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In This Issue:

📊 Social Media Marketers — who are they, what makes their work hard, and how much do they make?

🛍️ Amazon introduces new visual, AR search and “Find-on-Amazon” feature.

🔗 LinkedIn's new generative AI search tools added to Sales Navigator; offers free AI courses.

📹 Instagram adds “Following” feed to view only Reels from followed accounts.

💬 Threads adds new desktop functionality; allows following specific conversations.

🎵 Spotify now lets artists pay to promote music on users' home feed.

🌐 WordPress blogs now followable in the fediverse, including Mastodon.

😄 Google’s Emoji Kitchen lets you create custom emoji combinations

🤖 And finally… MSN's AI labels deceased NBA player Brandon Hunter as “useless”.

Social Media Managers — Who They Are and What They Think

Checking in with the overworked, misunderstood, patronized, and underpaid social media managers — or, at least, that’s how they describe themselves in a Hootsuite survey released this week of 3,800 of their peers.

Who They Are

Hootsuite says the statistical average social media manager is:

A white woman aged between 29-43 years old

College-educated with a degree in marketing or journalism

Has no formal education in social media, but has 5 years of practical experience

Gets 3 weeks paid vacation per year

Their Biggest Hardship

Two-thirds said they’re overworked — too many responsibilities for one person

56% said their bosses don’t understand social media

About half don’t have the time or budget to do their jobs well

And nearly half say they think they should be getting paid more.

All that said, though, more than three-quarters said they’re happy in their role — and those people whose entire job is dedicated to social media are the happiest of that group.

Salary

Social media people in agencies averaged the highest pay — around $83k a year in US dollars. Freelancers made almost $72k, and in-house social people were just a hair under that amount.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

Amazon’s Changes to Search

Amazon is launching new features to help consumers find products on mobile.

Image + Text

First, an upgrade to their existing visual search engine. This lets people take a photo, and the app will return a list of similar products. Now, consumers can add text to these searches to help narrow things down.

For instance, if you needed a spare part for your robot vacuum, you would take a photo of the part, then add the vacuum model name so it gave you the right part.

This is similar to Google’s multisearch which it brought out last year.

AR Upgrade

Amazon’s AR feature, which lets you see what a rug or a chair or a desk will look like in your space it getting an important upgrade — now, it will work for things on counters and tables (like desk lights or coffee makers).

You’ll also be able to move things from one surface to another.

Find-On-Amazon

This is a better integration with smartphones. Consumers will be able to send the Amazon app a link to a web page they’re on, through the phone’s Share sheet, and the app will parse that page and show them any products on that page that are also available for sale on Amazon.

Some Smaller Tweaks

A couple of smaller changes launching too — they’re rolling out the sales trend data more widely. You may have seen this in testing — it’s usually near the top and says stuff like “2K+ bought in the past month.”

The app will also catch searches for products you’ve bought in the past, and jump it to the top of your results, along with the date of your last purchase.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

LinkedIn Planning Stronger (AI-Based) Search

LinkedIn is working on an AI-based search feature for people trying to find good quality leads.

It’s basically an engine that decodes your natural language search, like: “Find me marketing decision makers at LinkedIn on the U.S. East Coast with whom I have a second degree connection.”

They’re also working on a new “Account IQ” option, which will summarize key information about potential contacts.

It’s presented as a sort of dashboard that pulls in recent company news, financial reports, recent senior hires, and a few other items.

I say “working on” because despite their flashy announcement today, like so much in this space, it’s actually only in testing with a handful of users for the time being.

LinkedIn is also offering its 10 most popular LinkedIn Learning courses on generative AI for free until December 15.

read more at techcrunch.com

Instagram Adds a “Following” Feed for Reels

Instagram is adding a “Following” feed for Reels. This will let you see only Reels from accounts you actually follow.

This is a welcome improvement — until now, there was a single feed, which forced so-called “Recommended” Reels into the session.

This does seem to be a trend these days with many platforms adopting a For You feed which was more discover oriented and a Following feed to just see accounts you actually care about.

These Following feeds are far from perfect, though.

For one thing, some apps hide the Feed from users. On Instagram (and Threads for that matter), there is a way to see only posts from accounts you’re following, but you have to know to tap the app logo at the top of the screen to find it. There’s no visible indicator otherwise. It’s a little better with this new Reels interface, as there’s a small down-arrow to show where the Following feed is.

Plus, Following doesn’t always mean all posts from accounts I follow. TikTok is the worst at this. Frequently, on the Following feed, you’ll get a message saying you’ve seen everything there is to see. But if you delete the cache and restart the app, suddenly there’s more there. (To its credit, X’s Following feed does appear to be a more pure form of the experience.)

This could be a net negative for marketers, though.

Brands and influencers alike rely on the more traditional discovery feed as a way of being found. If people stick mainly to accounts and brands they already know about, that makes it less likely they’ll find your brand.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

Threads Updates Desktop and Conversation Features

Over at Threads, some new updates rolling out.

First, you can now follow a specific thread in the app, without having to follow the user.

There’s a new bell icon on threads, which you can tap, and you’ll get notified when someone posts something new to it. These notifications will expire after 24 hours. This appears to be in the app now.

On the web version quote-posts are a thing now. This is sort of like an old-school retweet where you can add your own thoughts above the tweet. This has been in the mobile app since launch, but it only now coming to Threads on Desktop.

There is also an updated post activity display, which will let you look at each post’s Likes, reposts, and quotes.

There’s still a lot missing from Threads that would make it a must-have in a marketers’ arsenal — notably, an API, which would let third-party tools like Sprout Social and Agorapulse post directly to the platform.

Then again, even if there was an API, it doesn’t mean the platforms will necessarily adopt it. Mastodon has had an API for years, and so far only Buffer uses the integration.

There’s also not even hashtags yet on Threads, so there’s a way to go yet.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

In Brief

Adobe is hiking the prices of its software. The cost for an annual plan to all its apps is going up $60. The monthly version of that plan going up $5 per month. read more

Spotify has launched Showcase — a way for artists and music marketers to promote their music on the platform’s Home feed. This is a paid placement. You can select a single song or an entire album which will show up as a mobile banner. read more

WordPress blogs can now be followed on federated platforms like Mastodon. It comes in the form of a plug-in they acquired. Not only can people on Mastodon follow the content of a WordPress blog, if they reply to that post on Mastodon, it will show up as a comment on the original blog post. read more

If you’ve ever wanted that eggplant emoji to have a devilish smile, Google has you covered — the company releasing Emoji Kitchen this week, which will let you mashup two emoji into one: like an angry cat or a peach wearing a dress. If you want to try it out, type “Emoji Kitchen” into Google Search. read more

And finally…

The American basketball player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42 this week.

Many media covered the death, and one of those was published on Microsoft’s MSN news portal.

Only, it wasn’t a reporter who wrote the story — MSN fired all the human journalists three years ago who had, up until then, been responsible for vetting all the content.

No, it was an AI bot, of course, that wrote the article. And what a colossal steaming pile of horseshit it was.

First, the headline was “Brandon Hunter useless at 42” — apparently, its best guess for a synonym for “dead.”

But it continues:

Even worse, not only was there no disclosure that the article was written by AI, it implies that it was written by a human. The byline credits “Editor” as the author of the piece.

It was only a few months ago when MSN published an AI-generated article promoting tourism in Canada’s capital, and suggested people visit the Ottawa Food bank and even said they should go “on an empty stomach.”

At the time, Microsoft claimed that article actually did get sent through a human for review, but that in the future, they promise, really guys, this totally won’t happen again.

read more at futurism.com

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