ICYMI: Instagram's Live Tips + Tools
Here's what happened on social media this week, March 18
Welcome to ICYMI, a weekly recap of social updates and influencer news and trends. I’ll be off next week — my brain needs to unplug — but back in your email inbox 3/31. Thanks for reading, sending feedback and sharing with your colleagues and friends!
💻 ROADMAP
📲 Late last week, Instagram announced their newest feature, Live Moderator. This allows users who are going live to assign a moderator to maintain a safe environment for their community, whether that’s removing inappropriate comments or other users from the livestream.
It’s just the latest feature the company’s released around going live which underscores the importance of livestreams this year. Other new features recently released include Live Practice Mode (testing a live without an audience) and Upcoming Lives in Profile (announcements that can be scheduled up to 90 days in advance).
The Instagram marketing team followed up with some tips for going live with some great production suggestions from Creator marketing video lead Brooke Devard, which I’ve combined here with some of my own:
Make sure you have a strong wifi connection
Switch your phone settings to Do Not Disturb mode
Find a good backdrop, no white walls!
Use a tripod to keep your phone stable
Have your light source behind the camera (whether that’s a window or LED light from Lume, Geekoto or others)
Invest in a wireless mic, like Saramonic’s Blink 500
Don’t wait for people to join, start talking with energy — especially if you plan to post this stream to your Feed for people to watch later
Livestreams — especially shoppable live entertainment — have been forecasted as a huge trend for 2022. Start going live before you have anything to sell. It’ll help you perfect the technique and will get audiences accustomed to the format and encourage them to look forward to watching you live.
🎙 Instagram just launched a Creator account on TikTok … with repurposed Reels … and featuring TikTok stars they paid to promote Reels. My tweet about this lol situation made TechCrunch!
⏳ TikTok’s Story feature is rolling out to more people (I tested yesterday). The functionality is a lot like creating regular TikTok content but allows for photos or video. Stories posted then show up on the For You Page and profile pages and disappear after 24 hours.
😡 Twitter briefly switched user timelines to show recommended tweets versus the latest tweets and people were not having it. Within days they reverted to the chronological feed and peace was restored people found something else to complain about.
🔵 Twitter’s version of Instagram’s Close Friends is currently in test mode, giving users even more control over who sees their tweets and who can engage with their tweets. Twitter Circle will let people share with a smaller crowd of up to 150 people.
👆🏻 CLICK THRU
✨ Influencers on both sides are getting pulled into the assault on Ukraine. Vice revealed that Russian TikTok influencers were being paid to post videos pushing pro-Kremlin narratives. While the Washington Post shared that the White House hosted a Zoom call to share key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine with 30 American TikTokers. This led to a Saturday Night Live parody of the digital creator summit.
Meanwhile, creators in Ukraine are becoming go-to sources on Instagram and TikTok for war updates. A pregnant Ukrainian influencer known as @gixie_beauty was caught up in Russian disinformation campaign around the bombing of a hospital. And a Russian food blogger was one of the first three people to face a criminal case under Russia’s “fake news” law.
💼 Corporate America is mis-managing the influencers they have on staff: “Companies trying to prevent people from capitalizing on that [social] skill — in media and beyond — will probably have to change their policies as Gen Z enters the workforce.”
🛒 Instacart released a new “Shoppable Recipes” feature as part of an integration with TikTok, Tasty.co and Hearst to allow food creators to link shopping lists into their videos.
📹 There’s a lot being written about Casey Neistat’s documentary, Under the Influence, cataloguing the rise and fall of YouTuber David Dobrik. But one thing that really resonated was this quote Neistat shared with The Information’s Kaya Yurieff:
“With YouTube, you can get millions of subscribers and a faucet of money turns on... All of that happens without YouTube sitting you down around the boardroom, explaining to you what you can and can’t do and how it should work [unlike on a TV show where there’s a team of writers and lawyers.]”
📣 Arnold Schwarzenegger launched a Telegram channel to deliver a message to the Russian people, telling them the truth about the war in Ukraine in an incredibly compelling social video with English and Cyrillic captions. He’s a master at social video and it’s worth watching the 9 minute video.
🚫 Instagram suspended Kanye West for 24 hours following a racial slur toward Trevor Noah.
🎞 TikTok has become the official partner of the Cannes Film Festival, promising exclusive backstage clips, glamorous red carpet scenes, interviews with talent and a #TikTokShortFilm competition.
🔨 RESOURCES
Creators supporting other creators is a positive industry trend. After all, who best to provide marketplace transparency around contracts, rates and working conditions. Some of the notable startups being labeled as the ‘Glassdoor for influencers’ (all fronted by female founders!) include:
Clara: founded by former TikTok employee and #CareerTok creator Christen Nino De Guzman.
Influent: founded by creator coach Julia Montgomery.
F*** You Pay Me: founded by writer and creator Lindsey Lee.
Norm.ai: a soon-to-launch resource founded by creator Kayley Reed.
(RIP @InfluencerPayGap which also had anonymous creator payment submissions until it stopped posting.)
Are there other cool creators and influencers I should highlight? If you’ve got ideas or suggestions of influencer agencies, coaches, tools or services doing something special or innovative, let me know! Bonus if it’s female-founded or geared toward marginalized groups or creators of color.
🤔 QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Not really. They do help us understand what a post is about which means it might be more likely to show up in a place like a hashtag page for instance but in general no, I wouldn’t think of hashtags as a way to get more distribution.”
-Adam Mosseri, when asked if hashtags help views
📖 ALSO ON MY READING LIST…
Ukraine’s Mykhailo Fedorov talks about corporate sanctions and running a government during wartime - TechCrunch
The internet forgot about Clubhouse. Anti-war Russians didn’t. -Input
Where teen influencers go to become actors -Vox
Why this L.A. TikTok star dreamed of boxing glory -L.A. Times (paywall)