Today in Digital Marketing - Last night, I had the strangest dream.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, February 4th, 2020. Happy National Lifeguard Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, how does overlaid text on your Instagram images affect your brand's reach? YouTube is killing it in ad revenue. A couple of things you need to check if you are using Google's Search Console

Starting point is 00:00:23 or Google My Business. And a nice new addition for large teams in Sprout Social. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. If you know this song, then you are one of two things. One, you're old, like me, or two, you are on TikTok. Probably a lot. This song is from 1983, kind of a one-hit wonder from a singer named Matthew Wilder, and its distinctive lyrics are mostly the reason why it's had a resurgence of popularity on TikTok. The way the meme goes is you start screen recording on your phone, then text a friend or family member the lyrics to this song line by line until they either recognize the song or they're just completely confused by what you're texting them. Hey, last night I had this crazy dream. I sailed away to China in a little rowboat to find you and you said you had to get your laundry cleaned?

Starting point is 00:01:21 And then you dance in front of the screen recording playback. Honestly, it's kind of a hilarious meme. One woman sent the lyrics to one of the many Indian men who DM her all the time. He was confused. But fun memes aside, TikTok can mean big numbers for songs. Break My Stride has come back in the top 100 at Apple Music and the top 50 viral songs on Spotify. And that brings us to... I'm sorry, friends. top 100 at Apple Music and the top 50 viral songs on Spotify.

Starting point is 00:01:50 And that brings us to, I'm sorry, friends, Justin Bieber. And here we see TikTok being used differently as a deliberate marketing strategy. Justin Bieber's new single is called Yummy. He didn't even have an account on TikTok until the day of the song's release. There are TikTok videos of him in bed shirtless singing along. Another one where he's just nodding his head singing along. Another one where Yummy plays in the background while he strokes his mustache. Yes, Justin Bieber has a mustache now. During the Super Bowl, he had this promotion with Chipotle, where he and a bunch of TikTok influencers timed content with the song to pop up during commercial breaks. But more than all that, this appears to be one of the first songs actually designed for TikTok.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Quoting The Guardian, Bieber joined the lip-syncing social network on the day of Yummy's release, and its chorus seems designed purely for the Gen Zers in yoga pants to spoon frozen acai into their mouths while miming along to the word yummy. But he is appealing to a generation grown on highly sophisticated, multi-layered internet culture that can detect bullshit a mile off. Yummy is so eager to go viral that it almost certainly won't. This is true, I think, not only for songs, but for personality brands as well. I mean, kudos for Bob Saget getting on early, but my God, is his content cringy. All he really does is either lip sync poorly to a track or just grin and nod his head along while smoking a cigar. It's weird. It's not what people do on TikTok.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And here we get to you and me. As digital marketers, we always want to be front of the pack, showing our clients or our boss that we've got a solid foothold in what's to come. Hey, I bet you started a Snapchat account, posted to it for a few months, and haven't touched it in more than a year. My warning to you, be very careful with TikTok. I know you hear that all the time that you've got to adapt your material to each different channel, but until now that's mostly meant adapting the screen resolution or the content length. TikTok is different. Very different. There is a well-defined culture on TikTok, a way of speaking, if you will. And that's a first. Instagram never really had a

Starting point is 00:04:14 language, a culture. YouTube was just another channel to put your company's videos on. And brand managers, digital marketers, and online community people who just dive in with what they've always done may face the worst punishment in all of social media, being ignored. So you're working on some content for Instagram. You've got your photo. You know the text you want to use. Here's the question. Do you overlay that text onto the photo or leave the photo untouched and put the text in the caption? If you care about your metrics, the folks at

Starting point is 00:04:51 Agora Pulse have worked the numbers out and have an answer. Their social media lab is truly one of the best resources for digital marketers out there. They have seven separate Instagram accounts, each with a different overall topic. And in this study, they tried 49 different images. And the results? Images without text had 2% more comments, 14% higher reach, and nearly 40% more likes. The important number here, of course, is reach, because that's the thing that's controlled only by the algorithm. The full study is worth a read, and there's a link in this episode's description. YouTube, for the first time ever, has revealed its advertising numbers. Until now, Google has always lumped its results into one big pile. So now we know that YouTube's revenue rose 36% in 2019 from a year earlier.

Starting point is 00:05:46 That's a faster growth rate than Google's search ad revenue, which grew at 15%. That said, overall revenue from Google's parent company actually missed analyst estimates by a tad. In the same announcement, they also broke out some other numbers. Google's cloud business, for instance, was up 53% in 2019. Heads up if you use Google Tag Manager, and you've used that method in the last few months to verify ownership of your website in Search Console. Google said today that you may need to log in, double-check to make sure you're still verified.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Apparently there was a bug with Tag Manager verification, a bug they've now fixed, but that fix may have disconnected your verification. So if this is you, be sure to log into search console and see if you need to re-verify it. Google says if you don't do this, you could temporarily lose access to your property dashboard. And if you use different Gmail accounts to access different search consoles, be sure, of course, that you are logged into the right one or weird things may happen. Speaking of checking your Google stuff, we are hearing reports that Google has been sending out notifications to some Google My Business users that their unpublished business profiles will be deleted within 30 days. Sometimes digital marketers keep a profile unpublished

Starting point is 00:07:02 while they work on getting approvals or finalizing the content. If this is you and you want to keep that work, you have to verify your listing soon. And a nice addition to Sprout Social, you can now discuss messages with your teammates before they're published. With Sprout's new activity layer, you can now leave internal comments and notify other Sprout users about upcoming messages without setting up an approval workflow. If you're a Sprout user, you can get to this by going to publishing and click either the comment or activity icons on the message you want. Add your comment in the leave an internal comment section and tag any users that you want to notify. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show,

Starting point is 00:07:46 please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. There's a link in this episode's description that makes that an easy one-click process. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social,

Starting point is 00:08:02 links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. Thank you.

Today in Digital Marketing - Last night, I had the strangest dream.

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