Today in Digital Marketing - The Disturbingly Low-Effort Path to Millions of Facebook Views

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

A huge study on clickthrough rates finds consumers are clicking less. Instagram gets ready to pay for your Reels. The most-viewed posts on Facebook are shockingly low-effort. And how to take up more real estate for your brand on Twitter — without paying a penny.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). 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, a huge study on click-through rates Be protected. Be Zen. your brand on Twitter without paying them a penny. It's Friday, November 12th, 2021. Happy Canterbury anniversary, New Zealand. I'm Todd Mathen from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 503. And we begin today with some surprising details regarding click-through rates on Google. SEO Clarity has conducted what they say is the largest CTR study ever.

Click-through rates were analyzed by position, device, that's mobile and desktop, country, seasonality, and even industry across 750 billion impressions and 17 billion unique keywords. Here are the results. First, click-through rates have declined significantly, especially for top positions since their last study. Searches with no clicks on an organic result on page one or two account for, are you ready for this, 65% of searches. Yeah, 65% of searches.

No clicks on page one or two on organic results. Ouch. By device, mobile users are actually less likely to click top-ranked listings than desktop users. Yeah, the click-through rate for position one decreases from 8.1% on desktop to 6.7% on mobile devices. Around seasonality, May and December are the months with the lowest click-through rates, and July through September are the highest. CTRs by industry, they vary quite a bit, of course, from industry to industry, as you can imagine. Real estate has the highest average click-through rate across the top 10 positions at 2.45%, and the lowest, apparel and fashion at 1.43%.

So interesting benchmarks there for your own industry. Knowing what device will have a higher click-through rate, of course, provides marketers with valuable insight into their targeting. Quoting the report again, in fashion, you achieve a higher click-through rate on desktop than you do on mobile. And CTR in business and industrial is also higher on mobile. Based on its data volume alone, the full report contains a great deal of detail and provides pretty solid metrics to search marketers, especially if you are looking for a benchmark

to compare your own efforts to. You will find a link to the full report in today's premium newsletter. Here we are again. Honestly, I'm just going to have them change that to who's Facebook copying now, because that's all it is, really. And indeed, that's where we are today, copying Snapchat with the announcement of its new creative app platform for Facebook Stories. Meta, of course, formerly known as Facebook, could score a few points for creativity. Quoting the company, we worked to understand how sharing to Stories could further support the unique needs of our creative

app partners. We found that app discovery is a key issue in a competitive and rapidly expanding market. It is expensive and difficult for our partners to reach the people. In response, we've built the creative app platform, a new concept that allows people to discover creative apps directly in Facebook stories, unquote. So what are they talking about here with apps? They don't mean mobile apps, not directly anyway. They mean mini apps like Snapchat's implementation, which they literally call minis, in which developers share kind of like tiny micro versions of their full mobile apps within Snap.

So that's what is being copied here. Facebook's variation is limited to stories and has attracted several developers for the first phase, including Viva Video and Vita, Camera360 and Sweet Selfie. The creative app platform is still in beta, but it seems it is part of Meta's broader effort to regain young users. How well is Instagram's copying of TikTok going? Their version, which they call Reels, may not be doing as well as they say. Why else would they announce this today?

They are ready to straight up bribe people now to post on Reels. The company says users will be rewarded for posting short-form content on Reels instead of TikTok under Instagram's new incentive program. It is possible, apparently, to earn up to $10,000 for posting Reels on Instagram. But here's the catch.

Nobody knows how Instagram's bonus offers are calculated or what factors determine how big of a bonus they're eligible for because the numbers are kind of all over the map. One Reddit user was offered up to $35,000 for the 58 million views they got in a month. On the other hand, a Twitch streamer with around 800 Instagram followers was offered $8,500 for 9 million views in a month. So,.0009 cents per view?

Instagram's Help Center doesn't offer much help. Quote, bonuses are opportunities for you to earn money directly from Instagram. If you qualify to earn a bonus, you'll be notified in the Instagram app to onboard and enable bonus payouts. You'll receive bonus earnings if you meet the requirements for each bonus, unquote. According to the Reels play bonus program rules page, the feature is slowly rolling out and may not be available to you yet. Speaking of reels,

Instagram is finally introducing new voice effects and text to speech features, bringing them up to parody with the Tik TOK version text toech allows an auto-generated voice to read your text aloud, and the voice effect will make you sound like a chipmunk or a robot and so on. And honestly, it's about time. This was one of the biggest gaps between the two apps. So will this convince marketers to create more original content for Reels, as opposed to removing watermarks from TikTok videos

and then posting to Instagram like we all do currently? Time will tell. 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.

