Today in Digital Marketing - Instagram hates you.

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

Instagram’s having a temper tantrum — again Snapchat updates its bid recommendations VR isn’t catching on as fast as Zuckerberg thought it would And some nice updates for brands who use Click to Messenger ads 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. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Instagram • 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

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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Thursday, October 31st, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy Day of Local Songs, Peru. Today, Instagram is having a temper tantrum again. Snapchat updates its bid recommendations. VR is not catching on as fast as Zuckerberg thought it would.

And some nice updates for brands who use click-to-messenger ads. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Alright, so yesterday I whined a little bit about Buffer having some problems posting to Instagram. Now we may know why. Once again, Instagram seems to be blocking some brand accounts for really no reason at all. You may recall this happened a month or two ago when social media managers everywhere reported that their Instagram accounts were popping up messages scolding them for using shady services to boost their follower count, when in fact

they never did use those services. And Instagram would either log them out or block them entirely from posting. That bug affected people who used specific third-party platforms. Well, now it seems to be back. As I said, at our agency, we noticed something was up when Buffer was unable to publish to one of our clients' Instagram profiles. It just kept barfing up a, sorry, we can't do that right now, kind of generic message. So today we tried to post manually by logging into that client's account on the Instagram app

and got an error message. Only this one seems to be a little bit more severe than the last go around. This one says, your account has been temporarily blocked from taking this action. Sharing your account with a service that helps you get more likes or followers goes against our community guidelines. This block will expire on November 5th. Tell us if you think we've made a mistake. And there is a little tell us button that just sends a signal,

apparently, to Instagram. There's no form or anything to fill out. Of course, we would never, ever use any kind of service like that for any of our clients and never would. But this seems to be a repeat of the bug from a while back. All that to say, if it is happening to you, posts to your brand's Instagram account on a third-party platform are failing, try opening up your brand's account in the app and seeing if you have that little tell us button. Come on, Instagram. If you buy ads on Snapchat for your brand or client,

you may have noticed that it is changing its bidding recommendation. Paid social guru David Herman says Snapchat is now recommending running ads with target cost instead of max bids. He says he's tested both strategies in the last year and learned that, at least for him, Max Bid gave him a better return on ad spend when he was able to find spend at his threshold. But he says target cost will give you, quote, a longer road to play on. If you are looking for some benchmark numbers to test, he had a suggestion when asked on Twitter what methods he uses to choose his target cost. He says, quote, if you're running ads on Facebook, try using your average blended cost per acquisition over the past 90 days and adding 12%

higher for target cost. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted this week that virtual reality is a little slower to get started than he expected. Facebook bought VR headset maker Oculus five years ago for $2 billion. Actually $3 billion, really, if you factor in employee incentives and the likes. Brands, too, haven't really jumped in much. It seems most of the forward-looking, shiny object spending that most digital marketers are doing is in the AR space. It's augmented reality, mostly on smartphones, rather than VR, virtual reality, which requires the use of an expensive headset. Some nice updates to Facebook Messenger for brands who use it to chat with customers,

especially if you have multiple apps connected to the Messenger platform. Soon, you will be able to choose which app you want to have kick in for your click-to-Messenger ads. Those are the ads on Facebook and Instagram, which open up a conversation in Messenger instead of a traditional send people to our website link. And users will also be able to use reactions during conversations, so presumably like, love, angry, sad, that sort of thing.

Most importantly, threaded message replies are coming, so brands can see which exact message a customer is responding to. Here's something that we have learned here at EngageQ. Whenever we run a click-to-messenger ad for a client and put those pre-written clickable questions like, where is your clinic or how much is shipping or whatever, the life of our engagement and moderation team improved dramatically

when we added the following as a clickable option. Sorry, didn't mean to tap this. Honestly, there are a lot of people out there who do not know how to use Facebook and will open up an ad in Messenger and literally tap the first question they see, like, I want a book and a point, as if they're trying to, like, figure out the way to cancel, they tap the first thing they see.

So you reply to them and say, great, when you want to come in, and they say, what? Who is this? I don't know what you mean. Those of you chuckling and nodding your head right now know that this happens a lot. So there you go. Free tip. A nice addition to Google Ads, especially if you are in the B2B or direct market space, lead form extensions. They added lead forms a while back, which act very similar to Facebook's version of this. Well, now you can add a link to your form as an extension to your ad. When people tap it, their contact information will be pre-filled in, so it only takes a tap or two more to send you their information.

It's a nice touch. Finally, if you are thinking about whether to put part of your media spend aside to buy ads on podcasts, wondering if they'll remain a little bit walled off from the larger media, consider this. Today, we learned that when HBO Max arrives next May, it will include a mobile podcast listening app, and that app will come preloaded with podcasts about their most popular HBO shows. Also, news today that Netflix is taking a cue from podcast apps by testing the ability to watch programming in a faster speed. I do this with the podcast I listen to. I listen at about 1.8 times speed.

Still perfectly understandable and much faster. I don't know how I feel about video programming doing this. For now, it's just in testing and, of course, may never see the light of day. All right, that is it. I'm getting this out a little earlier than usual. No lightning round today. It is a busy day here at the agency, Halloween and all. If you would like to comment on anything you've heard in the podcast, just tweet with the hashtag TIDM.

Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.