Today in Digital Marketing - Jack Dorsey Will Break Your Heart 💔

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Facebook backs away from place ads on Whatsapp Microsoft drops an important search results metric Google thinks it has a better way to showcase and sell YOUR products And some news on the single biggest change to Twitter you’ve probably ever wanted Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish 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. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCES: https://www.seroundtable.com/microsoft-advertising-to-sunset-average-position-28843.html https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-confirms-that-it-wont-be-adding-an-edit-option-anytime-soon/570523/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/whatsapp-backs-off-controversial-plan-to-sell-ads-11579207682?mod=e2twd https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-a-new-shopping-section-in-search-results/343649/ --- 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 Thursday, January 16th, 2020. Happy Appreciate a Dragon Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook backs away from placing ads on WhatsApp, sort of. Microsoft drops an important search results metric. Google says it has a better way to showcase and sell your products. And some news on the single biggest change to Twitter that you have probably ever wanted. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. A while back, I told you that Facebook

announced it will slowly let digital marketers like you and me advertise on WhatsApp, which honestly would be great. Another placement in a well-used app would be fantastic. Well, funny story. They've changed their mind. Researchers have found that the ad-enabling code that was slipped into the app has been removed, and word is leaking out now that the ad team tasked with setting this up was actually disbanded a couple of months ago. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion six years ago. Since then, they've had a hard time trying to monetize it, despite it being used by more than 1.5 billion people globally. Late today, a Facebook rep said ads still, quote, remain a long-term opportunity, unquote.

But for now, it looks like they are working on building tools for brands to chat with customers rather than advertise to them. Google has added a new way to display products you sell in its search results, quoting Search Engine Journal. When searching for keywords such as running shoes or down jackets, Google will now return a new section that showcases popular products from stores across the web. This new section will show up when searching for clothes, shoes, and accessories. While browsing the popular products section, users can filter results by style, department, and size. After selecting a product, Google will list the sites where it can be purchased from, which will let users quickly compare prices. It will even be possible to read product reviews without leaving search results.

Users will, however, have to visit a retailer's site in order to purchase the desired product. It'll be interesting to see if this actually will help drive organic traffic to e-commerce marketers. After all, this new feature means users can do a lot of what they used to do on your site, but instead, they'll do it on Google's site. First Google, now Microsoft. The average position metric, which would roughly show you where you appear in the search engine results, that metric is now being retired.

Google actually did this last year, and now Bing, that's Microsoft's competitor to Google, Bing is removing it as well. In the announcement, Microsoft says they would prefer you focus on so-called prominence metrics. And what are those? They say among the better numbers to track, top impression share, top impression share lost to rank and top impression share lost to budget. Don't worry, you're not seeing things or not not seeing things. Yes, the IGTV button in the top right corner of the Instagram app is gone. Does that mean they have given up competing with YouTube? Nope, not at all. It's just being integrated into the app more directly. Now, if you go to upload a video and select one

that's more than a minute long, you will be able to drop it directly into your app more directly. Now, if you go to upload a video and select one that's more than a minute long, you will be able to drop it directly into your IGTV area. And in an interview on Matt DeVar's podcast, the head of Instagram says, nope, they are not going to add a regram button. And nope, they will not let links be tappable. I mean, why would they? The only way to make links tappable is to give Facebook money and run an ad. And even then, the link's not really tappable, but you do get a call to action bar under the image or video. I'm guessing if you listen to this podcast that you have probably sent a tweet from your brand's account before. And if you've been doing that for any length of

time, you've probably wished you could have edited a tweet. You know, a little typo slips through, you'd just be able to touch that up. Well, my friends, big announcement. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed yesterday that you still are not getting an edit button. Here he is answering a tweet in yesterday's Wired Magazine video. At Tazydurus asks, I owe Twitter. Can we get that edit button in 2020? The answer is no. The reason there's no edit button, there hasn't been an edit button traditionally, is we started as a SMS text messaging service. So as you all know, when you send a text, you can't really take it back.

We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days. But now, you know, we have an app and a lot of people are using us on the web. And there's some issues with edit that we can solve. One is you might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that. And then an hour later, you completely change the content of that tweet. And that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different so that's something to watch out for. A lot of people want it because they want to fix a quick spelling error or a broken link or whatnot and that's great we've considered a one-minute window or a 30-second window to correct

something but that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out, because once it's out, people see it. So these are all the considerations. It's just work, but we'll probably never do it. So there you go, folks. Watch those typos. Well, my wife and I are heading out of the country on a long-needed vacation, so no episode tomorrow and no episodes all next week.

Unless something huge happens, like Zuckerberg makes all ads free or Google gets sold to Apple or something like that. Anyway, that means now you have more time to rate and review this podcast. Just go to rate this podcast dot com slash today. Follow me on social links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you a week from Monday.