Are Carousel Ads Broken?

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• Are Carousel Ads Broken?
• Evolving Consumer Expectations on Social Media
• Snapchat Adds New Tools for Spotlight
• Google Adds New Options for Business Profiles
• Twitter Will Now Let Spaces Hosts Download an Audio File of Their Space
• HBO's Email Blast Did Not Go Well

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

FACEBOOK ADS: Are Carousel Ads Broken?

If you're running Carousel Ads in Instagram Stories, you should probably stop using them immediately.

Earlier this morning, a member of our Slack community reported that one of her clients' ads started breaking a couple of weeks back — specifically, Instagram would only show the first image of the carousel. She says Facebook has been investigating this for two weeks now, with no conclusive answer nor any refund of those broken ads.

Facebook, of course, hasn't said anything publicly about this. If only they had access to some kind of website where they could post these things. Actually, to be fair, they do. Last year, Facebook grudgingly put up an ads status page that reports when the platform is having problems. But it's never been particularly reliable.

Today, for instance, it's got some vague note about "an issue that may be impacting ad delivery across Instagram," but that's only been there for the last four days. This issue, apparently, has been going for weeks now. And also, what issue, exactly, Facebook?! Would it kill you to provide some details?

Anyway, all that to say — if you're running carousels inside Stories, you may want to pause them for the time being.

Evolving Consumer Expectations on Social Media

Fast response. That's the very top-level summary of new research into what consumers expect most from brands on social media.

The study, by Sprout Social, polled 1,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers and the result is their latest 'Social Index' report, which looks at trends in social media marketing, and where brands might be falling short in their use of social.

When asked what action a brand can take to get consumers to buy from them over a competitor, the top answer was "Respond to customer service questions in a timely manner." That was more important for older consumers than younger ones. In fact, when you pull out the 18-23-year-olds, that's actually in second place. Number one for them is "Demonstrate an understanding of what I want and need."

Interestingly, when asked how important engaging with them on social media was, almost all age groups put that at the bottom of the top 5.

Again, it was those pesky youngun's who messed up the data... they ranked social engagement a bit higher, and put "Create educational content about your product or service" at the bottom.

Snapchat Adds New Tools for Spotlight

Snapchat has enabled some developer tools to let brands integrate their own mini-apps into Spotlight clips. Spotlight, of course, being Snapchat's answer to TikTok.

This means if you have a mobile app, you can add this code library that will let people create a short video inside your app, then automatically drop it into their Snapchat Spotlight feed. Think of this similar to how the design tool Canva plugs into a lot of social media tools like Agorapulse these days.

Once in Spotlight, there'll be a little backlink to the brand app that created it originally, and users will be able to tap it to see other videos that came from that app.

If you want to see how this works, it's now in a bunch of apps like Lightricks, Splice, Powder, and Piñata Farms.

Google My Business Adds New Options for Business Profiles

Some improvements to Google My Business profiles — the company today releasing new services listings, booking options, and an easier way to get your product catalogue uploaded to their Shopping platform.

The booking stuff is interesting if you take appointments — you can now enable online bookings direct from Google Search. You first have to have an account with some kind of appointment-booking or reservation platform, but once you hook that up, users can book right from your main Google listing.

Restaurants can now add specific menu items to their Business Profile. The product catalogue improvement actually comes from integration with their Pointy tool, which — among other things — can pull inventory status from your in-store barcode scanners. If you're in the U.S., you should be able to sign up for Pointy now.

The easy way to get to your Google business profile is to be logged in with the Google account associated with your business, then just type ‘my business’ into Google Search.

Twitter Will Now Let Spaces Hosts Download an Audio File of Their Space

Twitter now lets you download the audio from a Spaces call (Call? Meeting? Show? What are we calling these things now?). This might be a quick way to get a podcast off the ground, or perhaps supplement your podcast with bonus content.

It's not the easiest process to download, as it's bundled into the account-wide Data Download section that Twitter offers. Right now, you have to download everything from your account, then you'll find the Spaces audio inside that ZIP file in a folder called Data.

One warning — that audio is deleted after 30 days, so make sure you grab it while you can.

They also said more is coming, including Space scheduling, a new Spaces tab in the mobile app, and a way to listen in on Desktop.

HBO's Email Blast Did Not Go Well

And finally, in case you had a bad week, at least be grateful you're not whoever is behind the keyboard at HBO Max.

Yesterday, someone there hit Send on an email blast with the subject line: "Integration Test Email #1" and the text read "This template is used by integration tests only."

I found out about this through my weather app, actually, which is called Carrot and has a pretty wicked sense of humour. The app had that entire text instead of my actual local forecast.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.