Rabbbits Weeekly: The Twitter Timeline
Twitter is trending and Meta keeps throwing spaghetti, plus more ads, more tips, and more bits!
Twitter is Having a Moment
April Fool’s Day (4/1) - Twitter tweets they are adding an edit button
(But who needs an edit button when you can turn a tweet into a micro Google Doc?)
April 4 - Elon Musk buys some Twitter. Potentially to add some weight to his opinions within the company.* He is now the single largest shareholder, he owns more Twitter than the dude who invented Twitter.
April 5 - He is named to the Board of Directors...in order to prevent a full takeover?
Also April 5 - “Hey everyone, we actually are working on an edit button for real! And no, our new majority shareholder’s joke tweet about this is totally not the reason.”
(The real question is: will this feature stay paywalled?)
April 10 - J/k, he didn’t want that seat
But before that news was made public Elon tweeted polls about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter and removing the “w” from the name.
We’re either ⅓ of the way through the month or 11 days into April Fool’s, but either way it looks like Twitter is the richest man in the world’s new plaything and there is not much the company can do about it.
*Matt Levine has written some great stuff on this lately that is hard to share due to Bloomberg’s super aggressive paywall
Socially Awkward
As Meta’s cornerstone products falter they’re starting to flail around for any toe hold they can find. The new plan? Fintech! First up, Zuck Bucks for the metaverse! (I’m not kidding and I did not know this when making previous “Zuck buck” jokes.) (paywalled, but if you don’t click the cookie notice you should be able to read the article)
Their custom chip dreams are faltering too. v2 of their AR glasses with Ray-Ban were supposed to use in-house chips, but this plan was scrapped in order to get production moving. This is after they disbanded the team that was developing a custom OS for their AR / VR product dreams. It seems like Meta keeps trying to pull Big Tech Company Moves™ and failing.
Instagram is now called Reels. Not really but it soon may as well be. They've ditched the in-stream video ad placement and are pushing the Reels placement like Tina Fey pushed LiLo in Mean Girls.
(gif)
But wait, there's more! They're also shafting Reels creators by decreasing payouts and increasing the thresholds required to trigger them.
RIP F8. Formerly Facebook will not hold the conference this year. It's probably nothing. Right? Right. Right?
There's a lot of talk (this space included) about how Zuck+co rips off TikTok, but did TikTok become The Trend Machine™ by starting as InstaLite? Reports surfaced that their original growth hack was to scrape and repost Insta content via their acquisition of Flipagram (whatever that was) way back in 2017.
Some employees said this data was used to train the For You algo, which is TikTok's golden goose.
(Could they have trained the algo without this? Maybe? Would Meta have created an algo to rival this without them? Clearly not, since even with TikTok around and their algo pretty easy to surmise, they haven't mounted a comeback.)
Cough, cough, immersive feed...
More Ads in More Places
Today the news feed, tomorrow the brain!
Instagram taketh and TikTok giveth. With search ads! I don't know how TikTok works so I have no further comment here.
We may soon have new Twitter ad formats to play with (assuming they are pending Elon's official stamp of approval). What's in the works?
Interactive text ads - up to 3 words can be highlighted and clicking will drive the user to landing pages. These ads also get much larger text compared to plain old regular tweets.
Product Explorer ads - it's an ad, but in 3D
Collection ads - it's exactly the same as ad types with the same name on Facebook or Pinterest
Walmart pulls a Meta and renames their ad platform to Walmart Connect. This is part of their effort to become a "top ad platform". The roadmap looks to be: place ads on every possible surface (CTV, TV walls, sampling), robots, and offering an IRL alternative to Amazon.
People Are Weird
People think you give better deals to other people. At least that's what this post suggests.
For some product types (where it's easy to know the product is a fit before buying), offers that don't appear personalized perform better. Maybe it's that feeling that they beat the system or tricked the machine that makes it work?
Weak Links in the (Supply) Chain
The race is on to build out more chip (the tech, not the food) supply chains as the pandemic showed the fragility of the current monopoly (more or less). But these plans will be slowed for at least 2 years as the supply chain for the chip printing machines (basically) ramps itself up to keep up with demand. (link is paywalled)
This could continue to monkey with factors like price, feature sets, and/or availability for products using chips (cars, phones, smart thermostats, etc).
