Today in Digital Marketing - Is Facebook About to Screw Up Lookalike Audiences?

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Is Facebook about to screw up Lookalike Audiences? A smart new marketing tool for musicians who are on YouTube What happens when you post TOO MUCH in your brand’s own Facebook Group? And how to avoid TikTok shadowbans The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Use the hashtag #TiDM to send hate mail about the hip-hop lightening round. 😉 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 Hip Hop Beat Loop used under license Audio ID:  45144305 Copyright : Soundbounce --- 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 Monday, October 21st, 2019. Happy National Election Day, Canada. I hope you voted. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, is Facebook about to screw up lookalike audiences? A smart new marketing tool for musicians who are on YouTube. What happens when you post too much in your brand's own Facebook group? Spoiler alert, bad things happen.

And TikTok shadow bans, how to avoid them. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Okay, potentially big deal here for advertisers who use Facebook's lookalike audiences. Some people are reporting that Facebook has taken away the ability to refine your lookalike by country. Now, as you may know, when you create a lookalike, you pick the source, like, say, a CSV file of your customers, and then the country you want. But I'm seeing some people in the various Facebook advertiser groups,

I mean, report that they now get a message saying, quote, you no longer need to include locations to create lookalike audiences. Lookalikes now use the locations from your ad sets. Which at first I thought, well, that makes sense. I mean, you've got to apply geography to your ad set anyway. What we do here at EngageQ at my agency is we usually layer an interests filter over top of the lookalike audience ad set. So no big deal. They just removed a redundancy, right? But, and this is a big but, if you are looking to create a lookalike audience of, say, 200,000 people in your country, you could easily get that right now at the 1% range of your lookalike. And all 200,000 of those people would be in the 1% similarity group, which, of course course is the strongest possible similarity.

If this change rolls out widely, though, if you want to create a country-specific lookalike audience of 200,000 people, then you'll probably have to widen that out to like 10% so that when you restrict it by country at the ad set level, you will end up with the 200,000 people in the country you want. But now you have an audience with 10% similarity and not 1%. As with most of Facebook's testing, they haven't announced any of this. And this restriction isn't in everyone's accounts. I can still create country-specific lookalikes in all our accounts, but something to keep an eye on, for sure. While we're on Facebook's Ads Manager, a small but powerful new feature was quietly added last week that I'm willing to bet you didn't even notice.

Now, at the ad level, when you're setting up your creative, you can actually add multiple options for the primary text, headline, and description. Facebook will then create different versions of your ad and show people the version they're most likely to respond to. Yes, it's multivariate testing right in the ads manager. Well, sort of. This isn't a huge surprise. Facebook added this at the ad set level a while back with proper A-B testing methodology. This alternative creatives feature is not that, in that it doesn't appear to isolate audiences into groups that only see the one

creative. Instead, this seems to just be a way to mix and match the creative a little to prevent ad fatigue. You've been able to do this for images for a while now. Until now, advertisers have had to rely on third-party tools like Ad Espresso to do this, so it's nice to see Facebook bring this in-house. A smart ad product for marketers of musicians has launched. YouTube has joined forces with MerchBar to help artists sell official merchandise on their YouTube channel pages. If you haven't heard of MerchBar before, that's probably because you're not in the music industry. They host more than a million items from 35,000 artists. So now, underneath the artist's video, there could be a place to show tour t-shirts, ball caps, vinyl, and that sort of thing.

Facebook's obviously feeling a little defensive over the looming American election. This morning, they said the Russian trolls were at it again, and this time targeting presidential hopeful Joe Biden. So now, Facebook will be introducing some changes that appear to affect all pages, not just political ones. They say soon, they'll be revealing the name of the organization that owns a Facebook page. Currently, you can see what country the admins are in and whether a page has been merged or had a name change recently. For now, they say this will only appear on pages with large U.S. audiences that have gone through Facebook's business verification. What's not mentioned in their announcement is what happens for brand pages that are owned not by an organization, but just by a person, a one-person shop, or a side hustle business page. Will the owner of that page get outed by Facebook? We just don't know. All right, let's talk TikTok for a bit.

I'm in a bunch of different digital marketing groups on Facebook to stay on top of things and find stuff for you here. Ran across an interesting tidbit in a TikTok marketing group. People there say they believe that TikTok's algorithm detects copies of a previously uploaded video and they'll shadow ban it if they find one. A shadow ban, by the way, is where your video is technically on the platform, but only you get to see it. It's not distributed widely.

There's no confirmation of this rumor, but it does make sense if you've been on TikTok for more than a few days. Something to consider if you're planning to repurpose stuff over there. One guy who's not repurposing content and surprisingly killing it on TikTok is Jagmeet Singh. If you're Canadian, I don't need to tell you who he is, but for the rest of you, today is National Election Day in Canada, and Jagmeet is the leader of the New Democratic Party, one of the left-leaning parties. He's had quite a surge in the last couple of weeks, and he popped up on TikTok the other day. But to his or his team's credit, they didn't just upload their usual packaged TV ads. Instead, he lip-syncs to this very popular

meme on the platform, where he's pointing at words like the environment and people when E40 sings yep and big pharma and polluters when there's a nope. Remember, keep your creative true to the platform. It works. All this TikTok chatter may make you worry about Snapchat's future. But paid social guru David Herman over the weekend says he thinks there's no cause for alarm. He tweeted, quote, as someone working with both platforms, I can say nobody at Snap fears TikTok, nor should they.

The platforms are entirely different at this point. Plus, Snap's ads manager is strong and the team has worked tirelessly to build a safe, healthy platform. For TikTok, we're still early, focusing on media buys going through their system, not a self-serve ads manager. It's evidently coming, but Snap's curation of content and user stories make it the best secondary channel for direct response after Facebook and Instagram.

Not sure I'd agree with him that the platforms are different. There are differences for sure, but that's mostly in the culture and not the technology. The Bank of America Merrill Lynch upgraded Snap to a buy rating just before the weekend, but it specifically called out TikTok as a risk and inferred from ad data that Snapchat's monthly users are on the decline. Is it possible to post too much in your brand's own Facebook group? I'm not talking about too much that people will get sick of you. I mean too much as in Facebook will block you. Yeah, it can happen.

The owner of the aforementioned TikTok marketing group got locked out of his own group last week. Michael Sanchez says, Apparently, I've been responding to my Facebook group too much daily that I've been temporarily blocked from being able to post, respond, or go live even in the group. Even more bizarre is, it seems like it's an IP block versus a profile, unquote. This is something that happens across Facebook, to be clear. Like, if you're liking too many posts too fast in one sitting or you're spamming contests, you'll get temporarily locked out for an hour or two. I haven't seen one that's lasted for days like this one before, but I'm sure it's happened, just so you're aware. All right. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the lightning round hip Hip hop edition. Run. Google podcast says you share your shows but clips your friends can't find.

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