Today in Digital Marketing - We Are All Truman Now.

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

A new study says use Carousels if you want to boost your Instagram stats… there’s a new tax on digital advertising… almost nobody is going back to the office after this work-from-home year… is Clubhouse already played out… and why Rating and Reviewing actually does nothing for podcasts.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:NEW! Podcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, a new study says use carousels if you want to boost your Instagram stats. There's a new tax on digital advertising. Almost nobody is going back to the office after this work-from-home year. Is Clubhouse already played out? And why rating and reviewing actually does nothing for your favorite podcast? It's Friday, March 26th, 2021. Happy Dia del Mercosur? Maybe? Latin America? I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

One of my favorite movies is The Truman Show, made in 1998. It's a comedy-drama starring Jim Carey where he's the star of a TV show he doesn't know he's in. Since birth, thousands of hidden cameras follow him. The sun isn't real. Stores he'll never go into are just facades. And the best moments of this film are the gloriously ridiculous product placements. Like in this scene, where he's fighting with his wife, who he doesn't know is actually an actress hired to be his wife. You can't stand me.

That's not true. Why don't you let me fix you some of this new mo' cocoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. What the hell are you talking about?

Who are you talking to? I've tasted other cocos. This is the best. We keep moving ever closer to this as our reality, and YouTube is testing something that might bring us as close as we've ever been. They announced this week they are, quote, experimenting with a new feature that displays a list of products

detected in some videos, as well as related products. The feature will appear in between recommended videos to viewers scrolling below the video player. The goal is to help people explore more videos and information about those products on YouTube. The feature will be visible to people watching videos in the U.S. unquote. Of course, e-commerce integration is all but an obsession with pretty much every platform these days. Almost a year ago, they started testing a products in this video feature for users to see more information about products mentioned in a video. Last June, Google released shoppable video ads specifically for YouTube

and Instagram launched shopping in reels last year, a few months after TikTok put their version out. Some new research from Social Insider has some good information for those of you who use Instagram in your marketing efforts. Here are the key findings. The engagement rate on the platform was flat in 2019, followed by a noticeable increase during the first half of 2020, only to go down to the initial rate of around 22% after that. Higher Instagram engagement is mainly brought by carousels, especially for small accounts, those under 5,000 followers. But when it comes to medium ones, it's better to choose video. Shorter captions, up to 10 words, combined with carousels

form the posts with which users prefer to interact. But captions with more than 30 words are better paired with videos. Carousels are also getting more likes than any other media type, and people are more open to comment on video posts across all profile sizes. The data comes from more than 100 million Instagram business posts. There's a full video breaking down the results in today's newsletter, which you can get at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. The daily newsletter is a paid subscription, but you can get a basic issue every Friday for free. Just click the tab marked None, Decide Later

once you've given it your email address. Again, that site is todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Pundits, marketing executives, and constitutional experts all have their eyes on the U.S. state of Maryland right now as that state has imposed a tax on digital advertising revenues. It became law last month after legislatures overrode the governor's veto of the bill. There's a good chance it won't actually affect you since there's no tax for any organizations with gross revenues under $100 million a year. But at the high end, if you make $15 billion a

year or more, Maryland plans to take 10%. Lobby groups for the tech industry quickly filed a lawsuit challenging it. Among their arguments, it's unconstitutional. I mention it only to put a flag on the story to watch, since if this law gets upheld, you can almost certainly see other American states put their own version in. Watch this space. Stunning findings from a survey of 4,700 professionals has found that after a year of remote work, only 13% say they expect to return to an office full time. This was a broad survey polling people in a dozen countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

More than half reported that their workload has increased over this year of pandemic lockdowns. And seven out of 10 said their employer was working on some kind of work at home scheme or other digital transformation. The study was done by usertesting.com. The internet, of course, is full of cool sites that got a lot of traction and eyeballs and then were just as quickly abandoned. Is Clubhouse, the audio-only broadcast platform, destined to be one of those? The app download tracking site Sensor Tower reports that Clubhouse's downloads have been dropping over the last few weeks. They're down at rank 172 today. The reason? Maybe Twitter's entry into the space with a tool they call Spaces.

Let's call it what it is. It is a Clubhouse clone right down to the design of the rooms. And when it launches, it will bring with it a massive existing user base. Even now, Clubhouse isn't available on Android at all. Even if you have an iPhone, you still need an invitation from a friend to even get in. Maybe that's why Twitter today announced it has raised the limit on how many users can access spaces via Android.

As socialmediatoday.com noted, quote, with most of the platform's top broadcasters and hosts already having established large Twitter followings, it makes sense that many of them will consider broadcasting

on Twitter instead in order to reach the largest possible audience with their efforts. Does that mean Clubhouse is done for? Well, no, the app has succeeded in gaining huge interest very quickly, and it's the favorite platform of many well-known broadcasters and celebrities. Clubhouse could still succeed by maintaining and building on those relationships, and as noted, by improving its algorithms to keep users engaged. That's how TikTok succeeded, by building an algorithm which makes its video feed so enticing. I'm guessing you listen to other podcasts too, you disloyal, cheating sons of bitches. You may have heard other hosts ask you to rate and review their show.

Okay, I've done it too. We do it because the more ratings and reviews we have, the higher up Apple's all-important top shows chart it'll go, right? Actually, no. Pod News says that doesn't factor in at all. Quoting from their piece, according to Apple, when we asked in December 2020, the charts encompass a mix of new subscriptions, playback activity, and completion rate. Ratings and reviews aren't factored into these charts.

The charts were always known to be based on recent subscriptions. Indeed, we uncovered Apple's patent, which says similar. An appearance on the Apple podcast charts, therefore, mainly reflects a podcast's ability to attract a larger number of new subscriptions to their podcast over recent days. It is not related to downloads. Unquote. So there you go. on that one day as possible. A couple of hundred new subscriptions is all it takes to ensure you are top of the chart in most categories, unquote. So there you go. That said, please rate and review this podcast. All right, that's it for this week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced

on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Bluffis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will talking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Bluffus. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will talk to you on Monday. We're high, so high, miles above and we're still proud Oh, I thank you for it Oh, I thank you for it