Today in Digital Marketing - Why Are Marketers Being Constantly Logged Out of Facebook?

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Does Meta keep logging you out of your account? You're not alone. Also: Wordpress might already be selling your brand's content. The two TikTok trends you might want to consider stealing. Social media engagement continues to decline. And Google's in hot maple-flavoured water.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories here GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, March 1st. Today, does Meta keep logging you out of your account? You're not alone. Also, WordPress might already be selling your brand's content, the two TikTok trends you might want to consider stealing, social media engagement continues to decline, and Google finds itself in hot maple-flavored water. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. 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. Automatic, the parent company of WordPress, has decided, like pretty much all platforms these days, to get into the lucrative business of selling their data to AI companies for training. And by their data, of course I mean your data. You might expect it on a social media platform like Facebook or Pinterest.

You probably aren't expecting that the sale of data might extend to your own brand's website. Well, that's happening now if your brand's website runs on WordPress's hosted service. WordPress runs about half of the world's websites, but the content management software comes in two flavors, hosted and self-hosted. If your site uses a third-party web hosting service like GoDaddy or SiteGround or DreamHost, then you're using the self-hosted version of WordPress. That's what most brands use, and this sale of data does not apply to you. But if your brand's website is on WordPress's own hosting service,

well then your company's content has likely already been sold to AI companies for training. Once this news leaked out this week, the company put out a statement, hilariously titled, Protecting User's Choice, in which they say you can opt out if you want, and if you've set your site to not be crawled by search engines, you're already opted out. The problem with that latter version, of course, is most brands want their content to be found on search engines, so why would they have that block toggle active? It does seem as if Automatic has been selling user data since well before the opt-out options existed. An internal memo reviewed by

404 Media showed that Automatic had provided AI company Midjourney with posts dating back a decade, and their initial data dump included private posts, posts from deleted blogs, and even posts marked NSFW. It also revealed the way that Automatic will try to claw back data that a brand or user asks to not be used for AI training. That method? To ask the A company nicely, if they wouldn't mind, you know, maybe not using it, please? There's no live data connection that Automatic can turn off. They appear to be providing this user data in big dumps of CSV files. Automatic also owns the beleaguered microblogging site Tumblr. It says it will sell user data there too, unless people opt out. Again, this does not seem to apply if your brand hosts its own WordPress site on another hosting platform. At least, not yet. Every Friday, we check in with our Meta Ads

correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million in Meta Ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Andrew, hello. Hello. I am hearing a ton of talk in the last couple of weeks of Meta logging people out of their accounts so often that people are not even able to work. Is this just me? Are you seeing this? Yeah, it's definitely been an issue. And it's hard to know how widespread it is.

Certainly, there's been a lot of reports of it in the community, a lot of reports of it on Twitter as well. Um, and you know, what ends up happening is people get logged out. They try to reauthenticate, they try to use a third party authenticator, they'll be back in and then it'll log them out again after usually 15 to 30 to 45 seconds. Um, obviously that renders people unable to work. Um, some theory is that it has to do with the Chrome extensions that you're using.

And for some folks, uninstalling extensions has been helpful. For some people, trying a different browser, like the Brave browser, has been helpful. But it still persists in a lot of cases for folks. And even when sending to Meta, they're aware of it, but they don't seem to have a widespread fix as of yet. So it's still out there and there isn't some solution that we all have. I was going to ask, I mean, what can people do if they're affected by that uh the best thing you can do is start a uh record videos of you working once you log back in um and make because if it'll likely log you out again and then you have a video of what's taking place um and then take screenshots of what it's telling you um that's another thing you can you can do. So that when you go to submit something with meta, you have a case ID that you can go back to and say like, hey, this continues to happen.

That's basically what what we've been doing with those members that are experiencing this. So yeah, it's been a it's been a real pain. And there isn't necessarily a good way to deal with it as of now. So I wish I had better news, but I want you to know that if this is happening to you, go ahead and continue to try to push it with meta support, get a case ID and follow up on it basically as much and as often as you can. That's really what I recommend. Keep hitting them up every day, every hour whatever it takes yeah um because it's a it's a widespread issue when these things happen often you know with with a technical problem on meta's end frequently another meta system will interpret that as like some sort of nefarious behavior on your part even though it was actually another meta system's fault are we seeing also

along with these logouts account bans or any punitive actions that are being automatically placed on people's accounts because some other piece of meta software is logging people out? I haven't seen any of that. One member did report that they logged into the Brave browser and then it locked them out of the account. And I'm like, oh my God. So that's only one instance of that. We haven't seen anything else. There is, you know, there still is definitely a thematic wave through and as much as you can, trying to share what's happening with meta support. There is a guy on Twitter, Yoni Levy, who is a meta employee who seems to be more helpful on these things. So you can certainly always tweet at him to see.

