Social Media News February 2023

Hello Social Media Marketers! We hope your new year started off in an amazing way, with lots of fun new projects and experiences. While it’s still a bit cold over here, we are not taking a break from supplying you with the hottest social media news. Get ready for a tasty and informative morning crunch on what’s happening in the world of LinkedIn, TikTok, Meta & Co.!

If your New Year’s resolution has been to focus more on LinkedIn in 2023, this article should be worth a read!

General posting tips:

• Your LinkedIn post will be cut off at 140 characters in the mobile app, therefore
  shorter is likely better.
• Try using “hooks” in your posts, like “5 ways the [product] will improve [what it can
  improve].”
• LinkedIn advises that organizations post at least once a week.

Hashtags:

• LinkedIn advises to select hashtags that a brand wants to be associated with.
• These hashtags should also be added to the profile to highlight the key areas of interest.
• There is no definite optimal number, but only the most relevant ones should be used and the readability shouldn’t be affected by them

Content types:

• Video is the best-performing content type on LinkedIn.
• Live-Streaming has also been reported to generate 24x more engagement.
• Generally, always use a visual, even if it a still image.
• Create informative carousel posts.

Best times to post:

Disclaimer: The best posting times vary between brands and are never definite, these are simply suggestions

As we all know, Instagram’s focus throughout all of 2022 has been short video content. With
their attempts to come out on top as TikTok 2.0 they faced a lot of criticism and people actively asking for Instagram to go back to the simple photo sharing app it once was. And apparently, Instagram decided to finally listen, as Adam Mosseri, the chief of Instagram, made an interesting remark as part of his weekly Q&A series on Instagram Stories:

“I think we were overfocused on video in 2022 and pushed ranking too far, and basically showed too many videos and not enough photos. We’ve since balanced, so things like how often someone likes photos versus videos, and how often someone comments on photos versus videos, are roughly equal, which is a good sign that things are balanced.”

If this statement means that Instagram has now fully decided to stay true to their own image and not try to beat TikTok in an imaginary race is still not clear and will have to be seen in the upcoming months.

Snapchat might not be the first platform anybody thinks of when the topic of social media marketing comes up, but shouldn’t be overlooked, as it can be a great way to reach new customers in ways competitors haven’t thought of yet, as well as get in contact with the younger generations.

If you are considering including Snapchat in your marketing strategies for 2023, let us share some tips:

Brand profiles on Snap:
• Snapchat added brand profiles in the app back in 2020. They are a great way to showcase your brands content. There is also the possibility of highlighting shoppable products in the app.

• Snapchat is working on improving its systems so that businesses can create engaging AR experiences for their followers and potential customers without having to have deep technical knowledge and skills about the topic.
• Snap has its own AR Lens Web Builder, which includes templates and tools to build AR experiences.
• Snapchat also offers AR educational courses to teach brands how to create their own experiences.

On Snapchat users either upload Stories or short videos in the Spotlight feed.

In order to be successful with content on Snapchat, these tips should be followed:

• Optimize the opening – Capture attention in the first 1-2 seconds of your story
• Storytelling – Post longer Stories (3+ connected Snaps) in a burst to get started and tell a
  cohesive story
• Cadence – Post consistently to start developing learnings
• Content – Test a mixture of re-purposed and custom for Snap material in order to see what resonates. Consider takeover, behind the scenes, contest and 1st-person POV content in addition to incorporating Lenses and Filters as formats to test.
• Call to Actions – Include calls to subscribe through audio and graphics regularly.

These topics for short form videos seem to perform well on Snapchat: Instructional videos (DIYs,
tutorials, how-to’s etc.), Showing off talents (Comedy, dance etc.), Breathtaking and Cute videos
(nature, scenery, animals, babies), Challenges.

Lately, there has been a bit of a buzz about a so-called “heating” button, which is why we want to
shortly explain what that is and why it has roughed up some feathers in those past weeks. “Heating” is an internal button, that TikTok staff can use to make specific videos go viral. So instead of letting the algorithm decide which videos get the extra push, some TikTok employees have the power to make that happen without including the algorithm at all.

This has lead to people (including brands, creators, influencers etc.) wondering, if the whole
“personalized feed by algorithm” speech is just a make-believe.

