Today in Digital Marketing - Please Click The X Clearly Visible In This Box: 🔲

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, TikTok goes to the big screen, an easy way to find out the hints Googlers have told us about search performance, and the Facebook bug of the day, hope you're sitting down for this one, because you can no longer delete interests from ad campaigns. It's Tuesday, December 15th, 2020. Happy end of the celebration of the Virgin of Katoka, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. By the way, this might be the shortest episode I've ever put out. We'll chat more about that at the end, but we start with TikTok on television. Samsung has signed a deal with TikTok to let owners of their smart TVs watch TikTok videos on their TV sets. This is only in Europe for now.

Starting point is 00:00:44 TVs these days, of course, have their own apps. Everything's a their TV sets. This is only in Europe for now. TVs these days, of course, have their own apps. Everything's a smart TV now. Our Samsung TV has apps for wallpapers, looking at photos, a Netflix app, a YouTube app, and more than 100 more. And I have looked at that screen exactly once in the six years that we've owned it. It sounds like this TikTok app is going to be very similar to the mobile app, a following feed, a for you feed, but a bit more curated. They'll organize content into 12 categories covering things like comedy and food and animals. They'll also incorporate the learn on TikTok section. You will not need a TikTok account to view the videos, although I presume if you do use one, it'll serve you more personalized content.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Makes it sound a little silly, but YouTube has found some pretty big success of people watching videos on these so-called smart TVs. So much so, they even added an ad placement especially for it, the masthead. So maybe this is an ad play somehow? It makes sense for YouTube because they've already got the Google ad platform behind them, but will Samsung open up their own ad platform? Or maybe partner with Google so that Samsung TVs are a placement? Who knows? One of the best sources for little tidbits about how the Google search engine works is to watch the Twitter account of three Google employees.

Starting point is 00:01:57 They are search engineers and are sort of known in the industry as the SEO whisperers. Someone will tweet them a question like, does the meta description rank pages at all? And the answer is no, but remember that's the first thing a user sees when they decide to click through. And that text does give Google's bot an idea of what you consider to be important on that page.

Starting point is 00:02:17 That last tidbit I hadn't realized they were doing. Well, someone has archived some of the more telling tweet responses into a sort of searchable website at seoasked.com. I say sort of because, ironically, the search function is really bad. So, you know, don't even bother with the search. But there are some links to some top-level subjects like technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO. There's some other interesting stuff in there, so it's probably worth a few minutes of your time to poke around.

Starting point is 00:02:45 It is at seoasked.com. Two bugs to tell you about. First, Sprout Social is experiencing issues connecting to YouTube pages. They're aware of it and are working on it. And it wouldn't be a day without a Facebook bug. This one's a doozy. You can no longer remove interests from

Starting point is 00:03:06 ad campaigns. So you know how when you set up a campaign, you could put interest in there like bowling and sports and healthcare. And let's say you accidentally put tennis in there, right? So you hover over it and the little X pops up on the right. So you click the X and tennis goes away. Well, now Facebook's UI actually covers up the X with information about that audience when you hover over it. You know this pop-up, right? It's that pop-up that tells you how many people are in the audience. Yes, now this pop-up is on top of the X, which means you can't access the X anymore, which means you can't cancel out an interest anymore. Honestly, like, I know I have a rep for being snarky to Facebook, but tell me they don't

Starting point is 00:03:51 deserve it. How do they let a bug this big get published to the live platform? Are none of Facebook's developers even using this? You know, don't even answer that question. I'm kind of afraid to know the answer. So yeah, short episode today. I have a medical appointment in a couple of hours at the hospital.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Nothing big, not to worry. It's just a lung function test. I've had a bad post-nasal drip all of my life, which is probably allergies, but I guess I want to see if there's asthma in the mix.

Starting point is 00:04:22 So three cheers for free Canadian health care. Don't forget, you can hang out with me and others as we produce each episode of the podcast every day starting somewhere around 3 p.m. Eastern, give or take an hour. I live stream everything, the voicing, the mixing, the uploading. I stream it on my Twitch channel, this podcast's YouTube channel. But the easiest way is to follow me on Twitter, because it goes live there too. Links to all my social media are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Mathen, talk to you tomorrow. Shake it next to me Find time to get it moving Shake all that we got to shake Find time to get it moving

Starting point is 00:05:08 Give it all to me

Today in Digital Marketing - Please Click The X Clearly Visible In This Box: 🔲

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.