The One With the Boings In It
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
Google’s latest move means you probably need to install their Business app on your phone
TikTok and Instagram both test some pretty significant changes to their platforms
Has someone cracked open Spotify’s exclusive podcast feeds?
The dumpster fire that is the Facebook ads platform burns even hotter today
Below is the transcription from this episode
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020.
Happy World Computer Literacy Day.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
GMB Messaging
If your business has a profile on Google — that’s the Google My Business platform — and really, pretty much every business does… you should be aware they’re adding the ability for users to message your business directly from Maps and Search.
These will be prominent message buttons. Very visible. So, what this means for you — download their app and familiarize yourself with the GMB back-end on the web so that you’ll know where to FIND those messages.
Also, these buttons will only show up on the profiles of verified businesses. And you DO want these buttons there since those people will have very specific questions that could win or lose you business.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there’s no third-party platform that supports these GMB DMs. I might be wrong — please correct me if there IS an API for these that platforms are using. And, while we’re here… unless the reason is that there’s just not API at all, why AREN’T the third-party platforms supporting messaging from Google My Business. There’s an API for reviews. Is there not one for messages?
Quoting SocialMediaToday.com: “If you haven't claimed your Google My Business profile yet, you really should - with so much search traffic being driven by Google, it's important to ensure that you control what you can of your presence within search and maps. That'll become even more pressing in 2021, when people look to start traveling again, and 'near me' searches ramp up.”
TikTok Time Limit Increase?
There are reports out there that TikTok is testing longer video limits. Currently, the limit is 60 seconds. But some people, in an apparent test group, are seeing three-minute long limits.
This wouldn’t be the first time they’ve upped their limits. TikTok originally capped out at 15 seconds, so people started stringing a series of 15-second videos together to make a full video. Something that still happens a lot on Snapchat.
There’s a lot of potential for brands with a three-minute limit — more room for unboxing videos, or interviews with staff, or coverage of an activation you’ve done, or tutorials.
There are naysayers, of course. There is anytime a platform makes a big change like this. Remember Twitter? People thought the platform would die when they doubled the 140 character limit and, you know, Twitter’s still around doing just fine.
As for TikTok, the company hasn’t confirmed the test, but screenshots are floating around and it does make sense.
LinkedIn Sales Insights
LinkedIn is adding more beef to its platform — a new tool called 'Sales Insights' which will provide a real-time overview of key business opportunities based on your market category.
They say the goal is to give members more visibility into the size and nature of specific departments, functions, and accounts, so that you can more accurately plan your sales strategy, and point your sales teams to the right accounts.
As well, it shows who, among your employees, is connected to people at your target companies, so you can tell them to get you an introduction. I’m not convinced this is a good thing, mind you. “Hey Karen? I know you’re just an intern, but looks like your ex-boss’s secretary is connected to the VP’s nephew. Can you make us an introduction?”
Quoting SocialMediaToday: “If LinkedIn can harness these insights in effective ways, it could become an even more significant element in various business processes. LinkedIn has been very protective of its data access over the years, but now, at 722 million members, it's looking to find more ways to help business partners glean more information.”
We don’t usually get a lot of numbers out the Reddit — but, for the first time ever, the platform reported its daily active user count — 52 million daily active users in October. That’s a 44% year-over-year increase which is quite a jump!
But still quite far from the rest.
Facebook is at 1.8 billion daily actives, for instance.
But Reddit can’t be written off. That growth rate is impressive. And the limited media buying we’ve done at our agency has yielded pretty good results.
It’s still building out its ads platform, so some things aren’t there. Breakdowns aren’t particularly strong. If I recall conversion tracking could use some help.
But if you’re looking for cheap clicks and eyeballs, Reddit’s pretty good there.
Their ad revenue reached more than $100 million last year and analysts expect 2020 to end up at least 70% higher.
Instagram Live Guests
Instagram now lets you bring up to three different guests on at the same time on an Instagram Live stream. Until now, it only let you have one guest.
Don’t go looking for it in YOUR app, though, unless you’re in India — which is the only place it appears to be active.
But it looks like they’re using India as a testing ground for a global rollout, which they do from time to time. Instagram’s chief Adam Mosseri said back in March that they wanted to work on this.
Why India? Two reasons, really. First, Indians love Instagram Live — views have grown by over 60% throughout 2020. Also, if you’ll recall, the Indian government banned TikTok in the country back in June so Instagram’s obviously trying to take advantage of that gap. At the time of the ban, TikTok apparently had more than 200 million users — in India alone.
Scrape Spotify Exclusive Podcast RSSes
I give this web site about a week before it gets shut down by a cease-and-desist.
You know how Spotify has bought up a bunch of podcasts and made them exclusive to their platform? They spent $100 million on Joe Rogan. $340 million on the Gimlet network of shows. And while Gimlets shows aren’t all exclusive, Joe Rogan’s is now as of this week.
Except — if you know the address of this secret web site.
Some guy built it. It’s called Spotifeed. You copy and paste the Spotify URL of the exclusive show into it, and it will spit out a perfectly good RSS feed that you can take to your podcast app of choice.
Yes, Spotifeed. Complete with the Spotify logo. So, yeah, it probably won’t be around long.
Bugs and Upgrades
A couple of bugs out there affecting platforms you might use.
I know this will shock you, but Facebook’s ads platform continues to disappoint. I’m seeing reports today of everything from pixels saying no events are being served, to the inability to put custom audiences into your ad sets… ads that were turned on suddenly turned off on their own… people getting that “You’re doing too many things so we’ve disabled your account for a bit” error. Even my own Facebook business account demanded I change to a different business manager — and popped up a window that — I guess was supposed to list all the options — but was literally blank. No options. No button. But apparently I was still expected to interact with it.
Good times. Good times.
Hootsuite is also having problems today — with their Amplify product. Specifically it sounds like welcome emails are broken, and adding and removing users is broken. Making changes to your Amplify profile might be glitched too. They know about it and are working on it.
Sprout Social this morning reported problems replying to Facebook Private messages. They too are working on that.
One nice ADDITION to Sprout’s platform: The Photo size limit in the Asset Library has increased. You can now add photos up to 20MB in the Library.
And Twitter has added the ability to use physical security keys as a two-factor authentication method.
That’s it for today, talk to you tomorrow.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.