Disruptive Marketing Tactics, Instagram Measurement, Meta Ads Branding Controls, and More

Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner... presented by The weekend is almost here, Alluser! Here's a recap of the most important insights, trends, and updates from the week. Catch up in minutes and go into next week prepared. In today's edition: How to measure hook retention on Instagram Tell Meta's AI exactly how your brand should look in ads LinkedIn newsletter analysis Disruptive marketing examples Your authentic voice scaled across any content type LinkedIn Updates: Comment analytics, newsletter metrics, predictive audiences, and more ChatGPT and Google Collab: How to do your own data analysis 10 prompts for better strategic results from AI 🗞️ Industry news from Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and more Measuring Hook Retention on Instagram Have you ever posted something brilliant on Instagram only to watch it get lost in the void? We've all been there. Lucas O'Keefe shares his brilliantly simple HACK formula for hooks that keep people on your content past the first 3 seconds. It works for videos, posts, and captions! Plus, he shows you how to use a new Instagram analytic tool to measure how effective your hooks are at retaining viewers. Read more here. Stop Meta's AI From Messing Up Your Branding in Ads Tired of Meta's creative enhancements making your brand look inconsistent? Meta is finally giving advertisers control over how their brand appears in AI-generated creative and Advantage+ enhancements. Jon Loomer has a great first-look for marketers: where to find it, how it works, and how to use it to define your brand elements directly in Ads Manager. Now you have more control over logo, brand colors, and fonts. While Jon notes the implementation isn't perfect yet, it's a massive improvement that reduces brand risk. Read more here. LinkedIn Newsletter Analytics: What You're Missing! If you're publishing a newsletter on LinkedIn, you're probably tracking subscriber growth, but there's so much more data available now. In this video, Louise Brogan walks you through which key metrics to track, then shows you how to analyze your audience demographics, see how many subscribers actually receive and open your newsletter, and compare your personal vs. company page newsletters. Whether you're publishing from your personal profile or company page, these insights are gold for improving your content strategy. Watch more here. How to Become More Valuable  Imagine acquiring specialized marketing knowledge that allows you to get a raise, increase your rates, or bring in more revenue for your company. That's what happens when you attend Social Media Marketing World 2025—taking place in just 2 days!  You'll walk away with new ideas that you can put to work right away for your business or clients.  Can't attend in person? We've got you covered.  Get the recordings of everything with a Virtual Ticket. You can also stream the keynotes and sessions live! Get your ticket now. How to Use Disruptive Storytelling to Thrive as a Marketer Are your tried and true marketing tactics losing their impact? Wondering how to adapt and stay relevant with consumers? While dining with friends, Mark Schaefer noticed people quietly standing up and walking to stand outside the restaurant. Curious, he and his companions abandoned their food and drinks to see what was happening. Outside, they discovered a drone show lighting up the night sky—an animation promoting a new television series that concluded with a QR code. Activating the QR code on a mobile device led the viewer to a trailer for Halo. This experience captivated Schaefer and made him wonder: Could he create a story so compelling that people would leave their meals to view, record, and share it with their social networks? The answer was no—and that realization sparked his journey to understand how businesses can stand out in an increasingly noisy world. Schaefer identified a pattern—a system for creating a disruptive story that demands attention. This system revolves around three key elements: What is your story? (Your narrative) Where do you tell the story? Who tells the story? To thrive, you must disrupt your narrative, where you tell your story, or who tells it—ideally, all three. Disrupt Your Narrative The strategy here is "breaking bad rules for good reasons"—pushing boundaries and industry norms to create something memorable for consumers. One of Schaefer's favorite examples comes from two Australian brothers, Andrew and James McKinnon, who run an agency called Taboo in Melbourne, Australia. During an on-stage presentation called "Taboo by Design," they announced that they would remove a piece of clothing whenever someone left the room during their talk. Andrew shared that they'd been told numerous times this was a bad idea but told the audience, "I would rather be humiliated today than be forgotten." By the end of their presentation about breaking industry