Today in Digital Marketing - Surprises from the 'Reels' Content Algorithm Breakdown

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, can you buy your disabled Facebook account back? TikTok's new edition is less about content and more about ad placement options. What do B2B buyers really want? And the exodus of senior Facebook executives continues. It's Wednesday, August 4th, 2021. Happy National Architect Day, Chile. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. In the history of technology, there have been some pretty bad ideas. Take, for instance, the Petticoat 5, a computer designed for women.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Now, the first thing you notice is the shape of the keys. That's right. They're designed to make it easier to type with long nails. Oh, that is a good idea. And what is this? Well, that's a place to put your rings. And on the side here we have a tissue dispenser. And over here is a vanity mirror which pops up when you press this button. And the space bar is an emery board. So I suppose you could fix your makeup while you work?

Starting point is 00:01:29 Well, yes, you could. The Petticoat 5 was ridiculous and, luckily, not real. It was showcased as a sketch on a British comedy show. What is real, though, are the thousands of Facebook accounts that have been disabled for seemingly no reason. Meaning if you run ads there for your brand or client, you're locked out of everything. There are, of course, thousands of pieces of advice about how to get your account back, nearly all of which about as helpful as a computer made only for women.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Here's one example. Paying Facebook money to get them to re-enable your account. Of course, you wouldn't just mail Facebook a check, then presto. But some people believe that by buying their virtual reality headset called the Oculus Quest, they've found a backdoor back onto the platform. This is because shortly after Facebook bought Oculus, they required the user to have a Facebook account to use it.

Starting point is 00:02:23 So the theory goes, buy a piece of expensive hardware from Facebook that requires an account, and they'll have to give you your account back. Also, apparently, the Oculus support team is different than the regular Facebook support team. Public radio journalists in the US spoke with two people who got it to work this way, and others who said it seemed like it would work, but when they sent in their ID as required to get your account back, nothing happened. They never heard from Facebook again. So all that to say, your mileage may vary, but regardless, even if you are thinking about

Starting point is 00:02:55 this, Oculus has paused sales on its Quest 2 headset until later this month. In related news, this week, Facebook's VR team released a paper showing their work on what they call reverse pass-through VR, which is a very fancy way of saying they will project an image of your own actual eyes to a screen on the outside of the goggles. And yes, it's as nightmarish looking as it sounds. Apologies to the premium newsletter subscribers who are seeing a photo of this in action. If you've ever said in a marketing meeting, we should have been on top of that when reviewing some new tech development, I'm here to give you that prompt, maybe before the regret. The Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger says it will soon let users send disappearing

Starting point is 00:03:44 photos and videos. The feature is rolling out this week. The way it'll work is you can share a photo or video in view once mode, which will disappear it after a single viewing. Most of Facebook's announcement can be summarized like this. It's not just for nudes guides. There are plenty of other uses for it. Also, who said anything about nudes? You're even weird for thinking that. So what can a brand do with this? Maybe use it as a way of guaranteeing brand engagement while a customer is in your store. Send them one message that says, we're about to send you a 30% off coupon, but be sure to only open it when you're at the checkout desk because otherwise

Starting point is 00:04:18 it'll disappear. Or maybe suggest that you're sending something risque, only to pay it off with a meme. The app went part way with this last November, introducing a way to have messages self-destruct after seven days. In its announcement, Facebook added, and I'm paraphrasing, Really, it's totally not for sending nudes. Instagram this week revealed some information about how its Reels algorithm works. So if you're producing brand content and you want more eyeballs there, this story is for you. But honestly, they didn't share much that we already didn't know about how the social algorithms in general work. Basically, like most of the others, making sure your video is compelling enough so users watch all the way through. You'll also want to get them to like it and have them add something positive in the

Starting point is 00:05:08 comments saying it was entertaining or it was funny. Also, and this one's a little unique, they will give your video more of a boost if a user rips the audio in your reel to make their own reel. So you may want to give extra thought to the audio in your reel, making it unique, something others would want to riff off of. I know Instagram's going to hate me for saying this, but the best inspiration here is on TikTok. They also say the more a user interacts with your account, the more they will see stuff from it, naturally. Perhaps more importantly, Instagram confirmed they reduced distribution of videos that have low resolution or are watermarked. That's a direct shot across the bow at TikTok.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Also, reels that focus on political issues or reels made by political figures apparently also get smacked down a bit. So that's Instagram copying TikTok. Now we turn to TikTok copying Instagram for a change, which was actually copying Snapchat. Nobody has any original ideas anymore. TikTok is now testing adding Stories to its app. Stories, of course, the vertical format of mostly photos that Snapchat created, Instagram copied, Twitter copied, then killed off yesterday. And pretty much every platform has had them since then.

