Political Social Grab Bag - February 2022 - Becker Digital Strategies

Political Social Grab Bag

What am I thinking about?

The big thing on everyone’s mind right now are the changes Facebook made this week to interest based targeting- namely removing 1000’s of targeting options deemed “sensitive” including targeting based on gender, race and political. We had a few months warning that Keywordpocalypse was coming so I spent December running ads as if what i expected to be removed was gone.

What I found was that the strategy of using a custom audience > look alike audience > interest targeting worked relatively well using contextual interest targeting. What do I mean by contextual keyword targeting? Think outside the box about the non political things your target audience is interested in. Music, books, tv, movies, magazines, products they buy. Using these strategies we did see a small increase in our cost pers- anywhere from a few pennies to as much as a quarter more per depending what our objective was. We also saw more comments from people who are clearly not our target audience.

Overall, it’s bad but not as bad as originally feared. It’s going to take more patience as we continue to play around with interest targeting to identify what works but make the time to do so…if you are doing digital advertising it’s important to diversify your ad spending but Facebook ads still need to be a part of the mix imho.

Also, this week we’ve seen all political pages get forced over to the new Pages experience which includes the switch from Business Manager to Business Suite.

Trainings & Webinar Alerts

Lots of upcoming trainings!

Social Deep Dive Europe via zoom Feb 14-17

Tectonica MasterClass: Organising and Building Culture Through Facebook Groups via zoom Feb 18

Digital Analytics Europe via zoom Feb 21 & 22

Social Deep Dive US via zoom March 7-10

Digital Analytics US via zoom March 14 & 15

Intro to Digital Organizing* in Austin, TX March 28- March 31

Digital Organizing Bootcamp via zoom June 5-11

Digital Organizing Bootcamp Canada* in Calgary, Alberta June 19-25

Labor Digital Organizing Bootcamp* in Nashville, TN July 31-August 5

Advanced Digital Organizing Bootcamp via zoom August 29-September 2

* for in person trainings proof of vaccination is required as is mask wearing. We will continue to assess the COVID situation and may pivot to online training if necessary.

What am I reading?

Democrats unveil bill to ban online “surveillance advertising”– Read this one and keep an eye on the bill…not convinced it will actually go anywhere

Yes, Government Social Media Can Be Fun – Good reading, especially if your org struggles with developing voice on social media

How Twitter Uses Twitter– Interesting read on how Twitter employees use Twitter

GIFs Are For Boomers Now, Sorry – GIF users beware

New Tools of Interest

TinyWow- I found this tool by accident but if you’re dealing with PDFs and converting them to other formats like word etc this can be handy

CSEmpathy– I’ve included this tool before but in light of the keywordpocalypse I can’t recommend this tool enough to help you manage the comments on both Facebook and Instagram

Platform Updates

Facebook

Creator Studio updates include a timeline view for posts and Stories highlights

Say goodbye to profile videos

Instagram

New metric visibility: If you crosspost your IG story to FB, in IG you’ll see FB viewers as well as IG viewers

In testing: Vertical scrolling of Stories

Twitter

Twitter Spaces recording is now available to both iOS and Android (originally rolled out iOS only)

Flocks– this is something we’ve been begging Twitter for for years

Other Platforms

TikTok testing a “repost” button– that took long enough