Preparing for Facebook ad changes

In late 2021, Meta (still trying to get used to that) announced plans for Facebook Ad Manager to phase out several audience targeting options. Part of this is in response to increase privacy demands by consumers and their concerns about what of their information is tracked and how it's used.

If you're not familiar with the detailed targeting options, they're ad options advertisers can set for ad campaigns based on users’ personal interests and behaviors. Examples include health, including select awareness, prevention, and treatment topics, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, political affiliations, and race and ethnicity.

Meta said it plans to remove audience targeting because "they’re too nuanced or too similar to other common options," according to an article by socialmediaexaminer.com.

The article adds, "But motives for eliminating the other topics are more complex. Essentially, Meta has attempted to balance advertisers’ ability to target highly personal interests with users’ expectations of what advertisers know about them.

"In consultation with policymakers and civil rights experts, Meta determined that many topics related to health, religion, and the other targeting options listed above are too sensitive for advertisers to target. The platform aims to prevent advertisers from taking advantage of these targeting options or creating negative experiences for affected groups."

These changes have been rolled out in moderation since the beginning of 2022.

To learn more about these changes, what the impact will be and how to adjust, click here.

9 best practices for CTAs

As noted previously, with all the recent changes to online privacy and mail privacy protection, a greater emphasis is going to be need on engagement on the web, especially within emails.

If you're not familiar with Apple's Mail Privacy Protection tool, simply, it's a tool that'll mask your computer's identifiers, such as IP address and location. The purpose of this is to protect consumers from having their data tracked without their permission or knowledge.

(You can read more about Apple's MPP here)

One of the biggest points of emphasis in trying to get more for your investment in online and email marketing strategies is to put a greater value on clicks.

Red Website Design, a digital marketing company based in the UK, showcased nine recommendations to help marketers increase website/email calls to action:

• Keep Your CTAs Brief
• Create Urgency
• Try Reverse Psychology
• Personalize Your CTAs
• Use Responsive Design
• Utilize Contrasting Colors and White Space
• Make Your CTAs Into a Button
• Double-check Your Landing Pages
• Test and Refine

Read more about those tips, plus an infographic by clicking here.

Disconnect between consumer, companies revealed in CX report

With the heavy push for data privacy and transparency, creating a high-quality user experience is key in acquiring and retaining customers. It has also become more difficult.

One of the recommended ways to do that is to create content that is engaging, content that leads to a successful call-to-action.

In a new report, released by Action IQ, it offers insights into the customer experience and the customer's interaction with brands, companies, etc.

One of the most telling statistics from the report (which you can read in its entirety here) is more than 60 percent of brands believe they offer a positive customer experience. Consumers disagree with only about 20 percent believe they are having a positive customer experience. That's a gap of about 40 percent.

In other words, the majority of brands are massively overrating their customer experience performance when compared to consumers.

The report says, "Such a substantial gap between what businesses perceive and what their customers describe indicates organizations across industries are not investing enough resources into the people, processes and technologies required to provide superior customer experience."

Here are some other key takeaways revealed in the report:

• 55% of consumers say data protection is “very important” to customer experience — more than any other CX characteristic. Thus, this build on the value of trust between the brand and the consumer. Consumers want to believe they can trust brands in all aspects, timely delivery, transparency about their personal data, etc.
• Consumers want convenience and reliability.
• Consumers say they want brands to be more understanding of their needs rather than knowing who they are.

How can this be accomplished? The report offers four tips:

• Prioritize data protection.
• Focus on real-time customer experience tools, such as chatbots.
• Anticipate customer needs.
• Avoid customer experience complacency.

Social media benchmark report released

One of the biggest or most frequent questions asked by social media professionals is how often or when to post on social media.

As stated several times previously, there is no exact science. You just have to kind of adjust as you see how your social media profiles perform.

But another important and frequent question is: How are my posts performing? How do I measure that?

Rival IQ has released a 131-page report called "2022 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report" (you can read full report here). If you have the time to read the report, it's worth it.

But let's break it down.

Rival IQ said this report is its "biggest report ever" and it "features the most important metrics from 2021 across 14 top industries: alcohol, fashion, financial services, food/beverage, health/beauty, higher education, home decor, hotels/resorts, influencers, media, nonprofits, retail, sports teams, and tech/software.