norms, they stood on stage in their underwear, showing their company name across their undershirts. This approach taps into what researcher Jonah Berger identified in his book Contagious: stories that go viral have a strong emotional impact. While marketers often focus on creating positive emotions, the McKinnon brothers demonstrated the power of creating anxiety—an emotion that gets internalized and remembered. Other examples include Liquid Death, a water company that breaks all marketing norms by associating its product with death (its mascot is called "Murder Man"), and Nutter Butter cookies, which has created horror-movie-style content on TikTok that has quadrupled its sales. Disrupt Where You Tell the Story  The second element involves telling your story in unexpected places.  A prime example is e.l.f. Cosmetics. Their marketing philosophy is to lean into the signal"—studying where their customers are showing up and how they're behaving differently, rather than obsessing over-optimization and metrics that every brand has access to. For instance, while most cosmetics brands advertise in magazines like Vogue, e.l.f. Beauty created an experiential world in Roblox. Why? Because many of their customers—generally young women and preteens—spend time there. Another creative example comes from Litographs, a company that prints the entire text of popular books on merchandise like t-shirts and blankets. They created temporary tattoos featuring individual sentences from popular books and sent them to fans. Customers applied the tattoos, took pictures, and sent them back to Litographs, allowing people to read an entire book displayed across various body parts. This unique approach created an engaging customer experience for minimal cost. Now, when the company releases a new line of products featuring a new book, they have a proven word of mouth marketing mechanism in place. Disrupt Who Tells the Story The final element involves getting someone other than your marketing team to tell your story, otherwise known as word-of-mouth marketing. Despite being the oldest form of marketing, word of mouth remains an afterthought for most marketers. "How many people have word-of-mouth marketing in their marketing budget? Almost nobody," Schaefer points out. So there's plenty of untapped opportunity for this one. Why does it work so well? We live in a streaming economy, where people pay extra for Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify specifically to avoid advertisements. Nielsen research shows that people will believe a stranger before they'll believe an ad. They trust friends, family, influencers, reviews, and testimonials over traditional marketing. Yeti, the premium cooler and drinkware company, exemplifies this approach and Red Bull followed a similar path in its early days, building its business almost entirely through word-of-mouth marketing rather than traditional advertising. Involving employees can also be effective, but Schaefer cautions against incentive programs. Instead, he recommends making storytelling a career development opportunity. Tractor Supply runs an employee-led Instagram and TikTok campaign where employees simply talk about store products as they would to customers. Today's advice is provided with insights from Mark Schaefer, a featured guest on the Social Media Marketing Podcast and speaker at Social Media Marketing World. Watch the full interview on YouTube Content at Scale: How to Train AI to Create Great Content Struggling to keep up with content creation? Want to create more content in less time while maintaining consistency in a voice that actually sounds like you? Discover a practical strategy anyone can implement for authentic AI-driven content creation in your business. The Experiment: Build an AI-Generated Content Creation System to Double a Social Media Following in 90 Days Research Social Media Profiles for Successful Content Examples  At the heart of Audra Carpenter's approach is what she calls a training database – a collection of successful content examples that AI can learn from to generate better results. This data-driven method moves beyond relying solely on personal experience or intuition. Audra spent 4-8 hours researching LinkedIn profiles with successful content to build her LinkedIn database. She looked at content from people with 40k-300k followers, avoiding mega-influencers because the volume of their audiences can skew the response to their content. Audra didn't want to sound like everyone else in the marketing space; she wanted to create her own voice, so instead of looking at content only from other marketers, she also examined content across different industries, including coaches, service providers, and venture capitalists, looking for profiles with posts that performed well. She ultimately settled on about 15 profiles. Assemble Your Training Database Create and Populate a Structured Content Database Next, Audra built a detailed Google spreadsheet with columns for: The