Instagram finally gives website click to all users

For Instagram users, the company's announcement Oct. 27 was a big win, especially for users who oversee business accounts and are trying to generate website leads.

The company announced that that links are now being made available in Instagram Stories for all users, instead of just those accounts with 10k followers or are verified accounts.

Said Instagram, "When we first introduced Stories links, the feature was limited to verified accounts or those with a certain number of followers. We’ve heard from the rest of our community that they also want to share things that matter with their friends and family. Whatever you’re into, from cooking to volunteering or shopping, you now have a space to share in Stories — regardless of your account size.

"We continue to be inspired by the change-makers on our platform and those who want to turn their passion into a living by sharing links. We recently introduced new ways for creators and businesses to reach more fans, engage their community and grow their reach, and we aim to further support them with access to links."

This is a huge victory for Instagram business users, especially those with less than 10,000 followers. Up until this point, the only clickable link on Instagram was in the profile bio.

But as Reels and Stories, as well as overall short-form video continues to grown, creating content for those tools will have a greater emphasis with a greater possibility of generating website leads.

Personally, I've seen it on two of the three business accounts I manage and have already put it to use. And, with any new tool often rolled out, utilize it as an opportunity for growth.

As explained by Instagram, here's how you put a link on your story:

Use the Link sticker to add a link to your Instagram story. When people tap on the sticker, they’ll be redirected.

• Capture or upload content to your story.
• Select the sticker tool from the top navigation bar.
• Tap the “Link” sticker to add your desired link and tap “Done”.
• Place the sticker on your story — like our other stickers — and tap on the sticker to see color variations.

"We’re also working on ways to customize the sticker so it’s clear what someone will see when they tap your link," Instagram said.

Twitter reports increase in monthly users

In its letter to shareholders, Twitter announced growth in revenue and daily active users in its Quarter 3 2021 report, which was released Oct. 26.

In the report (download here), Twitter said its revenue was $1.28 billion in the third quarter, up 37 percent year over year.

As for the the daily active users growth, Twitter reported it reached 211 million in the third quarter, up 13 percent year over year, increasing from 11 percent year over year. The company attributed that to "ongoing product improvements and global conversation around current events."

The company added, "We continued to make progress on our brand and direct response offerings, with updated ad formats, improved targeting, and better measurement. Revenue product improvements, strong sales execution, and a broad increase in advertiser demand contributed to 41 percent year-over-year growth in ad revenue in Q3."

Twitter said it recognizes the platform's use is best-suited to have "real conversations about what's happening - and creators are responsible for starting, influencing, and amplifying a large percentage of those conversations."

To assist in that, the company unveiled Tips, Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces as monetization streams for users and companies.

"We continue to enhance the global conversation on Twitter with live and on-demand video content," Twitter said.

Examples from the third quarter included:

• A multi-year global extension of our existing partnership with Dow Jones Corporation, which includes a renewal of the successful WSJ What’s Now series, as well as new Barrons, Investor’s Business Daily, and MarketWatch content on Twitter.
• A global deal with IMG Fashion Events & Properties, a division of the world’s leading entertainment and events company, covering Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 Fashion Weeks, including livestreams, highlights, and Spaces.
• A deal with Fox Sports to bring the best of college football content to Twitter with real-time highlights, opening drive “live” streams, as well as a fan-powered “Alternate Camera Angle” where fans get to choose how to watch one of the best games of the week.

As for a prediction for the rest of this year and moving into 2022, Twitter said, "We continue to expect total revenue to grow faster than expenses in 2021 (excluding the litigation settlement announced in Q3), and we expect to continue our investment posture as we enter next year. Our 30%+ headcount growth in 2021, with annual merit increases, and other investments we made in 2021, including our new data center, will flow into annual expenses for 2022, likely resulting in a mid-20% increase in total expenses next year prior to hiring any more people or making additional investments during 2022."

LinkedIn reports record-breaking engagement

LinkedIn reported record-breaking engagement in the last quarter, according to Microsoft.

In the report, LinkedIn reported engagement on the platform is up a record-breaking 19 percent. In addition, LinkedIn’s revenue was up 42 percent year-over-year.

Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been owned by Microsoft. And, as of September 2021, LinkedIn reported 774 million registered members from more than 200 countries and territories.

"We’re experiencing a Great Reshuffle across the global labor market as people are rethinking not only where and how they work, but why," the company said. "With more people changing jobs than ever before, we saw record engagement as nearly 800 million members turned to LinkedIn to connect, learn, grow, and get hired."

