No Place Like Home
First popularized by TikTok, platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are now jumping on discovery-based feeds. The shift has marketers wondering how to optimize their content and make a home for themselves in this new environment. Now, it’s Instagrams turn.
In an effort to shed some light on how Instagram ranks suggested posts (aka what you see in your home feed from accounts you don’t follow), the Meta-owned platform released insights and tips to navigate its home feed ranking system. Top highlights include some great food for thought for marketers:
With an emphasis on freshness — ensure you’re posting regularly. Additionally, create authentic content in line with your target audience’s established interests and likes. This two-pronged strategy makes it more likely that your content will feel at home on a new user’s feed when it pops up in their suggested posts.
TL;DR: Instagram joins other platforms in discovery-based feeds, and its new outline lays out how content creators can best navigate it.
CEO of SEOFor SEO-obsessed marketers, Google snippets are the golden ticket of organic engagement.
With Google’s AI update dedicated to improving the quality of snippets, these bite-sized results will be even more geared toward providing quick answers (rather than a list of links). While snippets might seem like trustworthy sources of information to a user, Google recently found the query itself is often flawed, and over time, the quality and relevance of snippets has decreased. The update seeks to improve the answers people see in snippets results.
As Google alters its algorithm, businesses’ SEO strategists should explore adding content-rich information to your Google search listings. With the push for more trustworthy and relevant information, this new snippets update can help elevate your brand, upgrading your content from bite-sized to a rich snippet meal.
TL;DR: Google’s coming AI update to snippets may add another layer of authority to your brand.
🎯 Target Acquired 🎯Look out LinkedIn — B2B advertising on social media is about to get a second home thanks to new targeting options from Meta. As privacy protections increase, uber-specific ad targeting is becoming more difficult. Meta’s update creates audience segments based on a user’s job title and interests, offering a targeting workaround for B2B marketers to reach key decision-makers.
Businesses interested in maximizing the impact of the messaging in their ad campaigns can select from these new audience segments:
💻 IT decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are IT decision-makers.
💼 Business decision-maker titles and interests: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers.
📈Business decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers in engineering/IT, operations, HR, strategy, or marketing.
📬New active business: Admins of engaged businesses that were created in the last 6, 12, or 24 months. (Note: This reflects three segments, with one for each timeframe.)
As data tracking becomes more difficult, brands can utilize this feature to help test out new ideas to audiences.
What Lit Us Up
Brand ID CheckIf you want to establish trust with your target audience, your brand needs to answer this essential question: who are you? Clothing retailer PacSun knows communicating brand identity is a marketing must, and over the past year, gained more than 2 million TikTok followers in the process.
While many companies have flocked to Gen Z’s favorite social media app to sell products, PacSun has shrewdly leveraged the platform to not only promote its clothing but to tell a story about who it is and what it stands for as a brand. With help from corporate employees and store associates, PacSun has leaned into non-retail content by using hashtag challenges, viral sounds, and effects — even if the resulting videos don’t directly relate to a product it wants to sell.
Instead of pushing merchandise, the brand is focused on four pillars — throwback, community, humor, and shopping — to showcase its personality and strengthen its voice on TikTok. The result is an organic connection with its target audience and an engaged, growing community of followers.
PacSun’s strategy offers a powerful reminder that content should be about so much more than selling. Creating a strong brand identity and finding ways to connect with your audience through current trends establishes trust and reinforces your brand as one your audience wants to interact with.
TL;DR: PacSun used TikTok to create and reinforce a strong brand identity and drove home the importance of communicating who your brand is — not just what it sells.
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