Today in Digital Marketing - This Episod...... [SEE MORE]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello friends, a quick word before we start today's podcast. There is some weird audio hum in today's episode. I'm not really sure where it's coming from and I will look into it on the weekend. Of course, it bugs me as a former public radio producer that it's even there. But if it really bothers you, turn down the bass just a little bit and we will get through this together. Okay, here's the episode. It is Friday, January 31st, 2020. Happy Three Holy Hierarchs Day, Greece. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, how much will a TikTok influencer cost you? Maybe less than you think. Amazon reveals its plans for brands beyond e-commerce. Snapchat launches a new feature some people think could be huge. And LinkedIn just keeps on growing. So, this is weird.

Starting point is 00:00:53 I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably set up an ad campaign or two on Facebook. And if you're like me, you've probably spent way too much time trying to figure out the exact number of characters you've got before Facebook hides your text under that dreaded see more link. Honestly, sometimes I think here at EngageQ, we spend more time trying to hack that character limit than we do anything else. Of course, there is no consistent character limit there. It's not like you've always got 45 characters to work with. That see more link shows up in different places depending on the viewer's smartphone size, the font, the text size they're using, and so on. But we've always been able to roughly guess where it'll show up. Like we get a

Starting point is 00:01:36 sentence and a half or so, right? Well, maybe not any longer. There is an active discussion in one of the Facebook ads groups I'm in where people are posting screenshots of their ad texts being cut off after only two or three words. The See More link shows up about two-thirds of the way through the first line of text. You don't even get a single line. And then it gets worse. Someone in this group posted an ad campaign they ran.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Here's the ad's text the way it was set up in full. Up to 60% off. They've had a good run, but it's time to say goodbye to these limited releases. Snag some of the 2019 top sellers before the year ends. Okay, that's the full text of the ad. It runs about four lines in full on a smartphone. Remember, it starts with the words, up to 60% off.

Starting point is 00:02:31 And how did Facebook display it? The only thing you could see before that Seymour link was, you ready for this? You. No, not the word you. The letter you from up to 60% off. All you could see was the letter you followed by that see more link. If you don't believe me, click the Twitter link that I've got in this episode's description under sources. Andrew Foxwell thinks he knows what's up. He believes Facebook is deliberately squeezing that limit down so they have more room in the feed for other ads.

Starting point is 00:03:12 If you've ever wanted to dip your brand's toe in the influencer marketing water but weren't sure how much any of that costs, we now have some idea what you could expect to pay. An influencer marketing agency has revealed how much they charge brands to get sponsored content up on YouTube and TikTok. The agency is Talent X Entertainment. They represent 32 influencers. They say they charge between one and two cents per view each on TikTok.

Starting point is 00:03:40 They say they charge between one and two cents for each view on TikTok. So say the post gets a million views, which isn't entirely unheard of on TikTok. You could expect to pay between 10 and 20,000 bucks. That's quite a bit cheaper than what you'll pay for their YouTube content. They charge between three and eight cents per view there. The difference is the content tends to go a little bit more viral, a little faster on TikTok, but it is by no means a standard. Sometimes they'll charge it out as a flat fee,

Starting point is 00:04:11 regardless of how many views the video actually gets. And sometimes creators will agree to a performance model where they get a cut of each action taken, such as each app download. Some good news for those of you in the B2B marketing space. LinkedIn is on fire and in all the right ways. They reported this week they saw record levels of engagement during the last quarter. There are now 675 million members. That's a record for LinkedIn. Only this past November, that number was 660 million.

Starting point is 00:04:43 Adding 15 million new members in that short a time, in what some people believed was a mostly saturated channel, it's pretty darn good. Speaking of LinkedIn, by the way, they are going to be making some back-end changes soon. This means you will have to reconnect to their API, if you use a third-party tool like Sprout Social, and you'll need to do that before February 15th.

Starting point is 00:05:03 If you don't do this, you could lose access to incoming messages, your scheduled posts won't go up, and you may have a gap in your reporting data. Amazon has started talking about their plans for new e-commerce tools brands can use. A spokesperson said yesterday, things that we're really excited about are stores, so a brand can customize and curate a multi-page store. Some other things like posts, which help customers discover products and brands, and it's through a curated feed that features the brand's lifestyle content, and it's on a mobile

Starting point is 00:05:39 detail page. That's actually the first time I've heard them talk about posts. I'm guessing this will be similar in a way to YouTube channels. If you subscribe to a YouTube channel, of course you get the new videos from your subscribed feed, but you can also see text posts the channel does, and even, God help us, vertical video stories. Last quarter, Amazon's advertising sales were a record $4.8 billion. That's just from ad sales. That is a 41% increase over the previous quarter. This is the weekend the long-awaited Bitmoji TV offering comes out on Snapchat. I reported on this earlier. Basically lets people make full motion cartoon videos out of the Bitmoji avatars you create based on yourself. This does seem to be a user thing for now, not necessarily a brand thing.

Starting point is 00:06:29 But there's no reason a brand couldn't do it and start creating their own little mini shows on the platform. One advantage, you create it all in app, so no video editing needed or lighting or good microphones or retakes. A journalist at TechCrunch said, Having watched the first three episodes, I'm pretty certain Bitmoji TV is going to be a hit. It embodies the whimsy of Snapchat and the youth culture of the community who uses it. It's rare to see something so premium, but so unabashedly kooky.

Starting point is 00:07:00 So, might not be right for your brand, but then again, depending on the space you're in, it could be. On Tuesday, I told you about reports that Google was backing away from its redesign of search results. The New York Times this morning has an in-depth piece called Why Google Backtracked on Its New Search Results Look. Essentially, the gist is that results that are ads are looking less and less like ads and more like regular organic results. But what is especially worth looking at in this piece is a graphic they have from Search Engine Land that shows year by year how the look of Google Ads has changed.

Starting point is 00:07:37 And it's really quite remarkable when you see it laid out that way. You might remember until 2013, ads on Google actually had a colored background behind them. So there was really no mistaking them. Then in 2014, the background was gone. But the word ad was highlighted in a bright yellow box. In 2015, that yellow box was smaller and a little less bright. The next year, the eye catching yellow was gone, and now the word ad was in a green box, the same green as the URL link beside it. 2017, and that green box became actually a white box with a small green outline. And now, with the redesign, literally all the color is gone. Now, just the word ad appears bold in small letters at the top.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Google always tweaks things from time to time. At one point, they tested 41 different variations of blue to find the one that users like best. But now that politicians and regulators are peering a little closer into Google's operations, this might be a time for them to back away a little. Well, that is it for this week. them to back away a little. Check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'm Todd Maffin.

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Today in Digital Marketing - This Episod...... [SEE MORE]

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