Social Media Round-Up
What you need to know this week
Hello!
Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.
Apologies for being MIA last week. I spent a long weekend in London, visiting my sister for her birthday. She had a house/garden party and honestly, I have never felt so old. Aside from my other sister and her husband, all the attendees were around the 25 year mark, so there was a considerable gap there!
Now I’m back, there have been a few topics I want to cover, so today’s newsletter is a bit of a round-up.
Before I jump in, I wanted to say, I’ll be at the recruitment festival RecFest on Thursday. If you’ll also be there, please let me know! I’m going alone, so am hoping to bump into lots of familiar faces!
Strap in, let’s go!
Threads
Threads, the Meta-owned social media platform that deffo isn’t a copy of Twitter, turns one this week. I downloaded it on its first day last year, which happened to be the same day as the recruitment festival RecFest. In between the talks and activities, I was trying to work it out…and in fact for many months afterwards I’d dip in and out of it, trying to make it work.
It’s taken a long time for it to be usable. For the longest while there wasn’t even a search feature, so you got what you were given. These days it’s much more similar to the kinds of social media platforms (*ahem* Twitter *ahem*) we’re used to using.
I scroll from time to time, and post even more infrequently than that (mostly without much engagement) but while I was in London, I decided to post an experience I had where a woman walked up to a random Asian shop worker to ask her to proof-read her Korean:
As you can see, it gained 5 likes, which was cool.
The next day was my sister’s party, and on my way home I decided to try again with threads, posting what I had learned from hanging out with inexcusably young people:
As you can see, the post went a little crazy. I’m not really sure why, as it’s nothing really exceptional. What was interesting was that it took 12 hours or so before it really took off, and then it burned bright over about three days.
People were on the whole quite nice, but I did notice a higher percentage of sassy people than on Instagram and LinkedIn, where I’ve been hanging out since quitting Twitter.
I noticed that question content does REALLY well on Threads, especially really stupid ones. So, in the interest of science, I posted a question next:
A lot more sassy replies to this post, but still a lot of engagement.
Or is it that I’ve taught the algorithm that I can type good words? So I tried again, this time with (what I thought to be) a value-adding post:
After hearing that my dear former-colleagues were facing massive redundancies again, just a year after my team was wiped out, I posted the same advice that did really well (35k+ impressions) when I posted it to LinkedIn. As you can see, Threads wasn’t having any of it.
I’m the type of person to play around with algorithms to see what works, and I think unfortunately at the moment, what works on Threads is still inane content. I’m not sure it’s worth building it into employer brand strategies yet, because I think people just won’t see your posts.
It still remains that the older gen-z to younger millennial age bracket are the largest citizens of Threads, closely followed by younger gen-z, so there may be some scope for early careers recruitment marketing, I just can’t tell what content would work there - if not the unhinged kind.
As a side-note, I also posted to LinkedIn this week, to test things out after people saying engagement is down. I did a bog-standard recruitment advice post, linking to a solid article (which may have been the issue - LinkedIn doesn’t like links), and also tagging Hung Lee. It kinda tanked, which was interesting.
In general, the things that are working the best for me right now are the carousel posts, which are a pain in the bum to create. I did a couple of posts about behind the scenes at my work, but I have to tone these down as the company is very private, but in general they did really well, too. I guess it shows that employee generated content still gets traction.
If you’ve been playing around with what works on social media, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Jumping on trends
Should we jump on trends? Well not according to this fella on LinkedIn.
Let me explain the post for those not in the loop.
A video (of which I cannot find the original, apologies) is going around of a street interview with a young woman, who is asked what “drives a man crazy” in bed. She replies “you’ve gotta give them that hawk tuah and spit on that thang”:
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It went a bit crazy, then was remixed to the following sound (which I found quite amusing):
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So back to Domino’s. Tuah sounds like Tuesday (I guess) but the tweet saying “it’s Two for (hawk) Tuahsday” could sound like someone’s spitting on your pizza.
My own take is that people who get “hawk tuah” will find it funny and won’t think their pizza will be spat on. The people finding it offensive are not the target audience and probably didn’t know the meme.
But should you jump on trends?
Many of us who have social media as part of our roles struggle with striking the right balance. You want to create content that performs well (thus is seen by lots of eyeballs) but there are often lots of approvals in place, many of which lay your content at the judgement of people who don’t understand trends, let alone what you’re trying to achieve.
I’m not saying here that everyone should be doing wacky content - but I think those who have similar roles to me out there will understand the battle between the safe, kinda boring content that tends to get posted, and the slightly more attractive content we see competitors post, and wish we could do the same.
This week, M&S went viral with quite a simple video of two men - Mark and Spencer:
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Personally, I don’t really see it…but I guess I’m not the target audience (and I’m not 100% who these men are…are they from TOWIE?)
Matalan jumped right in there with (IMO a better) video of colleagues Mat and Alan:
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I think this works well because M&S did the leg work to make the trend take off, and they’re jumping in showing inside the office, that their workplace can have a little joke. I think for employer branding this was a hit.
Not to be outdone, John Lewis jumped in with a similar video of colleagues John and Lewis:
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Though it’s similar to the Matalan one, I think it shows less of the “behind the scenes”, so isn’t quite as impactful for employer brand? I’m not sure. Let me know what you think.
[Note to those reading in an email, it’s telling me that as I imbedded so many TikToks, my newsletter will run out of length soon, so you may have to click to view in a browser to continue to the end]
The bottom line with trends is that I think you absolutely can jump on them, as long as you know why you’re doing it, and have your target audience in mind. Domino’s works (IMO) because they target gen z, and want to sell some pizzas. The Matalan video works because it’s simple shots of their office, gives an insight into what working there looks like, and is simple enough content to please those in the content approval chain.
Links
This post calling out Gymshark for asking too much in a job advert for a marketing manager really highlights all the different roles you can have in marketing. I once had a careers phse lesson plan that included breaking down roles involved in autonomous cars, which always went down well with students. I think if you had a creative class (media, business etc) you could easily spend 30 mins or so breaking down roles in marketing, assessing the skills needed for each.
Are gen-z late? Apparently, according to this recruiter post. I think that turning up 5-10 mins late is varying in acceptability based on the context. Meeting a friend? Sure, totally fine (we laugh about my one friend Jen who is constantly 30 mins late when we hang out). To a party? Probably the later the better. But to a meeting? I’d say getting there on the dot at least is important.
Education marketer Kyle Campbell has been putting out some banging posts recently. I found this post, that explores students who use AI, very interesting.
Articles
I’m still clearing out my backlog of articles I’ve saved (…taken screenshot of, which get lost within the million photos I have of my cats), so some of these may be a few months old.
It’s interesting to see the changing desires of the big companies in terms of who they hire. It seems Blackrock now wants to hire liberal arts students into their analyst roles, and AI companies are leaning towards creative grads as well.
I’ve seen a few articles in the US about how gen-z teens are bringing the Saturday/summer job back. Part time work is an important part of teen growth, and I know that my hours spent doing stock-checks of granny pants in The Factory Shop were certainly part of my own growth as a teen!
This has been a LONG newsletter this week so I’ll leave it there.
Until next week!
Charlotte