B2B Organic Social Media Roundup - November 2024

Wow, November was a crazy month for B2B organic social media updates. There were so many that this newsletter could be a university thesis, but I know that we're all busy and no one has time for that so I've curated the ones that are the most important for you to know this month.

Let's gooooo

INSTAGRAM

? Instagram is our winner for most interesting and relevant updates this month! ?

New analytics!

We haven't seen these updates on our dashboard yet but I'm excited to get them. Let me know if you have them!

1. "Top sources" for where views from a reel came from
2. Percent of viewers who watched past the first 3 seconds

Hashtags

Ok, let's talk about the rumors surrounding hashtags. According to this article in Social Media Today, it is true that you won't be able to follow hashtags anymore, but there is a good reason for this: spammers would "target trending hashtags with junk".

But, that doesn't mean that hashtags are dead.

Hashtags are NOT dead!

Hashtags will still show up on the Explore feed and search results, so it's still valuable to add them to your posts.

If we consider the reason that hashtags were popular in the first place - as a way to consolidate content about a topic - then the fact that Instagram's search has gotten better also means that hashtags aren't as important.

Basically, don't forget basic marketing: keywords are important. Put them into the caption of your post, and use appropriate hashtags. (Thanks for coming to my Marketing 101 class, you've passed! ??

And one more thing...

As B2B brands, you're mostly using Instagram for employee branding, recruitement and the like. With that in mind - personal profiles now have the ability to add up to 20 graphics to a carousel (it used to be 10.)

We recently wanted to post a carousel to our IG about what the Zoecial team is thankful for, but the company profile didn't have the capability to add more than 10 images.

HACK: Since we're talking about employee branding content anyway, we decided to post the carousel from my profile, and add ZoecialMedia and 2 more employees as collaborators (you can only add up to 3 collaborators currently.)

This is a great way to bring your content to a wider audience. It's especially effective if you're hiring, for example, an salesperson and you have one of your current salespeople collab on the post.

Not every employee is going to be ok with collab-ing with company content, and that's ok! But for the ones that do, lean in!

You can see how the final version of the post looks here

LINKEDIN

?? I hate to say it, but LinkedIn gets the award this month for most annoying update ??

LinkedIn has removed the "My Company" tab from corporate profiles.

Why does this matter?

Because the "My Company" tab was where you could do the easiest employee advocacy program on the planet. All you had to do was post one of your recent posts to this section and then your employees would get a notification that a post was available for them to post. They go in, click post, and done.

And we all know that employee advocacy is one of the main ways to bring visibility and authenticity to your company. (Yes, I use these words a lot.)

So... what now?

You absolutely can invest in tools like Oktopost or Sprout Social, Inc. . Both of these options have unique features that are easy to use and ultimately bring results.

(If you want to learn more about using either of these tools, please reach out!)

If you're not ready yet though, we've put together a template for rolling out and managing an employee advocacy program at your company. And of course, if you have any questions about running employee advocacy, please reach out!

?? In other news... quite a few articles and posts this month about video features on LinkedIn. I have a lot to say about this topic so stay tuned for my next post that will talk specifically about videos for B2B social media later this week. But in the mean time, here are a few interesting links:

LinkedIn Video Posts Generate 3X More Reach, Study Finds.

This is true for videos posted from personal accounts more than from corporate ones but this is an amazing opportunity to bring more visibility, credibility and, most importantly, authenticity to your employees and your company.

Her lowest-performing video posts garnered nearly triple the impressions of top-performing written posts

The full article is here in Search Engine Journal : https://www.searchenginejournal.com/linkedin-video-posts-generate-3x-more-reach-study-finds/532073/?

Speaking of the power of videos from personal profiles on LinkedIn, the platfrom has added a more prominent "Follow" button on videos in its immersive video feed. This is a great way for your thought leaders to reach a larger audience, hook them in and bring them the content you want.

LinkedIn Retires Celebratory Post Templates: I don't know about you but these posts were really cringy and annoying. But this isn't about what I find unvaluable on the platform, this is about what this means for you - please use new hirings, professional anniversaries, other milestones, etc as opportunities to showcase your company. If you hand your employee a branded graphic (and post text) on a silver platter, they'll use it. Do not miss out on these opportunities for employee advocacy and employer branding!

