Today in Digital Marketing - What's Up Guys, Smash That Like Button on This Podcast!!!!!!!!

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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 secret program celebrities use to bypass Facebook moderation.

Starting point is 00:01:06 The new smash that like button is coming. How does lead form placement affect your SEO? And guess who's copying TikTok now? It's Monday, September 13th. Happy Parliamentary Election Day, Norway. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 466. The world we work in, digital marketing, is made up largely of binary choices.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Do we go with a flashy, eye-catching email at the cost of increased spam reports? Do we push bottom funnel messaging the first time someone sees our ad at the cost of lower relevance scores? Do we include those social sharing buttons on our website, at the cost of slower page load time? We make these choices all the time. Some of those choices are around lead forms. For instance, do we try to capture lots of data on the form, knowing that for every field we ask someone to complete, more people drop off? One of the more important choices is the position of that lead form on a page.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Most of the time, we're thinking about conversion rate when we consider where to put that lead form. Too high, and it might look spammy. Too low, people might not even get to it. There is another factor, too. And last week, Google search engineer John Mueller highlighted it in one of his excellent weekly search central hangouts. The question was this, in terms of ranking, we know that Google gives high priority to content above the fold. In other words, content that could be seen right when someone lands on the page without scrolling down. So what about if we're providing good content,

Starting point is 00:02:41 like an ultimate buyer's guide, but also want to keep that form up high. What's the SEO impact of that? Here's John's answer. Our algorithms do look for things like ads above the fold that kind of push the main content down below the fold. And it's possible that we would think a lead gen form like that would be kind of like an ad, but I don't think it would always be the case. And it kind of also depends on what that page is trying to rank for. If it's essentially a page that's trying to rank for, it's like, I don't know, get car insurance, and the form is about sign up for car insurance,

Starting point is 00:03:23 then that's kind of the intent of the page. But if the intent of the page is find out more about why oranges grow and then you have car insurance form on top, then that seems more like an ad. So in other words, don't try to game Google with sneaking a

Starting point is 00:03:40 lead form on some highly trafficked but irrelevant content. The bots know better. Social media managers and content marketers do a lot of begging. On YouTube, it's smash that like button. On TikTok, it's like and follow for more. Even Facebook had its moment when we were all begging people to add us to their show first list a few years ago. Remember that? Well, get ready to beg a little more. Instagram is testing a new favorites list where people add accounts they follow to a list, content from accounts on that list, then show up higher in their feed. This is different than what Instagram called favorites back in 2017.

Starting point is 00:04:20 That version would let you set up a list of close contacts with which you could share specific content. For example, private photos from your wedding, or that swinger party. There's now a close friends list that sort of does that. But this version would change the priority of content delivered in people's feeds. Again, it's only in testing, internal testing at that. No word on if or when it would be rolled out more fully,

Starting point is 00:04:44 but if it does go public, get ready to type, add us to your favorites, a whole lot more. Catching you up on the latest Facebook is evil news. Three stories broke over the last few days. First, and you're not going to like this if you've ever had content taken down by Facebook, quoting The Verge, Facebook maintains a secret program to exempt athletes, politicians, and other high-profile users from its typical moderation process, according to the Wall Street Journal. The program is reportedly meant to stop PR fires or bad press caused by pulling down photos, posts, and other content from high-profile

Starting point is 00:05:22 users that should have been allowed to stay up. In reality, the program just lets these users break the rules in ways that would have gotten most people into trouble. The program is known as XCheck or CrossCheck. Posts from users flagged for XCheck are supposed to be rooted to a set of better-trained moderators to ensure Facebook's rules are properly enforced. But the program reportedly protected 5.8 million people as of 2020, and just 10% of posts that hit X-Check actually got reviewed, unquote. Facebook acknowledged the program existed, said it's not perfect. Their VP of Integrity, yes, that's an actual title there, seemed a little defensive, tweeting this afternoon, we've talked about this for years and there's no news here, despite how much Wall Street Journal

