Category: SOCIAL MEDIA

X is rolling out support for Passkey login, providing another way for users to access their X profiles without relying on passwords, or other less secure means.

Passkeys, which enable fingerprint and face ID login, utilize cryptographic data transfer to facilitate access, with your actual login info remaining on your device. That makes it a more secure login option, and many cybersecurity experts are now recommending that social platforms support Passkey access.

TikTok added Passkey support last July, while LinkedIn is also working on the same, and given the ongoing concerns around account hacking, it makes sense that, eventually, all platforms will follow suit.

And it could be especially valuable on X, which removed SMS two-factor authentication for non-paying users last February. X Premium subscribers can still use it, but as part of its cost-cutting drive, X decided to get rid of it as a security option for all users, which will reportedly save the business around $60 million in annual SMS costs.

You can still download an alternative authenticator app for the same purpose, but having Passkey access as an in-built alternative could be a valuable consideration for those who no longer have 2FA enabled.

It’s not available to everyone just yet (as X notes), but it could be worth considering, as X continues to roll out Passkey access to more regions.

So, X has now added audio and video calls for Android users, a feature that it rolled out on iOS back in October.

So now, if you want, you can make a more direct connection with someone via your X DMs. So long as you’re a paying user, as it’s only available on X Premium subscribers. And as The Verge points out, it’s not entirely clear if it’s available to Premium Basic users, the cheapest tier of X subscription.

But if you are paying, or are willing to pay for X, and you want to call them direct from the app, now you can.

Though of course, you can also conduct audio and video calls via WhatsApp, Messenger, basically every other messaging tool there is, which all have many more users, and are more likely your messaging platform of choice.

But as part of Elon’s “everything app” vision for the app, it’s another seemingly important step in facilitating more types of connection.

As with all elements of the “everything app” plan, I’m not sure that people are actually going to use any of these additions, but they’re there anyway, and who knows, maybe it will come in handy to launch a video call from an X DM exchange.

I can’t imagine much worse, and I would definitely be rejecting that request. But for more active X users, it could be of value.  

As X developer Enrique Barragan notes, the option is in the process of being rolled out to all Android users.

WhatsApp has announced some new features for its increasingly popular Channels broadcast messaging option, including in-stream polls, voice notes, and a new way to share public Channel posts as a personal Status update.

First off, on polls. Now, Channel admins will be able to send out polls to their audience, providing another way to spark group engagement, and gauge sentiment on specific topics.

As you can see in this example (shared by Android Central), polls will be displayed in-stream, with full vote counts shown at the right of the display.

Polls are an easy, low effort engagement option, which generally spark more response, and can also help to boost community connection. As such, the addition of polls within WhatsApp Channels makes a lot of sense, and you can no doubt expect to see them appearing in your chats sometime soon.

Voice Notes, meanwhile, will provide another creative option for admins to engage their groups.

Voice posting options seem to fluctuate in popularity, but it could be a handy way for celebrities, in particular (like Bad Bunny), to share unique, engaging updates to their WhatsApp channel audience.

And either way, it’s another creative consideration, with a range of potential possibilities.

Finally, WhatsApp will also now enable Channel members to forward a channel update as a Status update, if, of course, that Channel isn’t private.

Long pressing on a chat or image from within a Channel will now provide the option to forward that to your personal Status update, which could be a good way to promote public Channels, and get more people to sign up.

On another front, WhatsApp’s also increasing the number of admins that a Channel can have from one to up to 16, which will provide more capacity to maximize the option.

These are some handy updates, which will no doubt help to drive more engagement in Channels in the app. And with WhatsApp seeing increased usage, particularly in North America, that could be a valuable pathway to connect with your audience, and keep them updated of relevant news from your brand.

It’s a rising consideration, and these new tools could spark even more interest.

There have been various reports circulating throughout different LinkedIn communities as to the effectiveness of hashtags in the app, and whether you even need to bother with hashtags in your LinkedIn posts anymore.

As you may recall, for a long time, LinkedIn didn’t actually support hashtags at all, but then in 2018, the platform not only reactivated hashtag discoverability, but it also started pushing hashtag use in an effort to get more users manually categorizing their posts.

The idea here is that through better content segmentation, LinkedIn is then better able to show more users content that they’re interested in. But over time, as algorithms have evolved, the need for hashtags, in general, has lessened, because social platform systems are now much better at taking in the whole context of a post’s text, including visuals, user history, and all keywords included.

In other words, hashtags are less important because most of the time, relevant mentions and indicators are included in the post anyway, and that’s enough to ensure the system can show your post to the most interested audiences.

