Today in Digital Marketing - Great News for People Who Manage Facebook Pages

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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. Today, social media managers will love Facebook's new change to commenting. Twitter beefs up its ads platform. YouTube rolls back a popular video discovery tool, add one more platform to the pile of Clubhouse clones, and why the real comedy around April Fool's Day happens on April 2nd. It's Wednesday, March 31st, 2021. Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital, and here's what you missed today in

Starting point is 00:01:03 digital marketing. Some surprising changes to Facebook were announced this morning. Big changes. First, brands will be able to restrict comments on organic posts. This is something many marketers and social media managers have wanted since forever. Until now, you just couldn't. If you published a post to your brand's Facebook page, well, it's going to have a place for people to add their comments, like it or not. There was one exception involving video uploads, but almost nobody took advantage of that. Now, Facebook is reversing course,

Starting point is 00:01:35 in a way, and letting you control who can comment. This is great, of course, for brands that are gun-shy about what people might say, or brands in regulated industries that have had to stay off Facebook entirely because they just wouldn't be permitted to let anyone comment. Most of Facebook's announcement was consumer-based, so it talked a lot about personal profiles. There, too, you'll be able to choose from. Everybody can comment. Only my friends can comment. And only people I mention can comment, but they did go out of their way to confirm, quote, if you're a public

Starting point is 00:02:05 figure, creator, or brand, you too can choose to limit your commenting audience on your public posts, unquote. You may recognize this setup from Twitter, which added similar controls recently. Like everything on social media, this will come in waves. On Facebook's site and app, it's apparently rolling out now. That might take a couple of weeks to get out fully. Then Wave 2 will be the APIs so that third-party tools will be able to incorporate this functionality too. Or maybe Facebook just won't put this in the APIs at all. There's lots of stuff they left out. Another thing we don't know, if this will make it to ads or if this is an organic-only function.

Starting point is 00:02:42 I can't imagine they wouldn't roll this over to ad posts, but, well, this is Facebook we're talking about. All that said, though, once you can do it, should you? We don't know yet what consumers will think of a brand that turns commenting off on posts or on its whole page. Either way, certainly a surprising turn, and it wasn't the only big announcement from Facebook today. Facebook also announced they are making it easier to view the news feed in reverse chronological order. When Facebook started, of course, you saw posts in the order in which they were posted,

Starting point is 00:03:16 then they mixed it all up with an algorithm. They've always had a chronological feed. It's of sorts. It's called Most Recent. Don't let the name fool you. Like Twitter's version, which it calls Latest Tweets, it's not purely in reverse chronological order. It's more like algorithm light. There's still an algo there. It's just not cranked up to 100. Anyway, they're making that Most Recent feed easier to find now. It's going to be right at the top of the app on Android first and on iOS in the coming weeks. They've also rebranded their see first list to favorites. That will also be at the top now. And finally, in Facebook marketing news. For those brands which run busy Facebook groups, they are adding a slow mode.

Starting point is 00:03:59 This will slow down comments on a specific group post that is gaining a lot of viral traction. The idea is that it might help put heated debates on ice a little bit. Facebook explains it this way, quote, When comments are slowed down for a post, each person can only post one comment every five minutes. That could be a great circuit breaker in tense or argumentative debates, giving people a moment to take a breath and think about what they're posting rather than reacting in the heat of the moment, unquote. This too is something other platforms have done in varying forms. During the run-up to the American elections

Starting point is 00:04:34 last year, Twitter restricted retweets without a comment for a while. Instagram's version of the duets feature on TikTok launched today. It's called a remix. It's duets, but on Instagram. All right, next story. Some welcome news for marketers and media buyers who use Twitter ads. The company today announcing an expansion of its Amplify product. Those are pre-roll ads that run alongside videos

Starting point is 00:05:08 from selected partners. Partners include Fox Sports, NBCUniversal, and BuzzFeed. They actually have about 200 of these partnerships in total. The expansion will let brands be more specific about where they're placed with a new curated categories feature. Quoting the company, our curated categories include niche topics like

Starting point is 00:05:26 lighthearted content, football, basketball, soccer, or gaming personalities, and allow advertisers to run their pre-roll against video content from publishers covering the topic of choice. The publishers included in each of our curated categories are always hand-selected by Twitter teams for their relevance and conversation-driving ability within their category's topic, ensuring a deeper level of contextual alignment for brands, unquote. To be clear, Twitter has offered the 15 IAB standard categories. Now they're just adding 11 more content groups. Two of the new categories, you heard light-hearted content, also esports will be in there.

