The "Partner Permissions" Change Facebook Isn't Talking About

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

• AGENCIES: The Fix for Facebook's New (and Broken) 'Partner Admins' Screen
• GOOGLE: Employees Can Continue To Take Shower Breaks
• CONTENT MARKETING: If You Don't Get 38 Instagram Likes, You're Below Average
• GOOGLE: It Must Be Friday

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

AGENCIES: The Fix for Facebook's New (and Broken) 'Partner Admins' Screen

If you work at an agency or are a freelancer handling your clients' Facebook assets, you may have run up against a nasty change that's preventing some Partners from being able to reply to comments on their clients' pages.

'Partners' is Facebook's term for groups that work with a brand's assets.

Previously, this was all done through Business Manager. Your client would give you, as the Partner, certain privileges, then the partner would manage the access of their own staff.

That's still the way it's done — but Facebook has changed the names and function of some of these settings.

In a statement explaining the changes to its users, Facebook said.... Oh right, they didn't say anything about this at all. They just sort of dumped it on us.

First, the old way — those settings had two groups: "Partial Access" where you could turn on and off features like Ads, Messages, Comment Replies, and "Full Control" which essentially makes that Partner (and everyone on their team they assign to that asset) a co-admin:

Now, though, for some pages, that admin screen looks different — but only on some Pages. We have screenshotted examples in today's Premium Newsletter.

Now, those two groups are Task Access and Facebook Access. And — here's the problem — even though the Task Access setting is the one that says it will let you reply to comments (here's what it says verbatim: "Review and respond to comments, remove unwanted content, and report activity"), it's kind of a lie. Or at least a bug is preventing that from working.

I should mention this new screen now says these functions will work within Business Suite and Creator Studio — it doesn't mention third-party tools — but even Facebook's own tools don't appear to let you comment if you have any of the Task Access toggles on.

As you can probably guess, we know of this because it happened to us this week. With Task Access on our client's side and our side, we were able to onboard the Page to our third-party tools and, interestingly, we were also able to hide comments. We just couldn't reply to comments.

What is the solution? When both we and the client selected Facebook Access instead of Task Access, that seemed to solve the problem. Again, it's misleading because the Task Access screen claims that's the option that will give you commenting privs, but in our experience, it doesn't.

Also, side note, we filed support requests with our main third-party tool, our backup tool which is Agorapulse, and Facebook itself.

• Only Agorapulse answered within 12 hours and they were pretty detailed with their reply.
• Facebook took two days to get back to us — told us to clear our cache.
• The other third-party tool took more than two days and just reset the token.

Which is all to say — support matters.

GOOGLE: Employees Can Continue To Take Shower Breaks

Google is rethinking its return-to-office plans once again. Which could mean continued longer support wait times for marketers.

With concerns over the rising number of Covid-19 cases and the uncertainty of the new Omicron variant, employees will continue to work from home for the time being.

The company had intended to keep in-office work voluntary until January 10th, 2022, and then continue with a hybrid work schedule.

It’s been nearly two years of remote work for Google employees. How many of us in the last year have been on some kind of support call and heard a baby crying, a dog barking, or even being put on hold while your rep gets an Amazon delivery.

New plans about Google’s return to real life won't be unveiled until next year, with decisions about timelines being left up to local offices.

CONTENT MARKETING: If You Don't Get 38 Instagram Likes, You're Below Average

Attention social media marketers... eMarketer and Mention have provided some useful data that can help you with your Instagram content strategy.

According to eMarketer:

• Instagram's growth will slow down over the next few years.

Instagram’s future lies with millennials and Gen Z:

• The audience that is predicted to grow the most over the next five years is Gen Z, from 33.3 million to 44.3 million.

• So far this year, 29% of Instagram users purchased something via Instagram. (That's way higher than I was expecting, to be honest.)
• That number is expected to increase over the next few years — but only by one percentage point

But what of engagement? Mention collected data from over 100 million posts. The company analyzed average followers, ideal caption length, which post types lead to the most engagement, hashtag use, and the best time of day to post.

Here’s what the study found:

• When it comes to the average number of followers, home and auto pages dominate the business categories. Like, really dominate. If you look at the chart, that category is way, way ahead of second-place which is Content and Apps. And, this surprised me — third place on Instagram: Government agencies.

Content-wise, if you're still not on board the carousel or video bandwagon, it's time to make the leap:

• Carousel posts average 5 comments and 62 likes
• Video posts average 4 comments and 56 likes
• Image posts only average 3 comments and 38 likes

As for the all-important caption, the findings:

• Write shorter captions!
• People are posting longer captions on Instagram (between 101 and 1,000 characters), but not getting as much engagement.
• 21-100 character posts had a significantly higher engagement rate.

How many hashtags should you use?

• To get the best results only use 1…. or go full hashtag and use 20. There is no in-between.

And finally, the answer to one of the biggest unknowns for social media marketers…

WHAT TIME SHOULD YOU POST?

• Around dinner time. According to the study you should post early in the evening if you want to drive engagement.

Here is your regular disclaimer, though — these studies give out averages as results. Your account may indeed have radically different bests... the only way to know is to test.

GOOGLE: It Must Be Frida

Check your Google product listings to make sure you're not paying people to buy your products.

A Tweet from Zac Stafford shows Google's auto-generated promotions using old codes with discounts greater than the product value.

The Tweet displays a screenshot showing a product for $20 but with a code, it's negative -$27.95, implying that your customers will be paid $27.95 to order it.

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