Today in Digital Marketing - Would You Pay $56 to Talk to a Human at Meta?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, March 14th. Today, Meta is thinking of beefing up its paid checkmark program, but will it ever be worth it for marketers? Amazon will set your products up in one click, where the money would go if TikTok disappeared from America, and exploiting Gap Topics on the video apps for fun and profit. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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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Starting point is 00:01:29 After Elon Musk started selling the verified blue check marks, and after the shock wore off, Meta 2 decided they wanted some of that cash. It came out with Meta Verified, which, for businesses, costs $56 US per month if you wanted both Facebook and Instagram verified. It offers a handful of mild perks, though it's pretty clear the big benefit to the monthly subscription was getting that vanity checkmark. How's that program been going? Apparently not as well as Meta had

Starting point is 00:01:57 hoped. Social Media Today estimates that less than 1% of its user base signed on, which is on par for similar programs out there like X's and Snapchat's. That might be why Meta is thinking about throwing more things into that subscription, a couple of which could be beneficial to marketers. The company is surveying some users asking what features they'd consider valuable included in that list, faster review times for ad campaigns, the ability to add up to eight links per month to your products or websites on Instagram Reels, and an actual support phone line with a real human being, though they say those people could only help with common issues, unquote. One thing not

Starting point is 00:02:40 on that list, better reach. That's a key selling point on X, where the bigger a subscription package you buy, the more distribution your posts will get. Meta initially had that as a benefit of its plan, but backed away from it before it launched. Color me skeptical. These make great bullet points on a landing page, but we've seen that promises of better support from social media platforms, even support you pay for, often doesn't pan out. Over at X, many people have said they still can't get support, even though they have the premium subscription. And sometimes verification doesn't work at all. As a test when they launched that, we tried to get our podcast's Instagram account verified, paid the money, waited a day, then got an email saying we didn't qualify,

Starting point is 00:03:26 and Meta just kept the money anyway. Also, whatever goodwill there was in the blue checkmark has been withered away. If anyone can buy it, why is it special? Quoting social media today, quote, the very act of selling checkmarks erodes their perceived value. So really, the more subscriptions that Meta sells, the less it's worth either way, unless you're factoring in the other elements. And those do have value, especially more direct access to Meta support. But I'm not sure that it's worth the ongoing investment for most with the features only offering marginal periodic value, even for brands, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Amazon continues to push AI in its merchant offerings and soon will let sellers make product pages with a single URL. Basically, you give it a link to your external product page, like on Shopify or something, and it will generate a product page on Amazon for that item. The AI will write its own description and lift images from your site. Of course, you'll want to review that text as AI has a nasty habit of just making things up, though Amazon claims that nearly 80% of users accept the auto-generated text. And if you're thinking, hey, that's going to make counterfeiting super easy, you're probably right. Amazon reminds you that that's against the rules, but didn't spell out any specific guardrails they have in place to prevent that sort of thing.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Amazon's other AI tools include photo generation for sellers and Rufus, a chatbot for shoppers, which has had its share of peculiar quirks. This new instant product page feature is rolling out now. It should be available to all sellers in the US in the coming weeks. Digiday has a great piece up today about how a potential TikTok ban would affect marketers and what would happen to TikTok itself without those lucrative American ad dollars. Quoting the Digiday piece, quote, let's say hypothetically the ban does happen and marketers are forced to activate their contingency plans. A lot of money would suddenly be up for grabs in a hotly contested ad market.

Starting point is 00:05:37 For now, it's hard to say with real confidence where that money would end up. After all, it's not like TikTok's growth has come at the expense of one corner of the market or a specific incumbent. If anything, the dollars pouring into that business have come from everywhere. So it stands to reason that the same logic would apply if money started to flow out of the company. One place that money probably won't go to

Starting point is 00:06:00 is TikTok in other markets. That's not really how marketers allocate their ad dollars. They do so at a country level, not a global one. That leaves the likes of Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, in other words, anything with short form video ads business as potential places for all that money. And there could be a lot of money up for grabs. Reports from sources like The Information, combined with analysis from media experts like Brian Weiser, suggest that TikTok may have generated around $18 billion in ad revenue last year, unquote. As for specific numbers, the piece suggests that Meta could capture about

Starting point is 00:06:37 25% of TikTok's US ad revenues in the event of a ban. Remember, that actually sounds a little low to me. And YouTube would be the second choice for media buyers. That said, for now, Digiday quoted agency executives as saying, they're not seeing any advertisers pull budget from TikTok for the time being. It is, as they say, wait and see. The whole piece is definitely worth a read. It's up at Digiday.com. It's called TikTok's Potential U.S. Bans Stir His Marketers, Spurs Contingency Planning.

Starting point is 00:07:07 And we have a link to it in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes. 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. Part of what makes TikTok a compelling platform for marketing is its engaging content,

Starting point is 00:07:50 and a lot of that has to do with how sound is used in the app. TikTok says 73% of users will stop and look at an ad because of the audio used in it. That's partly why the company is releasing a new audio feature called Sounds for Business Voice Clips. There are 18 voiceover audio templates you can use in all your TikTok videos, Thank you. They are, of course, pre-cleared in terms of rights. You can find all 18 templates in the commercial music library. From the mobile app, navigate to Add Sound, then tap Commercial Sounds, where you'll see Discover, Favorites, and Playlists. Go into Playlists to find Sounds for Business and select a track to get started. TikTok is also revealing some new analytics around what people are searching for on the app. They're calling it Creator Search Insights. And the idea is you'd be able to see what's trending and perhaps jump on board with your brand's own content. A screenshot from TikTok

Starting point is 00:08:58 promoting the new feature shows three trending topics. The first one is a search for you left a paw print shaped hole in my heart, double glaze apple fritter, and sea wash denim. The items that it comes up with are pretty generic, but luckily you can still drill down into specific topics closer to your brand's industry like sports or science. Quoting TikTok, quote, creators can see which topics are most popular based on a popularity score or the recommended topic label next to the search term. These topics have a high potential for engagement and creators can reference these labels as they shape their content strategies and chart their creative direction, unquote. Also, helpfully, you can find so-called gap topics, which are topics that are being searched for a lot, but don't have many videos coming up as search results. This is something YouTube has offered since 2022. This is currently only available in some countries.

Starting point is 00:09:55 No word on when it will roll out globally. On the show tomorrow, a new format for Reddit ads, some new sponsorship options on LinkedIn, and big changes coming to Microsoft's Ads Manager. That's on the show tomorrow. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - Would You Pay $56 to Talk to a Human at Meta?

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