In theory, that could mean that LinkedIn wouldn’t actually need somebody to add in a repeated hashtag like the above example, because the system would be able to identify the “Meta” mention within the text.

But is that right?

I asked LinkedIn, and they kind of answered:

“Using hashtags can be a helpful tool for viewers to easily identify what a post is about and find other related posts. However, it’s important to use hashtags that are closely related to the topic of the post for them to be most effective. In addition to hashtags, we also consider conversation topics and keywords to help surface relevant information for professionals looking to advance in their careers.”

So LinkedIn’s saying that you should only use relevant hashtags to maximize effectiveness, but it’s not entirely clear whether you need to add them if the keyword/s are already mentioned in the post.

But:

“When searching for conversations on a specific topic you can use topics or hashtags.”

So it seems that LinkedIn is now less reliant on hashtags for maximizing discovery, though you should be wary of which keywords are mentioned in your main post, and consider how you can tap into the right conversation streams based on your target topics.

How do you do that?

By following popular pages and people within your business niche, you’ll be able to glean better understanding of the common hashtags related to your sector. You can also search for hashtags in the app.

As a bonus, here’s a listing of the top 50 most-used hashtags on LinkedIn, as of 2021.

I’m guessing that AI is a bigger trend now than it was three years ago, but this gives you some additional context around the more common discussion trends in the app.

So, do you need to use hashtags on LinkedIn?

I would say that hashtags in the app are less relevant, and as LinkedIn expert Richard van der Blom has noted, hashtags also aren’t helping to expand post reach in the app the way that they once were.

According to van der Blom’s research, using 3-10 hashtags in your LinkedIn posts did give you a significant reach boost over the past couple of years. But now, hashtags are providing no additional reach boost at all.

Which would seem to suggest that LinkedIn is gradually de-emphasizing them as a discovery tool, as part of its broader focus on topical relevance, as opposed to maximizing reach.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“If you share a post about getting a new job, and people like that post, that doesn’t mean their entire networks will also see the post in their feed since it probably isn’t as relevant to their connections as it is to them. However, if you share a post outlining advice about tackling a workplace challenge it could be seen both by your network and people outside your network who might find it helpful to their career growth.”

LinkedIn specifically notes that its system “is not designed for virality”, so hashtags are not necessarily supposed to work on LinkedIn the way that they do on other apps.

That could be part of the reason why LinkedIn is de-emphasizing them, in order to avoid people gaming the system, but the bottom line is that you probably don’t need to be as concerned about hashtags on LinkedIn as you may have been in the past, depending on the context.  

This could be interesting.

Microsoft has announced that it’s updating its Retail Media tool with a new “Creative Studio” element, which will enable users to create totally new ads, in new formats, all via conversational AI prompts.

As explained by Microsoft:

“With this creative management solution, retailers and advertisers can boost creativity and productivity by generating banner creative with ease, thereby improving banner ads’ participation, performance, and ultimately revenue. With the easy-to-use AI-powered tools, retailers can also support the full breadth of their advertisers, especially the smaller ones who may not be equipped to run effective banner campaigns, thereby unleashing the full potential of banner ads’ growth in retail media programs.”

The tool is able to create ads based on just a product URL, with users then able to further customize the creative for different channels.

Microsoft says that the AI-generated ads will automatically align with each retailer’s style guide, while you’ll also be able to customize your ads through further prompts.

You can also update and emphasize selected words and phrases, crop and clean up backgrounds, basically you’ll be able to modify all your ad elements, all based on text prompts.

It could be a handy tool for building your campaigns, and optimizing your ads for delivery on different platforms, adding another element to Microsoft’s expanding ad creation suite.

Microsoft is rapidly changing itself into an AI-first company, with generative AI being built into all of its tools. And with the hype around AI only set to rise, that’s looking to be a good bet for the company, with its Bing search engine getting more attention than ever, and its various other AI elements, powered by its partnership with OpenAI, helping to boost Microsoft’s value to record highs.

And with tools like this, which will continue to improve, you can see how Microsoft will continue to drive adoption via its AI elements.

It could be worth a look. you can learn more about Retail Media Creative Studio here.

Looking to come up with more compelling content ideas for your 2024 marketing calendar?

This will help. Social media advisor Angie Gensler has put together a new listing of over 100 social media “hooks”, or post types that spark engagement and interaction, and stop people mid-scroll in social apps.

And while not all of them will apply to your business, and some you might find unsuitable for your approach, the listing here will at the least give you some inspiration for your content, and what can help to trigger more response in feeds.

You can also use these as prompts to feed into ChatGPT to get more, similar hooks, which could also provide more considerations for your updates. Maybe they work for you, maybe not, but worth thinking over either way.

You can check out Angie’s full list of social post hooks here.

