact, that the app just displayed a big long screen with nothing but delete buttons on it. Anyway, stop what you're doing right now, press pause on this podcast, and go review the apps that are connected to your brand's account. Again, if you don't have it in the actual Instagram app, you can find it under security settings on the website. You might be in for a shock. If you don't use that app anymore that's listed, or you don't recognize it, delete it. You can always add it back later. Remember that Facebook's biggest data scandal, Cambridge Analytica, happened because of a third-party app that people had connected to their account. YouTube will be ending support for third-party pixels early next year. Quoting Marketing Land,

Starting point is 00:02:40 Google launched Ads Data Hub in 2017 to support cross-device campaign measurement across its systems without the use of pixels. It's been working with third-party measurement companies to migrate their services into Ads Data Hub. YouTube said today it expects those migrations to be completed early next year. At that time, it will no longer allow advertisers to use third-party pixels on YouTube. Still quoting Marketing Land here, pixels, used to set cookies in browsers, have been used for years to track and measure digital advertising performance. However, cookies aren't effective at measuring performance

Starting point is 00:03:17 when users bounce around their various devices, and they don't work in mobile apps. YouTube says these limitations and lack of privacy controls in many pixels are why it is moving to its own system. Interesting new tool out there for content marketers wanting to move their brand into the stories era that we've all been forced into. The tool is called StoryStrip, and it repurposes your website's content into dynamically generated vertical stories. This is actually kind of a fascinating way of handling this. Until this came along, most agencies and brands would manually create a story for each individual piece of content.

Starting point is 00:03:53 StoryStrip will also let you insert ads between the screens. One entertainment brand that had early access to it reported a 44% growth in content consumption. TikTok is going after Facebook. No, not their advertisers. Their people. The Chinese-owned mobile app that some describe as Vine with lip-syncing has taken over office space formerly used by Facebook's WhatsApp. This new location puts TikTok just a couple of miles away from Facebook's headquarters. This as the company posts lots of job openings in the San Francisco area.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Since last year, TikTok has poached more than two dozen employees from Facebook. So you are a multinational brand that operates in a number of languages. And when you've been running your Facebook ads, you have been dutifully creating and inserting separate language versions for each ad, which is good. Facebook says they are about to make that easier with its new automatic language translation for ads. It's basically what it sounds like. It's still rolling out, so you may not have it as of right now. And Facebook says you will still be able to provide your own translations, which I think you know is the right thing to do here.

Starting point is 00:05:14 Okay, lightning round. Some SEO folks are reporting today that the Google My Business Q&A feature is buggy. Apparently some of the Q's and A's are just disappearing. So don't freak out if you've noticed that. It's not just you. Tomorrow, LinkedIn will launch its new events tool, similar to Facebook events. This will let you create in-person meetups that invite your contacts. Twitter's head of product in a recent podcast interview says they're considering being able to let people post tweets that are only visible to a select group of people or that disappear after a short period of time. It's all hypothetical and conceptual right now, but still interesting. And in one of the weirdest yet maybe most brilliant brand co-marketing ventures of all time,

Starting point is 00:05:56 Microsoft announced this morning that there is a new Taco Bell branded Xbox. Insert gamer who never leaves the house joke here. And finally, listener Lissandro Frankie commented on my snark yesterday regarding the posts in Google My Business. He said, as an owner of a digital marketing company, just wanted to make a quick note. The Google My Business post feature, while isolated and clunky, does have very good effects for SEO. And we encourage our clients to post regularly, especially because nobody is using it. It's been a good tool that with little effort has very positive impact. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this podcast, just tweet with the hashtag TIDM. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to

Starting point is 00:06:38 you by engageq.com. Remember, the premium feed has a deep dive into the TikTok algorithm, plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. Visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. And I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Goodbye, Grey Checkmark. We Hardly Knew You.

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