Starting point is 00:06:10 wants it to seem like there is. Leading someone to reply, I don't recall you talking about, unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences. Can you point me to a blog post? At deadline, Facebook's VP of Integrity had not yet replied. 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. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:07:12 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. Second, remember a couple of weeks ago Facebook banned the accounts of some academic researchers looking into misinformation on the platform? Now, the New York Times is reporting that Facebook admits it gave them flawed and incomplete data for that work. They told the researchers they were getting data on all their U.S. users. In fact, they only got

Starting point is 00:07:50 data on half of the U.S. users. Facebook told the Times the glitch was because of a technical error. They proactively told the researchers about it. But that's questionable. Turns out an Italian researcher, not connected to the original project, proactively told the world about this. He compared the academic research to Facebook's supposed full transparency disclosure statement of Q2 content and noticed big discrepancies. Facebook then called a Zoom meeting with the researchers to apologize. And finally, Facebook admitted that some messages in its popular WhatsApp chat app were not end-to-end encrypted.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Which is weird, because a post published on the WhatsApp site as early as 2016 said, quote, we've rolled out end-to-end encryption. When you and the people you message are using the latest version of WhatsApp, your messages are encrypted by default, which means you're the only people who can read them. Not WhatsApp, not Facebook, nor anyone else, unquote. And a more technical document says proudly, quote, Except, well, there's a big loophole which turns off that encryption. Here's the loophole.

Starting point is 00:09:11 While messages start out as fully private, any user can report one of these messages to WhatsApp. The app then takes the reported message and a handful of messages that occurred before it and sends it unencrypted to moderators. And how much supposedly confidential content is there to review? Facebook wouldn't say. But consider this.

Starting point is 00:09:31 There are about a thousand people employed by the company whose sole job is to read and moderate WhatsApp messages sent by users. Even without the message contents, users could be at risk. One person was sent to prison in the U.S. for six months for leaking confidential government information to the media using WhatsApp. The prosecutor asked the app for metadata and found that this person exchanged 70 messages with a reporter. Even without the content of those messages, that frequency of communication was enough for the court to convict her.

Starting point is 00:10:10 A to Pinterest. The popular platform today confirmed it was working on a scrolling vertical feed of content, TikTok style, as part of a new watch mode. The user interface looks almost exactly like TikTok, with two categories at the top. Instead of TikTok's following and for you, they're called browse and watch. And along the lower right side are buttons for like, comment, share, and a menu for more. The user's information is at the bottom left.

Starting point is 00:10:37 Honestly, unless you look closely, you will think it's TikTok. The statement from the company was the usual, We're always testing new features and products, yada, yada, yada. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Pinterest didn't provide any specific info on this test, nor how many users can even access the watch feed. But again, it seems like the popularity of TikTok is inspiring even more UX choices in more apps as platforms look to move in line with emerging usage behaviors and maximize engagement. And finally today, LinkedIn announced it has jumped in on the dark mode trend, and you can now activate dark mode on its website or mobile apps.

Starting point is 00:11:48 So the fitness thing continues. So far, I've lost 13 pounds since mid-July, so I'm pretty happy with that. Of course, I took my photos for the new photos for the podcast artwork and so on, like literally the week before I started the weight loss. So I don't know. But this weekend, my wife and I got an e-bike for myself, so a mountain bike with some power assist. My wife has a hand cycle that has power assist. She goes out every day. She loves it. So now I have one too. I went out on my inaugural run. I realized as soon as I got on that I have not ridden a bicycle in 20 years, and I actually had to kind of relearn it in terms of how it works.

Starting point is 00:12:04 But the e-bike is nice. You know, it's power-assisted. So if you're going up a hill and you're out of shape, like, I don't know, me, it'll give you a little bit of a boost. And this one in particular has, I don't know what they call it. I think they call it a throttle. It's basically a cheat button. It's a little button you push, and it will just drive for you. Like, it just turns into a scooter, which I didn't use that much, I promise.

Starting point is 00:12:26 So anyway, my Twitter account, I that much, I promise. So anyway, my Twitter account, I'm sure we'll have some photos of our rides and all that kind of stuff. It's at Todd Mappin. Talk to you tomorrow. pearl a million miles from home i will travel to the end of the world yeah yeah oh where the poncho come gonna find my own special girl

Today in Digital Marketing - What's Up Guys, Smash That Like Button on This Podcast!!!!!!!!

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