Starting point is 00:06:04 Twitter says it saw a 75% increase in gaming-related tweets in 2020. These new categories will first roll out to the U.S., the U.K., and Brazil over the coming weeks, with more countries to follow. And also in Twitter ad news, they're also changing the format of Amplify pre-roll ads to include stronger branding and UI enhancements. The new format will more prominently show the brand's name and logo during ad playback, and there'll be a place for additional copy. Twitter says in testing, the new format showed an increase of ad recall by 10% and brand favorability by 7% compared to the previous pre-roll design. And they're also improving the Amplify campaign setup workflow, which they say will make it easier for advertisers to target the right categories.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And one small bit about Twitter before we leave them. Today is the last day that its Periscope app will be available. They have taken the code, moved it into the main app, and are retiring the original. So with Facebook adding comment controls, group features, and Twitter enhancing its ads platform, what the hell is YouTube doing rolling back features? Yes, their Moments feature was much ballyhooed when they launched it a couple of years ago. That's where it'll automatically pick out clips from your video and display them in a timeline so people can jump right to the relevant part of a video. Today, seroundtable.com noticed that YouTube quietly updated its help documents for this feature to say it has limited which video providers can show up with the Key Moments

Starting point is 00:07:38 interface in Google Search. They say it's now only available for a small set of video providers, and they're not adding any new videos that try to get in using the markup they developed for this purpose. A Google rep explained the change this way on Twitter, quote, participating via markup is limited to a small set of providers right now, and what changed was that we aren't accepting new requests. Before, there was an interest form link you could fill out. Google tries to automatically enable key moments without you having to do anything extra, but there are ways to help

Starting point is 00:08:08 Google understand which points specifically should be used through markup or in the YouTube description, unquote. Except now they're just ignoring that markup they rolled out. And why? This was a great feature. You'd search for something like Twitter ad policies, and it would take you right to a long video about social media in general, but right to the point at which they mention Twitter ad policies. Weird. Also in YouTube news today, they confirmed they're trying out a video page design that doesn't include a dislike count. This doesn't mean there won't be a dislike button. Those tests still have the button. It's just the count that's gone. Only the channel

Starting point is 00:08:48 owner would be able to see the actual dislike numbers. It's getting hard to keep track of everyone who wants a Clubhouse clone these days. Twitter is close to launching theirs. Facebook's working on one. Spotify just yesterday bought an app that would get them there.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Discord just today said it's expanding its existing voice chat to be more like Clubhouse. Well, add one more platform to that list. LinkedIn. It confirmed today it too is testing what it calls a social audio experience in its app. This is apparently part of a set of changes they're rolling out that brings them more in line with the whole creator mindset, carving out a group of people who produce content on the platform. And today they formalized those efforts with the launch of a new creator mode. So now you can switch your personal profile to be a creator, much like you can do on TikTok. This apparently will make it easier for people to follow you for your content,

Starting point is 00:09:48 as opposed to LinkedIn's origin story as a connector between colleagues who know each other in real life. A LinkedIn rep said, quote, We're seeing nearly 50% growth in conversations on LinkedIn reflected in stories, video shares, and posts on the platform. We're doing some early tests to create a unique audio experience connected to your professional identity. And we're looking at how we can bring audio to other parts of LinkedIn, such as events and groups, unquote. Also, they announced today a new video cover story feature, new options for pronouns and service pages for freelancers.

Starting point is 00:10:20 Google is once again reminding people to not freak out about the forthcoming change to its search engine. The update is scheduled to roll out in May. It's called the Page Experience Update. It contains a metric called Core Web Vitals, which is actually a set of three metrics around how friendly your web pages are for humans. If you fail that score, you could drop a little in the rankings. But only a little, says Google. Quote,

Starting point is 00:10:43 Our systems will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn't override having great, relevant content, unquote. They also said you won't need a full passing score of these web vitals to be eligible for the top stories carousel. Despite what you might read in breathless blogs, Google says they don't expect this big update to actually have a big effect on ranking. All right, finally, just a reminder, it is April Fool's Day tomorrow, and you should not believe anything you read or hear about from any company, Google especially. I, for one, am more excited about April 2nd.

Starting point is 00:11:26 That's the day we all get to bask in schadenfreude, enjoying the emotional collapse of some marketing people when they completely screwed this up and thought a joke about blackface or something would be funny. I'm telling you, April 2nd. That's where the real comedy is. Talk to you tomorrow. I need a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 I need a hero Second, that's where the real comedy is. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Great News for People Who Manage Facebook Pages

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