Today in Digital Marketing - Is Your Platform Not Showing Incoming Facebook PMs?

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Friday, December 13th, 2019. Happy Republic Day, Malta. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, here comes the wild binge-watching targeting option. Here's the worst possible time to tweet your news release out. Finally, swipe up to call ads are coming. And the new digital ad format that literally listens to you. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Yesterday, I reported on at least one social media platform just dropping messages, that incoming Facebook private messages that start as replies to those quick replies that you see on Facebook messenger ads, that those messages just don't show up for review. Again, I'm not going to identify the platform because this does seem to be a problem with the Facebook API. So if that's the case, then presumably this affects all third-party platforms. But here's what I've learned so far from someone senior at that platform. This is a bit technical, but it's really important to know if you monitor

Starting point is 00:01:05 your brand's Facebook messages. Quoting from that engineer, these message types are called postbacks, which are typically quick replies associated with bots in these different ad formats. We've seen a few cases of this show up, and it depends on what Facebook sends to us. It turns out, in some cases, Facebook is not sending us something called a message ID, and we don't have a way of handling messages if they don't have a message ID. In this case, we can escalate this to Facebook. At this time, we do not have a confirmed date

Starting point is 00:01:37 that this will be 100% guaranteed to be resolved. However, we will continue to track this issue and push it forward with a high priority with our partners at Facebook, unquote. At least that's what that guy told me. Over at their support department, in a separate conversation I was having with them about the issue, they told me their engineers were monitoring, but will only escalate to Facebook, quote, if it starts to become significant. So I don't really know which is which. Either they've escalated the issue to Facebook,

Starting point is 00:02:04 or they're waiting for it to become really bad before they escalate. Either way, it's really bad now if this is widespread. and you're using those little quick reply prompts, like what are your hours or is this in stock prompts that you can customize, it is entirely possible that your social media platform is not showing you the messages you get from that ad. And that is a big problem. An even bigger problem, the topic of my rant yesterday, the platforms don't seem to be telling their customers when big bugs like this are affecting message delivery. So, friends, go email your platform's support department and ask them if they are also affected by this, because you may simply not be getting private messages for your brand or client, and you may not know. Did Disney just try to pull a fast one, or was it a genuine mistake?

Starting point is 00:03:09 A handful of influencers who Disney paid to tweet about the new Frozen 2 movie say Disney's agency specifically told them not to disclose that they were being compensated. One influencer, an artist with more than 100,000 followers, reviewed the movie favorably in a tweet. That influencer has apologized to his audience and said Disney's agency said not to say anything about the money changing hands. Disney says it was a mistake. They just accidentally omitted information about disclosure and it wasn't intentional. After a few more influencers came back saying, I don't know, seemed pretty intentional to me, Disney has issued a second apology now. This one says, yeah, it turns out we did pay some of them to talk up the film without a disclosure.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Disney also says this goes against their own internal marketing rules. No matter what you think about Facebook's business practices, you've got to concede. As a digital marketer, they have some pretty damn strong targeting options for us. I'm not even talking about lookalikes or custom audiences. Even just their basic interests targeting can be incredibly strong. Well, what if they added this to their options? People who are currently binge-watching television. Could your brand use that? I'd imagine if you're Doritos, the answer is yes. Well, that's coming, thanks to, according to the news release, machine learning. But it's not coming to Facebook. It's going to be part of the ad platform on Hulu, the American streaming

Starting point is 00:04:38 service. Here's how it'll work. The ad software will watch someone's viewing habits and try to identify when someone is binging a show. Honestly, as a side note, machine learning has become such an unnecessary buzzword. This is not machine learning. It's just some lines of code. Anyway, when it thinks that there is a binge session underway, it will serve up ads during a viewer's third episode. Ads that are targeted to them and ads that say, hey, next episode, your fourth, that'll be ad-free, and you can thank Doritos, or whoever the advertiser is. Actually, we know who

Starting point is 00:05:13 the advertiser is for this first launch. It's Kellogg's, who will be promoting their Cheez-Its snack, which they describe as perfect for binge-watching due to, in part, and I'm not making this up, they actually put this into a news release, due to its lower volume crunch. Come on. And if your cheese at binge session gets messy, the second advertiser Hulu has lined up, a paper towel brand. All of this could come easily to Facebook or the other platforms, of course. Facebook has its own video products to monitor, watch parties, gaming, IGTV, or I suppose it could simply buy the data. My own binge recommendation for you, halt and catch fire. Trust me.

