Today in Digital Marketing - Hacking the LinkedIn News Feed (Legally)

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

On today’s show: You may be looking a little harder to find your Twitter DMs soon Some nice tips on cracking LinkedIn’s news feed algorithm Facebook is pulling Instant Experiences from Lead ads And is Periscope starting to fall apart at the seams? Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Facebook • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. It is Wednesday, October 2nd. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, you may be looking a little harder to find your Twitter DMs soon. Some nice tips on cracking LinkedIn's newsfeed algorithm.

Facebook is pulling instant experiences from lead ads. And Periscope? Starting to fall apart at the seams? Maybe. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. A couple of nice changes to Twitch if your brand is trying to reach gamers. Video ads there used to just drop in over top of the stream, which, depending on the gameplay, could have been really irritating to viewers. But soon, ads will still take over most of the screen real estate, but the streamer's video will stay visible in a picture-in-picture box.

And streamers will be able to disable pre-roll ads altogether in favor of mid-roll ad breaks. And finally, looks like there'll be some more inventory there for marketers, since Twitch's affiliates, those are sort of like partners in training, will also be able to earn money from ads, something that until now only full-fledged partners could get, which could mean more channels willing to run ads. Periscope. Remember Periscope? Bought by Twitter? It's still alive. Twitter hasn't shut it down yet, which is weird considering you can easily do live video right on Twitter itself. Whatever. Anyway, we're about to see maybe the death of a thousand cuts because Periscope this week announced it will no longer support 360-degree cameras.

Also, GoPro cameras no longer supported. Does anyone even use Periscope these days? If you use Twitter's own mobile app or desktop site to monitor and reply to your brand's tweets, it's important that you know that Twitter will soon start burying DMs from people you don't follow in a separate folder. Sound familiar? Facebook does it with PMs. Instagram does it. So Twitter, ever just so slightly behind everyone else,

is adopting that too now. So watch for that new folder and be sure to check it since if you're a brand, it is entirely likely that you won't be following people who DM you. You should be looking for the link that says message requests. Oh, what is a social media community manager to do? You see something trending in the news and you figure, that sounds like fun. We should jump on that.

That's what happened in Scotland last spring when several politicians had milkshakes thrown at them in public. In Edinburgh, one McDonald's just stopped selling milkshakes entirely on police request. Burger King, though? Yeah, Burger King chose a different route, tweeting, Dear people of Scotland, we're selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK. Hashtag just saying. Well, this morning, the BBC reports Burger King got its knuckles wrapped by the National Advertising Standards Agency.

They say the tweet in question received 24 complaints. Also, while we're here, the lead in the BBC story read like this. A Burger King tweet alerting customers it was selling milkshakes all weekend has been banned. Hey, BBC, hire real tech journalists. You can't ban a single tweet. Anyway, Burger King responded, quote, We'd never endorse violence or wasting our delicious milkshakes. Touche.

There's been lots and lots written about Facebook's algorithm, Instagram's algorithm. But if you are a B2B marketer, how do you crack the code of LinkedIn's algorithm? Well, a really solid article today on Sprout Social's blog might help. They say, unlike the other platforms, LinkedIn's news feed doesn't actually favor any particular type of post, like image post or text post or video link post, that sort of thing. But what does work? Questions. They say you should post things that encourage a response

rather than doing what pretty much everyone does on LinkedIn and that's just to dump a link there and call it a day. You can read their full post on their blog at sproutsocial.com slash insights. So this is weird. Facebook is removing the ability for us advertisers to create an instant experience form for lead ads that removal apparently is effective immediately so from here in you will no longer be able to create lead ads with the brand awareness reach or traffic objectives using that feature you will only be able to create a lead ad using the lead generation objective moving forward.

Facebook says if you're currently running lead ads, instant experience campaigns, any existing campaign you've created will continue to run, but on December 13th, all campaigns using that feature will stop delivery. Okay, lightning round. Yes, TweetDeck was down yesterday. It wasn't just you. It seems to be back now. Speaking of things that are down,

Instagram competitor reports on Sprout Social seem to be buggy. Apparently, support has had about 50 reports. They're working on it. You can now use longer videos for Facebook's in-stream video ads. When you create a conversions or app install for Facebook's in-stream video ads. When you create a conversions or app installs campaign with in-stream video ads,

those ads can run up to 120 seconds now. The first 15 seconds will play in-stream. Then people will have the option to watch the rest. If your agency or firm uses Shutterstock for its creative, you may want to check out their new Smart Brief, a new feature they say will simplify the creative briefing process. This is part of Shutterstock Custom, aimed at enterprise customers. Do you use

Facebook groups to market your brand? A new feature might help out. Facebook is testing the ability to set keywords to watch out for, and admins will get a notification if that word appears in a group post. And the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, is on Snapchat now because, of course, he is. Finally, and can I just say this?

If the meta really is going double shield Orisa Sigma, can we nerf Doomfist, please? Like, I have 650 hours on Mercy and I am sick of this already. I'm sure only three of you understood that, but I really needed to get that off my chest today. So, thank you. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing, and apparently Overwatch, brought to you by EngageQ.com. If you are listening to this on the web and have not yet subscribed, you will find direct one-click links for your podcast app

at bit.ly slash todayindigital. I'm Todd Maffin. You can follow me on Twitter at Todd Maffin. And remember, heroes never die.