Today in Digital Marketing - The Solution to Crashing Influencer Results? 🤖 ROBOTS!!

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

On today’s show: There’s no list of words you can’t use in a YouTube title right? Wrong. I know this won’t shock anyone, but Facebook is testing a TikTok clone Buyer beware on those lifetime deal sites like AppSumo A huge bug on Shopify sites was preventing some people from checking out And what are the ethics around hiring computer-generated influencers Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. 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. More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Facebook • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, October 1st. Happy Q4. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, there's no list of words you can't use in a YouTube title, right? Wrong. I know this won't shock anyone, but Facebook is testing a TikTok clone. Buyer beware on those lifetime deal sites like AppSumo. A huge bug on Shopify sites was preventing some people from checking out. And what are the ethics around hiring computer-generated influencers? Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Well, if you ever wanted to dip your toe into marketing on TikTok but didn't want to learn another ads platform, don't fret.

It might be coming to your Facebook ads manager as a placement soon. Not TikTok itself, but turns out Facebook is quietly testing a TikTok clone called Lasso, and presumably if they like what they see, they'll launch it. No word if it'll be wrapped up into Instagram like they did when they cloned Snapchat. All this came out of an internal town hall session Mark Zuckerberg had in July, in which The Verge leaked this morning. Here's a bit of that audio. We have a product called Lasso that's a standalone app that we're working on trying to get product market fit in countries like Mexico is I think one of the first initial ones.

So we're trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big, where we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big. If you rely on revenue from YouTube as part of your marketing, you need to know this. You're probably aware that YouTube has a list of words that if you use those words in the video title, it gets sent off for review,

or in many cases, monetization is just turned off. Of course, YouTube isn't releasing that list of words, but no matter, because the guy behind the YouTube Analyzed channel has got the list. And he got it by manually testing tens of thousands of different words in YouTube video titles. You can actually download the full spreadsheet of words from the video he made about this on his channel. But, and this was a little disturbing, he found that if the video title used a word like gay or lesbians, it could be automatically demonetized, even the phrase gay pride. And it's not just the title.

Andrew from this YouTube-analyzed channel says the bot looks at words on thumbnails, in tags, and descriptions. Quoting The Verge, quote, the study found if words like gay and lesbian were changed to random words like happy, the status of the video changed to advertiser-friendly every time. For its part, YouTube denies there is a list of LGBT words that triggered demonetization. Some great tips from Facebook ads expert Andrew Foxwell on how to get ready for Q4. In a tweetstorm yesterday, he offered this, quote, Spend money to send people to your site now.

Prospect a bit now, in what I call phase one, to bring people in while the audiences are a bit cheaper to hit. As Black Friday approaches, switch your messaging into get on the list now, or deals will be happening, take part in them, using separate landing pages with email signups or something like a Facebook event. And last but not least, build your creative now. Get your themes right so you're not scrambling, unquote. Great advice. If you've got an e-commerce store on Shopify and have noticed your sales are down the last few days, it could be because of a massive bug where shipping options were just randomly shut off. Paid social guru David Herman

said, quote, we figured out that some mobile web users, and by some I mean most, were not able to check out via anything but inputting credit cards. Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon, etc. all broke on the site. Nobody knew this till I pointed it out because my data from Facebook told me, unquote. So if you Shopify and haven't checked your sales history in the last few days, now might be a good time to check. LinkedIn has made a couple of very welcome changes to their ads backend. For one, they've added audience forecasting insights to the dashboard so you can see the composition of your target audiences. And you can customize that section to show the targeting you care most about, like top industries, company size, or seniority.

LinkedIn says especially when combined with matched audiences, that's what Facebook calls custom audiences, quote, you can be sure you're not only serving ads to specific prospects you're trying to reach, but that you'll have the demographic insights to deliver the content and creative mix that will resonate with them. They've also added Boolean logic in case you are a real nerd and want to get super particular about your targeting queries. Again, from LinkedIn, quote, For example, let's say you wanted to target people using director seniority and the finance job function. Previously, within a campaign, you could only do so by targeting directors in finance roles. Now, with Boolean targeting, you can use a single campaign to reach people who are directors at any job function,

as well as people in finance roles of any seniority. Influencer marketing is taking a hit, yeah. And what's going to fix it? Robots. Kind of. Really interesting article went up this morning on Marketing Dive, especially for those of you who run influencer campaigns. What happens when the influencer you want to partner with isn't real at all,

