Today in Digital Marketing - I Could Talk All Day With You, If You Want To.

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Hashtags are back, baby, and this time they’re superpowered… does one slow page on your brand’s web site affect the Google ranking on your WHOLE site?... Instagram’s new feature for influencers may be good news for some brands…. And it’s coming, soon… Instagram DMs in your third-party platform of choice.Join our Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slackNot subscribed yet? Subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Produced by: engageQ.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffiTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, hashtags are back, and this time Facebook wants you to apply them to videos. Does one slow page on your brand's website affect the Google ranking of your whole site? Instagram's new feature for influencers may be good news for some brands, and it's coming soon. Instagram DMs in your third-party platform of choice. It's Monday, October 19th, 2020. Happy National Book Day, Brazil! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

A new feature from Facebook could get you more views for your brand's videos, but this is one of those jump on it now before everyone else figures this out kind of things. They are adding two new discovery options for Facebook Watch. Watch is Facebook's somewhat anemic counter to YouTube. It's nowhere near YouTube, of course, but it is growing. They say almost double what they reported last June in terms of viewers. The first option is hashtags. I know, I know hashtags have been on Facebook, but nobody really used them before. In fact, a brand posting a bunch of hashtags on a post was more likely a sign of a lazy content manager

who's just cross-posting their Instagram stuff. Or worse, their tweets. But in the last few months, Facebook has given hashtags more prominence, and this update will turn those hashtags into clickable topics that will let users follow specific subjects. This is going live in the U.S US right now, more countries to follow later. Plus, they're adding new highlight sections to showcase the most popular videos. So, if you're posting a video on your brand's Facebook page and you're in the US, it might be worth going to the post and editing some hashtags into it.

I'm sure you know by now one of the factors Google takes into consideration in deciding how high up the rankings your brand's website will be is the speed of your brand's web pages. The faster they load, the higher you'll get. This will become even more pronounced when they launch the new triple threat core web vitals that will measure your speed, how much your page's layout jumps around, and how soon someone can interact with it. But here's a question. If you have a really fast website,

but one page on your site is particularly slow, maybe it's a web forum or an e-commerce page, does that affect the Google ranking of other web pages on your site? Google says, yeah, it might. Here's Google's John Mueller in one of his Webmaster Livestreams. JOHN MUELLER, In general, with our algorithms, we try to be as fine-grained as possible. So if we can get granular information for your site and recognize the individual parts

of your website properly, then we will try to do that. However, it depends a little bit on your site and how much data we have for your site, especially when it comes to speed where it's based or it will be based because it's not live yet. It'll be based on the Core Web Vitals and the Chrome user experience report data, which is just a very small sample of the people that visit your site aggregated. And that's something that doesn't have data for every URL of a website. The answer, of course, is to keep track of your site's speed through any of the measurement tools out there, not only for the algorithmic benefit,

but also just the plain old user experience. Instagram is now letting influencers apply age restrictions to individual posts. Until now, they've only been able to have this apply to their whole account. This is great news if you are a digital marketer for a brand that uses Instagram creators as part of your digital marketing program, or you are in a category that is meant for adults. Also, interestingly, they can set a minimum age for specific countries. This is especially a nice touch, given that things like the drinking ages vary from country to country.

In the U.S., it's 21. In Canada, it's usually 19. Some provinces, like Alberta and Quebec, it's 18. Quoting WeRSM.com, Instagram's been moving to improve its age requirements to protect younger users after various reports suggested that young people were unwittingly sharing their personal contact information in the app. Last December, Instagram added new age checks in the account creation process, while it also began experimenting with minimum age checks for business accounts to stop younger users sharing contact information in an effort to get the added insights available on business profiles. Also with Instagram, and this is a really nice addition,

one social media managers have been waiting forever for Instagram DMs will be coming to third-party platforms very soon now. I reported on this a couple of weeks ago when Facebook said they would put it into their API. Today, that API was released. I don't go looking into your third-party tool expecting it to be there today, though. Remember, developers at those platforms still have to program the connection. For its part, Sprout Social says some of its customers will start participating in a test group, but they don't expect it to roll out fully until next year sometime. And finally, CNN made an announcement this morning that its chief legal analyst, Jeff Toobin, quote, has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, unquote. I'm not going to tell you what that personal issue is. Let's just say there is a reason that hashtag Zoom dick is trending today.

One person tweeted, honestly, I step away from Twitter for one hour. Had an interesting experience in Overwatch this weekend. I joined this team. They were okay. Nothing to write home about. I mean, I'm mid gold on a good day. That's bad, by the way.

But in every game, the healers on the opposing team would disconnect and not come back. Right about the one-minute mark into the game, they were there, and then, poof, they were gone. And with no healers, of course, we were able to destroy the other team. Finally, one guy on our team owned up to it. He had been DDoSing the other team. I didn't realize you could even do this on Xbox. But sure enough, he told me my IP address, the city I live in, then my name. He called my unlisted cell phone number.

Turns out he was in a Snapchat group with a bunch of other hacker buddies. He would message them the user's gamertag, then do a bit of sniffing around and then message them back all the info. Hackers are everywhere, friends. This might be a good reminder for you to throw two factor on a couple of more sites that you use. Classified ads still available on the show. 20 bucks will let you reach the more than 1300 listeners in the digital marketing space that follow this podcast. There's a link in this episode's description if you'd like to take advantage of that. That's it for today. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.