Good Morning!
Welcome to The Social Advantage, our monthly newsletter on all things social media for business.
Avoiding the fluff and getting to the crux of the latest news, updates and actions that help to increase your bottom line.
Here are some of the latest updates across LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram:
LinkedIn’s new insights reveal the characteristics of successful B2B campaigns on the platform, with data showing that campaigns prioritising clear messaging and relatability drive the highest engagement.
They emphasise the effectiveness of campaigns that are visually engaging and straightforward in their calls to action, underscoring the importance of simplifying content while making it visually impactful.
Takeaway for B2B Founders & Marketers:
Keep it simple. Straightforward, visually appealing content that resonates with your target audience is clearly the winning vibe here.
We've seen in recent campaigns for clients that avoiding industry buzzwords and simplifying the messaging can lead to higher engagement with the market, whilst keeping content relatable helps to build the connection you have with your audience (because they feel like they can relate to you/the content), both critical for B2B sales pipelines.
In our view, this decision to retire Top Voice badges for collaborative articles highlights the platform's shift toward more organic, community-driven interactions.
While Top Voice badges have helped certain people stand out, the platform is moving toward a more democratic content discovery approach.
Takeaway for B2B Founders & Marketers:
This change emphasises the need to cultivate your brand’s voice independently.
Instead of focusing on acquiring badges like they're the next shiny Pokémon card, focus on being authentic and generating authentic engagement with your market.
YouTube has announced that all videos under 3 minutes in length will automatically be converted into YouTube Shorts.
We for one think this is long overdue (the number of times We have uploaded a 1:01 video only to notice it has not been a Short days afterwards.... 🤬), it also shows they're changing tact in the battle for short-form content, as they had kept the minute cut-off whilst both TikTok and Instagram allowed much longer videos.
Takeaway for B2B Founders & Marketers:
Don't sleep on this as a B2B company or a founder.
YouTube is basically everyone's second television nowadays, using it for entertainment yes, but also for education.
It's also one of the easiest platforms to monetise and with the reach that shorter-form content and "for-you" style news feeds provide, this is not an update to be ignored.
In a move aimed at improving platform performance, Instagram is now downgrading video quality for posts that have minimal engagement.
Our opinion is that this sucks.
Yes, it encourages people to do their homework and try to create content that resonates with the market more etc.
But let's face it, it could potentially put off new start brands or B2B companies who are just experimenting with video (or more so, Instagram) for the first time.
If the quality is lower, how can the content ever hope to gain momentum?
Takeaway for B2B Founders & Marketers:
Quality matters more than ever. We don't mean image quality, but if you get it wrong, that will get worse too...
Focus on producing high-value content that captures attention quickly.
“If you watermark a Reel with your own logo, will that affect its reach? The answer is no, that’s actually good to go. What we try to do is not recommend Reels with logos from other apps, but if it’s your own logo, don’t worry about it.”
Instagram's chief Adam Mosseri has clarified that adding your brand’s logo to Reels is permitted, reassuring businesses about using branded content without penalisation.
Takeaway for B2B Founders & Marketers:
This is a green light to embed your logo in Reels content confidently. HOWEVER - Be smart, don't plaster it everywhere or make it too big.
If it's visually annoying, people will scroll right on by.