Starting point is 00:05:56 If your brand or agency has a website, there's a very good chance it's running the WordPress CMS. If that's indeed you, expect a major update soon. Version 7.1 was announced today. Among the new features, table captions and easier editing on mobile devices. Also, the ability to select multiple paragraphs at a time, something that was oddly missing from the huge new Gutenberg update a while back. However, the news is not all good. The folks at Search Engine Journal have tested this new version

Starting point is 00:06:24 and found that it generally makes websites slower, on average, by a full second. That may not sound like a lot of time, but two things here. First, people really do click away from sites that take more than a couple of seconds to load. And Google itself uses the speed of your website as one of its most important factors in determining how high you'll rank in their index. Instagram story ads are popular nowadays, and they often do produce some great results. But they really only have two calls to action that anyone uses. Swipe up to load a web page, or swipe up to install an app. I've always thought, why isn't there a swipe up to call?

Starting point is 00:07:07 These ads are only shown on smartphones, so why not? See where this is going? Yes, someone has added swipe up to call, but it's not Instagram. It's Snapchat. And it's probably not available to you since they're launching this first exclusively in the Middle East. No timeline for rolling this out more widely, but I cannot imagine it won't be out everywhere pretty soon. Your move, Instagram.

Starting point is 00:07:34 Come with me on a quick journey to the past. Not that long ago, digital marketers like you and me used to agonize over the right time to publish a Facebook post or a tweet. There were countless blog posts about it. Services sprung up that analyzed engagement. Platforms built audience prediction into their platforms. But nowadays, it's not really that important a consideration. Facebook and Instagram both moved away from chronological feeds and more toward an engagement-weighted feed. So your brand's posts might show up immediately for some people, and maybe even the next day for others. At least that's Facebook and Instagram. Over on Twitter, it's a different story.

Starting point is 00:08:15 While Twitter does have an algorithm playing with time a bit, it's not nearly as, I don't know what's the word, heavy as the other platforms. When you post is still important on Twitter. And if you're in PR, this can make or break the success of your news release. The data science company Unclusive this week released a study in which they analyzed 15,000 news releases tweeted over the past few months and learned, quoting MediaPost, that the most popular time for PR teams to post their news releases targeting journalists is Tuesday at 8 a.m. Eastern, which has 10 times the press release volume of the average hour for the rest of the week.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Many investor relations releases go out around 3 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays, but there are also big pushes at 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. early in the week, unquote. So if you don't want your client's news release to get lost in the crowd, find another time to tweet. Finally, this sounds like a horrible idea. Pandora, the Spotify competitor, is trying out something it calls interactive audio ads. Yeah, I couldn't wrap my head around that title either. It turns out what they are are ads that require listeners to actually say something out loud for the rest of the ad to play out. The ad starts saying that they are about to hear an ad that requires verbal engagement. If the listener then says no, or doesn't say anything at all, the ad will skip and the music will resume. If they say yes, the ad continues. The first wave of advertisers includes Doritos,

Starting point is 00:09:57 Comcast, and Nestle, and the pizza brand Digiorno, which starts like this. What did the Digiorno rising crust pizza say to the oven? And then, if you want to hear the rest of theno, which starts like this. What did the Digiorno rising crust pizza say to the oven? And then, if you want to hear the rest of the joke, which I assume is terrible, you have to say yes. No, please, no. Who asked for this? I can just imagine thousands of office cubicle workers every eight minutes requiring complete silence of their co-workers for a few seconds so that the ad doesn't think it hears a yes and interprets that as please go ahead with your stupid dad joke. Remember, friends, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Well, if you are looking for some weekend listening, the premium feed has a bunch of stuff, The full description of the Facebook algorithmic repair

Starting point is 00:10:45 that we use for our clients. A deep dive into the TikTok algorithm. Plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail.

Starting point is 00:10:59 Click the link in this episode's description or visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. My wife has fallen back into Fallout 76, which I keep rage quitting, so I will probably give it another shot this weekend and then rage quit it again. I'm Todd Maffin. Check out our agency at engageq.com, link in the description.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Is Your Platform Not Showing Incoming Facebook PMs?

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