Today in Digital Marketing - Why Livestreaming Must Be In Your Marketing Plan Today

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Instagram adds affiliate marketing. WordPress's next version may help your SEO. The world is going live. Are your marketing campaigns ready? And details on our first ever Twitter space. It's Tuesday, June 8th, 2021. Happy Social Workers Day, Russia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Lots to get to today. We start with a big announcement this afternoon from Instagram.

Starting point is 00:00:51 In the coming months, they say they will begin testing an in-app affiliate tool that will let people get an affiliate link from a product they find on Instagram and earn commissions for any purchases they get from that link. To make this perfectly clear, this all happens inside the Instagram mobile app. The affiliate link, the purchase, the whole thing. Quoting the company, when people come across an affiliate post from a creator featuring a tagged product, they will see eligible for commission at the top of the post. So it's clear that their purchases help support that creator.

Starting point is 00:01:25 This will make it easier for people to shop directly from the creators they love and give brands a new way to partner with and reward creators who share their products. Affiliate will test with a small group of U.S.-based creators and businesses and will expand to more partners in the future. Also announced, they're making it easier to add an existing shop or open a new shop on an Instagram profile. And for creators who already have their own product lines, they can now link their shop to their personal profile in addition to their business profile. That is apparently available now.

Starting point is 00:02:01 So that big affiliate announcement came today as Instagram kicked off its first ever Creator Week event, a live stream that aims to help creators and brands perform better on the platform. They call it a week, but it should more accurately be called Creator Three Day Period. Although, you know, it doesn't have the same ring to it. They also released a companion to the event, the second issue of their Instagram Insider online magazine. It comes with some interviews with creators, expert tips, and some advice on the algorithms. Nothing you don't already know. The feed favors recent content, so be active on the platform, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Not exactly strategy-defining stuff, said socialmediatoday.com, quote, but it is interesting info to have, and in addition to the questions and answers provided in the first edition of the magazine, it does help to paint a broader picture of how it all works, unquote. The Creator Week sessions can be found as live broadcasts on the Creators account, that's at Creators, and you'll also be able to find replays there, as well as the algorithm busting session, which happened this morning. To find it again, go to Creators, tap their bio, then tap the IGTV icon under their Stories Highlights circles. A big change coming next month for one of the world's biggest web platforms.

Starting point is 00:03:15 WordPress said yesterday it plans to launch its version at the end of July and finally support the WebP image format. WebP is relatively new. It's intended to provide high quality with smaller file sizes than PNGs and even JPEGs. Small size means faster load time, means maybe higher ranking in Google. WebP actually is a Google invention, which they open sourced 11 years ago. It's only been in the last year or two, though, when people and browsers started using them. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, but it does warn there may be some web hosting servers that will need to upgrade their backend to take full advantage of it. There'll be a section in the new WordPress version telling you if your server doesn't support it, so you won't have to guess. If you want to use WebP today, there are plugins that can convert images to that

Starting point is 00:04:03 format, but bear in mind that if your image URL changes, as it would with a new extension, it could have implications for your image SEO. The new version of WordPress, which will be 5.8, will let you convert to WebP as well whenever you upload an image

Starting point is 00:04:19 in a different format. YouTube keeps building its TikTok clone, which it calls Shorts. They've made the format available for a couple of months now in some countries. And now they are rolling out the Shorts camera, that's the set of editing tools, to more users.

Starting point is 00:04:37 This expansion starts today, should reach everyone by the end of the month. And perhaps this is more important, they're also beefing up their music library, allowing Shorts creators to use the much broader YouTube music library, which is where TikTok has seen significant success, says socialmediatoday.com, quote,

Starting point is 00:04:54 with the platform also seeking to solidify its own links with the music industry as it becomes a bigger consideration for music publishers around the world. Indeed, TikTok has already proven its capacity to fuel music buying behavior. Fleetwood Mac's Dreams, for example, which was originally released in 1977, re-entered the Billboard Top 100 last year on the back of the viral clip of a skater cruising down the street. YouTube, which recently reported that it generated over $4 billion for the music industry last year, is keen to tap into that same shift, and the expansion of Shorts will help lean into this behavior

Starting point is 00:05:30 and boost usage of the option, which YouTube clearly sees significant potential in moving forward. YouTube recently reported daily views of Shorts has gone from 3.5 billion at the end of last year to 6.5 billion, a slightly disingenuous number since they control distribution of the format. So, you know, if they want to see those numbers up, they just make the videos more prominent in the feed. Still, though, it's clear the format is here to stay. You know what may not be here to stay? Clubhouse. John Brandon, writing in Forbes this week, detailed his experience recently with the audio app.

Starting point is 00:06:09 Quote, I held a Clubhouse chat recently inviting people to chat about productivity. In the app, I started inviting people left and right. A few months ago, when I was testing Clubhouse and writing about it more, this would lead to dozens of people joining in on the conversations,

Starting point is 00:06:21 sometimes hundreds. But now, I noticed a few users I could always rely on to join a chat were not even members anymore. When I posted about the Clubhouse room on my Twitter feed, all I could hear were crickets. Clubhouse really failed to do anything new and different these last few months. You still can't record a chat. They only recently added Android access.

