MarketingDojo #9: Saying goodbye to organic social media reach. 👋
Engagement rates on social media are trending to zero, a framework for influencer marketing, Meta Verified could be a money spinner & more.
Hello,
Happy hump day!
I hope this week has been fantastic for you so far. Here’s what we will cover in this week’s issue:
🤞Why Meta Verified might be good news for brands
🔃Resetting influencer engagement
📊 What do the latest social media benchmarks tell us
👶🏻New kids social media platforms on the block
And lots more.
Before we deep dive - a quick request. If you learn something new from MarketingDojo - why not share it forward? Please share the newsletter with fellow marketers and help spread the word.
Why Meta Verified Might Be Good News For Brands.
Meta's new subscription plan - "Meta Verified", is neither original nor wholly unexpected.
An unpopular opinion: When the subscription service opens for businesses, it might be a big hit.
Meta Verified is being trialled in Australia and New Zealand before a worldwide roll-out comes with
a. Verified badge
b. Algorithmic boosting of posts
c. Protection from impersonation
d. Human customer service
It is priced steeply at $12 per month per platform.
As the owner of a business FB account, some of the most common and frustrating challenges are - low organic reach, advertisements getting rejected for no apparent reason, and getting locked out of the account.
Yet businesses depend heavily on Meta. Its algorithm is light-years ahead of its competitors. For the Asia Pacific region, it is the most cost-effective way to reach a large audience.
At $24 a month for Facebook & Instagram - the human customer support & extra reach justifies the spending. Meta has over 200,000 business accounts. Meta Verified might be an excellent investment for them, even if it prized higher for brands (like Twitter Blue).
The steep price might be a disincentive for new & upcoming creators to start their creator journey on Instagram first. The falling engagement rates on the platform are already a significant disincentive (more on that in a bit).
For regular users, I doubt there's a need to worry about Meta Verified yet.
Twitter & Snap recently moved into the subscription game and have had a slow start.
LinkedIn & YouTube set a good benchmark for how subscription services perform on social media over the years. YouTube Premium & Music have 80 Mn subscribers accounting for a 3.125% of the total user base.
5.46% Of LinkedIn's user base pays for LinkedIn premium every month, contributing to an estimated 18% of the total revenue for the platform.
As per a Bank of America analyst report, Meta will reach 12 million paying subscribers by early 2024 - a modest number as it represents only 0.2% of the total active users of Instagram & Facebook.
Meme Time: An IG influencer’s nightmare called Meta Verified.
An Interesting Framework For Influencer Marketing
Inspiration strikes when you expect it the least. I wanted to figure out what influencer marketing can look like for one of my portfolio of products.
This tweet around an alternative framework blew my mind.
My usual approach is super-basic. Depending on the marketing objectives, we identify micro-influencers who create organic content & partner with us on paid ads. The entire process delivers results quickly but feels transactional and inauthentic.
The idea is simple -
Start with a no-obligation barter with a large set of micro-influencers (Influencer seeding)
Some of the influencers will create organic content.
Content that resonates with the brand & customers can then turn into paid ads
Leading to longer-term partnerships such as affiliates and ambassadors
I am looking to pilot some of these into my work. Have you worked on social seeding with influencers? Reach out if you have.
Meet Town & Lemon8: The Newest Players in the Social Media Jungle.
The social media giants have never looked weaker.
Meta platforms are having issues with user and revenue growth, Twitter is all over the place, and TikTok seems to be living in the shadow of potential bans.
It's no wonder many new social media platforms have been popping up lately!
Last week, the news was all about the stealth launch of Lemon8 by TikTok's parent company Bytedance. It looks like Lemon8 is a combination of Instagram (but filled with ads!) and Pinterest, so that could be an interesting one to check out.
The next one that had a soft launch is Town - by serial entrepreneur Joe Rubin. The town combines many voguish concepts. It’s a chat & networking decentralised platform powered by Cryptocurrency.
Engagement Rates Across Social Media Platforms Are In the Race To The Bottom.
When I set up Porsche India’s social media presence in 2017, starting on Facebook was a no-brainer!
The organic reach was sliding but was still 🤩!
RivalIQ’s social media benchmark study delivered another expected bummer - IG’s organic reach is down 30% y-o-y 😞.
The study includes 2,100 companies from 14 major industries and is an excellent resource for measuring your social media performance.
Three things that stood out.
TikTok reigns supreme when it comes to the average engagement rate per post.
However, brands are posting less often on TikTok than on other platforms.
Source: RivalIQ’s 2023 Social Media Benchmarking Report. The organic engagement rates on Instagram have been steadily declining.
Source: RivalIQ’s 2023 Social Media Benchmarking Report. Influencers are outdoing the average on Facebook & Instagram, yet posting less frequently on TikTok even with its higher organic engagement rate.
Short Stuff
Watch TikTok in your Mercedes (Money can buy a dopamine hit).
Burberry’s rebrand is about returning the past to the future (at least it’s not boring).
Walmart’s advertising business is experiencing double-digit growth. (It’s raining 💰💰💰)
That’s all for the week. I hope you learned something new from the newsletter today.
If you found it interesting, please spread the word around. Share the newsletter with fellow marketers.
Thank you for your time, and see you in your inbox next week.
Regards,
Garima
P.S: I am terrible at networking. It sucks my energy out of me. But this week, networking had the opposite effect on me. I came back energised and inspired.
MentorWalks is an easy-to-network format. You and two other peers are assigned a mentor. Your group and the mentor go for a walk and discuss issues that are top of mind.
Walking & mentorship - are a great combination. If you are a lady looking for women mentors in Singapore? Sign-up for the next MentorWalk here.
Let me know if you are walking.
I loved this newletter, very relatable. To marketer's top of the mind concerns.
I wish I could join Mentorwalk in Singapore. Is there a Bangalore chapter?