October 2024 Influencer Marketing Roundup
October brought a slew of social announcements including Digital Business Cards on Instagram, TikTok connecting creators and manufacturers to start brands on TikTok shop, YouTube testing AI powered comment reply suggestions, and more. Not to mention some killer brand influencer activations and three reports very much worth reading on the state of the industry.?So let's break down the top stories in social media and influencer marketing from the month of October.
PLATFORM UPDATES:
META
TLDR: Meta’s current AI bot uses Google and Microsoft Bing to answer questions about recent news and events, however it’s been reported that a Meta team is working to build a database of information for its chatbot. The search engine would reportedly provide AI-generated search summaries of current events within the Meta AI chatbot.?
TLDR: Adam Mosseri noted that the quality of video for Stories and Reels posts can be reduced or increased at different times based on the engagement that each video receives. Which again means that the system inherently benefits bigger creators, which is something that Mosseri has previously claimed that he’s working to correct.
TLDR: Instagram is currently experimenting with new notes on Reels in-stream which explain why a clip is performing well in the app. This could be another way to get people thinking about Reels performance, and the factors that IG’s algorithm considers when it’s ranking Reels clips.
TLDR: The hub features tips and educational videos about growing your audience and improving your Instagram content. It’s available for professional accounts and accessible through the professional dashboard.?
TLDR: Instagram introduced a "profile card" feature, acting as a digital business card for users to share their profiles easily. A survey showed that over half of Gen Zers want to become influencers, and this feature helps them present themselves to potential collaborators or brands quickly and conveniently.
TLDR: Instagram is prototyping a new “Social Library” section in the app where you can easily access things shared in chat threads, your collections, and posts you’ve liked. The feature could be pretty handy, but right now, it’s just something Meta is prototyping internally.
TLDR: Meta’s new family of generative multimodal AI models can make both video and audio from text prompts, and allow users to customize their own videos, adding special effects, props, costumes and changing select elements simply through text guidance
TLDR: The new initiative merges three existing programs into a single one that provides payments for Reels, long videos, photos, and text.
TIKTOK
TLDR: TikTok is in the “early stages” of connecting manufacturers with creators to help them create products to sell on TikTok Shop. This means that we are going to see even more creators start their own brands. If incumbent brands weren’t worried about this before, they should be now.?
TLDR: TikTok advertisers will now be able to incorporate InMarket tracking into their process. A store visit conversion is noted when a user visits a physical store after being exposed to a TikTok ad. This allows advertisers to understand if their specific campaign is leading to incremental visitations post exposure by comparing visitation rates of an exposed group to a group of similar control users
YOUTUBE
TLDR: These AI-generated reply suggestions will be in your “tone and style,” with YouTube’s system learning from your previous engagements to give you ideas for how you should respond to comments.
TLDR: The updates include longer videos of up to three minutes and the ability to “remix” clips from other Shorts creators and YouTube videos. Starting later this year, users will be able to use Veo, DeepMind’s generative video model, to create backgrounds and video clips.
MISCELLANEOUS
TLDR: Daze, an AI-powered messaging app, has captured Gen Z's attention pre-launch with interactive features like GIF-based chats and customizable games, accumulating over 150,000 sign-ups. TikTok buzz has driven much of its popularity, positioning Daze as a creative alternative in the messaging app landscape.
BRAND INFLUENCER HIGHLIGHTS:
DATA & REPORTS WORTH READING:
TLDR: The majority of millennials (93.0%)—or 68.8 million users—are active on social media, according to Insider Intelligence data. That’s higher than Gen Z, at 87.9%. In 2024, millennials had the largest presence on popular platforms like Reddit (43.3%), LinkedIn (35.8%), and Pinterest (33.1%).?
TLDR: Creative contributes the highest percent of sales contribution (47%), compared to elements like reach (22%), brand (15%), targeting (9%), recency (5%), and context (2%). This is further proof that no amount of granular targeting will make up for poor creative.?
TLDR: According to LTK and Northwestern’s second annual Creator Marketing Study, creator content is being used on channels including content marketing (56%), sponsorships (44%), connected TV (43%), display advertising (43%) and affiliate marketing (31%).
Jürgen Schmitt