Today in Digital Marketing - It's a Hat. It is Literally a Hat.

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Why is Google sending your leads to other companies? Twitter is close to launching a big change in how you post a tweet.... Reddit opens a sales office in Canada.... YouTube is totally not copying TikTok, guys… and TikTok copies YouTube?!Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our 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. Today, why is Google sending your leads to other companies? Twitter is close to launching a big change in how you post a tweet. Reddit opens a sales office in Canada. YouTube is totally not copying TikTok, guys. And TikTok copies YouTube? It's Monday, March 29th, 2021.

I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Whenever you publish a page or a post on your brand's website, inside your content management tool, there's usually a way to create a shorter URL. For instance, instead of toddmaffin.com slash post slash 2021 slash March slash name of post, you can use toddmaffin.com slash name of post. Most of the time, it serves as a redirect to the long URL. The common wisdom has been that Google prefers shorter URLs. But do they? That's today's quiz. Is there an SEO benefit to having an artificially flat URL structure

compared to one that shows directory depth? The answer, later in the episode. When Google rolled out messaging for Google My Business profiles a while back, they talked a lot about how proud they were of the tech, about how much time it would save businesses, that sort of thing. One thing they did not mention, that they might send leads destined for your business to your competitors. Some people are reporting seeing a new workflow in the request a quote section. This is where people send a request to a service business. In a screenshot shared on Twitter, instead of a generic thank you form, it says send your request to other businesses with checkboxes beside competing firms. I haven't

seen anything official from Google on this. We'll certainly keep an eye on it for you. If this is a concern to you, you can turn that request a quote thing off. I haven't seen anything official from Google on this. We'll certainly keep an eye on it for you. If this is a concern to you, you can turn that request to quote thing off. It's happened to all of us. You submit an ad to Facebook and then they deny it because you used the word you in the copy, which got a little too close to their ad policy on calling people out in the copy. If you're like me, you smack your forehead, think to yourself, God, I did it again. Of course I know about this rule.

And you redo the copy. A neat free online tool, though, has now emerged to scan your copy before you submit it to Facebook, and you don't need to connect it to your ads manager or anything. You just copy and paste your headline, body copy, and description into it, and it goes looking for things that may run afoul of Facebook policies. You can find it at Copyscanner.io. A big change to how you post tweets could be coming soon. Twitter's already talked about something they call communities, which is kind of a group, sort of like a Facebook group. The idea is that

you'll be able to share a tweet with a subgroup of users instead of everyone following your account. If implemented right, I think this could be a huge benefit to digital marketers. Think about your brand's own Twitter feed. You might use it for support, to promote sales, to publish news releases, to communicate with investors, you know, a mishmash of things. Now, imagine people are able to subscribe to the sub-feed of the particular topic they want. Like, for instance, only news about product updates. That functionality may be on its way soon. A software engineer has discovered code in the back-end of Twitter's mobile app that supports this new communities function. It's all part of the big push Twitter's making this year. They're hoping to have 315 million daily users two years from now.

They currently have 192 million. Reddit has opened a sales office in Canada, home to its third largest user base after the US and the UK and growing by 40% year over year, the company says Canada is the natural next place for Reddit to establish a new on-the-ground presence. Canadian Redditors skew younger than its global user base. Nearly 6 in 10 are less than 35 years old. 40% are female.

They say at 31 minutes a day, Reddit users in Canada spend more time in-app than almost all other social media platforms. Their news release ended by saying, For more information or to learn more about advertising opportunities or case studies, contact us. Sorry, we meant please contact us. Now that YouTube is expanding its TikTok clone to some users in the U.S., they've put out a video with an overview of how it works. If this is new to you, they're calling these videos shorts.

These are not stories. I know it's getting hard to keep track of it all these days. Shorts are any vertical video 60 seconds or less in length, and you can upload them by following the standard upload flow on mobile or desktop. YouTube recommends that you use hashtag shorts in the title or description to help with discovery. To be clear, you do not need to be in this beta group or have the new shorts camera to get featured. You just have to use that hashtag. In the video, a YouTube spokesperson said they created shorts because, quote, every year we see an increasing number of people coming to YouTube looking to create, and we want to make it easier for them to do so, unquote.

As Social Media Today noted, Oh, right, so not about the rise of TikTok at all. Good to know. So with YouTube copying TikTok, it's only fair that TikTok copies YouTube. And so they are, with the addition of video playlists. It started rolling out to a handful of counts late last week. It works the way you think it does. You can create dedicated collections of video clips, which you name as a group, and then they're displayed on your profile.

Looks like it'll only be available to creator and business accounts, and will only work with public videos. Also, these are more like folders than tags. You can only put a video into one playlist at a time. Of course, on the back end, this gives TikTok a better sense of the video's topic, which will help them serve out to the right people, increase engagement, drive more ad revenue, yada, yada, yada. For us digital marketers, it'll let us group things into product tutorials or explainers or whatever.

TikTok hasn't said when it would roll out more widely. Watch this space. Oh, and as for the quiz, is there an SEO benefit to having an artificially flat URL structure compared to one that shows directory depth? We have an answer now from Google search engineer John Mueller. Essentially, the URL structure that you have on your site is something that you can use however you want. Google does not count the number of slashes in your URLs and say, oh, this is like five levels down. Therefore,

we will not show it as visibly in search. You don't have to kind of have an artificially flat directory structure. That said, it's still generally good for the user experience, so there's no need to stop using the short versions. One small bit of Google news I'll squeeze in here as well. A rep said that Google will first begin testing a flock. That's their cookie alternative in the US and a handful of other countries. It will not be testing it in Europe because of potential issues with the GDRP. Well, as you probably know by now, I have become completely enamored of TikTok. I used to be a Reddit and YouTube guy in the evening. I don't think I've spent any significant time in either place in the last month.

Like all that time has been sucked out by TikTok. For our wedding anniversary earlier this month, my wife gave me a card that said, there's nobody I'd rather lie in bed and look at our phones next to. I do a daily 60 second summary of each day's podcast there. Plus, this is algorithm week on my TikTok account, where I am breaking down how each major platform's discovery and delivery algorithms work. Today, it is

the Facebook ad algorithm. I'm almost at 20,000 followers now, so come join the party. My account over there on TikTok is Digital Marketing Secrets. Also, I've added a Discord server in case you really aren't a Slack person. Discord is at todayindigital.com slash Discord, or tap the link in this episode's notes under Join the Community.

I will leave you with a short skit that I did over the weekend. It's on my TikTok. It seems to have gone a little viral. Pretty self-explanatory, I think. Suffice to say, here's what happens to all of us when we try to get an ad campaign submitted to Facebook. Talk to you tomorrow. suggestive hats. I'm sorry. Can you check again? It's a hat I'm selling. Oh I'm sorry you're right. How about you can't run it? Why not? It's about cryptocurrency. It's not about... it's a it's literally a hat. I sell hats. Is there someone else I can

appeal this to? Yeah yeah yeah, yeah. Dave? Nope. Well, who... Can I at least talk to that guy? I have no idea where he is. They're in policy. They're, like, in a completely different place. He's right outside the door.

You know what? I'm just going to take all your ads away. This is not fair. I'm just trying to run... You just banned your personal account. You can't do that. I just banned your sister's account. Do you really want to play this game with me?