But he's really the only one that seems to be listening to a lot of these issues. There's can certainly always tweet at him to see, but he's really the only one that seems to be listening to a lot of these issues. There's no other good solution, unfortunately, to make those things happen quicker. So we're actually working right now on an open letter about this issue that we'll be putting out because I was told by several Meta employees that our open letter that we did a couple years ago about improving shops did resonate within Meta. And so we're planning another one of those about hacking and technical stability to try to make a bunch of noise about it. So we'll see. All right. Well, assuming that you can log into your account and assuming that you're not auto banned.

Yeah. Many people now are putting some more faith into things like the advantage shopping campaigns and cost caps are now fully rolled out in those campaign types. What do you see? How are they performing? What should we expect from them? And so on. Yeah, I think this is an interesting one. You know, there's been more votes in this category. It's always like when something rolls out, you're like, I don't know, maybe we'll see. And now there seems to be more, you know, stability coming within cost caps and bid capping. I think, you know, if you haven't done it, you set that cap at a cost cap or a bid cap at, you know, generally 20% above, 30% above what your target CPA might be. And the issue that you'll deal with is that there'll be swings in spend. So some days it'll

spend your total budget. Some days it won't spend hardly any of your budget. But you're saying, find me, you know, with a bid cap, you're saying, find me at conversions this number and below. And with a cost cap, you're saying, find me at conversions within this range. So I guess if you haven't given these a shot, there's something that for me, I hadn't necessarily given a lot of stock to because of the mechanism that works within it, like how it was going to work within ASC. But there's now, you know, I've had at least probably 10 to 15 instances of members of accounts that are spending, you know, over $50,000 a month-ish that have utilized a cost cap or a bid cap for stability within their campaigns. And they are helping in a significant fashion. So that's a good thing. If you haven't given it a shot, give it a shot. It doesn't have to be your whole account, but it also can lend itself to more consolidation.

And that can also be helpful for performance and having kind of your creatives that are working lead the way and give it time and see if you're able to bring your results down that way. So just kind of a note, if you haven't given a shot, it's probably worth it if you're a direct response advertiser at this point. Definitely. Good advice. Andrew, thank you. See you next week. Thank you. Andrew Foxwell is our Meta Ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at b.link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at b.link slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links.

You can find those links at the bottom of our show notes and you can watch the full unedited interview. There is a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Rival IQ has published its latest social media benchmarks report. This pulls data from 5 million posts and more than 10 billion engagement points like reactions, comments, and favorites across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X. Let's start with Facebook,

which shows a depressing median engagement rate of 0.063%, which is miserable, of course, but actually is a small increase from last year's numbers. That number is, of course, across all industries. The only ones which had significantly better engagement were alcohol, health and beauty, and influencers. The best industry for engagement is sports teams, but even those didn't get a third of 1% of engagement. Quoting social media today, quote, that likely points to reach being a better metric to measure, as most people simply don't ever engage in social apps. Does that mean social media is less effective as a marketing tool than has been presented? Well, brand awareness and

subsequent indirect action would probably suggest it's still worth the effort. But as fewer people actually look to actively participate in social apps, preferring to only consume content instead, it may be worth realigning your KPIs around other metrics like actual sales, email signups, and so on in order to track relative performance, unquote. Over on Instagram, things are a little better. Engagement rates there are 0.43%. That is a tiny dip from last year

and about half of what it was in 2021. Every industry was around there except for sports teams, which got 1.5% engagement rate, and for some reason, higher education, which was nearly 2.5%. X, formerly Twitter, was even worse. Average engagement rate per tweet was less than 0.03%, and that is down from last year as well. And finally, TikTok, which has some good numbers, at least relative to their competitors. Median engagement rate per video was more than 2.4%, with the higher education sector again outperforming at 9.2% engagement.

TikTok's average engagement rate last year was 5.69%. That is a drop of more than half on average over the course of a year. We have a link to Rival IQ's full report in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. 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. So yeah, engagement on X is in the crapper, but a new feature might help increase your brand's reach there and perhaps buy a lot. X's owner Elon Musk this week said they're working on a change to pinned posts. Once this change is active, if you pin a post to your profile, all of your account's followers will see it.

Before we go on, of course, I feel I need to remind you that Elon is known for saying he'll do stuff, then never actually doing it. He's also promised a content moderation council that never formed. Manual verification of authentic identity when you bought a blue check mark that never happened. Not to mention telling Twitter staff he wasn't planning big layoffs, then firing 75% of the company.