LinkedIn said confirmed hires on the platform also increased more than 160 percent. In this quarter, the company said, "we launched new ways to help job seekers discover roles that align with how they want to work."

LinkedIn added, "In this rapidly evolving labor market, companies are increasingly turning to LinkedIn Learning to upskill and reskill their employees. We now have more than 15,000 enterprise customers, and we are expanding our opportunity in the creator economy, including offering new ways for LinkedIn Learning instructors to build their audiences and connect with learners live."

Businesses appear to be favoring LinkedIn as a way to reach professionals, as evidenced by the advertising revenue up 61% year over year. The company said this is attributed to "strong advertising demand in our Marketing Solution business."

Latest in email trends; reliance growing

The need to reach customers digitally has drastically increased since the start of the pandemic. Less customers are going out and more are staying in more regularly. One way to reach them right in the palm of their hand for most of them is email.

This past Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone, foot traffic decreased 52.1% compared to 2019 while

online-only shoppers increased by 44%. That is according to the National Retail Federation's "Holiday Shoppers Take Advantage of Early, Thanksgiving Weekend Deals."

Litmus, an email marketing company, has released its latest State of Email report. In the report, it identifies five key shifts marketers need to know:

• Email marketing is increasingly critical to business success.
• Personalization and automation are dire to standing out and scaling.
• Privacy measures are forcing marketers to rethink current strategies.
• Brands are looking to agile marketing to meet their growing email demand.
• Marketing must embrace the state of the world — brand purpose matters.

Litmus also revealed that at least 80% of marketers believe the pandemic had some kind of impact on their email marketing. Also, reliance on email has increased because of more people working remotely or in some kind of hybrid model, a plan that incorporates a mixture of in-office and remote work in an employee's schedule.

Click here for the full report.

A cookieless world. What should I do?

This week, I'm attending (virtually) the Ad World Conference. In short, Ad World is the world's largest online advertising event. I'm excited to participate in it and have signed up for 10 sessions.

The first session I attended was called "Survive the Cookiepocalypse: The Ad Strategy Buying Signals Guide." It was a fantastic session led by Ben Parr, founder of Mashable and Octane AI.

As has been noted several times is third-party cookies will be gone by around the start of 2023. However, customer data privacy has already moved into the market with Apple's latest iOS 15 update. One of those changes is the Mail Privacy Protection tool. The MPP, in short, is an opt-in feature in Apple Mail. If users opt in, when that user is sent an email, their identification data is removed and then the email is then sent on to the user. So, open rates will show emails are opened, but may not be actually opened by the intended user.

It's a dramatic shift in marketing.

Ben did an excellent job of breaking down what we can anticipate as these changes continue to roll out. Among those was breaking down the differences between third-party data, first-party data and zero-party data.

• Third-party data: Data borrowed from third parties and aggregators such as Facebook and Google.
• First-party data: Data you directly track such as Google Analytics, website tracking.
• Zero-party data: Data customers directly volunteer to you such as quizzes and surveys.

Here is a guide Ben provided from his presentation.

Instagram rolling out new analytics features

Instagram is in process of rolling out new features related to its analytics offerings to better help those overseeing business accounts.

Instagram has expanded its post analytics tool, offering a greater depth of data.

"At Instagram, we’re committed to helping creators turn their passion into a living and supporting small businesses," the company said on its website. "As part of our ongoing work to give professionals the tools they need, we are launching new experiences in Instagram Insights that will help creators and businesses learn more about their audience. Today, we’re introducing accounts engaged, engaged audience, reached audience and new transparency for creators who partner with brands."

The announcement was made Oct. 19 and has begun rolling out to users.

One of the enhancement is accounts engaged and engaged audience.

"Accounts engaged highlights the total number of accounts that interacted with your content in a given time period," the company said. "To help professionals better understand who’s engaging with their content, we’re also providing key demographic information including top cities, top countries, top age ranges and gender, as well as a breakdown by followers and non-followers. We will continue to highlight the total number of content interactions received across each content format."

Also changed is increased insight on your reached audience.

"Today, we will begin providing demographic information about your reached audience, including top cities, top countries, top age ranges and gender," the company said. "This information can be found by tapping “accounts reached” in Insights."

New podcast episode now available

The latest Dettmann Media podcast is now available on Buzzsprout, as well as Apple, iHeart Radio, TuneIn Radio, Amazon and Spotify.

At some point within the next two years, third-party cookies will be eliminated. The change is expected to hinder marketing campaigns, specifically understanding metrics such as key performance indicators, or KPIs, and return on investments, or ROIs.

