Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok is Way, Way Bigger Than You Think

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, October 24th, 2019. Happy National Kangaroo Awareness Day, Australia. Here's what's happening today. Twitter stock crashes hard and all because of a bug on their ads platform. TikTok is bigger than you think. Some new features coming to TweetDeck, if you use that. And Google removes your ability to see who wrote some of your brand's reviews. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:27 So Twitter's stock crashed today, down 20%. 20% in a single day. Why? A drop in ad revenues that came from a huge bug on their advertising platform, specifically their mobile application promotion product. Now this lets Twitter target ads and share data with partners. A big thing to screw up. The company reported revenue was up about 9% this past quarter compared to the previous year, but margins were only 4%. They were 14% a year ago.

Starting point is 00:00:59 That said, daily users on Twitter are still, and they say ad engagements are up 23% year over year. But the best news? Digital marketers are paying less for said engagements. The cost per engagement has dropped by about 12%. Some new numbers from Activate Consulting claim that average monthly time spent on TikTok now exceeds Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat. TikTok, they say, is now in the number one position for average monthly time spent per user. In fact, it's only when you combine Facebook with Facebook Messenger time that Zuckerberg's company comes out on top.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Meanwhile, two American senators have said that they are worried about TikTok's Chinese ownership and have asked intelligence officials to determine if the app poses national security risks, saying, quote, with over 110 million downloads in the US.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat that we cannot ignore. Yikes. Here I'm just trying to video my cat. A couple of small but maybe important Twitter changes. The company's TweetDeck web app is

Starting point is 00:02:23 apparently testing some new columns, specifically analytics, live video, and what's happening. I finally had to ditch TweetDeck a few weeks back because it was literally just missing tweets. The content that I know were on my lists just would not make it to TweetDeck, even though they were visible on every other app. Also, are they going to move into game streaming soon? Programmer Jane Wong discovered that they are testing latency control. That's how far behind viewers are in the live stream. On the gaming platform Mixer, there's almost no latency. Competing platform Twitch suffers from longer latency, although if you're a partner, you can choose to reduce that. Looks like Twitter now is giving people that control as well for their live videos.

Starting point is 00:03:09 Faster latency, though, sometimes means less stable or poorer quality video. Speaking of gaming, you may have heard about Fortnite's marketing stunt a week back where they took the very popular game offline for two days and replaced it with a video of a black hole. While most marketing thought leaders thought the stunt was brilliant, Jack Appleby, who works agency side in the gaming space, thought different. Tweeting yesterday after some numbers came out showing millions of people watched that black hole event, he said, quote, This will be viewed as proof that the black hole was a good creative idea, which isn't the case. People tuned in because a countdown timer on a huge beloved product said to. Black hole was the creative they chose to show an audience that was already there. Think about the Fortnite black hole like a TV finale's live

Starting point is 00:03:58 viewing audience. The number of viewers isn't a result of the quality of the final episode. It's from the equity previous built-in past brand and creative. Disruptive? Yes. Most users weren't curious. They were mad. That's never the goal. And one last bit of gaming news. Mixer, again, that's Microsoft's game streaming platform, has lured yet another big name over, First Ninja. And this morning, they announced Shroud,

Starting point is 00:04:27 who, like Ninja, has millions of followers, many of whom pay five bucks a month to get special bonuses. Microsoft has a lot of money, and they are clearly not screwing around when it comes to dominating the game streaming space. Okay, lightning round. Instagram will soon start grouping story mentions in their app. And thank God, because DMs are not the place to clear 100 messages that say so-and-so mentioned you in a story. Google has launched a cute animated tutorial series for people new to SEO.

Starting point is 00:04:57 You can find the videos on their Google Webmasters YouTube channel. Facebook's new News tab is reportedly launching tomorrow. It'll feature news items written by journalists, both who work at Facebook and at traditional media outlets. Hey, Mac users, are you sick of Adobe's pay us every month for the rest of your life pricing? Well, Pixelmator Pro, an excellent Photoshop replacement, is now half off right now in the App Store for 20 bucks once for the rest of your life. You can now target specific locations to Google Ads smart shopping campaigns. Sort of.

Starting point is 00:05:32 If you add a location from the user location report, your options drop back to just add and set bid adjustment. And you can no longer see an abbreviated version of someone's email address who left you a review on Google. When people left a review without being logged in, you used to be able to hover over the Google user words and get an abridged version of their email address. But no more. It's not clear if this is intended or a bug.

Starting point is 00:05:54 That is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by engageq.com. Just a heads up, there will be no episode tomorrow. I'm off to give a keynote speech out of town. But if you want to fill the gap or are looking for some weekend listening, the premium feed has a deep dive into the TikTok algorithm. Plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok is Way, Way Bigger Than You Think

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