Today in Digital Marketing - LinkedIn Has A Pee Problem

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Friday, October 20th. Today, LinkedIn is getting personal and not everybody likes it. Google says ad buyers shouldn't wear hats. Why Facebook is showing your crazy uncle your threads posts. And I am still studying for my amateur radio license and it is harder than I thought. And I am no longer having fun, and this isn't a story in the show today, but I just wanted to get that off my chest. Thank you. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:51 That's Ahead, today's digital marketing. LinkedIn this week announced updates to its collaborative articles tool. This lets users start a post with an AI-generated prompt and then ask other users to weigh in with their comments on the post topic. I have seen these. They feel a little artificial and generic, a little gimmicky, but I'm sure they're technically increasing engagement, so those KPIs are probably being hit. LinkedIn

Starting point is 00:01:15 launched this in March, says it's had more than a million expert contributions using it. If you reply to enough of these posts, by the way, you'll get a special little badge like top brand management voice, if that's important to you. And to be fair, it might be given that it might help your profile stand out a little among the urinary updates populating the platform. What is changing specifically? Well, they're changing the layout to better showcase contributors. They are reducing the emphasis on the AI prompt and they've turned emoji reactions on for other people to click on their way by. Also with LinkedIn, the platform will let people in more countries get their accounts verified. Now verified to LinkedIn means that someone has uploaded their government ID to the platform and LinkedIn's identity partner Clear confirms whether

Starting point is 00:02:01 you are that person or not. It doesn't cost any money, but it does add a verification badge to your profile. LinkedIn says verified profiles get 60% more profile views, 50% more comments and reactions on their posts, and 30% more messages. I did try to find this in their app and on their site. All I could find was a screen saying my account didn't have any verifications, which is true. Then it linked to a very long help page about verification, which contained everything you

Starting point is 00:02:29 could ever want to know about the process, except how to get verified. So I don't know, maybe it's just not rolled out to me yet. There is another form of verification as well. And that's proving that you work for the company you say you do. They do that through an email confirmation, though only some companies are supported right now. To Google now and a change to how their Google Ads certification testing works. From now on, anyone who takes the test will need to first send Google a photo of your government ID,

Starting point is 00:03:03 then take a photo of your face, then record a video of you taking the test. This is how many proctored exams work, of course. Google is outsourcing this to a firm called Honorlock. They use software that disables copy and paste and AI that tries to detect if you pick up a cell phone while taking the exam, which will flag your session for a human moderator to check.

Starting point is 00:03:24 But it's more restrictive than that. Google's new rules also say you are not allowed to have notes, you're not allowed to use scratch paper, you're not allowed to take restroom breaks, you're not allowed to use headphones, and you are not allowed to wear hats. Yes, finally those Bluetooth answer-giving beanies finally get their due. Also, some discussion on social in the last day or two about Google Ads' new advertiser verification form. This is supposed to prove that you're a legitimate business, but rather than what most platforms do, ask for business documents or mail you a postcard to confirm your address,

Starting point is 00:04:05 Google's new verification form appears to have gotten completely out of hand. It is 28 questions long, and a lot of them are what you'd write for a business plan. Describe your business model. Describe your target customers. Describe how your company interacts with its target audience. Who will be responsible for writing your ad copy? Do you run your website or does another company? And worst of all, people are reporting that this email comes without any indication of which business Google is asking about. So agencies are getting emails saying, hey, verify your business or you won't be able to run ads. But the email doesn't actually say which client Google is talking about. So might be worth double checking your email to see if you've got one of those waiting for you

Starting point is 00:04:48 or a company you work for. Instagram is testing a new way to drive engagement, polls. But these polls appear in the comment section of a post. It looks like only the account holder can create these in the comments of either feed posts or reels. This brings those formats up to speed with stories and DMs, both of which have had polls for some time. The company says this is in the final stages of testing and should roll out to everyone soon. It is doubtful this will be in the API at least right away. So

Starting point is 00:05:21 if you plan to use this for your brand account, you will need to do it via the Instagram mobile app. And you may have spotted a pretty big change in the Instagram feed in the last day or two. The app is now showing a selection of posts on threads, Meta's new version of Twitter. It appears to surface posts from people you follow on Instagram who are also posting text updates over on threads.

