Today in Digital Marketing - The Looming Death of the Single-Emoji DM

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, put down that gin, the Facebook crash ain't over yet, Be protected. Be Zen. campaigns in a world without cookies. It's Wednesday, October 6th, 2021. Happy National Kale Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 478. We start today with three important updates about the Facebook marketing platform. First, more lingering effects of the big Facebook crash. I'm seeing a number of reports out there that the Facebook pixel is broke for some marketers and their pixels haven't been tracking any data since the outage. People have tried reconnecting partner apps and so on, but

Starting point is 00:01:16 nothing's worked for them. Another person mentioned his Spotify built catalogs are all broken and no longer updating. Facebook is aware of the pixel issue and is working on it. So that's your call to go check the health of your pixels. Make sure this isn't happening to you. Also, some people are seeing audience limited warnings in ads manager. We do see this from time to time on small targeting buckets, but some people seeing this have audience sizes of close to 10 million people. And they report Facebook isn't spending on those audiences.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Another marketer said she too noticed this and that the frequency for her campaigns is around four, which is, you know, impossibly high for an audience of millions. You might think that Facebook would be working on some kind of feature to prevent this from happening in the future. But the Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that Facebook has decided to slow down the development and release of all new products and features to give them extra careful scrutiny and make sure they don't harm the company's image. This is all fallout, of course, from the whistleblower headlines of the week.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Among those products is a special version of Instagram intended for just preteens only, but apparently this pause and review will apply to almost everything in the company. Facebook did not comment on the report, but one feature that slipped through this review is rolling out this week, a change to how Facebook shows you estimated audience sizes in Ads Manager. As you may know, when you're setting up a campaign and start adding targeting, Facebook shows a kind of half circle meter on the right that shows whether your audience is too tightly targeted or too broadly targeted. In the past, this number, which it called potential reach, was Facebook's best guess as to how many people would be shown your ad based on your targeting, which people tend to be online during your campaign run, and so on.

Starting point is 00:03:10 Now, Facebook will show you the total number of people in your targeting criteria. This will be a larger number than potential reach. You'll still see estimated reach numbers in the box below it, usually labeled Estimated Daily Results. Facebook says this brings them in line with industry standards on the audience size metric. Also, and this is an important change to note, this will also apply to how Facebook displays the audience sizes of individual interests. As you may know, you can hover over an interest to see its size. Now that size will reflect the new definition.

Starting point is 00:03:47 These changes will be available in the API on October 27th, so that third-party tools can use the new numbers. And finally, in this Facebook Roundup today, Brandon Silverman, the founder and CEO of the Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle, this afternoon announced he is leaving the company. Why? Here's The Verge's take. Quote, In July, the New York Times detailed internal debates between CrowdTangle staffers and Facebook executives, who reportedly wanted to selectively share data about top posts. The idea was to refute the notion that Facebook was dominated by sensationalist right-leaning content. The Times said that Silverman was on the side of pushing for disclosing more data to the public, even if it could make the company look bad, unquote. And now he's gone.

Starting point is 00:04:32 In his farewell email to staff, he wrote, quote, You don't do this work because you're looking for some specific outcome or credibility or legitimacy or trust. I'm not sure what the future holds for CrowdTangle or data transparency here at Facebook, but I'm optimistic. To Pinterest now, where product marketers may find some good news. The company is launching some new e-commerce features today. First, Slideshow for Collections.

Starting point is 00:05:04 This will pull products from your catalog into an automatically generated collections ad some new e-commerce features today. First, slideshow for collections. This will pull products from your catalog into an automatically generated collections ad. The goal is to help you produce lightweight, video-like hero content that is dynamically created for each person. So, you know, this is similar to how Facebook will sometimes create a sort of video for you, essentially just sort of rotating through images.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Second, Pinterest becomes the latest platform to add labels to business profiles, things like responsibly sourced or black-owned or LGBT-owned and so on. They've also expanded the Verified Merchant program, which gives you the coveted blue badge. It is now available in several more countries, including Austria, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. Side note, this is actually worth your time getting because Pinterest says their algorithm gives a boost to content from verified brands. And finally, testing idea ads with paid partnership. Idea ads are their name for what everyone else in the world calls TikTok format videos. Quoting the company, This new format is a joint partnership between creators and advertisers.

