Today in Digital Marketing - Your Instagram Account Has (Not) Been Compromised

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

On today’s show: Manually posting Stories from your smartphone might be a thing of the past soon Your brand’s Instagram account has been compromised! Only, it probably hasn’t. The surprising thing that happens when you suddenly cut your post frequency by half And a new placement for YouTube is coming. And you’re going to hate it! 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 is Wednesday, September 18th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, manually posting stories from your smartphone might be a thing of the past soon. Hey, your brand's Instagram account has been compromised. Only, it probably hasn't. The surprising thing that happens when you suddenly cut your post frequency by half and a new placement for YouTube is coming, and you're going to hate it. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Think twice before checking the Facebook News feed as your next campaign's placement. A new study by Social Bakers says that real estate is far too saturated,

with more than 60% of media spend going to the Facebook feed. Heavy competition, of course, means higher auction rates. Only 20% of spending goes to the Instagram feed, and about 10% is spread out among Instagram stories, Facebook suggested video, and Facebook in-stream video, all places where you'll probably get much more reach for the same budget. But at the expense, perhaps, of clicks or conversions. The study also found that

the click-through rate for ads dropped from 1.6% at the start of 2019 to its current rate of only 1.1%. As for what placement gets the most organic engagement? The answer at the end of today's episode. Don't worry if you've been getting some very scary warning messages in your Instagram app. Messages that say you've shared your password with a service to help you get more likes or followers. I know you haven't. You never would. Business Insider this morning reports some users of Buffer, Hootsuite, and Planoly have been getting these messages, which is weird since all three are official Facebook marketing partners, so it's probably a bug. I mean, yesterday bugs were all over Facebook.

Pages that said, sorry, this content isn't available now. Mari Smith said that message showed up on almost all the pages she admins, and on the Insights tab, all she got yesterday was a blank page. So, it's not just you. More Instagram news. I know it looks great on the marketing plan. We'll post twice a day on our Instagram account. And then, someone has to do it. Come up with 60 pieces of correctly cropped creatives a month. What happens if you cut your Instagram frequency in half? That's what Agorapulse's social media lab did. They tested

against five Instagram accounts, each one a real brand account in different industries with lots of real followers. They went down from two posts a day to one post a day. And the results? Reducing Instagram posting frequency by 50% had no impact on engagement or reach metrics. This, of course, flies in the face of conventional wisdom. They quote Neil Patel saying in the past, quote, If you make a habit posting several times a day and then transition to only a few times a week, you will start to lose followers and generate less engagement per post. This means the best posting frequency for Instagram is the posting frequency

that you can consistently maintain for the rest of your natural life, unquote. It seems not true anymore. Speaking of posting on Instagram, it is the bane of every content manager's day when it's time to post that story to your brand's Instagram account. You've got to email the video file to yourself, open it on your smartphone, manually post it in the Instagram app. Well, that might be coming to an end soon. Buffer says it's building out some kind of tool to, quote, plan and schedule stories for Instagram, unquote. What's not clear is if this will just end up being a notification, like the way all Instagram posts had to be, or if they're working with Instagram on some kind of API that will allow stories to automatically post. Either way, definitely an improvement. And one final bit of Instagram news today. They have updated their naughty list.

Quoting the Evening Standard, Instagram will be, quote, removing all posts that make a miraculous claim about certain diet or weight loss products and is linked to a commercial offer like a discount code. Instagram will also be restricting posts for users under 18 years old that promote the use of certain weight loss products or cosmetic procedures and that have an incentive to buy or includes a price. Sorry, Kardashians. A couple of new placements out there this week. There's a new one for YouTube ads.

And if you watch YouTube on your TV or Xbox on a regular basis, you are going to hate it. It's called the masthead. It basically takes up the top two-thirds of the screen, very much like how Netflix's featured show gets a huge placement at the top. It's in beta right now. You will need to talk to an ad rep to get it going as it's not in the self-service engine and it will be priced on a CPM basis. And Yelp has a new placement. It's called Yelp Connect, quoting WeAreSM.com.

Restaurants can publish information like what's new on their menus, specials, and even upcoming events. Users who view a business page will be able to see these updates, allowing them to stay up to date with their favorite restaurant, unquote. And weirdly, this is not a dynamically priced product like, say, ad auctions on every other platform. No, this is a flat fee of $199 US per month. Updates will show up on Yelp's home screen as well and in weekly emails to people who have engaged with the restaurant in the past. Some not-so-encouraging news for brands that are trying to reach Gen Z and millennials on social media. This year's annual Edison research

study shows usage of social media among Americans aged 12 to 35 is down, and in some cases, really down. Facebook usage among this age group dropped from 79% in 2017 to 62% this year. Twitter dropped from 36% to 29. Pinterest from 36% down to 31%. LinkedIn down from 23% to 21%. Snapchat was stable at 62% for the last two years, didn't grow or decline. The only big channel that was up, not surprisingly, Instagram. But even then, not by much, only up 2% in the last two years to 66%. And in case you're curious about WhatsApp, Edison only started tracking them this year,

so far their usage rate is about 23% among that group. So the top three channels to reach Gen Z, sorry, that's Gen Z for you Americans, and millennials, in order, Instagram, Facebook, yep, they're still in there, and Snapchat. But if they're not on social as much, where are they first discovering new brands? A study paid for by Snapchat of 800 13 to 22 year olds released just today found that 18% of them found out while they were in retail stores. That is about the same as hearing about it online. Recommendations from family and friends are still big at 27%,

and 35% of 13 to 22-year-olds go first to a company's website, and many check the company's About Us page first to see if that brand's origin story lines up with their personal morals. You do have an origin story on your website, right? Ever wanted to know if your competitors are running Facebook ads? And if they are, what copy they're using? And what the image looks like? And how much they're spending on the ads?

And how many impressions they got? copy they're using and what the image looks like and how much they're spending on the ads and how many impressions they got? Just a reminder, Facebook will show all of that to you for free anytime you want. I'm not kidding. And the magic URL is facebook.com slash ads slash library. You're welcome. And finally, I'd like to apologize to Sprout Social. Yesterday at my agency, we posted something on one of our shopping center clients' channels that read, post a photo of your pet and we'll guess its name. The results were, as you can imagine, massively overwhelming

And we crashed Sprout Social I mean, I don't think we crashed their whole platform Sprout Social is actually pretty stable But our interface crashed a few times Apparently from the volume of incoming comments on that post I've said it once, I'll say it again Babies and puppies, friends Babies and puppies.

Oh, and earlier I teased what placement gets the most organic engagements. Social Baker's study says Instagram carousel. That's the block of images that you swipe right to see more. Apparently that's at the top of the organic engagements list, averaging more than 120 per post. Marketers only use Instagram carousel about 17% of the time. Okay, on the show tomorrow, have you ever been trying to boost a Facebook post and it says your ad won't be shown because your audience is too specific? Is it true? Will it really not be shown? I have been testing this for the last three months, and I'll have the surprising answer tomorrow. That's what you missed today in digital marketing

brought to you by engageq.com. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.