Inside Meta's Möbius Strip of Support Hell

[00:00:01] It is Tuesday, January 16th. Today, social media collapsing. More than half of consumers say they're ready to bail out. Google laying off hundreds of reps that marketers rely on. Do you actually need to use hashtags on your LinkedIn posts?

[00:00:16] And the endless cycle of hopelessness, doom and misery that is Metas Tech Support I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing Do you want someone who understands you like no other? Someone who can be your wish and want to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life?

[00:00:41] The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify you are now only focusing on your online shop. Without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient integration and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can sell and sell through Instagram, eBay and Co.

[00:01:01] It was never easy to reach new groups. Shopify offers on a single secure platform all tools to build up your online business. Test without cost and present a business of the world. shopify.de.try Simply enter shopify.de.try and start. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify

[00:01:26] Social media platforms are expected to take a hit in the next couple of years. A new Gardner study says half of consumers plan to abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media by next year. Why?

[00:01:41] Top reasons include the spread of misinformation, toxic users and how many bots there are. Also, and I thought this was more interesting actually, 7 out of 10 consumers said they think the obsession these platforms have with generative AI will harm the user experience.

[00:02:01] Quoting Emily Weiss, a senior principal researcher for Gardner, quote, social media remains the top investment channel for digital marketing, but consumers are actively trying to limit their use. A significant slice says that compared to a few years ago, they're sharing less of their own lives and content. Unquote.

[00:02:20] According to the report, 53% of consumers believe that social media has deteriorated compared to both the previous year and five years ago. We don't cover a lot of the tech layoffs on here, but now those layoffs are starting to seep into the digital marketing space

[00:02:42] with a few hundred employees on Google's advertising sales team being dropped. Quoting business insider, quote, bi previously reported that Google was shifting more staff away from large customer sales, a team that serves the company's bigger advertising clients

[00:02:58] to its Google customer solutions team, which serves more medium level clients. This was happening as more large clients didn't need access to as many Google resources current and former employees said. Google is also attempting to automate more of its processes through products such as

[00:03:15] performance max, which uses Google's AI to determine how advertisers money should be spent across products. This reorganization is the next evolution of that as cuts appear to be primarily targeted at the large customer sales team, unquote.

[00:03:31] Tomorrow our Google ads correspondent Jill Saskin-Gales who spent six years in sales at Google will be here to walk us through the potential impact of this on digital marketers. FedEx is coming for Amazon. The company announcing this week it is launching a new commerce platform called FDX

[00:03:53] that it says will help online retailers manage their supply chain, sell things and handle deliveries. Quoting the Verge, quote, FDX will combine existing FedEx commerce tools like access to members of Shoprunner, an e-commerce marketplace FedEx acquired in 2020 with features debuting in the fall like the ability

[00:04:11] to create a custom post purchase experience so brands can give customers more accurate shipment information or use insight from FedEx's shipment network data for order management.

[00:04:23] The new platform comes as the company competes in logistics with Amazon, a company FedEx has seen as a threat to its business for years. In 2019 FedEx declined to renew a contract to fly Amazon cargo through FedEx.

[00:04:37] Later that year Amazon forbade its sellers from using FedEx for prime deliveries during the holiday blaming declining performance, a ban it lifted the next year, unquote. This is of course a pivot that FedEx really didn't have a choice in doing,

[00:04:53] both it and UPS have been hurting since Amazon switched to its own delivery network, a network so large now that last year it made more home packaged deliveries than UPS and FedEx combined.

[00:05:11] So you have written your company's LinkedIn post and now all that's left is to add hashtags, but wait should you? Do they even do anything other than clutter up the post? Social media today reports that hashtags are not a sure path to reach,

[00:05:27] quote, as you may recall for a long time LinkedIn didn't actually support hashtags at all but then in 2018 the platform not only reactivated hashtag discoverability, it also started pushing hashtag use in an effort to get users manually categorizing their posts.

[00:05:43] The idea here is that through better content segmentation, LinkedIn is then better able to show more users content than they're interested in, but over time as algorithms have evolved the need for hashtags in general has lessened

[00:05:58] because social platform systems are now much better at taking in the whole context of a post's text, including visuals, user history and all keywords included. In other words hashtags are less important because most of the time relevant mentions and indicators are included in the

[00:06:15] post anyway and that's enough to ensure the system can show your post to the most interested audiences, unquote. Researcher Richard Vanderblum who has previously studied hashtags on LinkedIn now says they do not increase reach at all anymore and honestly this is probably the

[00:06:33] case as well with all platforms that use hashtags. They were a helpful tool when Twitter users started using them to group conversations in time, spammers took over, AI got smarter and the truth is there's probably not much use for them in most major social platforms anymore.

[00:06:50] A small change with Meta's threads app now lets you hide both like and share counts on your posts. Up until now you've only been able to hide like counts, this is set for each post if you want

[00:07:05] to tinker at that depth but you can also make it the account default by going to settings then privacy in the mobile app. One thing to note since threads uses Instagram's code foundation doing this will also hide those details on your Instagram account as well,

[00:07:20] quoting social media today again, quote. Back in 2019 Instagram launched an initial test of hidden like counts with some users. That test showed some promise in helping to depressurize the Instagram experience but then COVID happened the project got shelved for a time in order to

[00:07:37] focus on other elements. In 2021 Instagram rolled out the option for all users to hide like counts on posts and since then it's included this within its suite of well-being and management tools designed to help people customize their own Instagram experience, unquote.

