So-Called Social: Week of January 22

Hey there, hi there, hello. It’s Friday!

Just like 90s fashion, it seems like what was old is new again on social media (i.e. Groups are now a thing again?!), Adobe + Sundance is still going strong, and the Winter Olympics are coming up which means some awesome marketing moments are coming your way. Read on for more social news.

Social nets update stuff

It sounds like Facebook is going all Marie Kondo on its messenger app in 2018. With the ability to react to an individual message, the option to mention someone, add and remove people seamlessly, customization tools, and more, I do agree it’s a bit…cluttered. We’ll see how FB simplifies the Messenger experience in the coming months.

It might not be the Facebocolypse after all… As we all know, Facebook has changed their algorithm once again and is focusing the News Feed on content posted by friends, family, and groups above others. However, FB seems to be giving brands a workaround behind closed doors. They’re trying to appease advertisers that have voiced concerns by pointing them toward an existing “see first” feature in News Feed settings that it claims could improve their organic reach. Now, how we’d actually go about ensuring our fan base is clicking that “see first” button, who knows. But it’s an interesting concept not dissimilar to when Instagram made changes to its algorithm last October.

LinkedIn is sunsetting the Groups app on iOS (did you even know that existed? *shrug*), but is committing to updating the Group experience on web and mobile. These updates include the ability to access groups from the homepage and richer conversation tools like video posts and @mentions. (P.S. I don’t have a link for this one as it hasn’t been widely covered and just showed up in my inbox.)

Holy smokes, Instagram is adding new features to Stories like WHOA. The latest addition comes in the form of a partnership with Giphy, as users have been spotting a GIF library popping up in their Stories. The feature allows users to search for GIFs from the Giphy database and overlay them onto their Insta Stories. A video within a video? How meta.

Adobe does stuff

The #DiverseVoices Sundance campaign is still going strong, and man, we got to talk to a lot of awesome people (read: celebs) about the need for diversity in film. My personal favorite? Idris Elba (DUH).

ICYMI, the XD team hosted a 3-day Adobe live event on Behance focused on UX design. This is aligned with the January release for Adobe XD which includes 3rd party workflow integrations with 5 partners, radial gradients, batch export, and more – we also released 5 free UI kits for Adobe XD created by top UX designers. Rad.

Other brands do stuff

We all know Twitter has put all its eggs in the livestreaming basket. But, up until this point, livestreaming on Twitter has mostly been leveraged by media companies or publishers (Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, etc.).

Welp, Gatorade has hopped on the bandwagon by launching a live-streamed series on Twitter, called #TheDebut, that’s centered around high school basketball recruits. They’re not the first brand to live stream using Twitter (Nike, Converse), but it’s not super popular as few brands have the same ability to develop content, much less the right content for live broadcasting.

Influencer marketing is not going away anytime soon. And as marketers are spending more ad dollars on it, many brands have opted to bring influencer management in house. They’re creating internal influencer marketing teams to take more control over their relationships with social stars and campaign performance. While Adobe doesn’t have a dedicated team per se, we do have the wonderful Rani Mani leading up Influencer Enablement for the influencer programs we have across our Clouds. Gotta start somewhere!

I am so excited for the Winter Olympics and all the marketing and advertising that goes along with it. Team Canada, often a leading medal winner at the winter games, has launched a highly impactful campaign, “Be Olympic.” Unlike most Olympics advertising, the imagery is stark, highly artistic, and presents an array of stories about the athletes and some of the success and adversity they have faced. It’ll give you goosebumps. Guaranteed.

Interesting stuff

This may not sound too surprising, but a new report has been released that analyzes mobile application usage around the world and more than 2 billion people use at least one of the top five social apps each month. That’s a lot of people. It looks like WhatsApp is the most widely used, but Facebook comes in at a pretty close second.

While the title of this article brings all social media professionals’ jobs into question, the meat of it is pretty interesting. It’s all about how social media measurement must move beyond individual post metrics and into more business outcomes. This, of course, feeds very nicely into what the social team has been working on of late as we revamp the way we measure the success and impact of social media.

Fun stuff

Here are all of the amazingly terrible slogans from CES. (LAUGH)

It’s Fiona the hippo’s first birthday and she’s eating cake. Dying.

Nothing beats some good sass from your grandma.