Today in Digital Marketing - How One Brand Got Massive TikTok Engagement — For $0 Ad Spend

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

They haven't spent a penny but they get a million views per TikTok — we'll show you how. Also: Meta tests buy-now-pay-later advertising... Twitter's Circles might be your next sub-channel... LinkedIn offers more certifications... and has the Triller well run dry?Go PremiumNo ads, story links in show notes, deep-dive weekend editions, better quality, live event replays, audio chapters, earlier release time, exclusive marketing discounts, and more! Check out https://todayindigital.com/premiumfeedGet the NewsletterPrefer to get the show in email form? Sign up for daily or weekly issues at https://todayindigital.com/newsletterFor information on advertising, our social media, contact info, and everything else, please go to https://todayindigital.com/shownotes➡ Join our Slack at todayindigital.com/slack_____________Need to Upgrade Your Digital Marketing Skills?*Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Founders Slack GroupFoxwell Digital CoursesMarketing Tools We Use and Recommend:*Sprout Social: Full-service social media managementAgorapulse: Full-service social media managementAppsumo: Lifetime deals and discounts on marketing toolsRiverside.FM: Studio-quality podcast interview recordingShor.by: Smart link-in-bio service with full analytics* Some links may provide affiliate revenue to usOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, they haven't spent a penny, but they get a million views per TikTok video. We'll show you how. Also, Meta tests buy now, pay later advertising. Twitter circles might become your brand's next sub-channel. LinkedIn offers more certifications. And has the triller well run dry? It is Tuesday, August 30th. I'm Todd Maffin.

Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Every so often, digital ad platforms will test something in one country to see if it's worth expanding globally. If that's what's happening right now with Meta's operations in India, we may be in for a significant change in how the company builds advertisers. Today, Meta confirmed it's letting advertisers in India pay for ad campaigns in three monthly installments without interest. Sort of. Here's how it works. First, only ad payments between $40 and $6,300 will qualify for these installments. No word on why they picked those arbitrary numbers. Second, advertisers need to pay for their campaigns using credit cards from participating banks. Those banks will charge interest on the amount, but Meta says it will cover this as an

upfront discount. As a result, the total amount that advertisers will be paying their bank will be equal to the transaction value without the additional interest cost. India is the first market where the tech giant has launched this feature. No word on whether they plan to expand this more widely, though with all the attention around the buy now, pay later space, you've got to wonder. Meta also announced improved support for advertisers in India. All active advertisers there now have access to 24-7 chat support via the Meta Business Help Center. And finally, the company noted it is expanding its small business loans initiative to more than 1,900 postal codes across India. So does your social strategy include the comment section?

Ad Age recently shared a great piece on how the Slim Jim jerky brand has skyrocketed to more than 3 million followers on TikTok entirely through organic growth by becoming what they call the CEO of Verified Comments. To build up the brand's presence on TikTok, the company partnered with creative agency 180. TikTokers would upload videos, tag the Slim Jim brand, and challenge the brand to respond. Quoting the president of the 180 agency, we were going to be the verified creator that would make sure that no matter what, you rang the bell, we came running and showed up and commented.

And of course, what people want to do when that happens is test your might. We're talking about this insane amount of user-generated content that's being created. There have probably been close to 3 million videos that have been made of users saying, Slim Jim, show up, show up and do something, show me some love. And those videos have probably generated 550 million views of the Slim Jim brand, unquote. Aggressive, and it worked. Data indicates that Slim Jim's account has a 20% engagement rate and an average of 1 million views per video. The brand's engagement with TikTok users, more than any other metric, has been attributed to the brand's rapid growth on the platform.

Since uploading its first video to TikTok only back in February, Slim Jim has accumulated its following entirely through organic growth, even surpassing TikTok brand giants like Nike and McDonald's. Twitter announced today that Circles, its feature that lets you limit tweets to an exclusive audience, is now available to everyone. Similar to Instagram's Close Friends feature, Twitter Circles lets you share posts with a limited group of people, allowing your brand to take advantage of some free marketing opportunities, such as creating a VIP club or contest giveaways or sharing upcoming promotions or discount codes. You can only add 150 people to your brand's circle,

whether they follow you or not, and you can adjust that at any time. Users do not receive a notification when you add or remove them from a circle, but will see a green badge under tweets sent to the group. Those in the group can only be seen by those you've selected to be in your circle, and your brand's tweets cannot be retweeted or shared. All replies to these tweets are private, even if your brand's account is public. This could have some fun potential, perhaps, as I mentioned, holding a contest for your best fans to get into your limited circle where you post whatever exclusive content and so on might be worth playing with.

More tech skill courses are being added to LinkedIn Learning, and for the first time, certifications from other platforms are part of the library. The network confirmed today it has partnered with major tech companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and even Meta for this. There are currently three Meta courses, five Oracle courses available, for instance. LinkedIn says this is a plan to offer a broader range of certified courses from cloud infrastructure to project management to digital marketing. LinkedIn also announced that with the extension of its partnership with Microsoft, its learning product will soon offer certificates aimed at helping workers and job seekers transition into the digital economy with Microsoft's Skills for Jobs program,

which will be free to all learners. The saga of Triller ghosting payments seems to continue. Yesterday, Sony Music Entertainment filed a lawsuit against the video sharing app, seeking millions of dollars for allegedly not paying licensing fees. Last year, Triller announced a $14 million program that would pay Black creators for posting on the platform. But a few weeks ago, several creators came forward and said they didn't receive any payments, which we reported on. Not long after, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz sued the TikTok rival for $28 million, alleging that Triller missed payments there as well. Now it's Sony's turn. The lawsuit claims that Triller, quote, historically failed to make payments in a timely manner, unquote,

but the situation became worse when the company just stopped making payments entirely in March. Triller allegedly offered a near-total radio silence in response to the company's request for outstanding payment. As a result, Sony Music terminated its agreement with Triller earlier this month, but the copyrighted music remained on the platform. Triller told TechCrunch that it was surprised by the filing and that it is confident the issues can be resolved quickly.

That said, the short-form video app also announced yesterday that it has raised substantial debt and equity financing as it prepares to go public in early Q4, or so they say. YouTube is experimenting with a new way to make buying ads easier, or at least simpler. The company announced it's testing a new Promotions tab within YouTube Studio, which eliminates the need to run your YouTube ad campaigns through Google Ads Manager. This tool might be helpful to brands and creators who don't have the knowledge to run channel or video promotions through the traditional Google Ads platform.

But more experienced advertisers, of course, may want to stick with that platform. If you are in this experiment, you will see a new Promotions tab in the content page of Studio. It is currently being tested with a limited number of accounts on desktop. And finally, Google has fixed one of the most irritating parts of Google Docs, at least for me anyway, and that was that you couldn't use emojis in the damn thing. Like, I mean, you could paste them in and there was a menu option that was buried under menus. But if you used the keyboard shortcut on the Mac keyboard, for instance, it just it just didn't do anything. Well, yesterday, Google announced a new shortcut that lets you easily insert an emoji while typing.

The way you do it is you type an at symbol, then a colon and then a word like dog or something like that. And it'll pop up right there really quick. Definitely a welcome addition. Today is our 700th episode. And I wanted to take a moment to thank you for listening, tweeting and sharing. This is our agency's side project, and probably my personal retirement project down the line. So it means the world to us that you support our work. And to celebrate this week only, we are offering a one time discount to our premium podcast. If you sign up this week, you get it for just $7 a month. And that rate is locked in as long as you are subscribed. It doesn't go up after a year or anything like that. There is a link in the show notes. If you

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feed. All right. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.