Stories, Fleets, Shorts, Clips… Can’t We All Just Get Along?!

TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:

• Facebook ad campaigns stop spending with major Ad Manager bugs reported.
• Pinterest jumps on board the Stories bandwagon.
• And how one song by the Grateful Dead became the start of a revolution in audio storytelling and digital marketing.Below is the transcription from this episode

It’s Wednesday, January 20th, 2021.

Happy Birthday, Queen Mathilda of Belgium.

I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, today in digital marketing.

Broken Facebook Ads Dashboard

People on Twitter this morning reporting some big bugs with their ads manager — some campaigns not spending at all, other people report their Ads Dashboard is broken.

Independent Facebook ad consultant Andrew Foxwell says one fix that worked for him was to make sure all your ad sets attribution windows are 7-day click / 1-day view. Apparently, once you make all your ad sets have the same windows, things should work, although your campaigns will probably go back into review.

Someone on Twitter said their Facebook rep told them this is the way it’ll be moving forward. Another person said THEIR rep said, no, this isn’t permanant, this is just a bug. Once again, remember that Facebook reps are generally pretty junior and are essentially sales reps.

One interesting change in light of the forthcoming iOS 14 tracking changes is that Facebook says they are waiving all transaction fees for their native checkout on Facebook and Instagram until at least June and maybe longer.

Facebook Account Quality

In other Facebook ad news, looks like they’re rolling out an upgraded Account Quality dashboard.

This is the place you go to get a kind of quick overview of what policy violations Facebook thinks you’ve had.

It has the usuals you’d expect:

• Community Standards violations.
• Intellectual property rights violations.
• Job postings Facebook thinks are misleading or deceptive

But it also is adding a couple of violations — I’m using air quotes here — things that I don’t think until now have actually been classified as violations. Those include:

• Sharing too much content from other sources.
• And content that was too clickbaity.

One thing notably missing from the updated dashboard: Any way to get support.

Sources

Pinterest Stories

Another app has added the top-row of vertical Stories and that app is: Pinterest.

They call them Story Pins. And — side note here, hey, can we just all agree to call them Stories? You don’t need to brand the format every time. Fleets. Shorts. Clips. Come on. Let’s just pick one, okay?

Anyway, yes, very visible real estate if you’d like to get your brand’s message out there. Like Instagram, it shows stories that are available from accounts you follow.

There’s one big difference between these and other stories — these don’t disappear after 24 hours.

There are also multi-participant Stories to show content from a group of users.

Pinterest officially calls this a test, so you may or may not see it right now… but, let’s face it, this trend isn’t going way, so expect it to be part of your Pinterest content strategy very soon.

Sources

Bugs

A couple of bugs to report on today.

Hootsuite is having issues with plan upgrades, so if you’re trying to upgrade to its professional plan on an iPhone, it was bugged out and they’re working on it.

Source

And Facebook Login is experiencing higher failure rates for Android users.

Podcasting Birthday

20 years ago today — January 20th — was the Inauguration Day for U.S. president George W. Bush. On that day, an RSS feed was published to the Internet. That RSS feed — for the first time ever — contained a tag called Enclosure. That tag referenced a single song — this one: U.S. Blues by the Grateful Dead.

It was the first ever podcast.

20 years ago, today.

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