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. Meta's Transparency Center has provided marketers with some insight into the most viewed Facebook posts for this past quarter. And if there is anything we can learn from these posts, it's this.

Stop trying so hard. The majority of the widely viewed posts were in the form of text posts with a Facebook background behind the text. You know, that big wall of color and in the form of a question. Here they are. These are the top five posts on Facebook in Q3. Who can honestly say they've never had a DUI? I'll wait. Spell your name, but for each letter, press the first word that comes up in your predictive text. Honestly, we do that one about every quarter for our clients. What has ears but doesn't listen? Who the heck sleeps with a fan

and air conditioning on? And name something that a lot of people like, but you can't stand. So yeah, not exactly Pulitzer Prize winners there. And since it's a big block of text, you don't even have to go to the trouble of finding a stock photo or creating, you know, original content. It appears that if you want 16 million comments, all you have to do is ask people if they have a DUI. One interesting note I realized, though, since that post format is not in the API,

each of the top five posts on the platform had to have been posted by an admin directly on the page itself. And finally, after rolling out full-sized image previews on mobile this year, Twitter today announced it will no longer crop image previews on the web. Images will now occupy more vertical space on a user's homepage or feed or whatever we call that. But it is less of a hassle than having to manually click through images to see them in their entirety. Plus, it's a great way for social media marketers to take up more space. Thank you to everyone who filled out our listener survey. We learned a ton and are using the data

to make some enhancements to the podcast soon. Some of you had specific questions or comments, so let's lightning round this. Can we get more live Zoom expert sessions? Yes, we have plans to make them more regular, probably twice a month. Guests should be more diverse. Good point.

Thank you. We will try to do better in that regard. Do more how-tos. Honestly, this is going to be a no for us. There are a million marketing podcasts out there that are two-hour-long glorified blog posts, and I don't want this to be yet another how-to-rank-higher-in-Google every single week.

So if there's news about an algorithm change, then of course we'll cover it, but I want your time spent listening as a compliment to things you might be listening to, not a duplicate of them. More Facebook snark. Okay, no problem there. More case studies.

Definitely in our plans for the new year. Episode transcripts or links in the show notes. The premium newsletter is basically the script each day with extra stuff like images, related videos, direct links, that sort of thing. 14-day free trial. Tap the link in the episode notes. Share more about your agency and what it's like to work there. Okay. Well, basically we handle social engagement and moderation for small and medium sized brands. Our website is engageq.com. Do more NFT stories. No. I enjoy the small updates about Todd's life

Oh, that's not going to go away I don't have any real friends, right? So you folks are getting it all The only reason I don't talk about my personal life every day Is that I don't do much with it Like it would Legit, it would all be Overwatch If truth be told

Although last night my wife and I went out for an ice cream run See what I mean? Kind of boring But I'll keep you updated on anything interesting. I think Todd could loosen his tie and be more casual. Okay. There are a lot of acronyms. A quick reminder of what some mean would be helpful. Excellent point. Thank you. We'll try to remember. And can you tell us what song you play at the end of each episode? I could, but you know, it would kind of be pointless because they're not real songs.

Or at least they're not real in the sense of you being able to find them on Spotify or being able to Shazam them. They are all from a production music library for licensing reasons. So, like the actual song names are like CMD09 Engine

Driving Hip Hop with Lyrics No. 7. Right? But the big thing that we got back was that you are all evenly split into two camps. Those who like the current length of 8 to 12 minutes daily and don't want it to change, and those who want a longer episode each day with more stories. Well, we have found a way to do both. And that is part of what we are unveiling on December 1st. Premium newsletter subscribers, you folks will learn about it ahead of time.

Also Fazil, Taryn, and Seabrock84, if you recognize your name there, check your email. You three are the winners of our podcast survey contest. You have until the end of the day Tuesday to get back to us. Otherwise, we are sending it to someone else. And again, thanks to everyone who participated in the survey. Well, in case you've ever thought of adding to your own personal revenue stream, tomorrow, a special podcast weekend edition, all about how to become a fractional CMO. This is something gaining a lot of traction. Basically, you rent out parts of your brain to different organizations and act as their white-labeled chief marketing officer. I'll be speaking with Casey Stanton, who runs CMOX, about the fractional CMO role, how much to expect to get paid, how to get started, all that. That's tomorrow on the Weekend Edition. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional

territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Scripting and production support by Steph Gunn. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio and our theme composer Mark Blevis. Is that moment when you finally find the serial number

on the back of that thing that you have been looking for forever? I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you tomorrow for the weekend edition. Then I will talk to you

on Monday.