actual post (copied exactly as posted, including emojis, formatting, and spacing) Date posted Number of likes Number of comments Links to the creators' profiles Links to any images used Content category (how-to posts, mindset posts, etc.) Target audience Intentional message/summary She then copied and pasted 100 high-performing posts from her selected profiles into the Google sheet precisely as they appeared on LinkedIn, retaining emojis, formatting, etc., and filled in all fields except the last three columns. Then, she pasted each post into Claude and asked it to analyze the content and provide notes on the final three additional fields. Audra then pasted those notes into the appropriate field in the spreadsheet. You are an expert marketing strategist on LinkedIn. You know what a successful LinkedIn post looks like. I want to create a project to create LinkedIn content that will grow my audience from 25k to 50k in 90 days. I don't know how to create content for LinkedIn, but I have 100 examples of LinkedIn content that I think performs well. I want you to analyze these posts and note: 1. The content category (how-to posts, mindset posts, etc.) 2. The target audience 3. The intentional message/summary. This structured approach gave her AI assistant a comprehensive understanding of what makes LinkedIn content successful and provided a framework for generating similar high-performing content. Detail Your Personalized Voice Guidelines For AI content to truly represent you, it needs more than just your writing style – it needs to understand your experiences, expertise, and personality. Audra created detailed documentation that included: Standard brand voice guidelines Her professional experience Her personality, likes, and dislikes Her values and causes This personalization ensures that the content the AI produces for you feels authentic rather than generic, which is crucial for building genuine audience connections. Upload the Training Data to Claude Audra downloaded the training database and personalized voice guidelines as a PDF and uploaded it to her Claude Project. Though this took up about 60% of Claude's memory capacity, it gave the AI a comprehensive understanding of successful LinkedIn content patterns. Generate Social Media Content with Minimal Effort With all this preparation complete, Audra can now create LinkedIn posts with remarkable efficiency–often as little as two minutes. Good morning, Claude. Today, we're going to write a post on AI and Customer Service. Because Claude has access to all her reference materials, the output is typically high-quality and authentic-sounding, and minimal follow-up prompting is required. According to her, the results have been substantial: Significant follower growth More comments than she's ever had in 12 years on LinkedIn Invitations to speak at two events An invitation to be on Michael Stelzner's podcast Creating Content for Other Social Media Platforms Audra notes that what works on one platform may not transfer directly to another. When she tried using this LinkedIn Content Project to create content for Facebook, she didn't see the same growth results. You'll need to create separate Projects for each platform to adapt its content training data to that platform's unique algorithm and audience behaviors. Today's advice provided with insights from Audra Carpenter, a featured guest on the AI Explored podcast. Watch the full interview YouTube It's Happening This Weekend  Thousands of marketers will gather in San Diego for the 12th annual Social Media Marketing World… where they'll discover marketing strategies that can transform their value in 2025. Will you be there? Attending in person is the best way to experience the conference. But if you can't get there in person, we offer a Virtual Ticket that includes:  1️⃣ Stream the keynotes and sessions live  2️⃣ Get recordings of ALL of the content from the conference Yes, I want to experience the conference! Discover LinkedIn's latest analytic features, including metrics for newsletter open rates and post comments, and find out how to customize your LinkedIn feed to show the posts you really want to see. We also talked about some exciting new offerings for people creating content for LinkedIn. Plus, we explore what's happening with data-scraping tools on the platform and how their removal is shaking things up for some businesses. Watch it on YouTube No Data Scientist? No Problem: AI-Powered Business Insights Are Easily Within Your Reach Ever feel like you're sitting on a goldmine of business data but can't extract its value? In his episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis shows how to transform raw data into actionable insights—without a data science degree. Discover how to create comprehensive business reports in minutes instead of days using ChatGPT. Learn to transform screenshots into analyzable tables, combine siloed data from different departments, and generate visualization-rich reports that reveal