Third-party cookies are tracking mechanisms that help marketers understand a user's profile on a website that's placed by an outside program.

How do we get ready? Start now!

Also in this episode, what are the trends after about one month since Apple's iOS 15 update, which includes the Mail Privacy Protection feature?

1 month in, what is Mail Privacy Protection influence so far?

About a month ago, Apple unveiled its latest iOS 15 update. Among the features in this update was the option for users to utilize Mail Privacy Protection.

In short, Mail Privacy Protection or MPP, will act as a bridge between sender and consumer in email marketing. What MPP will do is it'll open an email sent to the user, remove identifying traits and then move the email onto the consumer. Analytics will show the email was opened, but it may not necessarily have been opened by the user. (Read more about it here)

Litmus, an email marketing company, released some data and finding from about one month into the launch of Apple's iOS 15 update.

A couple of interesting notes:

• Google has surpassed Apple as the most popular email client overall.
• About 6.6% of users have initialized the MPP.
• Mobile is down 12.8% after MPP compared to before.

Read the full report here.

Source: Litmus

Facebook addresses Oct. 4 outage

For several hours Monday, Oct. 4,  Facebook and its affiliates, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for several hours.

Facebook has released the following statement regarding what happened:

"To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.

"We recognize the frustration and business disruption caused by the lack of access to our services and ad tools and the interruption of advertising campaigns. Our engineering teams have been working as hard as they can to restore access. Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. For information about the outage, see our Facebook Engineering blog.

"Access to our apps and services, including our ads and business interfaces, have now been fully restored. We can also confirm that ads did not deliver during the time the systems were offline, and advertisers were not and will not be billed for ads during the outage. Ads have now resumed delivery and some advertisers may see accelerated delivery as our services recover from the outage. We encourage advertisers to review your bids and budgets to ensure they accurately reflect your marketing goals.

"We understand the impact outages like these have on the millions of businesses that use our services to find and reach customers. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.

"Moving forward, we’ll continue to provide updates regarding our business tools on our Facebook for Business status page."

Getting ready for change in cookie world

It's inevitable. By about 2023, third-party cookies will be gone, thus hindering marketing campaigns, specifically understanding metrics such as key performance indicators, or KPIs, and return on investments, or ROIs.

Third-party cookies are tracking mechanisms that help marketers understand a user's profile on a website that's placed by an outside program.

I want to emphasize that first-party cookies will still be available to you. For example, a first-party cookie is when a user signs into an ecommerce website, like Amazon or Walmart. The web browser will send a request in a process that provides the highest level of trust that the user is directly interacting with Amazon, Walmart or another ecommerce website.

Here is a deeper explanation by cookiepro.com: "The web browser saves this data file to the user’s computer, under the “amazon.com” domain. If first-party cookies were blocked, a user would have to sign-in every time they visited, and they wouldn’t be able to purchase multiple items while shopping online because the cart would reset after every item that was added."

So how do we prepare for the change?

Well, for one, collect the data you can now by doing an audit. Find out what you can about visitors to your website.

But don't worry if you can't collect all that information. First-party data will still be available, like I mentioned before. A great example of this are lead generation forms, such as email newsletter signups or purchases.

Putting a greater emphasis on customer experience will be big going forward. Create a positive experience so a consumer, in confidence, can provide you the information you'd like to collect to help with your marketing efforts. But also be transparent about it. Tell them why you're doing it and what you plan to do with it.

Another thing to keep in mind, put a great emphasis on engagement, such as cost per clicks or CPCs. That will help you collect first-party data.

Google Analytics, for the most part, won't be harmed in this transition. But if you do cross-tracking tactics, that will go away. What you can do there is making sure you set up quality UTMs (Read more about that here).

Data showing steep decline in young users on Facebook

Source: socialmediatoday.com

The last several weeks have not been good for the social media icon Facebook. This week in particular has been even worse.

In a matter of 24 hours, Facebook experienced a multiple-hours outage for users around the world. Then, a former employee stood in front of Congress and unloaded on her former employers about what they know about algorithms and its influence on young people.

With these revelations, Facebook is in trouble.

Also consider this, overall trust in Facebook had already been declining. In a blog post several weeks ago, I shared that the company's trust among consumers is barely in the top 10 among social media companies. What's slowing the decline for Facebook is Instagram. But look at the popularity of other apps, specifically Facebook. Snapchat and Twitter have also seen changes for the good.

Facebook has got a hole to dig out of.

But, if the outage showed us something, it is how reliant so many people around the world are on the app and the company in general.

Internal Documents Show Facebook Usage Among Young Users is in Steep Decline