Today in Digital Marketing - You Can't Handle the PNGs

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Today: Facebook may be shutting down an important part of LINK ads LinkedIn finally joins the Live Video party And expect another placement in your Facebook ads manager — good news, especially for hyper-LOCAL brands Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's Monday, September 16th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, Facebook may be shutting down an important part of link ads. LinkedIn finally joins the live video party. And expect another placement in your Facebook ads manager. Good news, especially for hyper-local brands. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. No, it wasn't just you. A huge bug on Instagram hit the platform early this morning. Nobody could use third-party tools to post any image that was in PNG format.

This led some platforms like Sprout Social to tell its clients to consider changing all their scheduled post images to JPEG. Ouch. Looks like Facebook is going to add yet another restriction into the ad manager, this time our ability to change the headlines on links. Until now, of course, you could have made the headline said whatever you wanted. Well, the CBC discovered this, thought, hey, someone might do something bad with this, and called Facebook on it.

Facebook told them, quote, We have a system that gives publishers control over how their links appear on Facebook. We're putting additional safeguards in place by the end of this year to make sure advertisers don't misuse this tool, unquote. Now, that previous control they're talking about there was for organic posts. A few years back, anyone could change the headline and metadata of any link they posted, which, of course course led to the usual manipulation and fake news stuff. So Facebook clamped down on that, preventing people from changing the headlines on links unless they verify they own the domain they're linking to.

Then it's all good. Well, that did not apply to advertising. Until perhaps now. We'll just have to wait to see what Facebook does here, but I expect they'll extend the same restriction they have on organic over to the ad side. Facebook is expanding its Today In section from six U.S. cities to more than 6,000 cities and towns. The section is a kind of catch-all for hyper-local information, everything from community news to upcoming events, school updates, and so on. Plus, the section will now contain local page posts,

which are getting high engagement. The opportunity for us marketers is obvious. It's another place where your top-performing organic posts might show up. But more importantly for Facebook, it gives them one more placement in the ads manager. And if your brand is trying to showcase its local roots, this might be a good place to test. First there was YouTube live videos, then Facebook live, Twitter live, then Instagram live, and now guess who? LinkedIn live. Better late than never, I suppose. Not much to say here other than it exists now. Sort of.

Don't worry if you can't find it on your company's page console. It's only available for select brands during this rollout phase. And it won't be easy to set up at start. You'll need to use a streaming tool like OBS or Wirecast to make it work. It's a weird decision, frankly, as these tools are not really meant for the average worker bee. They're pretty complicated. And LinkedIn says you'll need at least 10 megabits per second upload speed. That's about three times what Facebook needs to do a Facebook Live.

Oh, and one more thing. You're not allowed to promote anything. Oh, and it has to be longer than 10 to 15 minutes. Okay. All right, LinkedIn. As a result, I expect you won't see a ton of adoption until they let brands go live using a smartphone.

Like, you know, pretty much everyone else. Spotify continues its acquisition streak, hot on the heels of buying podcast producers, Gimlet Media, and podcast platform, Anchor. Now, Spotify has bought Sound Better,

a music collaboration marketplace. The real question now is, who's going to buy Spotify? My money's on Apple. And finally, it looks like it's not coming back. Brands using third-party tools used to be able to use reactions on people's Facebook posts and comments. You know, love, wow, sad, angry, and so on.

A while back, Facebook put it into their API, and those third-party platforms rushed to add the functionality on their end. Then a couple of months ago, it just stopped working. Turns out Facebook pulled it from their API. Now comes word from Sprout Social, don't hold your breath. Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away. That's what you missed today in Digital Marketing

brought to you by EngageQ. See you tomorrow.