Starting point is 00:06:42 The invite system starts penalizing you right away if you invite too many people, so then you sit helplessly with one or two people waiting for something to happen. In my room, it felt like the air had been sucked out through a vacuum. A visitor popped in, only to leave almost immediately, not waiting long enough to even see what we were talking about. It felt like this massive experiment in doing something novel by hosting an interactive podcast has suddenly collapsed into a heap. Unquote. Yeah, the download numbers on Clubhouse are not looking great, and everyone from Facebook to LinkedIn to Spotify to Discord are creating Clubhouse clones.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Twitter's clone is up and running. Feels like something that's been around for years, even though it's only a month or two old. And on that note, we are hosting our first ever Twitter Space later in the week. Details on that later in the episode. 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. We turn from live audio to live shopping, where the massive discount store Alibaba is now letting its cloud hosting customers

Starting point is 00:08:06 conduct commerce-enabled live streams, all part of their effort to get a wedge in against Amazon. Quoting Inside.com, live stream shopping, which typically involves a host talking about products customers can purchase directly from the live broadcast, has exploded in popularity within China, accounting for $125 billion in sales in 2020.

Starting point is 00:08:26 According to Alex Partners, two-thirds of Chinese consumers have purchased products via live stream in the past year. U.S. brands like the shoe company Allbirds and even American pop star Taylor Swift have participated in Alibaba's own massive livestream event, Singles Day. Alibaba made a record $74.1 billion in revenue last year on Singles Day. Unquote. Yeah, livestream shopping is huge in China. The U.S. and other nations way, way, way behind. Amazon's been trying to catch up,

Starting point is 00:09:08 having launched their own livestream shopping product, Amazon Live, in 2019. Well, with live streaming becoming a huge part of our digital marketing world, Instagram, too, wants a piece of that action. In the past, Instagram, like its parent company, Facebook, like all the social platforms, actually, reward people for trying its new things out by giving them increased reach. It's long been known that whenever Facebook rolls out a new post type or a feature, you get an algorithmic boost just by using it. Remember when Zuckerberg was infatuated with Facebook Live a couple of years ago?

Starting point is 00:09:35 And for a few glorious weeks, your brand's live broadcast would show up super prominent in the Facebook feed? Now, Instagram wants to reward its creators' use of live streaming. And how do they plan to reward them? Hard cash, baby. Instagram Live uses a currency called badges and stars that let their viewers tip them. Starting this week, creators are eligible to earn an extra payout when they meet certain milestones while using badges in Live,

Starting point is 00:10:03 such as going live with another account. They're also adding the ability for supporters to purchase multiple badges during an Instagram livestream, testing letting people send monetized stars during recorded content, and the whole star's currency will be added to nine new markets. There's not really a direct digital marketing connection here, since these are more for individual influencers than brands, but it does show how seriously Instagram, too, is taking the livestreaming space. It's not really a direct digital marketing connection here, since these are more for individual influencers than brands.

Starting point is 00:10:29 But it does show how seriously Instagram, too, is taking the live streaming space. Yesterday, we reported on two big Apple announcements that will affect our work as digital marketers. The forthcoming blocking of tracking pixels in its mail app and a place for users to see exactly what your brand's app is doing on their phone. I did miss one thing, though, and that's that Apple is trying to get into Zoom's space. They announced yesterday they'll make their FaceTime video chat option available on Android devices

Starting point is 00:10:58 and Windows machines through a new web interface. More interestingly, you'll be able to schedule FaceTime sessions, and you'll get a link that people can click to join. There'll be background blurring, voice isolation, a new grid view. They didn't call out a specific release date for this, but it does seem likely to launch the same time iOS 15 does, sometime in the late fall.

Starting point is 00:11:22 And finally, Google appears to be testing a new commerce-enabled carousel in the search results. It's titled Trending Searches and shows images based on a user's search that perhaps is trending upwards in search volume. Alright, about that Twitter space. So it will be this Friday at 3 p.m. Pacific. That's 6 p.m. Eastern and 11 at night in London. Sorry about that. The topic will be what iOS 14.5 is doing to all of our ad campaigns. I expect to have some special guest experts with me. The only way to find it is to follow my Twitter account, which is at Todd Maffin. You'll find a link in today's episode notes. Again, that's this Friday at 3 p.m. Pacific.

Starting point is 00:12:05 That's 6 p.m. Eastern. That's 11 p.m. London time. This will be my first ever space. So if I screw it up, even though it's not his product, we'll all blame Zuckerberg. Talk to you tomorrow. Dear light sun, you're coming down now Come on, shine a little light on me

Starting point is 00:12:25 I am getting up The sun is coming down Come on shine A little light on me Dear light sun Coming down now Come on shine A little light on me

Starting point is 00:12:40 I am getting up The sun is coming down Come on shine A little light on me

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Livestreaming Must Be In Your Marketing Plan Today

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