Starting point is 00:06:23 I'm not going to lie. It's a little disappointing to me that TikTok is doing this. Part of what made them such a runaway hit, I thought, was their presentation of content was unique. The platform developed its own culture. I guess stories have enough eyeballs on them in other places that TikTok wanted to grab some of those too. More likely they're looking for more placement options for ad inventory. That's the feeling of socialmediatoday.com as well. In their coverage, they said, quote, short video provides fewer monetization opportunities because you can't squeeze in pre or mid-roll ads like you can on Facebook and YouTube.

Starting point is 00:06:56 There are also fewer spaces for effective ad placement within the main TikTok feed other than inserting promotions between user clips, which limits TikTok's revenue potential, which is why at this stage of growth, TikTok is now looking to expand its content horizons with a view to both maximizing engagement and facilitating more ad space, unquote. For the record, TikTok would not confirm the test, giving one of those usual statements, you know, the one, we're always testing exciting new blah, blah, blah, value to our community, blah, blah, blah, enrich the experience. But screenshots circulating on the web confirm the beta. They're calling them TikTok stories and they will disappear after 24 hours.

Starting point is 00:07:32 The only real difference between their test and other stories implementations is that so far the people icons are in a collapsible side nav bar, which looks a little weird to my eyes. No word on where this test is showing up and how many people, but the good money is it'll be available to all of us pretty soon. Also interesting, TikTok has cut a deal with American Airlines. Flyers can now surf TikTok for up to 30 minutes without buying a Wi-Fi package. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:27 Be protected. Be Zen. An app trying to rival TikTok has fallen. The app was called Zen. It was only available in the US and only launched in May of last year. You may have heard of it not for its great app experience, but for the controversies around it. First, it was straight up paying users to watch videos in order to juice the App Store rankings. Then both Google and Apple pulled it from their respective App Stores over charges the app was just copying videos from other platforms. It wasn't a tiny competitor, though. The Chinese firm behind the app said it had amassed 1 billion total monthly active users. They didn't say why they were shutting it down in the U.S., though independent data from the mobile insight platform App Annie may have the answer. Data there leaked to TechCrunch showed

Starting point is 00:09:10 the app only had 200,000 monthly active users this June in the U.S. That was way down from 3 million last August. New data from Sonos Research and the Tech Marketing Council shows that people who buy B2B solutions want to be able to kick the tires more than many of these platforms let them. The study found easy and fast integration is the top feature buyers want. 44% of them cite this. Then the ability to try the product out first, 39%, and provable ROI at 36%. Today's premium newsletter has a number of charts and other findings from the research. The numbers come from a survey of 80 people, so smallish sample size there. Those people said the top motivators are to improve campaign execution and establish marketing ROI.

Starting point is 00:10:01 Lower on the list, somewhat shockingly, improve customer experience. Only 21% cared about that. And to create better content. Just a day after saying we don't cover executive moves, then covering one, I have another one for you. I promise we don't usually cover these, but the people involved here are pretty consequential. In this case, a very senior Facebook marketing executive is leaving. You may know her by name, Carolyn Everson. She was basically in charge of all Facebook's ads platform and marketing. She led the company's relationships with top advertisers, its top agencies. Her official title was Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions.

Starting point is 00:10:42 Today, she announced she's off to the grocery delivery company Instacart and will take over the role of president. The previous person in that role becomes something they call strategic advisor to the company's CEO. I'll let you judge what that actually means. Instacart seems to have a crush on Facebook executives. Everson joins several top-level hires poached from the company, including its new CEO, chief operating officer,

Starting point is 00:11:06 and two vice presidents. She starts on September 7th. Well, we have an ask for you. We spend a lot of time putting the show together. If you get value from the Daily News podcast here, I wonder if you'd be willing to share it on Twitter for us. We've even written a sample tweet for you. Just tap the link in today's episode or go to todayindigital.com slash tweet,

Starting point is 00:11:32 and it'll load it up in Twitter for you to review and edit if you like before sending it. I will retweet all of these to my 10,000 plus followers, so this might even be a marketing exercise for you. Again, the link is in the episode description or go to todayindigital.com slash tweet. Or if Twitter's not your jam, you can copy the text and post it on LinkedIn or a team Slack you're in or whatever. Thank you so much for considering and I'll talk to you tomorrow. So come on Shake it if you wanna

Starting point is 00:12:07 Alright Keep moving like you're moving

Today in Digital Marketing - Surprises from the 'Reels' Content Algorithm Breakdown

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