Hey everyone, Welcome to this week’s episode of This Week in Marketing. I’m your host Sajid Islam Today we’ll be covering all the notable news & updates in the Digital Marketing Space from the Week of May 11th, 2020.
- First, we begin with a news update that we have received from our friend Curt Maly, at Black Box Social Media, LLC. Starting on Monday, May 19, 2020, in an effort to increase security, Facebook will begin requiring the use of two-factor authentication to access Business Manager.
In this time of increased online activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, they continue to see instances where advertisers’ personal accounts have been compromised, allowing bad actors to gain access to Business Manager and run false or misleading ads.
This requirement applies at the individual level – each person associated with your Business Manager will need to sign up for two-factor authentication to access the Business Manager.
If a person does not sign up for two-factor authentication, they will not be able to access the Business Manager.
Signing up with a 2-factor authentication can be tedious, so Facebook has created a guide (PDF attached) that walks through each step in setting-up 2-fac via text and third-party apps for both Classic Facebook & New Facebook.
If there is someone who no longer needs to be in the business manager, feel free to remove them so they don’t need to go through this process!
You’ll find a link to the Facebook pdf guide on our show’s home page.
https://thebelt.live/2-Factor-FB-Steps 2. As you may know that Customer Feedback about Low-quality Purchase Experiences Can Impact your Ad Performance and Ability to Run Ads especially if your score falls below 2.0. If your Page’s score drops to 2 or below, your Page will be penalized. Pages with a score between 2 and 1 will see a delivery penalty applied to its ads, meaning they will reach fewer people for the same budget. If your Page’s score drops to 1 or below, it will automatically be disabled from running ads. So Facebook just rolled out a “forgiveness” program for businesses whose score dropped below 2.0 because distribution & delivery was delayed due to COVID-19. They require some form of proof that customers were notified of the delay. And advertisers who appealed for forgiveness received a response within 24hrs. You can read more on the page penalty program on our show’s page: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/108127923199330 3. Last week we covered the Google May Core Update that affected organic traffic. Here are a few sites that lost traffic & sites that won traffic on May Core Update:
- gearhungry (won)
- thespurce (won)
- faveable (won)
- wpbeginner.com ( won)
- foodal (won)
- village-bakery ( lost)
- wisepick.org ( lost)
- foodsharkmarfa( lost)
- wplift.com (lost)
The list might leave some hints to find out what kind of sites/content Google now loves.
To see the full list of sites that won/lost traffic, visit our site: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yIMiV6M0NXJZ6D05-OfAsbz0JYj9MIMjkVfOpdda69I/edit?fbclid=IwAR3JVKIicehghizH7HVhJDqA8HZCxkQ0e5VSFVfx5wvIp3QxJ9Gbbkwkzp0#gid=0 4. $340m in Google ad credits for small businesses In an attempt to help small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) stay in touch with their customers during COVID-19, Google has freed up $340 million worth of ad credits. These are to be used on future ad spend until the end of 2020. The credits are valid across all of Google’s advertising platforms and the amount you get depends on your previous ad spend as well as the country and currency in which you are set up.
To be eligible, businesses need to have a Google Ads account that has spent money within 10 of the 12 months of 2019, and in the first two months of 2020. You can have advertised directly with Google or through a partner. The ad credit is per customer rather than per account. The ad credit will be applied to qualifying accounts starting in late May. This will be done in phases over the following months and users will be notified when the credit has been applied to their account.
5. LinkedIn adds live video events dubbed as LinkedIn Virtual Events that allows the broadcasting of video events via its platform. The LinkedIn Virtual Events tool was launched in tandem with a new Polls feature on the professional networking platform and represents a tighter integration between the existing LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events products.
Despite now being owned by Microsoft, the new product is different from Teams or Skype, owner Microsoft’s two other big video products. LinkedIn Virtual Events taps into the huge videoconferencing trend. It is a merger of two products that LinkedIn launched last year, the live video broadcasting tool LinkedIn Live, and an offline, in-person networking product, LinkedIn Events.