Have you considered giving your branding a refresh for 2024?

Visual trends are always evolving, and while that logo and color palette that you came up with may have been cool in 2012, its now 2024, and it could be worth re-considering your approach, in order to maximize your visual appeal.

Which is crucially important. Attention spans are shorter than ever, and if you want to gain traction in busy social feeds, you need to grab people as they scroll by.

This listing could help. The team from Piktochart have highlighted 8 key trends that they expect to see gain traction over the next year.

Some interesting considerations, which could boost your visual branding.  

You can read Piktochart’s full report (including one more key trend) here.

With a new year comes new opportunities to reshape your approach, and experiment with alternative directions that could help you maximize your marketing and promotional efforts.

And with interactive behaviors always changing, it is important to stay up with the latest trends, in order to meet people where they’re active, and with messaging that resonates, in alignment with such shifts.

To help with this, here’s a quick overview of five key trends worth noting in your 2024 planning, which could help to refine your approach.

1. Experiment with short form video

You’ve no doubt heard and read this a million times by now, but you should be experimenting with short form video in your 2024 marketing plan.

Short form video is the fastest growing content type on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, and remains the key engagement vehicle on TikTok. X is also looking to push more video content into user feeds, and many businesses that have made the investment in short form video content have reaped significant brand awareness benefits.

The challenge lies in creating engaging short form content, which is not always so easy, but there’s also a growing amount of resources to help guide you, including TikTok’s Top Ads listing, which highlights the best performing branded content at any given time.

What’s more, the platforms themselves are also developing new tools to make it easier for brands to create short form video, including generative AI tools that can build video clips based on text prompts.

It’s worth considering your options, and looking at what’s resonating, in order to spark your own ideas about potential short form video clips. 

You can repost your video clips across various platforms (so long as you don’t repost watermarked content) in order to maximize ROI, and the more you experiment, the better you’ll get.

I don’t see the popularity of short form video easing anytime soon, so it should be on your radar, at the least.

2. Explore the potential of messaging

A key trend of the past three years has been the shift away from posting to social platform feeds, largely in public, in favor of more private sharing in DM groups.

The reasons for this are varied. Past posts coming back to haunt high profile users have added extra concern around what you share, political division and argument has made people less interested in sharing their personal insights, while alot of users are just over the random, trivial updates, treating your various profiles as a showcase of vague, daily highlights.

As such, digital interaction is changing, and more and more people are sharing in private. Which is much harder to brands to track, and can be equally challenging to infiltrate.

But trusted brands, who treat DMs with respect, can utilize this as a valuable connection channel. If you’re granted access to a potential customers’ inbox, that’s a key promotional option, which could ensure that more of your messages are read, improving brand awareness and engagement.

Key considerations here are exclusive offers, offers to friends so they can share private deals, hyper-segmentation to maintain relevance, and a non-intrusive messaging cadence. 

Invite people to sign-up for these deals, find ways to align your audience with your messaging offers, and you stand to benefit from this shift.

3. Consider alternative platforms

No matter how you look at it, X is declining as an ad option. Maybe for some niche brands that doesn’t hold true, and there are also opportunities to consider in reduced competition as the big players reduce their X presence. But for the majority of brands, you’ll likely be rethinking your X strategy in 2024.

As a result, it could be worth experimenting with some of the smaller, more niche social platforms to see what kinds of results you can get.

Reddit continues to refine its ad options, Pinterest has over 400 million active users coming to the app with high purchase intent, Snapchat remains a critical connector for youngsters.

If you haven’t experimented with these apps, maybe the shift away from X will provide new opportunities to try them out, and see what results you might get. 

There may also be opportunity in Threads, which doesn’t have ads as yet, but could still be valuable as an organic brand awareness play. LinkedIn is also seeing more activity, and if there’s any flexibility in your planning as a result of the changes at X, it could be time to explore the various alternatives.

4. Experiment with generative AI tools

I’ve tested a range of the latest generative AI apps, and while I don’t see them as being whole scale replacements for actually doing the work yourself, they are handy for elements of various processes.

And they’re not going anywhere. Generative AI is here to stay, and it’ll continue to improve and become a bigger part of many workplaces and business processes.

As such, you need to understand it, and consider the benefits of how the various apps could help to optimize your daily process. Generative AI is expanding into more areas, including audio and video creation, and you can expect to see significant advances on both fronts this year.

The fundamental core of any such project, however, remains the creative, and coming up with engaging concepts is still something that machines can’t consistently recreate. Indeed, generative AI is inherently derivative, as it’s an approximation based on whatever examples have been built into its training data, so it’s only able to provide outputs that are similar to things that have come before.