But the allegations don’t stop there as some sources also claim that TikTok is using the heating
button for their own benefit, therefore boosting its personal accounts and accounts of influencers
and brands, TikTok is seeking partnerships with.

TikTok itself claims, that only a few people have actual access to this button and it is only being used
to bring more diversity into the feed. So far, there isn’t enough information out there, to come to a definite conclusion.

Planning a year worth of content is hard and in most cases not even worth it, as it is
important to stay up-to-date and quickly jump on trends when they occur.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t prepare for important dates in the upcoming year. Which
is why TikTok has released a Marketing Calendar for 2023, in which they provide an
overview of key dates that can inspire content and help with certain marketing campaigns, such as International Women’s Day, Earth Day and the beginning of Summer Sales.

It definitely won’t hurt to take a look and include some of these dates in your marketing and content plans.

“ChatGPT3” (that’s short for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, if you want to know) is the latest iteration of the machine learning-powered chatbot from the OpenAI Foundation, which is largely financed by Elon Musk and Microsoft. And it marks a big leap in quality from its predecessor ChatGPT2.

In November 2022, Open AI has published a free version of the chatbot with which the public can experiment for the time being, in essence providing the research team with loads of free data to further train and adjust their model. And after only five days, more than 1 million users had already tested the demo.

The goal is to provide quick, accurate and helpful answers to questions from users, for which it draws on big data and computational techniques. This allows it to understand words in context, thus simultaneously impersonating human speech patterns and sharing knowledge as if from an encyclopedia.

ChatGPT can write an essay analysis on command, solve a statistics task, or act as a travel guide, recommending the best museums in your vacation destination according to distance and rating.
However, experts have pointed out significant differences between human language and trained language models. Also, sometimes the chatbot gives answers that sound right but are made up or wrong because the AI is missing certain information.

Nonetheless, people have shown great interest into the new system, which is why the developers are currently looking to introduce appropriate pricing models. Other big tech companies like Alphabet for example are paying very close to attention as well, with the aforementioned even activating an internal „Code Red“. And the German Unicorn DeepL, formerly focussed on providing translation through machine learning, has branched out into text generation in response as well. For now though, ChatGPT3 is the best thing that’s publicly available.

Dunkin Donuts on Snapchat

Snapchat definitely isn’t the easiest platform to market on and many brands are still hesitant to include this app into their marketing strategies, but there are also brands that fully embraced the process and are doing great for themselves on there. Dunkin Donuts is one of these brands.

They created donut filters and paired these with influencer marketing, in honor of National Donut Day. But instead of making these filters available to the general public, they wanted to create a feel of exclusivity and therefore created a “geofilter” (=filter that can only be accessed while in one of their stores or through a QR code).

This exclusivity combined with the influence of, well, influencers brought ten times more followers to their networks than on a normal day. So don’t be shy to experiment and try something new, you never know which strategy makes you go viral in the end.

Ryan Air might not be the most prestigious airline, but they are killing it on TikTok!

Making use of all the trending sounds and video trends they have incredible numbers regarding views, engagement and followers. Additionally to using all the viral trends, they aren’t scared of making fun of themselves or even their clients in a sassy but
relatable way.

Give their account a look and judge the content yourself!

Most of the time, when people come on apps like Instagram, it is not to look at product photos but to relax and put their mind at ease.

Therefore, it is important for brands to not only push and market their products, but to also create compelling and aesthetically pleasing visuals, that their followers and potential clients enjoy looking at.

GoPro seems to have mastered that technique and even though they do post pictures of only their newest action camera sometimes, they mostly focus on showing their followers beautiful sceneries shot by their products, instead of what that product looks like.

Amazing photographs like these can please the eyes of the customer and also convince them to possibly invest in one of GoPro’s products in the long run, without that brand even directly marketing to that very customer.

The health-focused supermarket Whole Foods has mastered the art of “rich Pins” on Pinterest (= Pins that include additional information directly on the Pin visual; example on the left).

Through these they spread brand awareness and add more context to their Pins, so that the viewer doesn’t have to visit an external website to get the information they are looking for,
creating a pleasant app and brand experience for the customer.

Through their rich Pins they share mostly cooking information, but they are also on top of what people are interested in and searching for on social media, e.g. how to organize a fridge the proper way.

We definitely suggest to take a look at how Whole Foods designs their rich Pins, as they are not only informative, but also aesthetically pleasing.