Today in Digital Marketing - Wait... Does the 'Link in Comments' Trick Actually Work?!

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Will the “link in the comments” trick get your post de-ranked? Facebook releases its brand collaboration tool What is hybrid-messaging and why do people say it’s going to be big in 2020? And my thoughts about third-party platform transparency of what they do and DO NOT support The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital 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. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Links to Tod's social media at at the bottom of http://TodayInDigital.com Sources: https://wersm.com/are-you-ready-for-the-instagram-photo-booth/ Hootsuite report: https://p.widencdn.net/y1dqcb/2020_Trends_Report --- 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 Thursday, December 12th, 2019. Happy Day of Victory, Switzerland. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, will the link in the comments trick get your post deranked? Facebook releases its brand collaboration tool. What is hybrid messaging and why do people say it's going to be big in 2020? And my thoughts around third-party platform transparency of what they do and do not support. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Over here in the B2B space, you may have heard the rumor that if you post the link you're trying to promote in the comments of your own post, that is, instead of in the body of the post like you would normally do, that you would get enormous reach. Guy Kawasaki did this once. He said he got huge results doing that. Growth Rocks did a study and found that reach could be triple if you did this trick. So everyone started doing it. And then, soon after, a new rumor started floating around that LinkedIn was now penalizing posts that used that tactic.

They'd look for phrases like, link in comments, and derank your post from getting on the feeds. So which is it? And does it work today? Agorapulse's social media lab tested. I have the results in this envelope right here, which I will open at the end of the episode. Earlier this afternoon, Facebook announced it is now rolling out that Brands Collabs manager that I reported on the November 7th episode. Also, and this is kind of cool, they're also putting in a kind of walled-off private message system that lets admins from two brand pages chat with each other to set these collaborations up. Or flirt or exchange memes or I guess whatever they want to do in there. They're also releasing a new video upload tool

that lets you upload multiple videos at a time. And you'll be able to edit the titles and metadata for all those videos in a single screen while those videos are uploading, which is a pretty nice touch. Hootsuite has released results from its annual survey of more than 3,000 digital marketers. They found five trends for 2020.

I'm not going to read you all of them because most aren't a huge surprise. TikTok's in there, of course. But one really compelling note, they say that brands will increasingly need to dip their toes into private engagement or a hybrid of public and private. Quoting from the report here, as brands start to act more like real people, there has been

a significant increase in so-called private behaviors like one-to-one and group messaging, unquote. We have seen this in early phases for sure. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, by the way, has been trying out this kind of hybrid engagement model. It'll be interesting to see if this changes how the brands that you and the API, which means not in the third-party platform that you use. Side note, Instagram, please, DMs in the API. It's nearly 2020. Okay, real talk.

I follow a bunch of user groups of the various platforms out there, Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprinkler, and so on. And I am increasingly seeing people report that the platforms don't always support everything that you'd think they would, or everything that an API makes it possible to, which makes sense. Just because Facebook has an API that lets you look up page names doesn't mean you have to support it in your platform. Or maybe you'd support it, but only at a higher price tier. But in one of these groups, I found something that honestly kind of shocked me. I'm

not going to say which platform because, as I said before, these tools can pick and choose what features they want to support. But it sounds like maybe disclosure of what they do and don't support is lacking in the case of some third-party platforms. One fellow said that he'd missed a week's worth of comments from interested customers because the Facebook new dynamic creative ad format was not supported by the third-party platform that he uses. It's not clear to me if that is a limitation of the platform or of the API that it's using. But there is a bigger point here. We digital marketers assume that platforms support everything unless we are told otherwise. So if you are a platform that has social engagement as one of your foundation, as this one does from this fellow I was mentioning earlier, and you can't pull comments in on specific types of ad posts, you should be

telling us clearly multiple times. Here at EngageQ, we found this out the hard way when we noticed that the platform we use was missing incoming Facebook messages for one particular client. If you went into their Facebook inbox manually on the Facebook main site, those messages were there just fine. But in the platform we use, not there. And we are on their top-tier agency plan. So we emailed support, who said the missing messages were generated from a Facebook ad that had messages as its objective, and the ad used those three question prompts. You've probably seen those that you can put in when people tap or click the ad.

And they're right. That is where those messages came from. It's a common format, and in the case of this client, we found it super productive. But the support rep told us, quote, Since this is a chatbot created outside of our platform, we will need to request to whitelist this so that you can start engaging with those messages in your inbox view, unquote. I don't know that I would call those auto-prompt messages a chatbot, but even so, why would we need to be whitelisted to see Facebook private messages that come off an ad? Isn't that the whole point of an engagement platform? But more importantly, we weren't told about this. So, word to the wise.

If you use a third-party tool, and I'm guessing almost everyone here does, it is worth asking them for a detailed spec sheet. Even things like polling times. How often does the platform you use ask Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever for new data? If you are on the Agorapulse's Medium plan, for instance, it only updates every two hours on Twitter. Agorapulse is capable of polling Twitter every five minutes, but that plan costs more than five times the medium two-hour polling plan. That's not hating on Agorapulse. I think Agorapulse's platform is great.

That's just pricing tiers. You need a higher depth of service? That costs money. They need the money to keep running the service. Maybe two hours is fine for your brand. Maybe it's not. Maybe not getting the first message after a Facebook prompt is fine for brand. Maybe it's not. Maybe not getting the first message after a Facebook prompt is fine for you. Maybe it's not. But we deserve to know those limitations before

an uncomfortable conversation about that gap with a boss or client. Which brings us to a very short lightning round today. Instagram seems to be working on a new function that turns the Stories camera into one of those coin-operated photo booths you see in malls. It takes four pictures, each separated by a three-second delay, and then generates a stop-motion video out of that. Why, yes, you did see that on TikTok. And Spotify has added some targeting options to its ad platform. You can now target some new segments such as commuting and theater, and you can also create copies of your previous or current campaigns.

Oh, and for that B2B post trick on LinkedIn, that if you put the link you're trying to promote in the comments of your post instead of the body, Agorapulse tested this across two different accounts, several posts, and for a month and found, open the envelope here,

a mixed bag. Impressions were about 170% higher on posts that used this trick, but likes were lower. Clicks on the link itself were only a tiny bit higher using that trick, up only 13%. So if you market in the B2B space and you use LinkedIn, it might be worth trying out to see how your post fares. Well, if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com and follow me on social.

Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. Reinstalled Overwatch again last night. Four hours later, still in silver. Honestly, I really don't know why I bother. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles, and you 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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