"This report has everything you need to measure your social media success against your competitors on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram across these 14 major industries," says the report's introduction. "We also feature tons of insights about how social media engagement has changed over the last year for these industries so you can optimize your strategy in 2022. As usual, we have channel observations, best post types, Instagram and Twitter hashtags, and more."

The key highlights as outlined by Rival IQ are:

• Brands saw less organic engagement this year.
• Posting frequency on the rise.
• Contest and holidays topped the hashtag charts.
• Every brand should post carousels on Instagram.
• Keep an eye on video.

In this report, and in general, engagement is a measurable action on a social media post - organic or boosted. Those actions include likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, etc.

Engagement rate is calculated based on all those interactions and then divided by total follower count.

Here is a breakout of the engagement data from the report.

• Engagement rate on Facebook, on average across each of the 14 industries measured in the report, is 0.064%.
  
• For Instagram, it's 0.67%
• For Twitter, it's 0.037%

What are the digital marketing skills you need?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says roles for marketing professionals will grow by about 8 percent between 2018 to 2028. That's higher than the projected 5 percent for most other professionals.

Plus, according to Linkedin, digital marketing is the most in-demand career going into 2022. How do you capitalize?

LinkedIn says in a blog post, The Most Valuable Digital Marketing Skills to Have on Your LinkedIn Profile This Year, its "internal data shows digital marketing and social media jobs are in high demand. Half of the top 10 jobs posted on LinkedIn are in the digital or media space."

As noted several times previous, the primary reason for that is how the world has changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The demand to reach consumers in the digital space is far greater than it was before the pandemic.

LinkedIn projected these three occupations as to be among the fastest growing in year-over-year growth: media coordinator, search manager and social media coordinator. And, the most in-demand occupations are: digital marketing specialist, digital account executive and social media manager.

From a personal standpoint, being a social media and digital marketing specialist has been a rewarding career opportunity that came to me out of the blue.

I was a journalist for 20 years. I lost my job at a newspaper after my position was eliminated. It was a challenging point in my life as I spent, up to that point, more than half my life dedicated to journalism. So, when I lost my job, I didn't know what to do.

I was introduced to content management and social media. It has done great things for me and my family, more than I could've ever thought. For the first time maybe in my life, I'm in a stable and growing profession!

Instagram adds new feature with Stories

Instagram has added a "like" feature for its Stories tool and is available for users.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted on his Twitter profile Feb. 14 the announcement of the new feature.

"Today, we're rolling out story like - the ability to like any story you see on Instagram," he said in a video posted on Twitter. "So now as you go through stories between send message and that little paper airplane, there will be a heart icon. If you tap on it, it'll send the author of that story a like and that like will show up in the viewer sheet, not in your DM thread with them. So you can do so without cluttering up your messages."

The number of likes on a story will not be public. It'll only be able to be seen by the creator.

The move now replicates what users can do with TikTok videos.

Whether this new feature will boost engagement is unknown in these early stages.

Mosseri said the reason for the change is to also improve the messaging capabilities between users and creators.

Engaging employees on social media

On Feb. 9, I attended a webinar called "Getting Employees Comfortable with Social Media" and it was hosted by Post Beyond, a company based in Ontario, Canada, that specializes in employee advocacy.

It was about an hour long and was very insightful.

You can watch the webinar in its entirety by clicking here.

Below are some slides that were shown that I thought were my key takeaways.

Staying safe on the internet in 2022

Last week, Feb. 8, was Safer Internet Day. It is a day aimed to help people understand how to stay safe online. This is especially useful, or a great reminder, as internet and digital usage continues to be a key part of everyone's day around the world.

In this article posted on Instagram's blog, it covers four tips on how to stay safe on the internet.

Those four tips are:

• Keeping your account secure. Ensure you have a strong password and enable two-factor authentication.
• Managing your Instagram activity.
• Leaning on your friend's help to access your account. Instagram says it's testing this feature and hopes to have an update soon. Here's how Instagram describes how it'll likely work: "... we’re testing a way for people to ask their friends to confirm their identity and regain access to their account."
• Finding more information about what's happening with your content and your reports.

To get the full story, click here.