ICYMI: TikTok Stories Edition
Here's what happened on social media this week, August 5
⏳ Because, of course. TikTok is now testing disappearing Stories. It’s only a matter of time before all platforms offer all things to all people. Except… Twitter did just retire its version of Stories this week (with Snickers taking advantage of the bad timing for a faux sweepstakes). Fleets, we hardly knew ya.
🎥 YouTube Shorts Fund is giving creators every incentive to post their short-form videos to the platform, offering eligible creators anywhere from $100 to $10,000 for their posted Shorts depending on viewership and engagement. (Check your eligibility)
📚 Platforms are rolling more tools and educational resources for creators and marketers. Instagram’s Professional Dashboard now offers tips from the IG team and content inspiration, YouTube has beefed up their YouTube for Creators site with tips, how-tos and monetization options, while Twitter updated its Agency Playbook to help marketers write better tweets.
✈️ American Airlines announced they’d offer 30-minutes of free access to TikTok as part of their inflight entertainment options. Random but a cute perk.
🔒 Losing access to your Facebook account is annoying but if you’re a social media manager, marketer or business owner it’s basically hell with no way back. But some Redditors have figured out that buying a $299 Oculus Quest headset (part of the Facebook family) could get them access to a separate customer support system.
📲 Fun fact: Despite what TikTok claims, 91% of people on the app never post a video according to author Chris Stokel-Walker.
🏅 Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee says she’s going to delete Twitter because it’s distracting and getting in the way of her Olympic dreams. To which a lot of people tweeted: Same.
🏆 US athletes have strict guidelines around the sponsored content they can post at the Olympics — as opposed to German Olympians who’ve negotiated much better terms. For example: The International Olympic Committee allows athletes a limited number of simple “thank you” posts to personal sponsors during the Games. The exact number varies — U.S. athletes get a maximum of seven; British athletes get 10. Germans don’t have a post limit and that’s just the start...
💰 A new-ish startup called F*** You Pay Me got profiled by Taylor Lorenz. It’s basically a Glassdoor for influencers where they can share their experiences collaborating with different brands and search crowdsourced compensation data, making it easier to figure out what price to charge for their services. But they’re not the only ones. Social media pages like Brands Behaving Badly, We Don’t Work for Free and Influencer Pay Gap also call attention to bad deals and potentially exploitative brands.
🎉 Embattled YouTube star David Dobrik threw a Lollapalooza 'house party' bash, where tickets went for as much as $1,500. Despite this year’s drama, the venue looks packed according to pictures of the party in Business Insider.
Peloton’s Ally Love went private on Instagram right before her wedding so you HAD to follow her in order to watch and other master class lessons in content creation from the Peloton star in this Buzzfeed piece.
🎓 In Session
I had some amazing guest speakers join my UCLA Extension classes for creators and entrepreneurs this Summer. I’m sharing some of the best advice or wisdom they shared.
“I bring up the whole profession thing because that's another thing that I think is becoming really popular for brands when sourcing. It’s not just creators who are full time content creators. I mean that’s great but people are more interesting than you think you are. You are more interesting than you give yourself credit for. What you do from 9 to 5, or whatever you do during the day, is really interesting.
It's becoming a trend that brands want to work with women in medicine and brands want to work with teachers and brands want to work with moms who are lawyers, right? So professions are really interesting, they add a whole other layer of depth to you.
So if you have quirky hobbies, if you have a 9 to 5 or 10 to 2, play that up because that is absolutely interesting.”
— Lindsay Fultz, VP Influencer Marketing at the Cashmere Agency on the evolution of what it means to be an influencer and what brands are looking for.
Thanks for reading! This originally developed as a way to keep students informed of key platform updates and how brands and creators use social to get their messages across and now has grown to almost 1000 people reading weekly. That blows me away and I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to stop and read this!