I know, I know, this is supposed to be updates about organic social media, but I know that a lot of you are also running paid campaigns so I'll add one important update here that's relevant: LinkedIn’s adding another way to get more out of your lead generation efforts, with lead gen now available as an objective for boosted posts.

FACEBOOK

Facebook switches to ‘Views’ as its primary metric for reels, videos, posts and stories.

What does this mean?

Views streamlines the various unique content distribution metrics into one, helping you understand how well your content is resonating regardless of format or Meta platform. Views also capture when people look at your content multiple times, telling you more about how interesting or entertaining it is.

• On reels and videos, Plays will now be called Views. How Views are calculated will not change, so you should not see any meaningful changes to this metric other than the new name. As part of this update, we’re removing the separate replays metric.
• For Stories, photo or text posts, Views will replace Impressions. For these non-video formats, Views are calculated as the number of times they appear on a person’s screen, including repeat views. So for example, a person viewing a photo three separate times in the same day would count as three Views for that photo instead of one Impression. This means you may notice your Views are higher than your previous impression counts.

This update is directly from Meta, and you can read the full announcement here: https://creators.facebook.com/introducing-views-to-simplify-content

This is a really interesting update I saw from Matt Navarra : Automatically invite followers who have recently engaged with your profile to join your group.

Well done scrolling down this far... let's just quickly get through the rest of the platforms...

THREADS

If you've considered opening accounts on Threads and BlueSky, stay tuned becasue we are currently compiling a report of what B2B industries are (doing) on these platforms.

Don't immediately assume that just because you're shying away from X right now, that you need to be everywhere else.

However, it is interesting to note that Threads is adding millions of users every week, and at its current rate, will overtake X for daily users by June 2025.

And also, this update from Adam Mosseri:

So if you've been thinking about joining and aren't sure if your audience or competitors are already on Threads or BlueSky, we'll let you know soon!

X (the artist formerly known as Twitter ?)

If you're company is still paying for premium on X (no judgements!) then let me know if you've seen "Radar", X's new real-time trend analysis tool (formerly known as Insights).

And even more interesting, in my opinion, is this new X feature: pinch-to-zoom on videos!

YOUTUBE

And one more analytics update (we B2B marketers love our analytics!)...

YouTube Launches 'Data Stories' For First-Day Video Metrics

AND NOW FOR SOME FINAL THOUGHTS...

Anyone else always immediately click "Jump to post" on recipe blogs?

That's what I was thinking about when I considered adding some additional thoughts to this newsletter. I want to make sure you're getting the value that you came for at the top, and then the icing on the cake down here.

My 15 year old daughter Maya recently told me that while she thought ZoecialMedia's social media was good, it was very "millenial".

I laughed.

And then I told her it was great she thought that, because she is not my target audience!

I was still thinking about this when very soon after I read the following in Jack Appleby 's Future Social newsletter:

I've read a handful of 2024 In Review & 2025 Predictions pieces this morning, and all seem to almost overindex their reporting on trends that resonate with Gen Z (currently 12-27 years old) without much context for Millennials (28-43 years old) and virtually no mention of Gen X (44-59 year olds).

I'm sure data shows that the <27 year old crowd is more actively engaged on social than the >27 crowd, but social media is old enough now that every generation is very present. Millennials are certainly online and active!

The reason I mention it—when I see whitepapers and predictions only focused on Gen Z interests, it tends to lead brands to focus solely on the marketing behaviors & brand voice tones that appeal to Gen Z, even when these businesses have colossal millennial consumer bases. And I worry that those brands are going to begin to alienate the people paying their bills in favor of social media engagements from their younger audiences.

I'd love to see more reporting on Millennial internet marketing, as well as how to build brand voices that resonate with multiple audiences. We're rapidly reaching a phase of social media where everyone's grown up with social media—you can bet millennials will still be online as we become grandparents.

I'll add one more thought to this: most of the newsletters and news about social media updates are for B2C social media. It's easy to get caught up in all the noise about B2C social media, especially as it relates to a younger audience, but what we're trying to do here is focus - on B2B organic social media, and your target audience - who we both know is not Gen Z.

?? And last, but certainly not least, a final final thought on this topic that made me LOL ??

We're safe from the youngsters on LinkedIn for now, according to LinkedIn :)

You know this must have been important if it was covered by the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2dz2z72y8o

That's it for November.

See you again next month!