In a double whammy for the auto sector, European automotive factories have ground to halt in the absence of Ukrainian wire used in the production process.
DYK there is (was?) a paper shortage?
Google Wants Attention Too
But maybe not this kind of attention. Yes, Google is slow to review your responsive search ads.
Google Ads needs to call an exterminator, they got all kinds of bugs.
Everyone wants to make a transparent, face-mounted computer (Google, Apple, Snap (Facebook is inexplicably going for head-mounted)) but no one quite knows if they'll work. That didn't stop Google from buying a company that specializes in AR spex components. (Paywalled, but you get enough of the gist for these purposes.)
Is this the future?
You’ve done it. You’ve harnessed the power of robots to scale your content efforts. And now you find out it’s against Google’s spam policy.
If the news of next summer’s sunsetting of Universal Analytics has you poking around in GA4 trying to figure out what the hell is happening there, these 2 Twitter threads may be helpful.
Google My Business is dead and Google Business Profile is born. It kind of seems like the concept is the same but you manage your profile through Search and Maps instead of a separate interface. But only time will tell. (Another reminder to not build out your business or prime strategy in someone else's bodega.)
And they’re adding some SERP labels that look to be geared towards combating misinformation.
Regulate (But Not Like Warren G)
More tech company and regulator yelling at each other fun. This time starring Google and the DA yelling about allegedly false attorney-client privilege shielding practices. (Wait, where have I heard this one before?)
Australia got big tech to pay for news (in an imperfect way) and now other countries are hoping to try the same thing. So what happens next?
A new EU law inadvertently made encryption illegal? “lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms.” We are still firmly in the competition vs. privacy stage of this big tech regulatory phase.
I’ve Run Out of Witty Headers, Here’s Some More Stuff
The metaverse is for kids! (as Minecraft rolls its eyes and builds something pixely)
Remember when an employee account was used to hack HubSpot in order to target crypto peeps using the platform? Well, Mailchimp was hacked using an employee account and crypto peeps were the prime target.
Add dynamic text fields to your Microsoft responsive search ads to become a full marketing cyborg.
User experience is talked about a lot when it comes to web/app experiences, but unless you're sitting behind the user looking over their shoulder, you really have no idea what their experience is. Of course, you could use things like heatmaps and session recordings to get an idea of the experience at scale. Microsoft has a free tool to allow you to do just that, fitting called Clarity.
Twitter Ads Tips
Similar to the Bid Cap strategy and rundown of the Big Blue Bidding Bot™ in the Meta Mega-Thread, Twitter's automatic bidding seeks performance goals smoothed throughout the day. Especially at lower budgets you're probably better off doing some manual shenanigans to prioritize performance over consistency.
Want more Twitter Ads hacks? Here ya go! A copy-paste framework.
- 3-4 unique tweet ads
- 2-3 ad groups with different targeting
- Run all the ads in all the groups
- See what happens and iterate
Other Ideas to Test Out
Maybe you don't need all those Amazon Ads. (This type of decision is where incrementality can be hugely useful.)
It's only anecdotal (but I don't disagree with it), but cutting social ad spend just because you can't track it as well — post iOS-14.5 — is not a good idea. Social is a discovery channel that can drive more traffic through the typical intent channels.
A long(ish) post with fancy words (much like this post, hey, wait a minute…) that says: do brand marketing, it’s important. (Better yet, so full-funnel marketing.)
A look at how Google might look at your site to gauge expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T in SEO parlance) when determining a ranking value. I want to highlight #4, which discusses that link text of backlinks (links back to your site) is also used as a thematic classification for your site. This contextual approach is the next step for Google as they are also developing an algo that will determine your site's category / topic based on popular content (which boils down to stop doing clickbait and write relevant content for your industry and audience).
Stories are the future (still?)
Google has some recs on how to use their Web Story feature, most notably how to have your stories found on Google:
Make sure they are optimized using the Web Story tool
Use the cover image to capture interest
Add video captions