So-Called Social: Week of November 5

Your weekly dose of social news.

Happy Friday! There’s some good stuff that happened this week on social. Marketers can search for hashtags on Instagram again, we launched a new campaign with Zach Braff, an actual cat climbed onto the catwalk in Istabul, and more. Read on for all the juicy deets.

Social nets update stuff

Instagram has announced a slight softening in the policy on hashtag-searching via it’s Graph API. This means it’ll allow marketers to search for up to 30 unique hashtags each week that are related to their business profiles, and will also allow them to pull up to 50 pieces of content per request. The user name field will be removed to protect users’ privacy.

IG will soon allow businesses and social media influencers to strengthen campaigns through Instagram Stories via a Promote function (basically Facebook’s Boost option), which will allow them to auto-target Instagram users who are similar to their followers, or users who are in certain areas.

Pinterest has launched Promoted Carousel ads, which display in a user’s feed like a regular Pin, but users can swipe through the images directly in their feed or tap to display one of the five images and launch the landing page. These are essentially the same-same as Facebook’s carousel ads, so no new innovation here. However, from their test with a few select brands, Promoted Carousel as campaigns are resulting in a pretty decent lift in ad awareness and message association.

Twitter, it seems, may have actually listened to its critics — at least about one feature. Since 2016, the company has been trying to make users use an algorithmic feed, which would try and figure out the most important tweets for every user and put those at the top. Naturally, everyone hated this new timeline — after all, the very reason we use the social network is to get real-time updates. So, now it’s experimenting with a new button that enables users to switch between chronological and algorithmic view. Boom.

Adobe does stuff

Adobe Students launched a new contest asking students to create a movie poster about anything they want with an Adobe CC product, called the Movie Poster Movie! We teamed up with award-winning director Zach Braff to turn the winning movie poster into a real short film. And the winner will get to join Zach for a day during the shoot. To inspire the community, we created movie poster templates in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Adobe Spark. The contest runs through November 30th.

Other brands do stuff

Lego is all about zen these days with its new Instagram campaign that encourages millennial adults (“kidults”) to find inner peace through creativity with its bricks. “It’s zen in the shape of a brick.” Lego’s IG ad isn’t the only way it’s bringing itself up to speed with modern trends — it has also launched a sustainable range of bricks made from sugarcane, as the #plasticfree hashtag sweeps social media.

Interesting stuff

I don’t think anyone on our social team would disagree, but sometimes it’s nice to feel validated, ya know? We aren’t the only ones — lots of ad buyers say Facebook Ads Manager is the most inconsistent of the platforms. “The site goes down, auctions are inconsistent, and hitting “publish” can be a crapshoot.” Yikes.

Despite the 280-character expansion, short Tweets are still the norm. In fact, the common length of a Tweet is still under 35 characters! Another interesting little factoid: Twitter says more people are using “please” and “thank you” in their messaging. Now, that doesn’t mean people are actually nicer on the platform — abusive content is still a big priority (and problem) for the social network.

Fun stuff

Noah Centineo recreated “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before” with James Corden as Lara Jean and it’s excellent.

Here’s an actual cat on the catwalk.

This guy def gets Dad of the Year.