But let's assume for a moment this promise is real, that you would be able to pin one post every 48 hours and every follower who reviews their feed in that time frame would have that post ready for them to see. Quoting social media today, quote, which inadvertently also highlights a current issue that many are having on X in that their posts are simply never going to be seen by even those who have specifically chosen to follow their account, which many would assume would be the default, given that people have explicitly signaled their interest in said content. But algorithmic amplification means that X, like all social platforms,

is able to show users the most engaging updates in stream in order to maximize engagement. And maybe within that, some of your boring posts simply didn't fit the bill, unquote. It does seem like this pinned posts boost is being planned for all accounts, not just those paying for the checkmark. Again, quoting social media today, quote,

The risk for X here is that too many people could choose to pin posts on any given day. And if it has to then ensure that all of the followers of each of these profiles get shown all of those posts, there could suddenly be a lot of competition for space in the main feed. X will also lose a level of quality control, as it won't be able to show only those posts that its algorithm recommends. Also, you can bet that some users are going to complain when their post reach doesn't match their follower count, and on balance, when you factor in all these elements, I don't really understand why X is doing this at all.

If I had to guess, I would predict creator backlash about two weeks after this is rolled out, then X will roll it back. Unquote. Podcast advertising is back in a growth phase. Big names in the space, including iHeartMedia, Spotify, SiriusXM, and Acast, reported an uptick in their revenues during the last quarter of 2023. This trend signals an improving ad market as we step into 2024, with companies like Spotify and Acast eyeing profitability for their podcast ventures for the first time.

iHeartMedia's podcast revenue grew 17% from the previous year. This growth, attributed to rising advertiser demand, now represents 12 percent of iHeart's overall revenue. Acast reported a 9 percent year-over-year growth in the last Q4, with its North American market leading the charge. SiriusXM also experienced a boost in its podcasting revenue, with a notable 22 percent increase in the same period. But the sector faced big challenges, like the impact of Apple's iOS 17 update, which changed the way its podcast app downloads episodes. Despite these hurdles, most podcast companies say they remain positive about the future, with iCart, Media, and Acast projecting continued revenue growth. More regulatory problems for Google, which finds itself under increasing scrutiny. After Europe slapped a hefty $2.1 billion lawsuit on the company, Canadian regulators are now widening their investigation into the tech giant's advertising practices. They say Google

might be misusing its dominant market position to sideline competitors. The Canadian Competition Bureau yesterday secured a court order for Google to hand over records concerning its ad business. This, part of a broader four-year inquiry into whether Google has been playing fair in the advertising arena. The focus is on whether Google has been disadvantaging rivals or engaging in predatory pricing where they might set prices so low that competitors can't afford to keep up. That's a bit of a side note here. I'm not sure I know many media buyers who would say that Google's CPCs are exactly inexpensive, but whatever.

Google, for its part, defends its ad business, claiming it supports millions of websites to thrive. As this investigation unfolds in Canada, Google also braces for a major lawsuit in the US set for September, accused of monopolizing digital ad technologies. TikTok has released a new Trends Digest series to help brands learn what's going viral there. And they're providing some clarity around what trends you should chase and which you shouldn't.

Quoting the company, quote, there's a difference between what's trending now and being on trend. We refer to these as trend moments versus trend signals. Numerous small trend moments make up a larger trend signal. Focusing on trend moments can be a challenge as keeping up with trending content requires a high level of reactivity. On the other hand, trend signals represent a more accessible entry point for brands to stay on trend by building a solid foundation and understanding of trending content. Unquote. Two trends that they did highlight. First is called Maddie Knew.

This is based on a trending sound where the voice says, Maddie knew who she was from a very early age. And then a slide reveal lets users showcase a specific facet of their personality, sometimes saying how they knew they were gay all along or were an introvert since childhood and so on. Then there's the Of Course trend, which sounds a bit like this. We're co-parents. Of course I still pay for her nails. We're're co-parents of course i still bring up the past of him cheating on me we're co-parents of course i still get jealous we're co-parents of course people assume we're together when we're out in public we're co-parents of course i'm convinced we're getting back together

eventually they're not all that depressing i actually find these a little bit irritating with the repetition but whatever tiktok says it will report on what's trending every month and we will try to bring those to you here as well. You can read the full TikTok trend digest in our email newsletter, which again, you can find by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. If you are trying to reach marketing decision makers, consider an ad on this podcast or our newsletter. Some ad slots are just seven bucks. Tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads. That will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.

Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Ad coordination by Red Circle and Beehive. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I will see you on Monday.