Coming up with concepts remains the realm of humans, but for almost every other element, you can probably gain some advantage from generative AI tools. 

Learn how AI systems work, understand the various tools on offer, and how they’re evolving, and consider the ways that they can be applied to your process.

A good place to start could be LinkedIn Learning’s various AI courses, some of which are available for free.

5. Improve your understanding of AR and 3D object creation

The next step of digital interaction is going to be within increasingly immersive environments, like AR, VR and the metaverse, whatever that actually entails.

Yes, Meta may have gone early in betting its future on its metaverse vision, but it is correct in its view that this, increasingly, is where we’re headed.

Kids these days spend all of their time within immersive gaming worlds, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, where they socialize, interact, and engage. That points to the future of broader engagement trends, which will eventually also include professional interaction.

Not buying it? Consider that Facebook Workplace now has over 7 million paying subscribers, while almost every business now has its own version of a collaboration tool that’s based on the UI of social networks. These tools originated from youth engagement trends, and as those users have aged up, it’s become the logical development framework for business options.

These trends are indicative, and with the next generation of AR wearables also set to hit the market soon, a revolution is going to take place that will enable a greater sense of place and presence for all users.

With this in mind, it’s also worth taking the time to understand the latest AR tools on offer, and how you can create 3D digital versions of your products, for example, in order to build your presence and representation in these new spaces.

Generative AI based tools can help, in simplifying the creation process, while evolving AR builder platforms are also becoming easier to use, so you can make your own immersive experiences.

You are going to be building within 3D environments at some stage. Maybe it’s time to start learning how these processes work.

There’s a range of emerging trends in the digital marketing space, and it’s important to recognize where the tide is pushing, in order to stay ahead of the game. These pointers will help you maximize your 2024 push.

TikTok’s working on some new tools to help creators maximize their performance, this time via new desktop-based creator tools, including a new Creator Center UI which provides more analytics insights and updated discovery tools, utilizing conversational AI.

First off, on the new Creator Center. Now, in the desktop version of the app, some users with a Business account are seeing a new format for the analytics UI, which better lays out the various data points in full-screen.

As you can see in this example, shared by Ahmed Ghanem, the new format makes it easier to research your content performance, and audience response, with dedicated, full-screen displays of all the numbers that you need to know.

That could make it easier to manage your TikTok presence from your desktop PC, which, for social media managers operating across various platforms, could be a big help.

TikTok has also continued to improve its Creative Center, where creators can access all of its various insights tools, including Top Ads, trends, keyword insights and more.

TikTok recently added a new conversational chatbot guide to help Creative Center users find what they’re after in the app.

As you can see, the new conversational UI makes it easier to get to relevant sections and tools, with examples of what you can ask it to find for you in-stream.

TikTok has had another solid year, and while it may not be seeing the same growth momentum that it once was, it remains a critical consideration for social media marketers, and could be a key element of your 2024 strategy.

And if you’re looking to make TikTok a bigger focus, then these updates could help.

The updated Creator Center format is being tested with selected users, while the new chatbot is now available in TikTok’s Creative Center.  

As Threads continues to gain momentum, especially among journalists, a next key step will be the development of an API, which will then enable direct publishing to Threads, as well as scheduling, third-party analytics and more.

And the Threads team is working on this, with Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently noting that they’re building a write API to begin with.

A write API would enable third-party publishing to Threads, which will be a big help for social media managers looking to manage yet another platform within their remit. But it wouldn’t facilitate analytics and other types of insight options as yet.

The Threads write API is already in live testing, so it’s close to launch, with the Threads team now looking to expand testing to partner and independent developers for further examination.

Threads will also look to eventually integrate the ActivityPub API as well, facilitating more open connectivity, but it’s not developing that option at this stage.

Threads has had a big year, racing to 100 million sign-ups in record time, then reaching 100 million monthly active users months after launch. Much of that success has come on the back of its connection to Instagram, and the massive amplification that Meta can provide through cross-promotion of Threads to Facebook and IG.

Without the Meta connection, it’s not clear that Threads would be such a success, while the divisive decisions undertaken by Elon Musk at the platform formerly known as Twitter have also played a part in Threads’ rising popularity.

But is it a good, sustainable platform in the long term?

The Threads team has already shown that it’s looking to take a different approach to app development, eschewing the usual pathway of amplifying the most engaging posts based on raw metrics, and not adding Trending Topics or even hashtags as we know them.

Meta believes that it has a better pathway to develop the next billion-user app, but it’ll be interesting to see whether Threads can maintain its momentum in 2024 and beyond.

But either way, at 100 million or more users, it is likely a consideration for businesses already and an API would be a big help on this front.