Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat

With elections looming, are brands right to be worried about the secret political leanings of their paid influencers?

Brands Wary of Influencers' Political Talk

Brands love social media influencers—until they start talking politics. And with the American election looming in a few months, keeping ads and politics separate is becoming more complicated.

To help brands navigate this, some marketing firms have developed tools that grade influencers on their brand safety.

The scoring systems

Captiv8, for instance, this week launched a tool that uses AI to analyze mentions of influencers in the media and assigns them a letter grade. An “A” means the influencer is considered safe, while a “C” signals caution. This grade reflects the likelihood of discussing sensitive topics like elections or social issues.

Another firm, Viral Nation, offers a tool that creates “risk profiles” for influencers by analyzing years of posts and videos. It can even detect subtle signs of political content, like protest signs in the background of a video.

‘Brands don’t like surprises’

These tools are in demand as brands fear the backlash from a politically charged post.

The New York Times published a piece on this yesterday, and quoted an Edelman executive saying what we all know: brands don’t like surprises, like discovering an influencer’s controversial past after hiring them.

Still on huge growth curve

As the creator economy is expected to nearly double by 2027, brands are increasingly cautious, using these tools to ensure they avoid any unwanted political associations.

Finding the Influencer ‘Sweet Spot’

Marketers have good reason to be cautious about who they use for their influencer marketing program.

A new meta-analysis of 39 studies has found that social media influencers can be as effective as celebrities in promoting brands, but their influence varies — sometimes wildly — based on follower count and perceived credibility.

The studies involved nearly 14,000 influencers and found that they are generally more persuasive than brand-only ads and can match celebrity endorsers in impact.

Size and “cred”

But there are differences. The review found:

And when it comes to credibility, influencers are seen as more trustworthy than celebrities.

The sweet spot

These findings highlight a “sweet spot” for influencer marketing, where influencers with sizeable but not too large followings can offer brands the best of both worlds: extensive reach and high credibility. For marketers, this means focusing on influencers who haven’t yet lost their authentic appeal because of commercial interests.

TikTok Adds Amazon Shopping Integration

TikTok has partnered with Amazon to let users make purchases directly within the TikTok app.

To use this feature, TikTok users must link their Amazon account to their TikTok profile. They only have to do this once.

Once accounts are linked, users will see real-time pricing, Prime eligibility, and delivery estimates within TikTok listings. This arrangement is similar to partnerships Amazon has established with Meta and Snapchat.

Hesitation looms

But the real question is whether users will feel this is too much connection.

Social commerce still growing

While social commerce is growing at a rate of around 18% per year in Western markets, it still lags behind in-person commerce.

TikTok Offers Nearly-Free Products for Referrals

TikTok is now offering some U.S. users extremely steep discounts on goods, as a reward for inviting their friends to join the app. Some discounts are nearly 100% off, with products like digital cameras and hair styling tools, marked down to just a penny (plus shipping).

This builds on referral schemes TikTok has been running in other countries, offering users coupons and cash rewards for inviting friends.

Follows European setback

The U.S. effort follows a setback in Europe, where TikTok withdrew rewards from its TikTok Lite app after regulators raised concerns.

Scrutiny from European regulators, citing the recently enacted Digital Services Act, quickly derailed TikTok's rewards-focused expansion in the EU.

Aims to boost growth

The rewards effort is apparently an attempt to reinvigorate TikTok's user growth, which slowed sharply from its pandemic peak, according to estimates from Sensor Tower.

The promotion runs until September 27.

Meta Simplifies Managing Multiple Profiles

Meta will soon let people who manage their brand’s presence switch between multiple profiles easier.

Many marketers, especially those who work in agencies, use multiple profile accounts to administer their various Pages and ads.

So, multiples are cool again?

Meta itself has never really been consistent about this. Years ago, they were banning so-called “grey accounts” that existed only to manage content; then, they encouraged users create multiple sub-profiles to express themselves.

The details

This new system will let you “save up to ten profiles at a time and switch between them to access the business profiles and assets that they’re connected to. This means that you won’t have to log out and back in each time you want to switch to another profile.”

Of course, the fact that Meta felt the need to add this suggests that there are a lot of people managing several profiles in the app, which would also point to a lot of people having multiple profiles, which could be inflating Meta’s user numbers.

Snapchat Scales Back Campaign Objectives

Snapchat has updated its Ads Manager platform to try to simplify the campaign creation process.

It’s reduced the number of available campaign objectives from eleven to five by merging similar options. Advertisers can now choose from Awareness and Engagement, Traffic, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales.

Simple = profits?

Snapchat has been working to improve its ad offerings, especially for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In its Q1 '24 performance update, the company reported an 85% year-over-year increase in SMB advertisers, attributing this growth to its simplified ad creation process.

Gradual rollout

The new ad objectives will be rolled out to all advertisers over the next few months. Existing campaigns using the old objectives will continue to operate as normal until the new elements are phased in, at which point they will automatically switch to the new objectives.

Instagram Tests Snap Map Clone

Instagram is testing a new feature that closely resembles Snapchat’s in-app Map, letting users post text and video updates to a map based on their location. The map is shared with friends, whose updates can appear alongside each other.

What we know

Currently available as a “small test” in a few markets, the feature is opt-in and includes controls over location sharing. Users have to pick a specific list of people who can see their location, such as Close Friends or only followers they follow back.

A spokesperson didn’t answer questions about if map sharing would be extended to public viewing, or how long the posts would stay up.

This isn’t the first map

In 2012, Instagram had a private photo mapping feature that displayed all of a user's images on a map. However, it was shut down four years later due to low usage.

Meta’s photocopier

If widely released, the maps feature would join a large list of Meta’s habit of copying ideas from competitors, such as Stories from Snapchat, Reels from TikTok, and Threads from Twitter.

– 30 –