Today in Digital Marketing - The Compelling Argument for “Calm the F**k Down, Influencers”

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Under Pressure — Meta might be forced by Europe to slash the price of its Verified subscription plans. When being enthusiastic backfires for influencer marketing. Instagram is testing longer Reels. And the Facebook Poke is back, and Gen-Z are loving it.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereListen to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. “Future You” will thank you. GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, March 19th. Today, under pressure, Meta might be forced by Europe to slash the price of its verified subscription plans. When being enthusiastic backfires for influencer marketing, Instagram is testing longer reels again, and the Facebook poke is back, and Gen Z are loving it. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. 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. In a world where social media influencers are the new celebrities, a recent study throws light on how the size of an influencer's following can influence the impact of their endorsements. Researchers discovered that the effectiveness

of an influencer's message varies greatly depending on their audience size. For those with fewer than 100,000 followers, a high-energy, enthusiastic approach with words like obsessed and the use of emojis and exclamation marks is more effective. This strategy, as long as it appears genuine, can include calls to action like order it here now. But for influencers boasting more than a million followers, they will find more success with

informational messaging. Their posts should educate rather than overly promote, using phrases like, find out more here, to avoid appearing inauthentic. This difference in strategy stems from the perception of influencers by their audiences. Micro-influencers are seen as more relatable and genuine, making their excited endorsements more persuasive. Bigger influencers, viewed as professional advertisers, risk losing trust with overly enthusiastic promotions. The study, which analyzed more than 20,000 Instagram and TikTok-sponsored posts, highlights that a 10% increase in excited language boosts engagement by 5.4% for micro-influencers, but decreases engagement by 8.4% for larger influencers. Interestingly, the negative effects of over-excitement in those larger influencers'

posts can actually be mitigated by using both positive and negative judgments or focusing on the informative content. The study is called How High Arousal Language Shapes Micro Versus Macro Influencers Impact. It was published recently in the Journal of Marketing. We have a direct link to the study in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes

or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Reuters is reporting today that Meta is considering a significant price cut Thank you. users, with additional accounts potentially being charged 4 euros instead of the current 6. As you've probably guessed by now, this is because of pressure from the European Union, specifically its Digital Market Act, and will likely only apply in Europe. Europe is mad at Meta for even having the fees in the first place. Meta's documentation says the paid subscription, quote, provides consumers with the ability to receive the services without Meta using their information to show them ads, unquote. Some European lawmakers liken that to charging users a coercive fee to maintain their privacy, a plan sometimes called pay or OK. As Instagram continues to chase TikTok,

Meta is letting more people upload longer reels to the app. Some Instagram users are getting notifications saying they can now upload three-minute long reels. This is definitely welcome, especially for those who are creating longer content for TikTok and want to repurpose it to other vertical platforms. Currently, for most users, the limit is 90 seconds on Instagram Reels. The app's been tinkering with this for a while.

Some tests were even allowing 10-minute uploads. To be honest, I am not sure what their hesitancy is or even why the slow rollout. It's not a new format and just brings it in line with what other platforms offer. Plus, Instagram itself even sometimes pops up a note saying, the length of your reel may be impacting its reach. Reels that are more than 30 seconds usually perform better. Also strange, this test appears to only work for uploading videos. If you are recording a reel live with your camera,

you'll still be stuck at the shorter length. TikTok this week launched its new creator rewards, where users get more money for longer clips. Of course, longer videos are much easier to monetize, and if they're long enough, might even permit a mid-roll to be snuck in. In January, Meta says reels consumption is up 20% year over year. Continuing the Meta copies everyone theme, its Twitter clone Threads today added a long requested feature, a trending section. Unlike on X though, where that section tries to summarize topics, the Threads version shows you the specific post that's going viral along with the user who posted it. Despite Meta saying they were trying to stay away from news and politics, three of the five trending

topics when we checked this morning were about the two main U.S. presidential candidates. For now, it's only available to Americans, or more accurately to people with a U.S. IP address. Do with that information what you will. Might might be a good place to check in with periodically to see if there's anything gaining traction that your brand could jump in on. Meanwhile, on X, the trending section appears to actually be gone now or at least bugged out in the box where it usually appears. For me, it just reads no items. Do you remember the Facebook poke? Old people, I'm talking to you. In its early days, it was a way of saying hello or I'm thinking of you.

But some people felt it was creepy and Facebook felt it cluttered up the UI. So they dropped it. But they didn't get rid of it entirely. It's always been there, if you were willing to do a lot of digging around. Business Insider today quipping that, quote, you'd need a pith helmet and satellite phone to reach it, unquote. Now, apparently, Facebook is unearthing the poke, and apparently the younger generations are loving it.

Quoting Business Insider, quote, Meta said that it made a design tweak at the start of 2024 that made the poke button slightly more visible. The new design would surface the button alongside any name that a user searched. That encouraged people to actually use the button. Meta also made it easier to find the poke page. You can now get to it by typing poking or pokes in the search bar instead of just poke.

In 2017, there was a small attempt to bring back the poke by putting it on profile pages, but the trend didn't catch back on. Too soon, perhaps, unquote. Meta says more than half of the poking now is being done by people aged 18 to 29. Remember, for them, it's probably new. Back when poking was much more a thing, they weren't old enough to be on Facebook.

Again, Business Insider, quote, the poke is a perfect low effort way to connect with a Facebook friend you haven't seen in a while. It's a little bit nostalgic and surprising, a little cheeky, but friendly. And Facebook desperately needs something like that. A way to be useful for connecting with people you know IRL. So yesterday my wife and I picked up a Quest 3 VR headset. We had an old Rift, but that one you had to attach to a gaming PC. I actually had to buy a gaming laptop to use that. But the Quest 3, it's all kind of self-contained now. It is not nearly as powerful as the old ones. Apparently, it's running on Android, which sort of surprised me.

I really want to play Fallout in VR, but we already own Fallout on the Xbox, and I'm just so cheap that it pains me to have to buy the same game again for a different platform. Actually, we have to do it twice because, like, I bought Beat Saber for the Rift, but that's on my laptop. And if I want Beat Saber on this new headset, I have to buy the game again. Like, it's kind of frustrating. Anyway, I'll be trying it out on stream today. So if you are interested in seeing what that looks like,

you can check out my Twitch channel, which is twitch.tv slash low effort dad. All right. Talk to you tomorrow.