hidden patterns in your numbers. You'll also see how Google Colab can pull external data through APIs and create interactive maps, perfect for making location-based business decisions. Whether you're tracking customer profitability, analyzing financials, or planning market expansion, these tips and tools democratize data analysis that once required specialized teams. Watch more here. Transforming How You Use AI: From Basic Q&A to True Thinking Partner If you're just asking AI questions, you're missing the good stuff. We all say AI should augment human intelligence, but many of us still ask it to think for us instead of with us. In her recent deep dive with Claude and ChatGPT, Liza Adams discovered something game-changing: AI becomes exponentially more valuable when you lead with your ideas first. She shares 10 prompts that turn AI into a true thinking partner and includes a use case for using these prompts in Claude and ChatGPT to uncover fresh insights about trust, attribution, and brand perception in the AI era. Read more here. Use Calendly in LinkedIn Custom Button: This integration allows custom button users to create or link a Calendly account, enabling viewers to schedule meetings directly on LinkedIn without leaving the platform. Source: LinkedIn LinkedIn Introduces Custom Date Range for Analytics: This feature allows users to track performance metrics during specific time periods of their choosing. Users are no longer restricted to preset timeframes and can instead select custom date ranges that align with their goals. This functionality applies to tracking both impressions and engagements on user content. Source: LinkedIn Meta Announces AI-Powered Business Tools & Ads: Meta is expanding access to omnichannel ads that drive online and in-store sales. This summer, Meta will introduce a simplified checkout experience for Shops ads that directs people to complete purchases on advertisers' websites after building their cart. Meta now allows advertisers to combine Partnership ads with Advantage+ catalog ads, bringing creator content to this experience. A new optimization feature will show additional products from catalogs when promoting preferred items. This spring, Meta will begin testing ads in Facebook notifications, giving advertisers a new way to engage people and drive product discovery and reconsideration. Meta will introduce the ability for advertisers to request emails before sharing promo codes in promotion ads. Site links will soon be available globally on Instagram, allowing marketers to highlight multiple landing pages in a single ad. Source: Meta Reddit Replaces Private Messages (PMs) with Reddit Chat and Inbox Notifications: The transition will begin in late March and roll out in phases over three months. Existing PMs will remain accessible as a read-only archive on the updated reddit.com website. Reddit Chat will offer enhanced features, including pinned chats, unread filters, a spam folder, and more sender context when accepting invites. Mod Mail will remain unchanged, but Mod Mail messages will now be delivered to recipients as chat messages instead of PMs. PM APIs will remain active for 99% of requests, allowing developers to continue using PM API endpoints without code changes. Admin notifications that don't support replies will appear as inbox notifications, with user-configurable preferences in settings. Source: Reddit Instagram Expands Marketing API Support for Instagram Partnership Ads: Advertisers can now utilize existing Instagram posts for partnership ads in both Placement Asset Customization and Advantage+ Creative when creating ads via API. Additionally, partnership ads now support click-to-message destinations, enhancing direct communication opportunities with audiences. Source: Meta AI-Powered Tools for Instagram Partnership Ads Announced: These tools include AI-driven recommendations within the Ads Manager and smarter creator suggestions in the creator marketplace based on brand affinity. Additionally, the creator marketplace now features keyword search, playable Reels on creator cards, easier direct email contact (for opt-in creators), experience badges, and visibility into a creator's active partnership ads. Source: Meta Instagram API Updates: The Login API now includes User and Media Insights to help understand content performance, matching features previously only available with Facebook Login. These insights provide view metrics, profile visit data, and follower demographics. A new accessibility feature in the Content Publishing API allows developers to add alt text for images in Instagram Feed posts, making content more accessible to visually impaired users. Source: Meta LinkedIn Campaign Manager Enhancements: The new Media Planner lets marketers forecast potential ROI before launching by exploring different audience targeting, placement, and budget scenarios. It shows expected reach, impressions, leads, and cost metrics, with shareable plans for improved collaboration. In