Today in Digital Marketing - Social Platform Spending is Going Up — Way Up

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

If you sell any products on your website, today’s Google update was a big one… Twitter makes things simpler for media buyers… Snapchat dives even deeper into augmented reality e-commerce… and now we know: Facebook has no sense of humour. Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, spending on social platforms is going up, way up. Be protected. Be Zen. Facebook has no sense of humor. It's Thursday, April 8th, 2021. Happy Romanian's Independence Day, Sweden. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You probably know that there isn't one Google search engine.

There's one for each country. You also probably know that you can remove your website from Google's index if you ever want to, but can you do both? Today's quiz, can you remove your website from Google search in a specific country while leaving your websites listing up in the other countries? The answer later in the episode. New numbers from Pew Research may help guide your next media buy on social media platforms. Each year, they do a pretty detailed study of social media habits. And so here are those numbers for this year's study.

With one caveat, they only polled American users. So this is just U.S. data here. Yes, YouTube and Facebook were at the front of the pack, as they usually are, with 81% and 69%, respectively respectively of people reporting they used that site last year. But YouTube and Reddit were the only two platforms that saw statistically significant growth since 2019 when they last did this study. Other platforms, 40% of U.S. adults now use Instagram. About 30% are on Pinterest and LinkedIn. And at the time they did the study, TikTok had 21 percent of the population. By the way, a separate Harris poll released today found that 91 percent of surveyed business executives expect their company's social media marketing budgets will increase

in the next three years. Nearly half say they expect they'll actually double their current spending. This morning, Google threw the switch on a pretty significant change to its search algorithm, specifically the part of the code that ranks product reviews. The change is designed to provide higher rankings for well-researched, in-depth content. To be clear, this only affects websites that publish product reviews. So if that's not you, nothing changes. But if this is you, you may want to monitor your traffic and rank position over the coming days and weeks and see if this does anything bad. One easy way to track this is to drop an annotation pin on today's date in the Google Analytics timeline so you can more easily track any changes to today's date.

And specifically, what is the revised algo looking for? Any expert knowledge about products? Thank you. editors. SearchEngineJournal.com has a great piece about this today. So if this news is making you sweat a little, go check out their piece today called Google Product Reviews Updates Goes Live in Search Results. TikTok this week announced a new partnership with LiveRamp. This means you'll be able to connect any LiveRamp hosted customer data to TikTok for audience targeting in the U.S. market. Technically speaking, this is less about TikTok pulling LiveRamp into their platform and more LiveRamp offering TikTok in its list of available targeting platforms. Quoting social media today, Right now, TikTok's biggest risk remains losing its top creators to other platforms, which can offer more lucrative revenue share deals, especially for those with large followings.

Facebook has already sought to poach TikTok stars for its own Instagram Reels product, and for TikTok to secure its place, it needs to build its business model, while also providing new flow-through tools to ensure creators can get paid. It's making significant advances on this front in various ways, while its efforts to incorporate e-commerce are another step in maximizing its opportunities. That's why deals like this are so critical. And it's smart for TikTok to secure such partnerships with a view to longer-term stability. If you've ever tried buying Twitter ads beyond the usual self-service platform, you may have been overwhelmed by all the names they have for the ad products. Amplify Sponsorship, Amplify Pre-Roll, Live Broadcast, Live Event Page, Trend Takeover,

Timeline Takeover, Branded Hashtags, Moment Ads. Actually, there are 22 individual ad formats, or at least there were. Twitter today announced it has rebranded and recategorized its entire ad product lineup in an attempt to make things simpler for us digital marketers. They've gone from 22 names to just five advertising categories with those formats now grouped underneath. And here they are. First, promoted ads. These are the most basic form of ads, video, image, carousel, text ads, those sorts of things. Two, follower ads. These can promote an account to a targeted audience to hopefully gain followers. Three, Twitter Amplify. That will put your ads alongside video content from a curated list of publishers. Four, Twitter Takeover. This includes the most premium mass reach placements that take over the

timeline and explore tabs. And Twitter Live, that one is, of course, self-explanatory. There are some other options, too, like hash flags, which are those sponsored hashtags that come with an automatic emoji. But those are only available to the big budget folks. The updated names are already reflected in the new Tweet Composer. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything,

always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. I'll say this about Snapchat.

They are leaning into the e-commerce future of augmented reality and leaning hard. Reports say they've bought Screenshop, an app that scans the photos on your phone to recommend clothes you could buy based on what it thinks your personal style is. Screenshop launched in 2017 and gained early traction after Kim Kardashian shouted the app out on her Instagram account. Today, the app has more than 450 retail and brand partners, including Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. It's likely they'll integrate it by having it scan photos users have saved to their memories section in the Snapchat app. And as Social Media Today noted, they're running into AR-enabled e-commerce at full speed.

Quote, Snapchat may be close to taking the next step. With the development of its full body tracking process for AR, Snapchat is already investigating new ways to help users virtually try on more items of clothing with a view to advancing online shopping options. And with Snap also reportedly developing a new AR-enabled version of Spectacles, the app is poised to remain on the cutting edge of the next AR evolution, which has the potential to transform online shopping. Which brings us to the lightning round. Pinterest today launched more moderation tools for creators, including comment removal and keyword filtering.

Creators can also feature up to three comments within the comment feed to highlight positive feedback. They've also added new spam prevention signals to detect and remove bad comments. Reports say Instagram is finally working to bring back the search for stories by location function. Google has added a new policy for Google My Business posts. You are no longer allowed to put your company's phone number in the content of your posts. They say you should be using a call now button that uses your verified phone number. Facebook is testing new labels on posts from satire pages that clearly indicate you are

looking at content from a satire page. And finally, the Wall Street Journal reporting today that Procter & Gamble participated in testing an advertising technique being developed in China to gather iPhone data for targeted ads, a step intended to give companies a way around Apple's new privacy tools. Oh, and as for the quiz, can you remove your website from Google search in one specific country while leaving your website's listing up in the other countries? The answer, no. Google search engineer John Mueller answered this question on Reddit the other countries? The answer, no. Google search engineer John Mueller answered this question on Reddit the other day,

saying, quote, you can't reduce your rankings in one country in Google. The only thing I'm aware of, which is kind of country limiting, is video structured data, which would affect how a page is shown in video search and the video universal results, assuming you have a video on the page.

If you're worried about hackers from one country, you should fix the security issues, not try to block that country. It's trivial for anyone that's dedicated to circumvent a country block. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos,

links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. Just yesterday, our premium subscribers got access to a PPC salary survey that was conducted. Really good information there. There is a free tier as well. You'll get an issue every Friday. Newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. So just go to today in digital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. All right, I'm Todd Mappin. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles, and you love you want, it's free.

It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.