Today in Digital Marketing - Thanks for nothing, Facebook.

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

Facebook crashes. Big time. TikTok under fire Social ad buying is bigger than analysts expected And Twitter backs down The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Thursday, November 28th, 2019. Happy American Thanksgiving, Americans. I'm Todd Paffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook crashes big time, TikTok under fire, social advertising is bigger than analysts expected, and Twitter backs down.

Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Well, it is the day before one of the single most important days in the retail calendar. So Facebook celebrated this by crashing. And not just a little, like everything seemed to be down for a couple of hours this morning. Groups, the news feed, and oh yeah, ads manager. Nice. So maybe we will use this as a reminder that you should get your missionical ads in and scheduled days and days before their start date. Also, don't forget, they now have a status page at status.fb.com. That shows what parts of their platform are down at any given moment. So you never again have to wonder, is it just me or is it down for everyone?

Today, it was pretty much everyone. And it wasn't just Facebook, by the way. Reddit was also experiencing delays for the little gadget that processes new votes on posts and comments. So, yeah. Everyone was in a special little part of hell today. This is Feroza Aziz. She posts a lot of makeup tutorials on TikTok. At least she did.

Until she posted this. So I'm going to teach you guys how to get long lashes. So the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously. Then you're going to put them down and use your phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there,

separating their families. And it goes on. Now, despite TikTok's claim that its Chinese ownership doesn't influence its content moderation decisions, guess what happened to Feroza's video? Yep, it got taken down. And then she got banned from the app. Once word started to spread, TikTok quickly put out a statement saying,

no, no, no, it wasn't because of any of this Chinese stuff. We're cool with that. It's that she mentioned Osama bin Laden in a different video, and we have a policy against terrorism or something like that. Anyway, the band was reversed. She's back on. But certainly it will be interesting to see how this fast-growing social platform handles things like that in the future,

whether or not those decisions affect whether or not we digital marketers trust it as a platform. Social is making up more share of programmatic ad spending than estimates had pegged it at for this year. Marketers will spend more than $57 billion on programmatic digital display by the end of this year, and more than 56% of that spend is going to the various social platforms. That, according to new numbers from eMarketer. No surprise, the report also says social's share will increase again by 2021, and by 5% more than they had predicted just this past April.

Curious to know how much Facebook consumes of social ad spending? 83%. Earlier this week, I reported on Twitter's plan to clear out a bunch of inactive accounts, which makes sense. If someone's just squatting on a handle, that's not cool. Except in your case, where you might be squatting on some brand name variants or something just to keep your company's brands protected. Well now, Twitter says it will be postponing those deactivations anyway, after many people

were worried that the accounts of their loved ones who had died would also get zapped away. Twitter says it will try to figure out a process for memorializing Twitter accounts, something similar to Facebook's system, I guess, before they start deactivating inactive accounts. And that is actually it for today. It's a little slow in the news department, thanks to the American holiday. If you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for Today in Digital Marketing on the Skill Store. Follow me on social.

All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Check out our agency at engageq.com. And assuming I survive Black Friday here, I will see you tomorrow.