campaign creation, ad duplication allows seamless ad copying across campaigns and accounts. Dynamic UTMs automate tracking parameter generation, ensuring consistent performance reporting. The Marketing Overview home page provides a centralized performance snapshot for measurement. Measurement Insights offers detailed views across campaigns, ads, audiences, and the customer journey. The AI-driven Campaign Performance Digest delivers concise summaries with tailored recommendations. Source: LinkedIn Meta Must Stop Targeting UK User With Ads Based on Personal Data: Tanya O'Carroll has successfully forced Meta to stop using her personal data for targeted advertising through a settlement of her lawsuit filed in 2022. The settlement means Meta must stop using her data for ad targeting when she uses its services. O'Carroll's case was based on the argument that under UK and EU data protection law, she had a legal right to object to the use of her personal data for direct marketing and that Meta must respect this objection. Meta refuted this claim, arguing that its personalized ads are not direct marketing. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) intervened in the case and sided with O'Carroll. Source: TechCrunch Pinterest Launches Modules: Instead of just showing a grid of pins in the homefeed, the platform now shows two types of modules that give more context and help users explore new topics: one type takes you to a new page when tapped, and the other shows a row of pins you can scroll through. Source: Pinterest via Medium Snapchat Ads Updates: Recent improvements to the platform's automated Target Cost (tCPA) bidding strategy are improving user engagement and advertiser performance. Source: Snapchat New TikTok Commerce Features: The rollouts include Smart+ Catalog Ads with website and app capabilities, GMV Max with affiliate creator content and LIVE formats, and enhanced search functionality with Shop Tab. TikTok Symphony offers AI solutions like product-to-video conversion, digital avatars, voiceover translation, script generation, and daily video generation to help brands create TikTok-ready content efficiently. Source: TikTok TikTok Simplifies Second Camera Capabilities: TikTok Studio desktop streaming users can now easily add their phone, a friend's device, or an iPad as a second camera. The new process involves scanning a QR code displayed in the TikTok Studio app with your phone's camera to link the devices. While streaming with two cameras has previously been possible in TikTok Studio, this update makes the connection process more straightforward. Source: Social Media Today YouTube Developing Dynamic Host-Read Ads for Podcasts: The ads will be swapped out within individual videos, similar to capabilities on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This technical change addresses a limitation where YouTubers and podcasters couldn't update ads in older videos, potentially unlocking more ad revenue as sponsors can be changed after hitting download targets. Source: Semafor YouTube Testing Recommended Videos in Premium Queue: To use this feature, add a video to your queue, then open your queue to discover more recommendations. You can tap a video to start watching or tap the three dots to add it to the beginning or end of your queue. This feature is available until April 7 and only on Android. Source: YouTube YouTube Channel Management Updates: The platform is introducing a new feature called See Your Subscribers that allows channel owners with more than four subscribers to view their subscriber list directly from their channel page. YouTube is also making it easier for creators to distinguish between content-specific analytics and channel analytics on Studio Mobile by adding thumbnails next to detailed content headers for videos and podcasts. Source: YouTube Image Creation in ChatGPT: OpenAI has integrated advanced image generation directly into GPT-4o, creating what they describe as their "most advanced image generator yet." It can put actual readable text in images, learn from pictures you upload, make realistic photos in many different styles, improve images through normal conversation, and more. This feature is available now for most ChatGPT users. Source: OpenAI Microsoft Announces Researcher and Analyst for Copilot: Researcher helps with complex research by analyzing your work data and the web to provide in-depth insights for strategic tasks. It can also connect to external data sources. Analyst acts as a data scientist, quickly analyzing raw data using reasoning and Python to generate insights and visualizations. Both will be available in April through a new "Frontier" early access program for Microsoft 365 Copilot users. Additionally, Copilot Studio is gaining deeper reasoning and agent flows for more complex process automation, as well as autonomous agents that can act independently to complete tasks (now generally available). Source: Microsoft Facebook Friends Tab: Starting today in the United States and Canada, the new Friends tab provides an experience made up entirely of content from your Facebook friends. Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show friends' stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests. The Friends tab is available initially through the navigation bar on the home Feed and can always be accessed in the Bookmarks section of the app. Users can pin the Friends tab by clicking their profile picture in the Home feed, selecting Settings & Privacy, Settings and then Tab bar. Source: Facebook Instagram Repost Feature: This new functionality allows users to repost public reels or posts on the platform. When users repost content, their followers may see the reposted material in their feeds. Reposts will appear in a dedicated tab on the user's profile. Source: Mari Smith via Facebook Instagram to Removing Content Notes: The feature allowed sharing notes on posts or reels. Source: @Mosseri via Instagram Watch Instagram Reels at 2x Speed: The new feature allows users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen. The ability to fast-forward increases the chances of a viewer making it to the end of longer videos. Source: TechCrunch LinkedIn Ads Updates: LinkedIn Accelerate now supports more campaign objectives and ad formats with improved AI targeting; Brand Lift Testing adds multi-question surveys and click-focused delivery for better brand impact measurement; Campaign Manager includes new planning and optimization tools like Media Planner, ad duplication across accounts, and performance dashboards; and Conversions API extends lookback windows to one year with upcoming cross-account conversion rule sharing. Source: LinkedIn Reddit Expands Conversation Ads: All advertisers can now serve ads between comments on conversation pages when running conversation ads. All advertisers using conversation ads will automatically be opted into available ad slots throughout the comments page that meet their specified brand safety requirements. Source: Reddit TikTok Shutting Down Notes App: The platform is serving a notification that Notes will be discontinued for all users on May 8. Source: Social Media Today TikTok Shop Expands in EU: The platform announced it will launch to users in France, Germany, and Italy on Monday, expanding its reach further into Europe. Source: Reuters X Video Features: The React with video feature allows users to display a post over a video as a reply, making it easier to create reaction clips in-stream. X began rolling this out to testers earlier this month and is now expanding it to more users. X is also working on a new video option that uses entity segmentation to overlay an isolated video of yourself on-screen. This format is aligned with reaction videos, using a regular post or image as a background for your clips. Source: Social Media Today YouTube Notifications Test: The platform is conducting a small experiment to test improved notification experiences for viewers who subscribe to channels with "All" notifications enabled. Viewers who haven't recently engaged with a channel despite receiving push notifications will temporarily stop receiving these notifications during the experiment. Notifications will still be available in their YouTube app inbox. Actively engaged viewers with push notifications enabled will continue to receive notifications as usual with no changes. Channels that upload infrequently will not have their notifications affected by this test. Source: YouTube YouTube Shorts Views Changes: YouTube is changing how it counts views for Shorts starting March 31. Previously, views were counted after watching for a certain number of seconds, but now views will count anytime a Short starts to play or replay with no minimum watch time. The existing metric will be renamed "engaged views" and remain available in YouTube Analytics advanced mode. This change won't impact creator earnings or YouTube Partner Program eligibility, which will continue using engaged views. Creators can view both metrics in YouTube Studio on mobile and web, with views on the Shorts overview tab and engaged views on the engagement tab. For comparing performance between Shorts, use engaged views for content published before March 31 and either metric for content after that date. Source: YouTube   What Did You Think of Today's Newsletter? 😠 😞 😐 😃 🎉   Did You Know? Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a playing card company, producing handmade hanafuda cards. It is one of the oldest surviving entertainment companies in the world. Enjoy this AI-generated artwork inspired by the hanafuda style. Michael Stelzner, Founder and CEO P.S. Add michael@socialmediaexaminer.com into your contacts list. Use Gmail? Go here to add us as a contact.   We publish updates with links for our new posts and content from partners. Your information: Email: tukangpostoemel@gmail.com Opted in on: 2021-09-06 17:20:47 UTC. 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