[00:07:58] Let's be honest, retros can be boring and if you're the organizer you know it's more than just running a meeting. You have to synthesize and categorize themes, get the team involved, assign next steps and make it all a fun safe space where teammates want to participate.

[00:08:14] Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps you run effective engaging and actionable retrospectives. We use Miro at our agency to map out a client's messaging for our engagement team that can be complicated, a lot of if-vents but making it visual and sharing

[00:08:31] it directly with our client sped things way up plus our side can share spitballing ideas with private mode the client doesn't get to see our thoughts until we've decided on the approach whether you work on the marketing side or in product design engineering or UX

[00:08:47] bring your team together on Miro and your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com that's three free boards at Miro.com

[00:09:47] And finally one of the advantages that Meta says you'll have when you pay for a blue verified checkmark is better support. You'll have access to actual humans when something goes wrong and things go wrong with Meta's platform all the time. For marketers, one of the most common

[00:10:12] and frustrating issues is getting locked out of their account. It seems to happen at random Meta's policy enforcement AI bots mistake some behavior pattern as nefarious or someone successfully hacks into your account and poof you are locked out with no human beings to help. So some brands

[00:10:29] have taken to buying the blue checkmark just so they can get a real live support rep at Meta and not a support bot but and I know this will not come as a surprise to you this new system

[00:10:40] is hardly a pathway to actual issue resolution. Ars Technica reported this week on some poor photographer who got locked out of her Instagram account the issue was that initially she signed up using her husband's cell phone number but then they got divorced now ex-husband changed

[00:11:00] his number a hacker got into her account and the app tried sending the reset code to her ex-husband's now defunct phone number Meta's ironically named help pages didn't get her an answer nor did filling out the forms so she sprung for the paid verification which promises

[00:11:21] quoting from Meta sales page on this quote help when you need it from a real person on common account issues that matter to you unquote she got in touch with a real person apparently named Maria and was told that the company's internal team was working on the issue

[00:11:39] and they would get back to her then nothing for an entire week remember this was her business Instagram account being unable to log in meant not replying to comments or to dms from prospects eventually she got a templated response telling her to check the recovery number sent

[00:11:58] to her ex-husband's non-existing phone number so she emailed Maria back who said hi Amy we know how important it is for you to get updates regarding your concern we appreciate your patience while we work on your case we just wanted to update you that our dedicated team

[00:12:16] is still working diligently on your case unquote the next day another email telling her to check the phone that doesn't exist now though a meta-rept named you know what we need some music for this

[00:12:32] now though a meta rep named Matt asked her to send in a screen recording of her using the code on the phone number that and just so we're all following along here does not exist

[00:12:45] a few days passed and Maria is back saying she has now shared the issue with Meta's respective team then another email saying we appreciate your patience while we work on your case we just wanted to update you that our dedicated team is still working diligently on your case

[00:13:04] as ours technica wrote when they call in the dedicated team you know that things are getting serious and then a few days later a new email could this finally be the answer could an actual human have read her issue with their eyeballs understood the issue in their brain

[00:13:23] and done something to help her have the email right here it says so she just try resetting the code from the phone number that does not exist and ends with we'll now closed this ticket

[00:13:37] have a beautiful day and stay safe so she emailed back begging them to just send the code to the verified email address on file problem solved but they wouldn't instead met a support actually got

[00:13:59] a little snotty quote we hope you understand the limitations in assistance that can be offered at this moment if your request is denied please do not resubmit the request unless there is new information that is likely to have a direct impact on the decision that was made

[00:14:17] unquote but the photographer soldier dawn and emailed again and this time melissa replied saying she would forward the issue on to the relevant team quote will not put your hard work to waste

[00:14:31] we'll do our part by doing the best we can to have your issue resolved unquote but the relevant team didn't seem to have any more power than the internal team the respective team or the dedicated teams quoting ars technica again quote Amy lives out endless replays of

[00:14:51] this disappointing loop she receives polite but pointless replies from hazel and other new people maria makes a return from time to time they're always reviewing options and setting things to a dedicated irrelevant team the problem is never solved perhaps the meta support team

[00:15:08] models its service on the meta logo that resembles the infinity sign unquote well finally today a resolution one that came not because meta's support team is good but because meta's PR team is risk averse again quoting ars technica quote less than 24 hours after this story was published

[00:15:30] a spokesperson for meta reached out and said they would look into the issue then about an hour later her account was unlocked meta was able to temporarily remove the two-factor authentication on her account and the requirement for a recovery code afterward the spokesperson

[00:15:46] told ars the following quote in terms of what happened due to a system error that has since been resolved our normal path to regain access to an account was not working at the time of her

[00:15:56] requests our support reps were not aware of the issue at the time the issue has since been resolved unquote look i'm not a betting man but i've got five bucks here saying there was no system error and internally probably nothing has changed who's with me

[00:16:26] having fun still doing the live stream on twitch i started uh live streaming the scripting even of it so if you're completely bored one day drop by be nice to meet you say hi in the chat room it

[00:16:36] is twitch.tv slash low effort dad don't forget about our email newsletter it is free it comes out every day it contains everything you hear in the podcast and links to learn more about the

[00:16:50] stories we cover videos charts illustrations and so on you can sign up by tapping the link in the show notes or going to today in digital.com slash newsletter i'm todd mathen thanks for listening see you tomorrow

[00:18:00] brawls so kanst du dich ganz oft ein business konzentrieren shop if i kostenlos ausprobieren und ein business voranbringen shop if i punkt de schräg strich try besuchen also shop if i punkt de schräg strich try made for germany powered by shop if i