Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner...
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The weekend is almost here, Alluser! Before you unplug, here's one last round of insights and updates. Whether you read them now or save them for later, you won't want to miss these.
In today's edition:
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Tell Meta's AI exactly how your brand should look in ads
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How to measure hook retention on Instagram
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Disruptive marketing examples
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10 prompts for better strategic results from AI
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🗞️ Industry news from ChatGPT, Instagram, YouTube and more
Stop Meta's AI From Messing Up Your Branding in Ads
Tired of Meta's creative enhancements making your brand look inconsistent? Meta is finally giving advertisers control over how their brand appears in AI-generated creative and Advantage+ enhancements.
Jon Loomer has a great first-look for marketers: where to find it, how it works, and how to use it to define your brand elements directly in Ads Manager. Now you have more control over logo, brand colors, and fonts.
While Jon notes the implementation isn't perfect yet, it's a massive improvement that reduces brand risk. Read more here.
Measuring Hook Retention on Instagram
Have you ever posted something brilliant on Instagram only to watch it get lost in the void? We've all been there.
Lucas O'Keefe shares his brilliantly simple HACK formula for hooks that keep people on your content past the first 3 seconds. It works for videos, posts, and captions!
Plus, he shows you how to use a new Instagram analytic tool to measure how effective your hooks are at retaining viewers. Read more here.
How to Become More Valuable
Imagine acquiring specialized marketing knowledge that allows you to get a raise, increase your rates, or bring in more revenue for your company. That's what happens when you attend Social Media Marketing World 2025—taking place in just 2 days!
You'll walk away with new ideas that you can put to work right away for your business or clients.
Can't attend in person? We've got you covered.
Get the recordings of everything with a Virtual Ticket. You can also stream the keynotes and sessions live!
Get your ticket now.
How to Use Disruptive Storytelling to Thrive as a Marketer
Are your tried and true marketing tactics losing their impact? Wondering how to adapt and stay relevant with consumers?
While dining with friends, Mark Schaefer noticed people quietly standing up and walking to stand outside the restaurant. Curious, he and his companions abandoned their food and drinks to see what was happening. Outside, they discovered a drone show lighting up the night sky—an animation promoting a new television series that concluded with a QR code. Activating the QR code on a mobile device led the viewer to a trailer for Halo.
This experience captivated Schaefer and made him wonder: Could he create a story so compelling that people would leave their meals to view, record, and share it with their social networks? The answer was no—and that realization sparked his journey to understand how businesses can stand out in an increasingly noisy world.
Schaefer identified a pattern—a system for creating a disruptive story that demands attention. This system revolves around three key elements:
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What is your story? (Your narrative)
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Where do you tell the story?
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Who tells the story?
To thrive, you must disrupt your narrative, where you tell your story, or who tells it—ideally, all three.
Disrupt Your Narrative
The strategy here is "breaking bad rules for good reasons"—pushing boundaries and industry norms to create something memorable for consumers.
One of Schaefer's favorite examples comes from two Australian brothers, Andrew and James McKinnon, who run an agency called Taboo in Melbourne, Australia. During an on-stage presentation called "Taboo by Design," they announced that they would remove a piece of clothing whenever someone left the room during their talk.
Andrew shared that they'd been told numerous times this was a bad idea but told the audience, "I would rather be humiliated today than be forgotten." By the end of their presentation about breaking industry norms, they stood on stage in their underwear, showing their company name across their undershirts.
This approach taps into what researcher Jonah Berger identified in his book Contagious: stories that go viral have a strong emotional impact. While marketers often focus on creating positive emotions, the McKinnon brothers demonstrated the power of creating anxiety—an emotion that gets internalized and remembered.
Other examples include Liquid Death, a water company that breaks all marketing norms by associating its product with death (its mascot is called "Murder Man"), and Nutter Butter cookies, which has created horror-movie-style content on TikTok that has quadrupled its sales.
Disrupt Where You Tell the Story
The second element involves telling your story in unexpected places.
A prime example is e.l.f. Cosmetics. Their marketing philosophy is to lean into the signal"—studying where their customers are showing up and how they're behaving differently, rather than obsessing over-optimization and metrics that every brand has access to.
For instance, while most cosmetics brands advertise in magazines like Vogue, e.l.f. Beauty created an experiential world in Roblox. Why? Because many of their customers—generally young women and preteens—spend time there.
Another creative example comes from Litographs, a company that prints the entire text of popular books on merchandise like t-shirts and blankets. They created temporary tattoos featuring individual sentences from popular books and sent them to fans. Customers applied the tattoos, took pictures, and sent them back to Litographs, allowing people to read an entire book displayed across various body parts. This unique approach created an engaging customer experience for minimal cost. Now, when the company releases a new line of products featuring a new book, they have a proven word of mouth marketing mechanism in place.
Disrupt Who Tells the Story
The final element involves getting someone other than your marketing team to tell your story, otherwise known as word-of-mouth marketing.
Despite being the oldest form of marketing, word of mouth remains an afterthought for most marketers. "How many people have word-of-mouth marketing in their marketing budget? Almost nobody," Schaefer points out. So there's plenty of untapped opportunity for this one.
Why does it work so well?
We live in a streaming economy, where people pay extra for Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify specifically to avoid advertisements. Nielsen research shows that people will believe a stranger before they'll believe an ad. They trust friends, family, influencers, reviews, and testimonials over traditional marketing.
Yeti, the premium cooler and drinkware company, exemplifies this approach and Red Bull followed a similar path in its early days, building its business almost entirely through word-of-mouth marketing rather than traditional advertising.
