Social Media Shakeup: What’s Fresh, Hot, and Trending!
By Vladislava Genova
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the December edition of “Social Media Shakeup: What’s Fresh, Hot, and Trending!” In this edition, we’ll explore the latest updates and trends in the world of social media and how they impact businesses and marketers.
There is a lot to unpack here, starting from TikTok’s new shopping feature to Facebook’s upgraded Insights, YouTube’s latest shopping instruments, and LinkedIn’s newly introduced AI-powered advertising tool – Accelerate.
Without further ado, let’s dive in and see what’s new in the world of social media.
TikTok
TikTok’s Ads Manager now features an Attribution Analytics tool. It provides advertisers with a more comprehensive view of their campaign performance. The tool also gives them better insights into user behaviour based on their awareness-discovery-action journey on the platform. The main feature of the tool is the so-called Performance Comparison which showcases conversions across different attribution windows, enabling advertisers to explore click-through and view-through conversions, events, and the campaign’s cost-per-acquisition across diverse strategies. The aim is to identify and apply the best attribution settings in future measurement and strategy.TikTok has recently introduced TikTok Shop in the US, which enables users to shop within the app itself. The feature allows brands and creators to tag their products in videos and live streams for users to purchase them without leaving TikTok. Businesses can take advantage of affiliate marketing opportunities, leverage TikTok ad formats, and showcase their products. At the same time, TikTok manages the checkout and fulfilment process with the help of third-party partners to ensure a seamless buying experience. TikTok Shop aims to create a native shopping culture by combining community trends, commerce, and creativity. It capitalises on viral trends like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and provides brands and creators with tools to sell their products directly to highly engaged users. This move is very likely to position TikTok as an e-commerce destination.
Facebook is introducing A/B testing for Reels, giving marketers a carte blanche to experiment with up to four different captions and thumbnails on mobile and pick the top performers. Additionally, the Reels composer on mobile enables the repurposing of existing videos and live streams. Another helpful feature is the different placement options for thumbnails in the news feed that make them more clickable and allow for testing a variety of thumbnail and caption styles. As a marketer, this is important to know because you can strategically use captions to engage viewers, boost reach, and encourage interactions. Essentially, A/B testing can become a valuable tool for optimising Reels performance on Facebook.
Facebook has upgraded Insights giving marketers access to more detailed data, which includes weekly account highlights on posting habits, audience, and performance. Digital marketers can play around with new customizable filters in the Insights overview section and look back in time up to 90 days (three times longer than the previous 28-day window).
A new Reels-specific Reach split will allow marketers to split ad viewers into followers and non-followers and compare the performance of different Reels. In addition, they will be able to determine for how long viewers watched their content and when they dropped off. These enhancements give marketers the tools to fine-tune their content strategy and optimise Reels for heightened audience engagement.Now creators can use Facebook’s new content management tool which can be found in the professional dashboard. There they will be able to scroll through their posts, Reels, and videos in one single location. From there, they can get performance insights for individual posts and hide or delete them if needed. For marketers, this streamlined dashboard means better campaign supervision and content management.
YouTube
YouTube has introduced three new features that come in handy for marketers and business owners to get more sales on the video streaming platform.
Timestamp Product Tagging allows the addition of timestamps in YouTube shopping videos to tag products and showcase them at precise moments. With YouTube’s Multi-Video Product Tagging, the platform users can tag the same product on multiple videos using link detection in video descriptions.
Soon to be launched, Order Analytics will enable affiliate creators to observe their highest-performing products by sales within YouTube Shopping. This functionality will help creators optimise their content-based earnings.
To sum up, YouTube’s new shopping features allow creators to directly tag and timestamp products in their videos, reducing friction in the buying process and increasing the likelihood of purchases. Overall, these features create a big opportunity for businesses and marketers to monetize their channels seamlessly and natively.
To support content creators, YouTube is taking new restrictive measures for users with ad blockers enabled. The platform will show pop-up messages reminding them that ad blockers violate the terms and conditions, and users that do not disable them, could end up having their playback disabled. As an alternative, YouTibe recommends upgrading to its Premium ad-free subscription plan. As a marketer, you may consider alternate monetization strategies and not rely solely on ad revenue. Such methods include sponsorships and affiliate links.
LinkedIn has unveiled a new tool called Accelerate that uses AI to create B2B marketing campaigns automatically. The tool analyses a company’s website, LinkedIn page, and previous ads to recommend campaigns with optimised targeting, creatives, and placement. Users are allowed to make adjustments to the recommendations before launching. With features such as Predictive Audiences and Performance Summaries, Accelerate aims to continuously help marketers optimise digital ad campaigns. The tool is currently in limited English beta testing and builds on LinkedIn’s existing automation tools, which have already shown improvements in various performance metrics.
That’s all from this edition.
We’ll be here with the next one soon!