Today in Digital Marketing - Twitter W0n't Be Foo1ed Again

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Thursday, January 26th. Today, Instagram in panic as it tries to stem the TikTok content tide. New certifications are coming for Meta's platforms. Substack offers invite-only newsletters. The Facebook ad platform drops a helpful tool media buyers rely on. And the solution for Twitter impersonation? Just change the font. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. BuzzFeed to create content for Facebook and Instagram. BuzzFeed will generate creator content for the social media giant's platforms

Starting point is 00:00:46 and train creators on how to grow their online presence, according to people familiar with the matter. Sources say BuzzFeed, known as one of the OGs of viral content, aims to help creators understand what makes content resonate widely on the two platforms. The partnership comes as both companies are looking to embrace the creator economy in which individuals build large social media audiences and earn money from advertising or brand sponsorships. But will it be enough to keep up with TikTok?

Starting point is 00:01:15 According to research firm eMarketer, TikTok's global user base grew nearly 20% last year, while Facebook plateaued and Instagram grew just three percent. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is the latest publisher to succumb to our robot overlords. The journal also reports in an internal memo to staff today that BuzzFeed's chief executive said AI will become more central to its operations as its content machine will soon be assisted by chat GPT creator OpenAI. He said OpenAI's text generation software will be used to enhance the company's memeable quizzes,

Starting point is 00:01:50 which are known for their clickbait headlines. According to the memo, the AI's role would be to personalize responses that users would want to share on social media. As Meta works to lure more creators to its platform, the company is also looking to attract more agencies with a new certification for businesses to highlight their Facebook and Instagram marketing expertise. Meta has launched a new Meta-certified company program,

Starting point is 00:02:18 and there are five distinct certifications now available. Media, Marketing Science, Creative Strategy, Community Management, and MetaSpark. Each program requires a percentage of employees to complete the respective blueprint training, and then you can apply for official recognition. The courses are free, but there is a fee for certification exams, so there still is a little bit of business expense involved. Have you ever wanted to publish your brand or business's newsletter online, but don't want it to be public to the entire web?

Starting point is 00:02:56 Newsletter platform Substack today introduced several new features, including private substacks that readers can request to subscribe to. The company explained that private accounts work similarly to private Instagram profiles. Readers can request to subscribe to your substack, and then writers can approve or decline access to them. Users have the option to change their substack from public to private at any time. The company is also launching new updates to its chat feature. Now when you share a new post, podcast, or video, you can instantly start a conversation in chat by automatically sharing the link with a caption in your chat. Other new features include search improvements, a duplicate posts option, which lets you reuse templates instead of reformatting them for each post, and math and science writers can now embed equations into

Starting point is 00:03:40 posts using LaTeX. Substack, by the way, is the platform we use for our daily email newsletter, which comes complete with images, charts, related videos, and links to dive deeper. You can sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in the show notes. So this one slipped past me, but I noticed a few people chatting about it in Andrew Foxwell's great Slack community, the ability to inspect your meta ad sets. Used to be there was a little magnifying glass that would appear on ad sets when you hovered over them. Turns out that's been gone since January 3rd. One member of Andrew's community said their rep told them the tool was considered out of date

Starting point is 00:04:19 and they'd received complaints about poor performance. Also, they'd already moved engineers off updating it even before they turned it off. Apparently, meta reps have been telling media buyers to just customize your columns in ads manager to see the missing data, but it's not really a solution. The inspect tool, if I remember right, would bring you directly to charts showing performance. Charts obviously aren't available in a table with columns. Also, the inspect tool was home to some metrics not available elsewhere, like first-time impression ratio. So if you were confused as to where that inspection tool has now gone, now you know. TikTok is making it harder for your brand

Starting point is 00:04:59 to slide into DMs. The company has expanded its direct messaging settings to give users a choice of who they want to receive messages from. Now the DM options are everyone, suggested friends, now this includes any synchronized Facebook or phone contacts, mutual followers, so those are people who you follow and they follow you back, people you've sent messages to the past, or no one at all. Previously, only accounts that users had identified as friends or recommended users could send DMs to each other. While TikTok

Starting point is 00:05:32 has long claimed to be an entertainment app, not a social network, the change marks the latest way that the platform is expanding social features to compete with Instagram. Twitter has changed its font. Again. So far, the new font appears only on the web and the iOS mobile app. It's not clear yet why the company updated it, but some speculate it might make it easier to spot impersonators.

Starting point is 00:05:58 The new font makes it easier to see lowercase Ls, which scammers sometimes replace with a number one. Depending on the font, the two can look identical identical same with the number zero replacing a letter o this new font puts a slash through the o so it's easier to identify the font change is relatively minor to my disappointment it is not comic sans so my old mac monitor finally gave up the ghost. It's been kind of glitching out for the last couple of months. It finally refused to turn on this morning.

Starting point is 00:06:29 What a workhorse, though. This thing has been around for like 15 years. It is so old that I had to get an adapter to plug into an adapter so that it would plug into my computer. But it all worked. And here's the thing I learned. I went out and I bought a new monitor. And I hate it. I hate the new monitor because it's widescreen,

Starting point is 00:06:46 which I guess everything is now. But my old monitor was of an era where widescreen wasn't really a thing. It was still kind of in like the, I don't know, what is that ratio? Four by three? And I liked having the extra screen room up top. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:07:03 New world. Sometimes I hate it. Thanks for listening. I'm Todd Mappin. A new world. Sometimes I hate it. Thanks for listening. I'm Todd love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Twitter W0n't Be Foo1ed Again

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