Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok's Secret Content Algorithm: Lk+Cmt+Ptime+Pcount

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

The Colonel's secret recipe is out — TikTok's addictive content algorithm has been leaked. Also: You talk too much, and that's killing your conversion rate. How does changing your name affect your blog posts' Google ranking? What every business can learn from Facebook Marketplace.Go Premium! No ads, more stories, and expert livestreams — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/adsShowcase your marketing tool for free! https://todayindigital.com/showcase  JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Today, the Colonel's secret recipe is out. at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. business can learn from Facebook Marketplace. And on the premium podcast with more stories, no ads and expert live streams, the simple step you can take to nullify the effect of any negative review of your business. It's Tuesday, December 7th, 2021. Happy Letter Writing Day, United States. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 521. We start today off with some leaked information regarding TikTok's algorithm and just exactly how the platform can seemingly read your mind. An insider at the New York Times has obtained an internal document from the company that provides deep insight into how TikTok decides what content to show you.

The document is actually titled TikTok Algo 101 and was created by the platform's engineering team in Beijing. According to the document, there are four goals for TikTok's algorithm. User value, long-term user value, creator value, and platform value. The report goes on to explain that in order to achieve the company's ultimate goal of adding daily active users, it has chosen to optimize for two metrics in the video stream. Retention, that is to say whether a user returns, and time spent. The document also illustrates a simplified version of TikTok's formula for how videos are scored

Basically, it's a combination of likes, comments, watch time on a video, and whether or not the video is viewed And the actual formula behind that algorithm was leaked too And it is, essentially, likes plus comments plus playtime plus playcount Quoting from the report, quote, The recommender system gives scores to all the videos based on this equation and returns to users videos with the highest scores. Today's premium newsletter has a flow chart showing how the whole thing comes together. In addition, the document says creator monetization is one of the company's goals. TikTok considers creation quality, which is determined by three things. Publish rate, creator retention, and creator

monetization. The leaked document suggests that if you and your brand want to come out on top of the TikTok algorithm, you should create content that does four things. First, keeps users on the app as long as possible, retains and monetizes creators, keeps users coming back for more, and features a diverse range of content. And here is what I think is the most important part. Apparently, baiting users by explicitly asking people to comment or like your video will not work. In fact, according to these leaked documents,

it will work against you. The algorithm is smart enough to identify and suppress those videos. My friend, your spouse is right. You talk too much, and it may be costing you sales. Recent research from Korn Ferry has found what exactly impacts the buying decision of a B2B buyer when it comes to the salesperson they are dealing with. According to the report, here are the top sales behaviors that are deal breakers for B2B buyers.

50% say a salesperson not understanding the business. 38% say a salesperson talking too much or not listening. Also another 38% say when a salesperson is not supportive after a sale. How good are salespeople at virtual selling? Not so good. In the study, 32% of respondents said salespeople struggled with communicating empathy during presentations, and only 33% of salespeople are effective at selling in a virtual environment. So how does your business bridge the buyer-seller gap? According to the report,

buyers need to view you as a resource for solving their problems, and you should probably invest more time into learning about your prospect's business. Proving once again that the best advice is often the oldest advice. Some things never change. A new mobile app by TikTok may show us what they have in mind for commerce. It's called the TikTok Seller app. Now, don't go looking for it in your app store. It's only available in Indonesia right now. And it allows users to manage their TikTok shop. The Apple App Store provides a description of the new features you can expect to see once it's available, if it's available. Quote, TikTok Seller enables sellers to manage their TikTok shop via mobile phone. Available features including but are not limited to seller registration, product management, order management, return and refund management, promotion management, customer service, data analysis, campaign registration, and seller education, unquote.

And I have to say that is a lot of functionality, especially for a mobile app. No word on any broader release, but this certainly points at brands soon being able to manage their TikTok product listings easily from any device. 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.

People change their names all the time. Changes happen for legal reasons, personal choices, marriage, gender confirmation, the list goes on. So how will your ranking on Google be affected if you or an author on your site changes their name? This is actually an important question, especially in the Google era of EAT, where authority and trustworthiness of an author factors into ranking. Google search advocate John Mueller addressed this on Twitter, saying, quote, for most cases, there's probably not much to do other than change the name. For bigger cases, including legal name changes, for example, scientific literature or content

references across the web, I'd try to make things as consistent as possible. Facebook is offering marketers insight into the biggest trends of the holiday season with its new Holiday Guide 2021. This guide is specific to Marketplace, their person-to-person platform like Craigslist, but a growing number of merchants are also listing their stuff there. So Facebook put out a pretty comprehensive resource. According to the guide, here are some tips for optimizing your listings and increasing sales. Add keywords into your listing title and description. By the way, some keywords that people are searching online right now, fun stocking stuffers, best white elephant gifts, and unusual Christmas gifts. Also, make sure you put key holiday dates into your calendar, check shipping deadlines to make sure your put key holiday dates into your calendar, check shipping

deadlines to make sure your products will be delivered on time, and consider what consumers find important while shopping. 64% are looking for sales and discounts, 58% look for product quality, and according to this resource, 47% want free shipping. And that, you know, that last data point, by the way, we looked that up. That's from the National Retail Federation. And I'll be honest, I don't trust it. The stat, not the organization. Every piece of anecdotal data that I hear from people who sell online tells me that free shipping is probably closer to 100% of buyers wanting that. Anyway, the guide also includes strategies for optimizing your marketplace listings, including inventory planning, pricing strategies, best practices, and more.

And several of these trends can provide useful insight into how to approach your holiday marketing strategy, whether or not you are actually on Facebook Marketplace. A link to the guide is in today's premium newsletter. Google Ads is improving image extensions by making them visible on desktop search results pages. Until now, those extensions have only shown up on mobile. That'll start in a few weeks. You don't have to do anything to activate this. They'll just start serving to desktop. If you'd like to see the performance split out by that, you can do that by segmenting your performance data by device. This update applies to dynamic image extensions as well. And in case you've wanted to use image extensions but didn't know what image to put there, you'll now be able to choose from a searchable

library of stock images that are free to use in Google Ads. To do that, select the stock images option when you're asked to choose an image for your image extension. Once you've found an image you like, you can crop it to a square or landscape format in Google Ads before you apply it to your extension. And finally, Google Docs has made some improvements to tables inside documents. Those improvements include being able to pin a table header row to repeat on each page, designate that a row should not be split across pages, quickly add and arrange columns and rows. This looks really cool, by the way.

It's literally just to grab the column header and drag it. You can sort tables by row, and there is a new table sidebar to manage table properties. This change should be showing up between now and the end of the month. Next week, two expert live streams for you. The first on Monday will be all about Google Ads. Jill Saskin-Gales will join us for that to answer your questions live. She spent six years at Google. The second on Wednesday,

Facebook Ads with veteran Facebook Ad consultant Andrew Foxwell will be covering everything from how to know when to scale a winning campaign, some of his favorite custom metrics, and more. Expert live streams are part of the premium podcast, which you can subscribe to at todayindigital.com slash premium or tap the link in the episode notes. Also, yes, we have heard your feedback. You do not want the weekly happy hour to be gated. So it's now open to everyone. This is new, by the way, starting this Friday.

So if you're free, you want to hang out, we'll all jump on a Zoom. There's no agenda. You can ask me questions. We can pick each other's brains. Kind of like a happy hour, but with some business talk from the hive mind. So this and every Friday at 12 p.m. Pacific,

that's 3 p.m. Eastern and 8 p.m. London time. The URL will be todayindigital.com slash happyhourlive. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. We'll see you next time.