It’s time for another installment of Social Commotion, sharing the latest updates in social media world. Let’s dive in.
Meta Now Offering Paid Verification
Facebook and Instagram announced they are launching a new subscription service that will allow users to become verified. There’s just one catch: You have to pay to be verified. The subscription, called Meta Verified, will start at $11.99 a month online or $14.99 a month on iOS or Android.
Meta Verified will also include a few other features in addition to the shiny new badge on your profile. New features include increased protection against impersonating accounts, increased visibility across search and recommendations, and greater access to customer support services. Meta announced testing in select countries would begin soon with additional countries to follow.
Spotify Debuts a New AI DJ
There’s been a lot of chatter about artificial Intelligence (AI) lately. It’s slowly creeping into every aspect of our lives, making our day-to-day work, human interactions and technological advancements more interesting.
What if we told you AI could now enhance your music taste? If you’re a Spotify user, you can now use an AI DJ that will tailor its choices to your listening habits, add new releases to your mix and pull throwbacks from your listening history.
Spotify prides itself on its ability to personalize, such as its fan-favorite Discover Weekly playlist and end-of-year Spotify Wrapped campaign. Now, the Spotify AI DJ feature is connecting users to even more music they’ll love through the power of AI.
Deinfluencing: What Happens to Social Media Influencers When Inflation Hits?
If you’re an avid TikTok user, you’ve likely been encouraged to purchase some new and exciting product. Maybe afterward you discovered you didn’t need it. A new trend on the app has emerged in response to TikTok’s trend of overconsumption: deinfluencing.
The “deinfluencing” hashtag features roughly 155 million videos and has been slowly expanding in recent months, erupting in late January when a popular TikTok beauty influencer was accused of sporting artificial eyelashes in a paid video promoting L’Oréal mascara.
If the current trend continues, it could signal the end of the easy money era for the influencer marketing economy, which is expected to reach $16.4 billion by 2022. Deinfluencing also reflects a tightening economy in which people are less interested in frivolous spending and more interested in spending nights in.
How Are Brands Investing in Their Social Media Communities?
A strong social media following is not enough. Brands must also have an active community in order to stand out against competitors. The HubSpot Blog polled 1,283 social media marketers worldwide to learn what social media channels they are using and where their social focus is for 2023. Here’s what they discovered:
- 20% of social media users had joined or engaged in an online community in the previous three months at the time of the poll.
- In terms of the platform with the most growth potential in 2023, social media marketers rank Facebook third, after Instagram and TikTok.
Why is investing in an online community important? From reaching new audiences to increasing customer connection and loyalty, the benefits are many.
Investing in your social community can improve the customer service experience, too. Customers can use these active social communities to ask questions and respond to others’ issues. This helps reduce the overall demand on customer support employees and can also cut support expenses. In fact, one study found that answering a question via online community was 72% cheaper than submitting a ticket to a support team.
For brands, social media communities also offer key consumer insights—insights that can help unlock new strategies and future ROI.
