HomeNews
Facebook Removes the Like Button. (Wait, What?!)
Facebook Removes the Like Button. (Wait, What?!)
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
- Facebook bids goodbye to the Like button on Facebook brand pages
- This digital marketing tactic killed it this holiday season, and you’ll never guess which one it was
- The first salvos fired in the newest battle between privacy advocates and digital advertisers, this time: It’s the Podcast industry under fire.Below is the transcription from this episode
It’s Wednesday, January 6th, 2021.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, today in digital marketing.
Pausing Messages
It doesn’t happen often, but it happened today — social media managers at brands and agencies had to decide if they would pause all content. This, because of the dramatic developments in the U.S. — rioting on Capitol Hill.
One brand’s tweet — this from the social media platform Buffer: “We are sad and troubled by the events unfolding at the U.S. Capitol right now. In light of this situation, we’re pausing our scheduled social posts.”
Here at my agency, we have a workflow just for when events like this happen — does it rise to the level of pausing our client’s contents. And those decisions are often made client-by-client.
Even if your brand decided you didn’t need to pause content, it’s worth checking with your third-party social media tool to see how to do this when you need to. Many, like Buffer and Sprout Social, have a kind of Kill Switch that just stops everything in its tracks. Other platforms you might need to delete scheduled content instead of just pausing it.
It’s worth learning how that works, and hope you’ll never need it.
Venture capitalist Chris Sacca blamed social media for the political chaos, tweeting this afternoon “You’ve got blood on your hands, Jack and Zuck. (those are the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook, respectively) For four years you’ve rationalized this terror. Inciting violent treason is not a free speech exercise. If you work at those companies, it’s on you too. Shut it down.”
New Facebook Page Design
Facebook, ever the corporate paragon of excellent design choices, has changed the layout of some brands’ Facebook pages. Or, as they call it, “Facebook Page experiences.”
First, this only applies to a few categories of brands — mostly public figures, content creators, that sort of thing.
What’s New?
- A redesigned layout that Facebook says should make it easier to engage with fans.
- Better navigation between personal profiles and Pages
- There’s a new Q&A format
- And some updated task-based admin controls
But what’s most interesting is this, from the company:
“We are removing Likes and focusing on Followers to simplify the way people connect with their favorite Pages. Unlike Likes, Followers of a Page represent the people who can receive updates from Pages, which helps give public figures a stronger indication of their fan base.”
Look, I shit on Facebook a lot because (a) they have it coming, and (b) I’m immature and it’s a lot of fun. But on this point, I think they’re right.
Here at MY agency, we’ve used Followers as the primary community metric for more than a year now, since that’s a much more accurate count of who could potentially see your organic content.
Another welcome change: In this new Page form, you’ll be able to grant varying levels of access to manage specific tasks including Insights, Ads, Content, and Community Activity & Messages. This expands on the current roles list.
Let’s just hope they’ve made these changes on the Business Manager side of things too.
And one potential opportunity here — they say if you have a verified Page, and you comment as your page on another Page’s post, your comment may appear higher in the comments section, and has a better chance of surfacing in the News Feed.
Facebook adds, somewhat ominously: “This is just the beginning.”
Email Rules
One thing we digital marketers tend to fall for - are shiny new things. Remember Messenger Bots? Zuckerberg was like “All commerce will be done by bots in the future,” and we jumped all over it. We signed up for the bot platforms, we tried it out, we were underwhelmed, and I’d bet most of us have left it behind.
If it’s not bots, it’s Facebook Lives. Or IGTV.
And sure, sometimes in the early days, these tools offered ridiculously cheap CPMs. I mean, I remember when Facebook was the new kid on the block, you could get clicks for like 10¢ each.
So while we chase the latest cool thing, some new numbers are reminding us that the old-school marketing methods are still quietly killing it.
Take e-mail marketing. Ain’t nothin’ sexy about THAT these days, but new research from LiveIntent shows that Black Friday email campaigns done on their platform did well this year. Like, really well.
