Today in Digital Marketing - Meta’s New “Support Pro” Option — An Answer to Prayers?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Meta might finally be doing something to help those of you locked out of your ad accounts, the end of TikTok may be near, a popular SEO plugin adds IndexNow integration, Facebook kills off a video scheduling feature, and Pinterest's CEO steps down to pivot the direction of the platform. It's Wednesday, June 29th. I'm Steph Gunn, filling in for Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Locked out of your Facebook ad account? Meta may finally have the answer to your prayers. Today, the company announced it has expanded its free live chat support for businesses and rebranded its former Facebook marketing experts program as Meta Pro

Starting point is 00:00:46 Team. Plus, there are now three types of Meta Pro Teams that some small to mid-sized businesses can access. The first is Meta Support Pro. This is the big one. If you've had your accounts disabled, you're aware of Meta's virtually non-existent support. This could be a solution. This support option will put you in contact with a rep in a few minutes via live chat, where you can get help with troubleshooting policies, billing, ad accounts, and more. The second is Meta Marketing Pro. This was formerly known as the marketing experts who generally tended to be entry-level college grads who were not, in fact, particularly expert on the platform. In fact, the running joke is that the only advice they had was to raise your budget.

Starting point is 00:01:29 And the third and final is Meta Technical Pro. These are support reps that will help you or your team install or optimize the MetaPixel, product catalog, conversions API, and handle measurement issues. Again, these are all free despite the word pro at the end. However, you will need to visit the pro team website to see your business's eligibility as the program is not currently offered to all advertisers. Just when you're starting to get the hang of marketing on social media's current golden child. First Trump, now the FCC. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission wants Apple and Google to ban TikTok. Commissioner Brendan Carr made the request by sending a

Starting point is 00:02:11 letter to the two companies' CEOs, which he tweeted. The request follows BuzzFeed's report that China allegedly accessed U.S. data. Quoting Carr, TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It's not just an app for sharing funny videos or memes. That's the sheep's clothing. Quoting Carr, Unquote. and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for its pattern of surreptitious data practices. Unquote. Carr also gave the CEOs an ultimatum, stating that if the companies do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they must respond separately to him by July 8th, 2022, explaining why. Neither Google, Apple, nor TikTok have responded yet. Google announced today that it is adding new APIs for embedding Reserve with Google on your site. Through search maps or Assistant, the Reserve feature lets customers reserve a table,

Starting point is 00:03:19 purchase tickets to an event, book appointments, and more. Yes, embedding. This means you'll be able to put the feature on your own website to use as a lead generation and booking tool. This is something many brands use additional third-party plugins for. According to Google, it offers end-to-end appointment booking flow and connects users to a variety of services. Developers of the popular Yoast SEO plugin announced yesterday that it has finally added IndexNow integration, but only for premium users. IndexNow, the Microsoft-backed protocol,

Starting point is 00:03:52 automatically notifies search engines about content changes on your website. The tool has seen support from several search engines, however, Google is still holding out. While Microsoft built its own plugin for WordPress sites to use IndexNow, Yoast recently decided to build it into its premium plugin. Why did Yoast add it now? Quoting the company, the IndexNow team changed the endpoint of the API from pinging each individual supported search engine to a single API managed by the protocol. This means that sites only have to ping a single site, making the process much more efficient, unquote. In order for it to start crawling, all Yoast SEO Premium users have to do

Starting point is 00:04:31 is toggle the tool on for their WordPress websites. Yoast Premium adds previews for sharing on Twitter and Facebook, plus content suggestions as you type. It costs $99 US per year. financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Pinterest has taken perhaps its biggest step yet in pivoting its platform to a social commerce engine. The company announced yesterday that its CEO and co-founder Ben Silberman is stepping down and will be replaced by Google's former president of commerce, Bill Reddy, who also worked at PayPal and Venmo. Silberman is not leaving Pinterest. Instead, he will become the company's first executive chairman. Quoting Silberman, In our next chapter, we are focused on helping pinners buy, try, and act on all great ideas they

Starting point is 00:05:40 see. Bill is a great leader for this transition. He is a builder who deeply understands commerce and payments. Facebook is shutting down its Premieres feature for videos. The feature lets brands and businesses schedule pre-recorded content through what's basically Facebook Live. But instead of a video being tagged as live, it is tagged with Premiere, and has all of the engagement benefits of a live broadcast without being live. This is essentially the same functionality that a YouTube Premiere has. Meta is alerting users in-app that the video option will be deprecated on Monday, August 22nd, and that after that date, you will not be able to use Premieres to schedule a video to debut. The company recommends that you use scheduled video posts for any pre-recorded content.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Or better yet, just make a reel. Some good news for those of you who market musicians. Spotify announced today that US-based artists can now promote their eligible releases in 14 new markets to audiences overseas using its ad format Marquee. The campaign tool is a full-screen sponsored recommendation of an artist's new release to Spotify free listeners, as well as premium listeners who have shown interest in their music. When listeners click the ad, it takes them directly to the artist's new release. Marquee was launched a couple of years ago, but it could only be used to target audiences in the US until today. And finally, an update to yesterday's story about Meta's terrible content moderation job,

Starting point is 00:07:19 in which some media reported it was removing abortion-related content within minutes, but left posts about guns and weed up. A Meta spokesperson has now responded to these claims on Twitter, noting that the company discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these. It reminded people that content about selling and sharing medication has always been against policy. Instagram also posted an update yesterday claiming that its sensitivity screens have been applied to certain content when they shouldn't be, which is a bug and it's working on a fix. Very peculiar considering the bug only affected abortion posts for some reason. Thoughts and prayers, it gets fixed. I am physically here, but my mind is in Greece. So I leave for Greece Friday morning and the travel stress is very real.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Our flight has already been canceled and we've had to move it around a bunch. But it has taken hours and probably years off of my life and we haven't even left yet. And we're flying out of Pearson Airport in Toronto, which recently got some bad press because the guy from Barstool Sports called it the biggest gong show in airport history. So can't wait for that. We're going for my best friend's wedding, but more importantly, we are also going to the Palace of Knossos in Crete, which is actually on my bucket list. So I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Classics major, and I've studied a lot of Minoan frescoes. So for the first time in probably over a decade,

Starting point is 00:08:50 my degree might actually be useful. That's if we make it out of Pearson Airport. Listen, why aren't you in our Slack group yet? We're past 900 members now, all sharing advice, getting help. You can get an inside peek at what's coming up in each day's episode. There's even a channel you can promote yourself in and it's free to join. All you have to do is tap the link in the show notes or go to todayanddigital.com slash slack. Thanks for listening and Todd will be back tomorrow. you

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta’s New “Support Pro” Option — An Answer to Prayers?

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