Involving employees can also be effective, but Schaefer cautions against incentive programs. Instead, he recommends making storytelling a career development opportunity.
Tractor Supply runs an employee-led Instagram and TikTok campaign where employees simply talk about store products as they would to customers.
Today's advice is provided with insights from Mark Schaefer, a featured guest on the Social Media Marketing Podcast and speaker at Social Media Marketing World.
Watch the full interview on YouTube
It's Happening This Weekend
Thousands of marketers will gather in San Diego for the 12th annual Social Media Marketing World… where they'll discover marketing strategies that can transform their value in 2025. Will you be there?
Attending in person is the best way to experience the conference. But if you can't get there in person, we offer a Virtual Ticket that includes:
1️⃣ Stream the keynotes and sessions live
2️⃣ Get recordings of ALL of the content from the conference
Yes, I want to experience the conference!
Transforming How You Use AI: From Basic Q&A to True Thinking Partner
If you're just asking AI questions, you're missing the good stuff.
We all say AI should augment human intelligence, but many of us still ask it to think for us instead of with us. In her recent deep dive with Claude and ChatGPT, Liza Adams discovered something game-changing: AI becomes exponentially more valuable when you lead with your ideas first.
She shares 10 prompts that turn AI into a true thinking partner and includes a use case for using these prompts in Claude and ChatGPT to uncover fresh insights about trust, attribution, and brand perception in the AI era. Read more here.
Image Creation in ChatGPT: OpenAI has integrated advanced image generation directly into GPT-4o, creating what they describe as their "most advanced image generator yet." It can put actual readable text in images, learn from pictures you upload, make realistic photos in many different styles, improve images through normal conversation, and more. This feature is available now for most ChatGPT users. Source: OpenAI
Microsoft Announces Researcher and Analyst for Copilot: Researcher helps with complex research by analyzing your work data and the web to provide in-depth insights for strategic tasks. It can also connect to external data sources. Analyst acts as a data scientist, quickly analyzing raw data using reasoning and Python to generate insights and visualizations. Both will be available in April through a new "Frontier" early access program for Microsoft 365 Copilot users. Additionally, Copilot Studio is gaining deeper reasoning and agent flows for more complex process automation, as well as autonomous agents that can act independently to complete tasks (now generally available). Source: Microsoft
Facebook Friends Tab: Starting today in the United States and Canada, the new Friends tab provides an experience made up entirely of content from your Facebook friends. Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show friends' stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests. The Friends tab is available initially through the navigation bar on the home Feed and can always be accessed in the Bookmarks section of the app. Users can pin the Friends tab by clicking their profile picture in the Home feed, selecting Settings & Privacy, Settings and then Tab bar. Source: Facebook
Instagram Repost Feature: This new functionality allows users to repost public reels or posts on the platform. When users repost content, their followers may see the reposted material in their feeds. Reposts will appear in a dedicated tab on the user's profile. Source: Mari Smith via Facebook
Instagram to Removing Content Notes: The feature allowed sharing notes on posts or reels. Source: @Mosseri via Instagram
Watch Instagram Reels at 2x Speed: The new feature allows users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen. The ability to fast-forward increases the chances of a viewer making it to the end of longer videos. Source: TechCrunch
LinkedIn Ads Updates: LinkedIn Accelerate now supports more campaign objectives and ad formats with improved AI targeting; Brand Lift Testing adds multi-question surveys and click-focused delivery for better brand impact measurement; Campaign Manager includes new planning and optimization tools like Media Planner, ad duplication across accounts, and performance dashboards; and Conversions API extends lookback windows to one year with upcoming cross-account conversion rule sharing. Source: LinkedIn
Reddit Expands Conversation Ads: All advertisers can now serve ads between comments on conversation pages when running conversation ads. All advertisers using conversation ads will automatically be opted into available ad slots throughout the comments page that meet their specified brand safety requirements. Source: Reddit
TikTok Shutting Down Notes App: The platform is serving a notification that Notes will be discontinued for all users on May 8. Source: Social Media Today
TikTok Shop Expands in EU: The platform announced it will launch to users in France, Germany, and Italy on Monday, expanding its reach further into Europe. Source: Reuters
X Video Features: The React with video feature allows users to display a post over a video as a reply, making it easier to create reaction clips in-stream. X began rolling this out to testers earlier this month and is now expanding it to more users. X is also working on a new video option that uses entity segmentation to overlay an isolated video of yourself on-screen. This format is aligned with reaction videos, using a regular post or image as a background for your clips. Source: Social Media Today
YouTube Notifications Test: The platform is conducting a small experiment to test improved notification experiences for viewers who subscribe to channels with "All" notifications enabled. Viewers who haven't recently engaged with a channel despite receiving push notifications will temporarily stop receiving these notifications during the experiment. Notifications will still be available in their YouTube app inbox. Actively engaged viewers with push notifications enabled will continue to receive notifications as usual with no changes. Channels that upload infrequently will not have their notifications affected by this test. Source: YouTube
YouTube Shorts Views Changes: YouTube is changing how it counts views for Shorts starting March 31. Previously, views were counted after watching for a certain number of seconds, but now views will count anytime a Short starts to play or replay with no minimum watch time. The existing metric will be renamed "engaged views" and remain available in YouTube Analytics advanced mode. This change won't impact creator earnings or YouTube Partner Program eligibility, which will continue using engaged views. Creators can view both metrics in YouTube Studio on mobile and web, with views on the Shorts overview tab and engaged views on the engagement tab. For comparing performance between Shorts, use engaged views for content published before March 31 and either metric for content after that date. Source: YouTube
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Did You Know?
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