Starting point is 00:05:43 So if your brand is posting there, this might be a nice little free reach. who are also posting text updates over on Threads. So if your brand is posting there, this might be a nice little free reach. It's also, by the way, pushing your Threads content into Facebook. So fair warning, if your edgelord posts on Threads, make it to your crazy uncle in Alberta. Slack has announced it is shutting down its status updates account on the former Twitter site.

Starting point is 00:06:08 So if you relied on that to check outages, as many, many people did, the company says you should now visit its status website at status.slack.com. In the announcement, they basically said, nobody's here anymore, so we out. The actual quote was, we made the decision to retire the Slack status account in order to focus resources on those most widely used by our customers, unquote. Slack joins other brands Quitting X, American Express and Air France, both shut down their customer service accounts there, pointing people to their websites instead. So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts.

Starting point is 00:06:49 That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm,

Starting point is 00:07:03 a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. Thank you. and an escalation path, then leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast section. And finally, an interesting piece today at fortune.com talks about how the vibe over at LinkedIn has changed. The LinkedIn feed has been for the longest time, well, let's just say it, boring. People talking about their promotion or ads for white papers. But now, quoting the Fortune piece, professionals on the work-focused social network are now sharing uber personal updates about divorces and bodily functions. LinkedIn influencers are becoming mainstream and unwanted sexual advances and trolls are now commonplace. Other media outlets have noticed the change too,

Starting point is 00:08:30 with Insider saying the platform has gotten really weird, while Bloomberg argues that it's, quote, cool now, unquote. So what's behind the vibe shift? According to Fortune, the collapse of Twitter. People are jumping off, and some are landing on LinkedIn, bringing with them their content and their sharing preferences. There's an Instagram account that tracks some of this.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Best of LinkedIn is the account name. It has more than 40,000 followers. It curates the more bizarre of these. Here's an example, a post on LinkedIn from an SEO person. Quote, I have a secret. Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms. I've missed weddings, held my pee up to 10 plus hours, social events and going out in general because I was too afraid if I was going to pee or not, unquote. Look, I am not mocking this gentleman's urinary issues.

Starting point is 00:09:26 Hell, I'm past 50 now. Trust me, I get it. But as a LinkedIn post? Other examples, the lessons a Trader Joe's grocery taught their child and some tech bro bragging about how great an employee they are by sleeping in their car instead of a hotel room. But there's a darker side too. A piece earlier this summer by Fortune

Starting point is 00:09:45 revealed a growing number of incidents of sexual harassment on the platform. A survey of 1,000 women in July said 9 in 10 women say they've received a romantic advance or inappropriate message on LinkedIn at least once. And then there are the trolls.

Starting point is 00:10:01 New accounts by the thousands without profile pictures jumping into the comments to call people things like, quote, a white privileged bougie piece of crap, unquote. And quoting from that fortune piece, while internet trolls are by no means new either, there's a jarring feeling about being trolled on a platform ostensibly for professionals.

Starting point is 00:10:22 Despite its undeniably growing prominence, LinkedIn doesn't feel like LinkedIn anymore. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen. A little note for premium podcast members. Normally, of course, every Friday, we get the detailed meta ad platform update with Andrew Foxwell. Andrew had a scheduling conflict, so we are going to be pushing that to Monday. If you are looking for very detailed information about the Google ad platform and the meta ad platform,

Starting point is 00:10:59 consider taking a look at our premium podcast. That's at todayindigital.com slash premium or just tap go premium in the show notes. That's also where you'll find all of our social media links. We are on all the new and upcoming ones, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads, Pebble and Spoutable. Sproutable? Spoutable? Sproutable? I don't even know.

Starting point is 00:11:19 We're also on the OG platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. You can find the links to all of our social media and my own personal social media, including my secret Twitch channel where I play video games poorly. Check the link in the show notes. That will do it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you Monday. Every day I'm stronger. I'm getting stronger. Every day, every day.

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Today in Digital Marketing - LinkedIn Has A Pee Problem

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