Today in Digital Marketing - How the BBC Added 10,000 Followers EVERY DAY

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

They added 10,000 new followers a day — without a penny in ad spend. Here’s how they did it. If you’re outsourcing your content creation, you’re not alone Facebook continues its theme of “We know best, just let us decide how to run your ads” And Google proves… people here in Canada… apparently… are nuts. The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital 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. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Links to Tod's social media at at the bottom of http://TodayInDigital.com Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/11/twitter-will-now-preserve-jpeg-quality-for-photo-uploads-on-web/ https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1204828405881081856 https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/bbc-news-instagram https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/12/03/john-mcafee-location-exif/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, December 11th, 2019. Happy National Tango Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, they added 10,000 new followers a day without a penny in ad spend. I'll tell you how. If you are outsourcing your content creation, you're not alone.

Facebook continues its theme of, we know best, just let us decide how to run your ads. And Google proves people here in Canada apparently are nuts. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with a bunch of new Twitter things. This is important if you manage a photography brand or a brand that relies on high quality imagery to market yourself. Twitter is changing how it processes photos that you upload. Now, images you post will retain their original JPEG encoding,

meaning Twitter no longer sends it through another layer of transcoding, which, until now, has resulted in poorer-quality images. This may sound like a small thing, but it's actually pretty important for us digital marketers, especially as screen resolution gets better on smartphones, and some social content ends up on 4k screens and 8k screens. To be clear, it is still compressing your image to make the thumbnail. Just now, when someone clicks the image to go full screen, they're going to see actually what you intend them to see. Also, Twitter will be stripping EXIF data from photos. That's the information that rides along with each digital photograph

that details what aperture and ISO and shutter speed the photo is snapped at. But, and this is more the data that Twitter is stripping it for, EXIF data can also contain the name of the photographer and even the exact location the photo was taken. You might recall this is what gave John McAfee away, rather hilariously, when he was on the run from authorities. Someone just looked up the EXIF data on a photo that a reporter who was with him tweeted, and everyone was like, oh, there he is, he's in Guatemala.

Anyway, some nice improvements over at Twitter. Twitter also recently unveiled Topics, a way for you to follow broad subjects instead of picking and choosing individual accounts to follow. Well, a word of warning, in case you don't know this, the topics you follow are public. Anyone can see the topics you're following. And it's easy to do. You just put slash topics at the end of the URL. So in my case, you just go to twitter.com slash Todd Maffin slash topics. Spoiler alert, I only follow the video games topic. Similarly, by the way, Instagram will

let anyone see what hashtags you are following. So I'll wait a little while while you delete a couple of those. Okay, we good? Yeah, email newsletters, not dead yet. As well, most content marketers outsource at least one activity. Content creation is the most likely to be outsourced. Also, when presented with a list of seven possible content marketing priorities for 2020 and asked to select their top three, they came in, number one, improving the quality and conversion of audiences. Number two, focusing more on content quality and quantity. And number three, increasing the size of our audiences. And finally, respondents say Facebook was the top organic and the top paid social media platform they used in 2019 and the one they say generated the best content marketing results

for their organization. Facebook continues its push toward dynamic ad placement. That's where Facebook serves different variations of your ad to people based on what version it thinks your target will best respond to. We saw this kick off recently with, of all things, that little description text under a link post. Facebook now displays it, or chooses not to display it, based on Facebook's projection of whether each user who sees it will respond better. Now we're seeing this go really far. John Loomer spotted a kind of takeover of the whole ads process with the option to let Facebook even pick the entire format. I think the jury is still out on whether Facebook gets it right with these daddy-knows-best options.

We've found them to be pretty solid in most of our campaigns that we run for clients, but not all, certainly. For now, you can turn on and off this dynamic ad stuff with a toggle at the start of the ad creation screen on Ads Manager. But remember, Facebook has a habit of jamming this down our throats, whether we like it or not. For instance, all accounts will switch to campaign-based optimization early next year. So it might be a good idea for you to try this new dynamic system if you have it in your ad account before Facebook makes you use it. Here's some crazy numbers. From April of last year to October of this year, the BBC grew its Instagram account an average of 10,000 new followers every day. So how did they do that? Facebook's journalism project has a solid breakdown on it, but in essence, they credit four tactics to this insane

growth rate. First, they produced Instagram stories in-house. This meant they didn't have to wait for a design agency to get through client approvals and all that stuff. Number two, they posted regularly and consistently. They did and still do two Instagram stories every day, Monday through Friday. One is a daily news story that highlights the top three stories of the day, lets people swipe up to visit their site to read more. The second daily story varies. It's often the most interesting story of the day, like a Brexit explainer or a feature story on climate change. They also publish at least six regular Instagram posts a day, a mix of videos and photos. Three, they made sure they carved out enough internal time to engage readers in the comments. And that included liking comments, which I don't think is in the API.

So I'm guessing that they did this manually on their phones. And number four, they used some of the newer story features like poll stickers and the like. You'll find a link to the full case study in this episode's notes. A correction. On Monday, I reported on some changes coming to the design app Canva and mentioned their enterprise pricing. A Canva rep told me it was 30 bucks US a month with a minimum of five users. So we really were talking $150 a month minimum

and then $30 per user after that. But yesterday, a different Canva rep emailed to say they actually have two enterprise tiers. The one I mentioned Monday does not include enterprise level phone support or invoicing. If-level phone support or invoicing. If you want phone support and invoicing on your enterprise plan, that's going to be $600 a month for your first 20 seats. 20 is the minimum for that.

All right, lightning round. Google has released its top searches for 2019. It's broken down by country. Top search in Canada that starts with the word who was who should I vote for? Because, yeah, a Google search is a great way to select your next government. In number two position in searches that start with how, how old is Dolly Parton? Okay. Weird.

Twitter says those so-called live photos that you take on your iPhone, you can now use those as animated GIFs anywhere you use images on Twitter. Looks like Pinterest is working on its own Explore tab, like Instagram has. Which is a little weird to me, because isn't Pinterest just one giant Explore tab already? Sprout Social has launched two new reports. The Inbox Team Report lets you find out how fast your team or individuals are engaging with people. And a new publishing report that has a handful of stats around how much content each team maker publishes. These replace the former team report. And TV maker Vizio is creating a new company that will sell ad space on its television screens. They say they can offer ads on around 13 million TVs.

I think it's time to re-watch that EdTV movie. For the last two weeks, you probably know I've been documenting the process of getting our first ad on this very podcast. I've been using a platform called Podcorn for this, and yesterday you heard that ad for Sharekit.io, except I almost screwed it all up. Turns out I was supposed to upload an mp3 of the fully produced mid-roll ad into the little workroom that Podcorn set up with me and the client. I didn't realize this until the last minute and uploaded it Monday night, like late Monday night. The ad was running Tuesday. Luckily, the client apparently

has really good email hygiene because he saw it and approved it and things were fine. Things I'd do differently. I don't know that I'd put the client's name as the episode title again. Or maybe I would, but I'd charge more for that. I don't know. I also probably should have done a nice little, hey, thanks to sharekit.io for sponsoring today's episode or something like that. I'm also not really thrilled with the background music that I picked. Kind of slim pickings in the music library that I licensed, so still poking around there. But anyway, there you go. All in all, really quite a smooth process. I'm still hooked on Stardew Valley. I really want to chain smoke all the YouTube tutorials on it, but I worry about spoilers, So I think this first playthrough is just going to be a giant mess. If you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing

every day. Just search for today in digital marketing on the skill store. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social, links to my channels and agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin, see you tomorrow.