The launch is more than just a simple integration, however, and LinkedIn is working with third-party specialist broadcasters, including Restream, Wirecast, Streamyard and Socialive. The new virtual tool allows users to generate a native landing page on LinkedIn, with a unique URL to promote their event. They are then able to stream the event using LinkedIn Live. All events are listed on a user’s LinkedIn page. Users can stream up to four separate broadcasts into one LinkedIn Event for multi-session activations. “As the business world moves towards virtual events, we recognize how important it is to equip our customers with tools to bring the professional community together — online, in real-time and at scale in the safest way possible,” said Ajay Datta, head of product in India at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is already claiming that Live now has 23X more comments per post and 6X more reactions per post than simple native video. 6. Businesses are facing immense challenges during the COVID-19 crisis, and supporting them is critical to the well-being of entrepreneurs, communities and the economy. As many stores remain closed and social media serves as an online Main Street, the shift to doing business online is more urgent than ever. So on 11th May, Facebook announced new ways for people to support and discover small businesses, along with more tools for keeping businesses informed and connected with their customers.
They have released a “Support Small Business” sticker on Instagram and a #SupportSmallBusiness hashtag on the Facebook app to let people show their love for small businesses. Creators on Facebook can also use a new “in support of” tag to promote small businesses to their fans. When people use the Support Small Business sticker on Instagram, their story will be added to a shared Instagram story, so their followers can see it along with other businesses that people they follow are supporting. If they mention a business using the sticker, the business can repost the content to their stories or message the people who tagged them. To learn additional details on this program make sure you check out the link to the full announcement on our podcast show page: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/helping-people-and-businesses-find-their-online-main-street/
7. Facebook is expanding the availability of tools to give advertisers more control over where their ads appear within in-stream placements.
- Publisher whitelists for Audience Network let advertisers designate which third-party publisher apps to run ads on.
- Content whitelists offer video-level whitelisting for advertisers working with Integral Ad Science, OpenSlate, and Zefr. This allows these partners to dynamically review and customize suitable videos for in-stream campaigns on Facebook.
- Delivery reports provide advertisers with access to impression data at the publisher and content levels, giving greater transparency into which individual pieces of content their ads were embedded in so they can properly validate brand safety risks of our placements and publishers.
- Live stream exclusions allow advertisers to opt-out of the test of in-stream ads in live streams from vetted partners. Previously they offered this at the campaign level, and are now providing this control at the ad account level.
These new tools can be found in the Brand Safety Controls interface in Business Manager, with a redesigned overview page to show all ad accounts under a business and the status of their brand safety controls. They also introduced a new controls page to make it easier to apply available brand safety settings, including Inventory filter, at the account level. This interface is also where our existing tools like blocklists and publisher lists can be managed. Also, make sure to check out Facebook’s fifth Community Standards Enforcement Report, which looks at how well they enforced their policies from October 2019 through March 2020. In this latest report, they are introducing data for Organized Hate under the Dangerous Organizations category for Instagram and Facebook, and four new policy areas on Instagram: Hate Speech, Adult Nudity & Sexual Exploitation, Violent & Graphic Content, and Bullying & Harassment. You can learn more about these efforts and the progress they’ve made.
8. TikTok Changes Rules on Music Usage by Businesses TikTok has quietly altered the rules around commercial usage of popular music, which will stop verified brands from using popular tracks and came up with new ‘Commercial Music Library’ of sounds that are available for businesses.
9. Twitter Officially Launches New ‘Retweets with Comments’ Listings Up till now, Twitter has actually considered a retweet with the comment to be a unique tweet in its own right, so it deliberately hasn’t included these in your total retweet count. Many have suggested that this was likely a bug with Twitter’s system, but it wasn’t – Twitter considered a retweet with a comment a separate action from a regular retweet. But now, the issue will be clarified, and you’ll be able to get a full, all-encompassing listing of your total retweet count, while also being able to view the related comments and responses, and engage with those as well if you choose. 10. Lastly, Facebook acquires Giphy image-sharing platform for reported $400M. Giphy will join the Instagram team and see its GIF library further integrated into the app, along with other Facebook products. Alrighty folks that’s all the worthwhile updates from this week. If you are interested to read more then make sure you visit our show page where you will find the links to the articles. And If you enjoyed this episode of this week in marketing than make sure to subscribe and give us a thumbs us.
Signing off until next week.