but is a CGI-programmed avatar? Like in this ad from Galaxy. Everything seemed unimaginable when I was just a few lines of code. I love creating new things. Achieving the impossible. On the screen, a computer programmed young woman is looking longingly at a Galaxy phone. Do what you can't. As the piece published this morning from Marketing Dive explains, quote,

as more brands double down on working with these typically young, stylish tastemakers who have amassed extensive online followings, consumers are beginning to show signs of influencer fatigue. On Instagram, the top social media platform for influencer marketing, creators have seen their engagement rates hover near all-time lows as it becomes congested with sponsored posts, according to a July study, unquote. Among the ethical questions, does an advertiser even need to disclose that the influencer isn't a real person? Scary times ahead, friends. Buyer beware on those lifetime deal sites like AppSumo.

At our agency earlier this week, we noticed that one of the deals we bought and paid double for white labeling, a tool called Shorby, they'd suddenly removed white labeling from their tool with no announcement to customers. Or at least we didn't get one. Once people noticed and started complaining on the Shorby deal page that they could no longer white label, the company admitted they changed the deal, calling the switcheroo, quote, a really hard decision. Of the option to remove logos, which, again, was part of the deal they sold, the company explained, quote, unfortunately, some people removed the logo and we lost referrals, unquote,

leading one buyer to reply, you are complaining that some people removed the logo? Why wouldn't they? That's how you offered the deal. Well, after a bit of double speak about, well, that was for the old pages, not our new smart pages or some nonsense like that, Jorby said they would re-enable white labeling for people who, you know, paid for it, but only if they sent them a chat request. Strike one. And then same day, I noticed that SendFox, the deal that I talked about on this very podcast last week, also disabled the white label no branding feature that we had paid triple for.

They said that offer was a mistake and they'd grandfathered in people who'd bought it when that deal was up. At least in our case, that didn't seem to happen. But it made me a little concerned that deals are changing after purchases are made. So I asked AppSumo to clarify their policy on that. The company's head of business development told me, deal terms don't and can't change after a purchase is made, unquote. Which obviously isn't true since it happened with Shorby. And then somewhat confusingly in the same statement, he also said, quote, in regards to the change to the SendFox deal, deals, offers and prices in the e-commerce world change all the time. Errors are made and fixed. Sales and promotions start and end, unquote.

So I'm just as confused as you are. AppSumo is just a third party seller of these tools after all, and they do seem to try to go to bat for their customers if it looked like the deals changed after people sign up for them. And there are alternatives to AppSumo. There's PitchGround, StackSocial, Rebellions, GrabLTD, a bunch of them. I guess my advice? Screenshot these deals that are offered on their website as you're buying it, just in case you have to prove to them that they changed what you purchased. Because I guess that's a thing now. Oh, and to be fair, let's remember, removing features from a lifetime deal isn't always the fault of that provider. A lot of tools you and I use are controlled by the APIs of the big social platforms.

When they pull functionality from the API, all the tools that relied on that lose access. One example happened this week. Interest Explorer. You may have seen them advertising to you in your news feeds. It helps you find smaller interest audiences in Facebook that it doesn't usually surface on its own in the ads manager. But we bought it at our agency because it had one really nice feature. It would show you what specific interests were bringing in the most results,

even if you'd grouped all of your interests in one single ad set. But easy come, easy go. Interest Explorer no longer offers that because they say Facebook pulled it out of their API. That said, Interest Explorer refunded me right away when I asked about it. Okay, lightning round. Ever played Words with Friends? Better change your password?

They got hacked and the hacker got access to names, email addresses, hashed passwords, phone numbers, Facebook IDs. Yeah, it was bad. If your company's web server is set up to deliver pages to mobile users by switching to a URL that starts with m dot instead of www dot, Google search engineer John Mueller says stop it! It might be negatively affecting your ranking, especially for new sites. Facebook stories placements can now use Messenger as a click destination. Oh, just a tip here for the you know that place

where you can set up three question prompts like what are your hours and so on? Here at EngageQ for our clients' campaigns, we've started making the third question say, sorry, I didn't mean to tap this and holy crap, is our life so much better now. The Creative Commons group has released a new WordPress plugin that makes content attribution easier. It lets you set up a one-click attribution link for images. Very important if you are using images licensed through Creative Commons. And Agorapulse has updated its platform. Let me ding that again. That was a horrible ding. Thank you. you by engageq.com. If you're listening to this on the web and haven't yet subscribed, you will find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash today in digital. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on Twitter at toddmaffin.com, and I'll see you tomorrow.