Today in Digital Marketing - Meta is Bad at Math.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, a surprise admission of failure from Amazon. Be protected. Be Zen. And on the premium podcast with no ads, more stories and extended weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes for more. The 9-10 plan, how one agency switched to a reduced work week and found profits and happier people. It's Wednesday, March 2nd. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. In a surprise announcement this afternoon, Amazon said it is significantly scaling back its brick and mortar operations. The company today said it will close all of its Amazon Books physical bookstores, as well as its Amazon Four Star and Amazon Pop-Up shops, which sold popular trending items. In total, 68 stores across the U.S. and U.K. will be shut down.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Quoting CNBC, store, and offline operations by featuring the top-selling products in its web store. But sales growth of the physical stores unit has noticeably lagged the company's overall retail business. Physical stores, which includes Whole Foods and Fresh Outlets, reported lower sales in 2021 than in 2018. Amazon is trimming its physical retail footprint after coming off its slowest growth rate for any quarter since 2001. Shares are down more than 8% so far this year, and the stock was the worst performer

Starting point is 00:02:14 in the big tech group last year, unquote. So how is Meta doing when it comes to refuting the idea that Facebook is a platform used to spread misinformation? Yesterday, the company released its widely viewed content list, which shows the most popular posts from the last quarter. And it revealed that the most viewed Facebook page was a page Meta later banned. What is that page? Meta, in its ironically titled transparency report, wouldn't say. Also not helpful, the breakdown of the source of newsfeed content. Posts from friends and family

Starting point is 00:02:54 are the most prominent on the chart at about 51%, but that doesn't really tell us much because those posts could be shared from news pages. Same with groups, to be honest. Almost 20% of news feed content came from groups, says Meta. But again, those shares could be from news sites or spam or misinformation. And far be it for me to challenge Meta's honesty here, but check these numbers out. Here's what their report said. Quote,

Starting point is 00:03:24 Most of the views in the U.S US during Q4 2021, 85.4% did not include a link to a source outside Facebook, unquote. Let's stop there for a moment. 85% of newsfeed content didn't have a link to a source outside Facebook. That seems awfully high, at least in my own anecdotal experience. And let's not forget that meta is using the literal definition of link here. A bit of misinformation from an outside source, which is posted as an image, as most of these are nowadays, wouldn't be considered by Facebook here. Then, quote, for the 14.6% of views in posts that did include a link, they typically came from a page the person followed, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Okay, math is hard, but let me try this out. 85.4% had no link. 14.2% had a link, but only from pages that that person followed. That's 99.6%. Even if we concede a rounding error, Meta is claiming that in the last quarter, statistically speaking, they showed almost no links from pages a user didn't already follow. Again, anecdotally, but doesn't everybody have some whack job uncle that's posting all sorts of crazy nonsense from bizarre conspiracy sites? Not to mention links to YouTube videos and GoFundMes and all the rest? Color me unconvinced. Social media platforms continue to respond to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Yesterday, Snap, Meta, and Reddit provided updates on measures taken, some of which impact ad delivery. The updates include Snapchat first. They have halted all ads in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as ad sales to Belarusian and Russian entities. But it says due to its, quote, importance as a communications tool, unquote, Snapchat will continue to be offered in those countries. The platform says it will vigilantly monitor its platform for misinformation or misuse. Meta, on the other hand, has worked with Ukraine's state emergency services to launch a free bot on WhatsApp that will provide Ukrainians with reliable information as well as details about what to do in an emergency. Instagram is now offering encrypted one-on-one chats through direct messaging in Russia and Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:05:51 And Reddit added some Russia subreddits to its quarantine list. That list restricts communities from being displayed in search results and adds warnings like, This community contains a high volume of information not supported by credible sources. What steps should you be taking to protect your brand? Adweek today has some pretty common sense wisdom on their site. First, ensuring that your advertising doesn't look insensitive by appearing adjacent to war-related content and pushing platforms to eliminate misinformation.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Advertising and even the use of some organic content on social media during wartime can be risky, given the prevalence of unmoderated user-generated content. Many marketers are learning this the hard way. Last week, CNN ran an Applebee's ad on a split screen with live footage from Ukraine. It looked terrible. The network quickly pulled the ad format. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:06:58 fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. With the news about websites blocking Russian traffic, some people are asking if the practice can be used as a marketing tactic. For instance, can you block US visitors from seeing your website? Yes, you can. But what effect does that have on your search ranking? Turns out, 99% of the Googlebot crawling originates from the US. So if humans in the US can't see your site, Google's web crawlers can't either.

Starting point is 00:07:45 Also, Google search advocate John Mueller confirmed that it would actually be against Google Webmaster Guidelines to show the Googlebot the content, but then display an alert to U.S.-based users saying they are not allowed to see the content based on their location. That said, you can do the opposite, show U.S.-based users content, but hide it from people in, say, Russia, for instance. That would not violate Google's guidelines, because Googlebot does not crawl from Russia. Advertising budgets continue to shift to streaming content, so-called over-the-top spending, often just called OTT, that's streaming video services mostly, still represents a relatively small percentage of monthly digital spending because many streaming services are ad-free or have a light advertising

Starting point is 00:08:35 load. But according to a new study, OTT advertising is growing. Five streaming services now account for 65% of OTT ad spending last year, with a total of $1.3 billion spent in 2021. The study was done by MediaRadar. A small but important update. Google is cracking down on verifying businesses, the company has updated its help document on how to verify your business in Google profiles to say that it, quote, may require you to verify by more than one method, unquote. Verification methods currently include phone or text, email, a video recording, a live video call, or as most of us have received, that postcard in the mail. Now, the search giant might request that you have two of those methods to verify your business. The SEO tool provider SEMrush has announced that it will be acquiring Compite. Compite is an AI-driven solution that helps sales marketing and executive teams

Starting point is 00:09:40 identify, track, compile, and analyze competitor insights. Its platform provides insights based on monitoring competitors' online presence. SEMrush says its goal with this acquisition is to broaden its professional offerings beyond search marketing-specific tools. Quoting the announcement, the acquisition will expand SEMrush's ability to help its customers beyond their marketing departments, especially considering 88% of Compite's total user base falls within sales organizations. A couple of social media-related updates to share with you. First, the results are in for the top U.S. mobile networking apps ranked by downloads. TikTok and Instagram were once again the top US social

Starting point is 00:10:25 networking apps of 2021. No real surprise there. TikTok had 94 million downloads, followed by Instagram with 64 million. But here's a surprise. Snapchat took third place, beating Facebook. And Snapchat jumped 10% actually in downloads with 56 million. Facebook dropped 11% at 47 million. The data was provided by Insider Intelligence. Second, Instagram is finally rolling out auto-generated captions for feed videos. This feature should now be available for all feed videos, but you will need to turn it on by default. The change will eliminate the need for your brand manager to manually add captions to your video content, which of course makes the platform more accessible to hard of hearing and

Starting point is 00:11:10 deaf users, as well as those who prefer watching videos without sound. And finally, some late breaking news. A software engineer has found code in Twitter's app that shows the company is working on bringing podcasts to its service. No confirmation from Twitter, of course, but this does seem to line up with their recent expansion into content, from their Clubhouse clone called Twitter Spaces to their Subspace clone called Review. Nothing interesting to tell you here. I will talk to you tomorrow. You're a rainstorm on a wildfire. A drop of oil on a squeaky door.

Starting point is 00:11:52 The cool side of the pillow at night. You're the joke I've never heard before.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta is Bad at Math.

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