ICYMI: Social Media as Press Release Edition
Here's what happened on social media this week, November 19
Welcome and thanks for reading! There will be no email next week because of Thanksgiving (for everyone outside the U.S., it’s arguably American’s most popular holiday). I hope you all get a chance to go off the grid and I look forward to seeing your photo dumps after the holidays 🦃🥧🍁
💻 Roadmap
Instagram is rolling out Badges to all U.S. creators, which will allow users with over 10K followers to get paid during Lives in $0.99, $1.99 and $4.99 increments.
To take advantage of this new monetization feature, your account has to meet the following eligibility requirements:
10K+ followers
18+
US based
Professional account (creator or business)
Meet partner monetization policies
Other micro-updates on Instagram:
Instagram is now letting you delete photos out of a carousel. It’s starting on iOS and expanding to Android soon.
They’ve introduced a feature called Rage Shake, if you shake the app it pops up the option to report a problem.
Instagram is testing the ability to like Stories, with likes showing up on Stories in the same place as story viewers.
The platform will allow you to add a moderator to live videos to help manage comments.
After Instagram recommended using no more than 3 to 5 hashtags, Later analyzed over 18 million Instagram feed posts to see if there was a magic number. The tl;dr “using 20-30 relevant (and targeted) hashtags is even better for your overall reach and engagement rates.”
📈 TikTok is expected to surpass 1.5 billion active users by 2022 according to this mobile forecast report from App Annie. The app “will continue as a disruptive and genre-blending force in 2022 as they expand their investment in shopping.”
👻 Snapchat launched two new interactive features on Snap Map: Memories (meant to show you old Snapchats that you sent from particular places) and Explore (which shows activity by volume around a location).
👆🏻 Click Thru
🚨 Social scheduler SocialFlow stopped publishing to Facebook and Instagram this week (and wiped out weeks worth of posts for some). The company’s CEO released a combo apology-shade letter that’s a masterclass in reinforcing your value prop at another brand’s expense: “While this issue remains unresolved, you can post to Facebook and Instagram natively (which we understand is a terrible inconvenience).”
🧡 We’re less than a week away from Thanksgiving and one of the greatest holiday traditions: watching these strangers-turned-fast-friends continue to celebrate the holidays together.
Quick recap: In 2016, Grandma Wanda accidentally texted Jamal Hinton (instead of her grandson) and invited him to family Thanksgiving. He took her up on the offer and it sparked a friendship that has endured to this day.
Even after Wanda’s husband died, they continued to celebrate the holiday together.
"This Thanksgiving, along with all the holidays coming up, aren't going to be the same as past ones but we will make the best of it," Hinton wrote last year. "Rest In Peace to Lonnie and everyone else we lost this year we will miss you greatly. Thank you for being in our lives."
🛍 A Grin report on the power of influencers reveals the top-performing promoted products (in order of preference) according to industry are:
Subscription Boxes
Health & Wellness
Cosmetics
Home Improvement
Appliances & Cookware
Electronics
📺 Livestream shopping has been much slower to take off in the U.S. versus China. But according to this Glossy report, it’s estimated that “livestreaming e-commerce penetration in the U.S. will more than triple by 2023.”
💅🏻 Marketers, brace yourselves. Emily in Paris is back with a new trailer for season 2. The marketing magician who made all her campaigns go viral (“impossible,” says Entrepreneur and “lovably hateable” according to The Cut) returns Dec. 22 on Netflix.
🚌 This San Francisco bus driver's viral Twitter thread on the Shang-Chi bus scene is a gem. Simu Liu concurs.
📲 This was a big week for female pop stars sharing to social media:
Britney Spears - the self-described advocate - announced on Instagram that she’s headed to Oprah.
Camila Cabello used Instagram Stories to announce the end of her relationship with Shawn Mendes.
Brands (and fans) rallied to Taylor Swift’s side on every platform for her rereleased album RED.
Hilary Duff did a TikTok challenge 15 years in the making… “So I can stop receiving text about this.”
🎤 About 40K people logged into a Clubhouse room to hear Oprah unpack her interview with Adele. That seems like a win for the audio app, which hasn’t made headlines in a while. But The Verge says that audience is nothing compared to the 10M people who watched the Oprah and Adele special on CBS.
I say it’s still a win for Clubhouse and here’s why: Without Adele participating in the chat, Oprah unlikely to reveal any significant new details and virtually no marketing for the live conversation — they were competing with every other platform to host the watercooler recap for Adele’s fandom.
🎾 The hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai has been gaining traction on social after the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai. Fellow pros such as Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic and Naomi Osaka have all lent their support to the movement on Twitter.
🎁 If you work in any social or marketing capacity, you’re going to want to put one of these mugs on your holiday wishlist.