Starting point is 00:06:07 The creator makes an idea pin and tags a brand partner. From there, the advertiser can promote the idea pin as an idea ad. This kind of partnership helps both businesses and creators scale their content and reach a broader audience. Idea ads are currently being tested with a select group of creators and brands in 15 countries and will expand to more audiences soon, unquote.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Pinterest says people on its platform are 40% more likely to say they love shopping compared to people who don't use Pinterest. 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. Snapchat is rolling out what they call Spotlight Challenges.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Spotlight is their version of TikTok, just like how Reels is Instagram's version and Shorts is YouTube's version. Anyway, Spotlight Challenges will be a weekly competition that rewards creators for making videos using specific lenses, doing specific things, or playing a specific sound inside Spotlight. To win, these video creators will just need to have the most viewed videos in the week's challenge. Actually, there'll be multiple challenges each week. There will be between three and five winners, splitting prize pools of between $1,000 to $25,000. And though they didn't outright say it, there's no reason a brand couldn't capitalize on this.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Spend any amount of time on TikTok, and you'll see people using hashtags for similar competitions or sponsors, even if their content has nothing to do with that. Just try to jump on the increased organic reach. And hey, what's the worst that can happen? You might even win a few thousand bucks. There is another opportunity for digital marketers here. Snapchat said they might offer brands the ability to create their own challenge and

Starting point is 00:08:12 sponsor it for what we presume will be a hefty budget. Challenges are rolling out now in the US, with more countries to follow later. Incidentally, in case you were wondering, this is in addition to their existing creator fund. It does not replace it. Another shout out for Andrew Foxwell's outstanding course called Surviving and Scaling Post iOS 14. Andrew has spent more than a decade running Facebook ads for large brands, and this covers everything you need to scale budget and revenue profitably and efficiently, even in a post-iOS 14 era. High-level thought processes to tactical implementations,

Starting point is 00:08:53 including reporting dashboards, optimization, testing, the phases of scaling, creative needed to scale, and more. I have paid for and taken Andrew's courses before. I have paid for a membership to his Slack before. I have paid for a membership to his Slack community. I will tell you this, there is nobody better in this space, especially if you've been underwhelmed by the general basic advice that everyone else covers. The program is more than four and a half hours long, broken up into modules, of course, and it includes quarterly

Starting point is 00:09:21 live webinars, a Google Data Studio custom dashboard, a Supermetrics custom dashboard, a UTM worksheet, and a Black Friday Cyber Monday projections worksheet. You can check it out at our affiliate link at b.link slash after Apple. That's b.link slash after Apple. I hate it. You hate it. And maybe finally, it's coming to an end. I'm talking about all those single emoji responses you get in your brand's Instagram account DMs. Why are people DMing you single emojis? Well, they're not doing it that way on purpose.

Starting point is 00:10:03 They're just reacting to one of the stories you published. But for some reason, rather than showing them on the video and in reporting, Instagram also sends them to you as a standalone DM. And honestly, it's kind of stupid. Some people have even built workflows in their third-party engagement tools just to ignore those. Now it looks like they are testing dropping those DMs and showing them on the video. If this sounds familiar, it's because we reported on this test almost a year ago when they had started testing it. Nobody's quite sure why that test stopped and this test just restarted.

Starting point is 00:10:37 But hey, we'll take what we can get. To Twitter marketing now and two items. First, after a small beta test, Twitter is letting all businesses now apply for a professional profile. The distinction is the same as a Facebook profile and a Facebook page, the latter being the professional presence of your brand on the platform. TikTok has these, Pinterest has these. Now Twitter finally is also joining the party.

Starting point is 00:11:04 It gives you some more detail you can put on your profile, like your hours, link to a map, product catalog, and so on. You'll start by going to Settings and selecting Switch to Professional. Then Twitter should take you to the form you need to fill out to add more details. I couldn't find it on their web app or mobile app today, so perhaps it's still rolling out. But when it does get to you, it is probably worth doing. And second, with Christmas only 80 days away now, Twitter has updated its holiday marketing mini site, which contains tips, case studies, and insights to help your planning.

Starting point is 00:11:38 It's not really well fleshed out yet, but it does have some helpful notes on key trends. There are also links to its ad tools and other seasonal planning guides. Also, it's hosting a holiday ads webinar on October 14th. Today's premium newsletter has the signup link for that. WordPress has released a new version, 11.6. It includes easier image drag and drop,

Starting point is 00:12:04 on-site logo editing, the ability to lock individual blocks, and a handful of bug fixes. If you are responsible for your brand's WordPress site, today is the day you will want to update it. So, the credit card statement came in today, and I am here to report camping is expensive. I mean, we knew what we were buying, but somehow it's so much more, I don't know, defeating? When you see it all added up on a single piece of paper. Yes, we get credit cards on paper still. Anyway, word to the wise. Talk to you tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:12:41 I'ma spend all this money. I'ma spend all this money. I'ma spend all this money. I'ma spend all this money. I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money I'ma spend all this money

Today in Digital Marketing - The Looming Death of the Single-Emoji DM

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