Today in Digital Marketing - How to Stop the Facebook Admin Spam Messages

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Those Facebook spam DMs are out of control. Turns out, there’s an Off switch for them buried in business manager. We’ll tell you how to find it. Also: Product placement comes to online videos, a new way to generate leads on LinkedIn. And the first instalment of our digital marketing helpline..📞 NEW! Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to answer your question on the show!.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Story links in show notes✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-exclusive Slack channel✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with Tod✅ Discounts on marketing tools✅...and a lot more!Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium·GET MORE FROM US🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🤝 Our Slack community⭐ Review the podcast·UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.·Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, January 19th. Today, those Facebook spam DMs are out of control. Turns out, there's an off switch for them buried in Business Manager. We'll tell you how to find it. Also, product placement comes to online videos, a new way to generate leads on LinkedIn, and the first installment of our digital marketing helpline. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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.

Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Well, every Friday we check in with our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million in Meta Ads spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Hello, Andrew. Hello. I see that Meta is removing from its ads manager soon the ability to use detailed targeting. Is this interest? Is this and or? What do they mean by this? They're not removing necessarily interest targeting. They're removing

detailed targeting, which is the ability to do and equation targeting. So this would be things like an interest in gardening and trucks that's being removed. It's not out of the question that over time they will remove, you know, targeting interest targeting generally. I think that a lot of the signal that they just want, you know, us to know that by using Advantage Plus or by using broad targeting, they're better at finding those people than we are with interests. And it also, I think, reflects upon the inaccuracy of interests, which is true in some cases that they don't have a lot of really good info on that particular target. And so, you know, it's sort of a combination of those things. But as of now, they're removing detailed targeting, which is the AND equation, and it should be gone

within the month. But not a lot of people were using this anyway. It just made things a little too narrow at this day and age. I'll confess, I used it. We used it for running ads for this podcast. In fact, we would say people whose job titles have digital marketing or marketing VP in it and people who also are interested in podcasts, which to me is kind of a perfect audience. I still I just don't understand how that interest targeting has gotten so low quality, how they've

let it get so low quality that they're now just saying, you know, it's crap. We're just going to pull it. Well, to be honest with you, I think what it is, is it's a difference between what the social graph in referenced interest was built on before and the signals that went into said social graph versus the signals that are currently being utilized under CAPI or engagement signals. So I think engagement signals were obviously part of it before. A lot of the social graph before was built on pages you follow, etc., which I know it still is, but I think it was an incomplete picture versus now it's more built around, you know, the activity you're utilizing on like a more commerce basis, kind of, I think.

And it also seems to be more accurate based on the post iOS 14 signals. So I think that's, the system is built to not have to do that. And from Meta's standpoint, they want to make it easy, as easy as possible for someone to launch a campaign and not do targeting and just press go

and say, we'll find you those people. And so by removing this, this is a barrier, really. I'm not saying it's great. I actually really have always liked interest targeting. And I think we'll still see interest targeting, but the detailed targeting allowed you to feel more comfortable, certainly, in the targeting that you had. I felt that way. But I don't think moving forward, its accuracy is going to be as locked in as it once was. So I think that's probably why they're removing it for now. I would imagine if they're relying more on sort of having us do broad, more broad audiences, and then they're using AI to sort of focus down, I would imagine

that the only real targeting levers that we have is in the creative itself, which I'm not certain people think of creative as a targeting mechanism. But is that a focus that you're seeing in your community? Definitely. Yeah, I mean, it is, it absolutely is. Creative is targeting at this point in time, and it will continue to be so. So I think that this is why you see such a rise in creative strategists, people hiring creative strategists, etc. So yeah, absolutely. I think this is a big deal. And I think if you haven't invested in diversifying the set of creatives that you have, it's absolutely essential you do so because it'll make your life easier moving forward. Yeah. Andrew, we run at our end an engagement and moderation firm. We handle the social media engagement of medium sized brands.

So we look at their mentions, we reply, we're in their DMs replying to people. But these days, the DMs, I don't think this is an exaggeration to say dozens an hour of spam messages, and they're all kind of the same from Facebook. They're all and they're not from Facebook. I mean, they're on Facebook's platform. They're all sort of like, you've done something wrong. You violated this and your page is going to be shut down. Now, at our end, we use a tool where we're able to filter those and sort of, you know, move them aside. If we can filter these out, why can't

