Social Media Industry Round-Up #88: How To Go Viral, Comment Prompts, Image Search on TikTok Shop & Google TV Ad Placements

Every week, the Marketing team at The Social Shepherd puts together all the relevant industry updates in a round-up newsletter sent every Monday morning.

This way, we keep our team, clients and interested marketers up to date with what's going on in the social media industry :)

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How to Go Viral on Instagram, TikTok Shop Search & Our Favourite Football Campaigns. 

Coming up tomorrow at 12 pm BST, our CEO & social team discuss all of the marketing updates of the week, Euros campaigns, Instagram being more intrusive with ads and the most important metrics to track on social… 👀

Adam Mosseri’s Interview Highlights.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, did an interview with Colin & Samir to talk about the algorithm, creators on the app and more insight into the platform. 

We watched the 90-minute interview, so you don’t have to: 

• Sends per reach is the key metric to look at to judge the performance of your content “Of the people who saw it, how many of them sent it to a friend? Because that tends to be the content that does the best”
• “Shares per Impression” is now the most important factor when it comes to reach, on average.
• Mosseri said that TikTok being banned in the U.S. is a concern from the perspective of more and more platforms being banned more regions “and countries and governments using that stick as a way to push their own agendas”
• Around half of all video impressions are viewed with sound off
• Meta is prioritising creators over publishers “because we believe power is going to continue to shift from institutions to individuals across industries”

Audience Feedback for Unpublished Reels.

Would you like to get feedback on a Reel before publishing? 

Instagram is currently testing a new feature that would allow users to share a preview of their clip with friends and get their input. 

Reel Sharing With Non-Followers.

This option would allow users to test their Reel with some non-follower viewers, before choosing to share with everyone or archiving the Reel.

Comment Prompts.

A beta feature that allows account owners to create custom prompts for feed and Reel posts, to encourage engagement. This prompt would appear at the top of the comments along with responses and be tagged with an ‘Author Prompt’ label.

Meta AI Training.

This last week we’ve seen many Instagram users, including celebrities, sharing the same stories template stating that “they own the copyright to all images and posts submitted to Instagram and do not consent Meta to use them to train their AI”. 

Unfortunately, it’s simply not possible to ‘opt-out’ of this as you have to accept Meta’s user agreements to set up an account on the platform, granting Meta “a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content.”

This means that Meta is free to use a user’s public content (posts, captions & stories) to train their AI models unless the user opts out via its ‘Right to Object’ option.

Search Capabilities for TikTok Shop.

TikTok is testing the ability for users to take or upload a photo to find similar products in TikTok Shop. 

Users in the US and Southeast Asia who have access to the new feature will see it in the form of a camera icon in the search bar in TikTok Shop.

Key Considerations for Brand Marketing.

TikTok have released a new report in collaboration with Ipsos, to help brands elevate and optimise their creative. The report includes strategies advertisers can use to boost their efforts, as well as key insights.

The report covers: 

• The Value of Creative
• Strategies for Unlocking Creative Value: Creating empathetic content, embracing resonance, and diversifying content. 
• Unlocking your Return On Creative on TikTok: Blend paid and organic content, remix existing assets, and prioritise TikTok-first creative.
• Embracing Creativity for Bigger Returns

Thumbnail A/B Testing.

YouTube has finally rolled out thumbnail A/B testing for all video creators! 

This new feature allows creators to upload up to 3 different thumbnails that YouTube will test for the first two weeks, and then automatically choose the best-performing one as the video thumbnail moving forwards.

AI-Generated Comment Summaries.

YouTube is now expanding the ‘comment summaries’ test to Shorts as well, provisioning more ways for users to interact with content. 

How does it work? The AI detects common themes within the comment section and automatically sorts them into categories. This way, viewers can skip through and find the most relevant and interesting conversations.

TV Ad Placements.

Google will now display ads on connected TV sets via its Google TV network (selected smart TVs and OTT devices) in the US, providing more ad placements for marketers.