Quoting MarketingDive: “Retailers experienced a 32% jump in conversions from their email ads on Black Friday as homebound shoppers responded to digital promotions. Advertisers in the style and fashion categories experienced the highest conversions on LiveIntent's platform, while clickthrough rates were double the average. Shopping newsletters boosted impressions by 10 times above the average.”
MarketingDive also noted that there was a 22% increase in digital ad spend. So while that certainly increased the number of impressions, it wouldn’t have necessarily changed the ratio metrics, like Conversion Rate and Clickthrough Rate.
Digital ad spending excluding political ads was forecast to rise 5.4% to $110.1 billion last year, and comprise more than half of total ad spending for the first time.
Podcasts on Blocklists Now
The programmatic ad industry has been through a lot in the last few years. And the technology’s adaptation to podcast marketing has been interesting to watch.
Podcasts, like this one, use programmatic ads — and the implementation’s pretty clever. Your app asks a server for an MP3 file, the server checks some things about you, then packages up the show AND some ads that are targeted to you, and sends you what is essentially a one-off. A custom MP3 of the podcast episode, designed just for you. Well, just for your targetable information.
But now, that very targeting technology is under fire. And some Internet block lists have added one big podcast hosting provider to their lists. That provider — Megaphone.
Let’s back up a little. There are blocklists available for all sorts of things. For instance, you can download one of many of these to drop into your Facebook ad account and Facebook will make sure your brand’s ads don’t appear on the web sites on that list. Blocklists have gotten smarter over time. When before they were just a CSV file you’d have to update every so often, nowadays they’re self-updating with their own APIs and tiered subscriptions.
So what’s happening with Megaphone?
Well, some of these blocklist providers think Megaphone’s ad insertion system is just too aggressive. While they have a way on their web site to opt-out of targeting, it’s not clear if that carries over to podcast players too. Also, their privacy policy admits they’ll be sharing listener data with ad tech companies like Neilsen. And, of course, they’ll have to if they want to target this way.
So whether it was that, or the fact that it’s now a Spotify company, a number of major blocklist providers are blocking downloads from Megaphone.
It seems this is the first such blocking of an entire podcast hosting platform.
And this just isn’t affecting a small handful of shows, thousands of podcasts are there. Some of the big ones. All of the shows on the Gimlet network. All of Slate’s shows.
All unplayable if you use a browser or plugin that has a blocklist.
The implicit threat — back down on the targeting, or we’ll make sure you lose a tonne of listeners. One blogger asked Megaphone if they’d be changing MTM, and the answer: Nope.
That blogger at LimeLink asked rhetorically: “What if you get on ALL blocklists? Will you consider it then? What if podcast players decide to add these blocklists? What if certain countries start using these blocklists at their borders? At what point do you consider that your dynamic ad targeting system is not good for listeners or podcasters and reformat how it works?”
So, I guess a standoff. And no indication that these blocklist providers will stop at Megaphone. There are lots of other hosting providers that use similar systems.
Who’s got the bigger gun here?
And finally, Snapchat has switched up its partner program. You used to either be an Ad Partner or a Creative Partner. Looks like they’ve removed the Creative tier and rollered them into the base tier. There’s also a Certified Partner level. Anyway, lots to check up with, if your brand or agency is a Snapchat marketing partner.
So ran across this great video on Twitter today. It’s was titled something like “every podcast saying nothing for 20 minutes.”
And it was a perfect sendup of why I usually don’t like longform interview podcasts.
CLIP
It goes on and on… it’s pretty funny.
So that’s it — you may have noticed I’ve stopped the pre-roll and mid-roll ads. I hate ads as much as you do, so I’ll leave a slot at post-roll, but I’ve set a pretty high CPM, so you may not even hear much in there.
If you support this decision of fewer ads in this show, and you like that I don’t do longform interviews that say nothing, you can pay it back to me with a 5-star review. I can make this SO QUICK for you. Just swipe over to the episode notes and you’ll see a one-tap link that will take you directly to the review page of your podcast app. Or you can go to RateThisPodcast.com/today
And thanks for considering it.
Okay, see you tomorrow.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today in Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.
