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Monday’s Marketing Minute: LinkedIn Exits China, Twitter Spaces Spark Program, Coinbase Gets Into NFTs

Happy Monday, y’all! Fall has finally arrived in the Deep South, and not a moment too soon! Temps are now in the 70s and sunny, this is my favorite time of the year! Here’s some stories that caught my eye the last few days…

 

And then there were none. LinkedIn will pull out of China, marking the departure from the country of every major American social media platform. They will maintain a jobs board, but this is still pretty big news.

 

Twitter is adding an accelerator program for Spaces, called Spark. This will be similar to offerings from Clubhouse whereas accepted members can get access to mentoring and cash to maintain and build their Spaces.

 

You’re about to see a lot of talk here and really everywhere about Web 3.0. You can ask 10 different people to define Web 3.0 for you, and likely get 10 different answers. Here’s how I think about the progression of the internet:

Web 1.0 : Fewer platforms and websites. Websites are mostly a luxury for businesses, limited content creation options for the individual, typically tied to major platforms like Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.

Web 2.0 : An explosion of content creation options for the individual, but far fewer monetization options. User data is owned by major social media platforms, who are the huge benefactors of content created by users.

Web 3.0: Users will reclaim control of their data, and communities will control and support platforms. Power will shift from the social media companies and platforms, to the individual.

The potential power shift from the corporations to the individual is what has so many people excited about the possibilities of Web 3.0.

If you haven’t already begun to educate yourself on the movements and technologies that will drive Web 3.0, fear not, you still have time, as it’s still early days. But you owe it to yourself to begin to educate yourself on things like cryptocurrency, the blockchain, NFTs and the like. I will be creating more content around Web 3.0 in the coming months.

If you’re on Twitter, I have created a List of experts in Web 3.0.  Following this list will get you up to speed on what’s happening in the space.  You can subscribe to the list here.

Exciting times, to be sure! Hope you have a wonderful week, I’ll see you next Monday!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Paid Events Coming to LinkedIn and Twitter, Young Adults Using Facebook Less, NFT 101

Happy Monday! I hope you are ready for a wonderfully productive week! Can I complain about the weather for a minute? October has always been my favorite month of the year, by far. The weather is always amazing, low humidity, temps in the low to mid 70s the entire month.

But this year has been a weird Summer and Fall, weather-wise. June-August was consistently 5-10 degrees below normal almost every day, which was VERY welcome! But starting in September, the temps inexplicably stopped falling.  The temps since have been mid to upper 80s.  So now it’s 5-10 degrees ABOVE normal. So crazy. The good news is that starting next week we are supposed to get highs in the low to mid 70s, and lows in the low 50s. Which is finally normal for this time of year. Ready for cooler temperatures and Halloween!

On with the marketing and social media stories I’ve been reading…

 

So LinkedIn is tinkering with an option to let creators charge for virtual events on the platform. This comes after Twitter has begun rolling out an option to let creators charge for Spaces. I think paid virtual events make complete sense for LinkedIn. There are a ton of monetization options being made available to creators of all shape and size right now. If you are active on any social platforms in any capacity, it’s worth your time to see what’s available to you.

 

 

Internal documents from Facebook show that will users under age 30 make up over a quarter of the userbase, they are spending less time on the platform versus their older counterparts. Let’s be honest, Facebook has had a lot of problems for years. The reason why its getting attention now is mostly because politicians are scrambling to leverage them to attack or silence the opposition. Facebook is no longer the ‘cool’ social network it was 10 years ago or so, and young users will avoid anything with even a hint of ‘uncool’ about it. So don’t be surprised if more problems are on the horizon for FB in the coming year.

 

Two topics that I am woefully ignorant on is cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Luckily, I found this guide to NFTs shared on Twitter to help get you up to speed.

 

So that’s it for this Monday, thanks for reading! I’ve added a Donate button to the sidebar on the right underneath the search box near the top. If you’ve gotten value from my content, please consider donating whatever you like. I will use the tips to help offset the cost of hosting, certificates, security and equipment to run the site. So any help is greatly appreciated! Hope you have a wonderful week, see you here next Monday for more news!

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Social Media Isn’t Transactional, it’s a Community

A few weeks ago I was driving and a pastor came on the radio and he discussed how most Christians pray the ‘wrong’ way.

He explained that most people who pray, pray in a transactional way. “God if you do this for me, then I will do this.” The pastor explained that we shouldn’t pray asking God to do something for us. He said we should pray that God will empower us to do more for other people. He said as we do more for others, the blessings we bestow on others, will return to us.

This has completely changed my outlook on prayer. I now focus on how I can serve others, versus what I want to get.

I was remembering these words when I saw this LinkedIn update from Mackenzie today:

This is true for all of social media, and really all of life. If you want others to help you, helping them first is a great way to make that happen.

Every time I talk to my friend Michelle, she ends every call with the same request “Now, what can I do to help support you?”

Here’s what I’d like you to do, please check out Michelle’s new podcast, Hard Won Wisdom, which debuts next week with her co-host Fawn Germer. I cannot wait to listen and I’m so excited to see what happens next for Michelle!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Telegram Surging, LinkedIn Joins Social Audio Bandwagon, Micro Influencers Get Engagement

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a glorious Easter weekend and are ready for a productive week.  Here’s some marketing and social stories that caught my eye:

 

The focus of this story is how Tik Tok continues to do well, but I think Telegram’s surge is more timely. Notice how high Telegram is on both the Downloads and Active Monthly Users lists. I mean, Telegram now has more Monthly Active Users than Twitter does. Which is ironic, since a decent amount of the new users going to Telegram are coming from Twitter. It’s also an interesting commentary on how social media is mirroring mainstream media when it comes to how people get their news and information. Up until the 1980s or so, most people got their news from the Big Three; NBC, ABC and CBS. Then cable television came along, with more shows and more options for news. And that trend has only intensified in the time since. I think we are seeing the same thing with social media. It used to be that most people when to Facebook and Twitter for breaking news. But since Facebook and Twitter have begun censoring accounts that share some information, people are following those banned users to other sites like Telegram. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Do I think Telegram will be here 5 years from now? I’d say probably not, but then again there’s no guarantee that Twitter and Facebook will be either.

 

From the ‘We all saw this coming” department, LinkedIn is planning to incorporate social audio functionality into its platform. I think this may work better for LinkedIn than other platforms, as LinkedIn’s users are more geared toward professionals, which in this case simply means they are more likely to come from a similar background with similar interests. Contrast that to Twitter and Facebook, which is sort of a catch-all for users. I think social audio rooms work better for more tightly defined topics that attracts perhaps fewer people, but people who are more invested in the topic being discussed.

 

Micro influencers or T-Shaped Inflencers drive more engagement. This works because one to one engagement doesn’t scale and neither does your attention. As a person’s following increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage with everyone in that group. Having said that, Twitch streamers seem to have cracked the code on how to drive engagement at scale.

 

So that’s all I have for this week! I hope you have a wonderful week, and please subscribe to my Backstage Pass newsletter if you haven’t yet, by clicking the image below.

PS: I have a massive post coming tomorrow. Check back here then!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Users Don’t Trust Facebook, How Covid Has Changed Shopper Behavior

Welcome to the start of another great week! Thanks for reading, on Wednesday my Movies and Marketing post will feature the movie with the greatest product placement of all-time (what do you think it is?), and on Thursday I’ll do a special post recapping what happened here in the month of September after relaunching my blog. Happy to see the stats are looking pretty good, and I’ll dive into that more on Thursday.

Now, let’s jump into the news!

 

eMarketer had some interesting research into which social platforms are the most and least trusted. eMarketer states that it is measuring trust as “the confidence users have in a social media platform to protect their information and provide a safe environment for them to create and engage with content.”

LinkedIn and Pinterest ranked at the top in first and second, while Twitter and Facebook ranked at the bottom in seventh and ninth. I think there’s two issues at play here, the first is privacy concerns and how comfortable users are in letting these platforms handle their data. But that’s not the only area, because LinkedIn ranked first, even though the platform has had security breaches in the past. So the trust factor also incorporates the actual environment and user experience on these platforms. This is what really hurts Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion.  These sites simply have toxic environments. Users argue and insult each other constantly, and neither site has developed an effective or consistent way to monitor and police content. LinkedIn has much user interaction, but its far more professional and business-oriented in nature. Pinterest is focused heavily on the content (pins and boards), not the user interaction.

 

I’ve been a big fan of the work BazaarVoice does as well as its timely research studies ever since I spoke at its headquarters a few years ago and got to spend some time with the management team. I look forward to their research studies and they have a new one on how shopper behavior is changing as a result of covid. Among the key takeaways, shoppers are becoming more comfortable with the idea of doing more in-store shopping, but want to see stores taking greater measures to ensure safety for shoppers. Honestly, I think this could be the big area where we could see a lasting improvement for the health of shoppers. Let’s be honest, prior to this year, whenever you went to a grocery store, you grab a buggy that’s been touched by who knows how many strangers that same day and who knows what germs are on that buggy. If retailers simply make a better effort to clean their buggies and offer hand sanitizer at store entrances, those changes alone would greatly reduce the change of shoppers catching a cold or other germs while shopping. Very simple changes can and should be made by stores to help promote a more healthy environment for in-store shopping.

 

And for you Pinterest fans, Search Engine Journal has a rundown of a ton of new features the site has rolled out for creators.  And yes, I do spend some time on Pinterest, have actually spent quite a bit of time there the last few weeks.  It’s fun to poke around and look for inspiration and just focus on the content!

Hope you have a fantastic Monday, see you in 24 hours!

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Sorry Twitter, I’m Leaving You For LinkedIn

I joined Twitter in March of 2007. It took about six months, but I eventually fell in love with the social media site. I joined Facebook and tinkered there too around this time, but Twitter won my heart. It gave us a way to instantly connect and have real-time conversations with, well….anyone that was on Twitter! The ability to discover new people and hear differing points of view on any topic imaginable was intoxicating

So for years, I spent almost all of my time on Twitter, and a bit of time on Facebook. LinkedIn was sort of the outcast. I never really saw the point as all it seemed to be was the same people I followed on Twitter, sharing the same content. Maybe a bit more focused on business, but it was pretty much a content stream, whereas Twitter was where you got the content AND the conversations around that content!  An easy win!

But over time, Twitter got popular. REALLY popular. The celebrities found Twitter around 2010 when Oprah and A+K joined. Those celebrities brought more celebrities, and that also brought the mainstream media to follow them. The user experience on Twitter changed dramatically. The era of conversations had ended, the era of broadcasting had begun. One of the most popular posts I’ve ever written here was this one in 2015 lamenting that the organic conversations have left Twitter. It’s only gotten worse since then. Since 2016, Twitter has become a tinderbox of political arguments and fights. Every day the Twitter trending topics are dominated by political articles that are attacking this side or that side. And I still want to know what the New York Times’ secret for getting a minimum of one article to trend every single day, because they’ve found something no other media source can duplicate. (Sidenote: As I am finishing this post, the term “The Benefits of Boat Rentals” is trending on Twitter, with TEN tweets in the last hour. AFTER it started trending).

The constant fighting over politics really drained me. It’s basically driven me off Facebook, I log in once, maybe twice a week now, where I used to check Facebook multiple times every day. And it’s seriously killed my interest in Twitter as well.

So a few weeks ago, out of sheer desperation, I decided to give LinkedIn another look. What I found was a site that actually understands who its audience is: Business professionals.  There was almost no talk of politics, the focus is on business. And I noticed something amazing about the newly-designed home feed: LinkedIn shows me what activity MY network is engaging in.  It shows me when Tom endorses someone, or when Kelly Likes an article, or when Jim connects with Jessica. LinkedIn makes it easy to DISCOVER new people and new information!

This is the thing that made Twitter SO amazing as a discovery tool in its early years!  For those of you that joined Twitter after say 2009 or so, you don’t know that Twitter used to let you see when people you follow interact with someone that you are NOT following.  So if Kerry is chatting with Chris (who I am not following), I could still see her tweets to Chris. It was a wonderful way to meet new people like Chris, because I could see what Kerry (who I follow) was saying to Chris (who I wasn’t following). But Twitter decided that such a feature was DISTRACTING from the core user experience. In fact, Twitter has said all along that Twitter was never intended to be a platform for conversations, it was designed to be a broadcasting tool.

LinkedIn is changing into the discovery tool that Twitter used to be. That, plus almost all of the political nonsense is checked at the door. The focus is business, and connecting with and discovering new business contacts and information. LinkedIn even curates a Daily Rundown, which gives you a quick overview of the BUSINESS stories you need to know. Oh, and they now have over half a billion users worldwide.

It’s funny because when I started using and enjoying Twitter, I wanted it to get the attention I thought it deserved. I wanted companies to spend more time there, I remember being upset because it never got mentioned in the mainstream media. “Be careful what you wish for.”

LinkedIn is currently my favorite social media site, and the one that I find the most useful. Which social site do you enjoy the most?

UPDATE: It’s been very interesting to see the reaction this post has gotten on social media. I only shared it on LinkedIn and Twitter, and only once on LI.  As you can see from the share counts, it’s far more popular on LI, but I guess that’s somewhat expected since it seems to be more favorable toward LI than Twitter. What’s fascinating to me is the vitriol I’ve seen on Twitter over this post. People have insulted me, told me I don’t know how to use Twitter, accused me of clickbait, etc. The clickbait charge I can somewhat understand but the title was more an analogy to dating, like Twitter isn’t my ‘steady’ anymore, now I’m seeing LI.  And what I’ve really noticed on Twitter is most people are commenting on the title without actually reading the post. This happens far too often on Twitter. On the other hand, the reaction on LI has been far more measured and has actually sparked several deep and interesting conversations. The reaction on Twitter has mostly been that I am wrong and not using Twitter the ‘right’ way, and that I don’t know how to drive engagement. If anything, the reactions have helped solidify my decision to spend more time on LI versus Twitter moving forward.