Facebook? Yeah, this is an issue that really arose. And I did get confirmation this morning from Meta that this is something that was flagged immediately by engineering. So it was a ton of Facebook messages that were phishing messages were spamming Facebook pages. So they found a loophole. And engineering is on it. And hopefully these have subsided. Another option that you do have in terms of, you know, going, basically putting a little bit harder filter on these things is you can go in and go to the meta business Suite, go to your inbox, go to settings, and then go to chat plugin and turn off guest chat and hit publish at the bottom right of the page. And that seems to take away 99% of it. There's something in the guest chat function that allowed people to just go crazy

and start chatting to you and sending you phishing messages so it's one thing met as aware of it um but this was a major issue i put this on twitter on and and it got like i don't even know 30 retweets and it had thousands and hundreds of thousands of impressions because it was such an issue for people this week and the last couple weeks so um if you haven't tried turning off the guest chat, that's one. Meta is also on top of it, hopefully meaning that they're going to make it better in the next few days. Yeah, hopefully. It feels like a tsunami. Andrew, good stuff. Thank you. See you next week. Thank you. Andrew Foxwell is our Meta Ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at b.link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers. We are in

there as well at b.link slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links. You can find those of our show notes. to fix your problem. And today's, our first, comes from Greg Tirico. So I have a customer who runs a resort property off the coast of the United States and have a number of rental homes as a part of the resort property. It seems that intermittently, when they boost a post for a rental home on Facebook, they get rejected because Facebook has a policy against, quote, discriminatory practices, end quote. Are there other people out there that have faced this issue before? And how do they get around it? It feels like a trivial issue because it's a boosted post for a rental property as a part of a corporation that owns a resort. It doesn't seem like it violates any of the discriminatory practices,

policies that Facebook has in place, but we can't figure out what we're doing wrong and why these boosted posts keep getting flagged. For some help on this, earlier today, I spoke with Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media in Los Angeles. They are a 20-person agency specializing in digital media buying. And I asked him, assuming, of course,

that Greg's people are checking that little this is about housing special category box, what could be going on here? I think the issue here is the boosting of the post. I firmly believe that there's some system issue that boosting a post with a housing ad is causing some sort of flag to go up. Like there might be a bug in the boosting system, you think? There's bugs all over Facebook. There are bugs that are consistent for months and years at a time.

And then there are bugs that happen over the course of five hours and then they get resolved. We vehemently are against boosting posts. Like 100% of the advertising that we run is through Facebook Business Manager and ad accounts. We don't do anything with boosted posts because it's far less effective. Now, if we are running ads in Facebook Business Manager and we select a special category, do ads get declined? Yeah, of course. We're running a political ad right now that's getting declined because it's probably against terms of service. So there you have it. This sounds to Robert like a bug in the boosting system. A couple of troubleshooting ideas would

be to try running the ads through Ads Manager, like a regular campaign, or maybe try running them through a different Ads Manager account if you have access to one or are willing to set one up for testing. And if all else fails, you can appeal the denial to Meta and hope that you get an actual human being to read it and not just the digital cousin of the bot that denied it in the first place. But if you have an issue with your digital marketing and would like a couple of ideas to try to get it fixed, call into our helpline by going to todayindigital.com slash voicemail. If we use your call on the show, we will give you a free subscription to our daily premium newsletter. That's todayindigital.com slash voicemail

or tap the link at the top of the show notes. 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.ca. 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. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. I've always wanted to, I feel like you see this in celebrity news or whatever all the time, where it's like a couple's always just naked on a boat. You're listening to the Asian Boss Girl podcast. And if you're thinking, okay, weird cross-promotion, Todd, This is not a sponsored segment. But the poster behind the three co-hosts

visible on their YouTube version of the episode is sponsored. It's just a small poster, maybe even just letter-sized, for the Garnier Fructus shampoo brand. You might not even notice it. You certainly won't notice it after about the halfway mark because, after that point, the poster disappears. No, it's not a continuity error. It didn't fall. It was never there to begin with. It was a virtual product placement, which came from a company called Rembrandt. Their ad tech allows for post-production insertion of visual products into videos, specifically video podcasts. Since June, Rembrandt has been working with about 50 creators, placing ads in their content.

The company's raised $9 million from investments from Bold and L'Oreal. Rembrandt's system can insert products within a few hours, and they say they're working on a self-serve platform that could get this down to minutes. The cost ranges from about $10 to $30 CPM. That's more or less the same as traditional podcast ad rates. LinkedIn is introducing sponsored articles, allowing company pages to promote their articles directly on the platform and include a call-to-action button like Un unlock article, which will require users to sign

up if they want to continue reading. They're still rolling this out, so you may not have it quite yet. Over time, LinkedIn says it plans to integrate additional post amplification and CTA options. But of course, the effectiveness of this tool largely depends on the quality of the articles. For now, only articles authored by company pages are eligible to use this. And finally, Reddit's on-again, off-again IPO seems to be back on again. If it actually happens, this would be the first major IPO in the social media space since Pinterest in 2019. This is reporting the company plans to publicly file late next month, launch a roadshow in early March, and finalize the IPO by month's end. Valued at about $10 billion in 2021, Reddit wants to sell about 10% of its shares, with

the final IPO valuation set closer to the listing date. So remember, if you've got a question that is stumping you, you need some tech support, and the platforms aren't giving it to you, turn to us, friend. We will get an expert for you. And that'll do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of this new name at First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Mappin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday.