Today in Digital Marketing - The Social Platform That Finally Toppled Facebook

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, you knew it was big, but now it's bigger than Facebook. So why can't you run ads there? Plus, YouTube moves even closer toward e-commerce integration, browser plugins are not always your friend, and meet the guy who is two password attempts away from the worst year of his life. It's Friday, January 15th, 2021. Happy Teacher Day, Venezuela.

Starting point is 00:00:24 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. About five years ago, in a small office in Beijing, some mobile app developers created a kind of hybrid video app. It was a little like the old app Vine, but updated for vertical screens. It had some better video editing tools. They called it A.me. It got pretty popular, got renamed to Douyin, and then expanded outside China. And that is where it really took

Starting point is 00:00:53 off. Now, some new numbers show that users are spending more time every day on that app than on Facebook. That app is now, of course, known as TikTok. Yes, for the first time, people are spending more hours per month on TikTok than on Facebook. They expect they'll hit 1.2 billion monthly actives this year. Sounds like a great ad platform, right? I've heard it is actually pretty good. I've heard the CPMs are surprisingly low. I've heard ROAS is solid. I've only heard these And even though Snapchat is the kind of old man in the club now, don't count them out. The New York Times today had a piece about Snapchat's payout to creators, something they call Spotlight. Since November, they've been taking a million dollars a day and splitting it up among the people who made the top-viewed videos.

Starting point is 00:01:58 One woman profiled in the piece, who makes $12.50 an hour working as a Lowe's merchandising assistant, over Thanksgiving, uploaded a video of her sister deep-frying a turkey. Two weeks later, Snapchat sent her about a half million dollars. YouTube has now expanded its product tagging test. This lets brands and creators highlight specific products in their videos, which are then tappable directly to an e-commerce page. Until now, the testing has mostly been back-end stuff. Now, it's gone live onto a handful of channels. Quoting the company,

Starting point is 00:02:35 we're testing a new way for people to easily discover and purchase products featured in YouTube videos. Creators in this pilot can add certain products to their videos. Viewers can then see a list of featured products by clicking the shopping bag icon on the bottom left corner of the video. From there, viewers can explore each product's page to see more information, related videos, and purchase options for that product, unquote. Here's socialmediatoday.com's take, quote, It's a logical step, especially considering the broader shift toward e-commerce, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, some analysts believe that the pandemic has accelerated the growth advanced e-commerce tools linked into their video clips and tools, the expectation will soon be that all social media content will be shoppable with easy links from every image and clip that enable the purchase of any item displayed. Let's talk about my mom.

Starting point is 00:03:43 My mom is 78. She is very active on Facebook. She is spending her retirement managing a bunch of Facebook groups, something that sounds like absolute hell to me, but, you know, she likes it. Well, she liked it. Until, that is, Facebook's head of UI apparently got drunk on cheap gin and barfed up the monstrosity that we see today. And like a lot of people, my mom went searching for a way to revert to the old design.

Starting point is 00:04:09 She downloaded every browser plugin that her friends said they'd heard will fix it. None of them fixed it, of course. There is a danger to downloading these browser plugins, and today Facebook itself highlighted one big danger, the risk of having your personal information compromised. The company announced today it is suing a developer that made a number of browser plugins designed to enhance Facebook products. One was a web UI for Instagram, one was a messenger enhancement. But Facebook says not

Starting point is 00:04:36 only didn't the apps work well, they were actually secretly scraping users' personal information off their Facebook profile. Quoting the company, When these people installed these extensions on their browsers, they were installing concealed code designed to scrape their information from the Facebook website, their name, user ID, gender, relationship status, age group, and other information related to their account, unquote. So remember, be very selective about what browser extensions you install and who you get them from, especially when your brand

Starting point is 00:05:09 or your client's brand is at stake. Which brings us to the lightning round. PodNews is reporting today that the popular app PocketCasts is hunting for a buyer after taking a loss. NPR owns about a third of it. They took an $800,000 loss so far on that investment. The social media management tool Buffer has updated its mobile app. You can now tag users within Instagram images. There's a new account overview

Starting point is 00:05:35 page and the Shopify integration now lets you create quick product posts in the app. iSpot.tv has acquired Ace Metrics. They both work in the TV space, both terrestrial and streaming. The combined company has yearly contracts with more than 500 brands. WhatsApp, still having trouble communicating changes to its privacy policy. Looks like they're trying to buy more time to get it right. This afternoon, they announced the deadline for agreeing to the new policy has been pushed back to May 15th. It was going to be early next month. And LinkedIn has

Starting point is 00:06:05 added six free courses about running campaigns on their platform. The courses are pretty comprehensive and cover audience targeting, reporting, building a full funnel content marketing strategy, using LinkedIn for brand awareness, and using LinkedIn for lead generation. And finally, from the You Think You're Having a Bad Month department, may I present for your weekend consideration a programmer named Stephan Thomas. About 10 years ago, he did some video work for a client, a video about cryptocurrency, and rather than taking a regular payment, he agreed to be paid in Bitcoin. He got about 7,000 Bitcoins.

Starting point is 00:06:42 It wasn't worth a ton back then. Today, thanks to those 7,000 Bitcoins, his digital wallet is now worth $240 million. But say a prayer for Stefan because the poor bastard has lost the password. A password he wrote down on paper 10 years ago and has since lost. And it gets worse because he's already tried eight possible passwords and only has two tries left before the password will obfuscate itself,

Starting point is 00:07:15 rendering all that money permanently inaccessible. So next time you're having a bad day, just be grateful you're not stepping. Thank you. your workday. We'd really appreciate it if you'd take a minute to rate and review this podcast. There is a link in this episode notes that will take you right to the review page of your app. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Flevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. This podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. And I will talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Social Platform That Finally Toppled Facebook

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