How much social media managers *really* get paid

Hello, geeks

Welcome to another overloaded edition of Geekout!

To kick things off this week… Social media managers. This may hurt a little. 😬

Also… Are you better than Meta?

I stumbled upon this last night. How well can you handle content moderation?

I made some shocking decisions while playing this game. 😆

Can you do any better? Play Moderator Mayhem 

Alright… Let’s get into it. First up: The hottest headlines in social this week:

🔥 GEEKOUT HOT 5

What else is new and noteworthy in social this week? Here’s a round-up of everything else you’ll want to know about:

Meta / Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp:

Meta looks set to bring its Instagram Notes feature to Messenger … Instagram working on several new features including: 1. Polls in comments, 2. ‘Professional’ notifications tab, 3. Fast forward button for Stories, 4. Allow messages from verified accounts only…

WhatsApp has also been spotted testing three useful new features: 1. Message editing feature, 2. Silence calls from strangers option, 3. New Broadcast channels feature.

Twitter:

Elon Musk warned (again) about plans to purge inactive Twitter accounts … Elon also revealed plans to offer a cheaper verification plan for small businesses (He just figured out $1,000 p/m is ridiculous 🙄)… And he says his Twitter goal is ‘unregretted user minutes’ (no comment)... Twitter confirmed Circle tweets were temporarily not private…

Twitter also shipped a bunch of new features this week, including 1. Threaded DM replies, 2. Custom reaction emoji picker for DMs, 3. Highlights tab on profiles to showcase top tweets, and a bunch of other small twitter feature improvements.

TikTok / YouTube:

TikTok reportedly delayed the rollout of its Shops feature in the U.S due to limited interest… TikTok launched ‘TikTok World Hub’ to help brands connect with audiences and a ‘New Music’ discovery hub… TikTok is testing a new text-only camera mode… And Google announced plans to bring YouTube to more cars.

Google / Pinterest / BlueSky / Twitch:

Google’s new ‘Perspectives’ feature will place more Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube videos in search results… Twitch is making it easier to edit clips for TikTok and YouTube Shorts… Pinterest is combining Pins and Idea Pins and added several new features… BlueSky is testing an audio spaces feature…

And finally… Tinder says it will remove social handles mentioned in profile bios. ❤️

DID YOU SEE… 👀

Right… It’s time to dig a little deeper into the hottest headlines in social this week. Geekout analysis is coming up next 👇

– Matt

🚨 Everyone's talking about...

After Elon Musk yesterday teased an announcement about having found a new Twitter CEO, it only took a few hours for a leading likely name to emerge. Linda Yaccarino is the current head of advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal.

While it seems the deal isn’t entirely done, Yaccarino has reportedly been angling for the job for weeks. And as she recently interviewed Musk at a big conference for advertisers, she’s certainly had an opportunity to put herself forward in person.

Assuming she gets the gig, she’ll be taking over at a pivotal time for Twitter 2.0 as its new direction increasingly takes shape. This week, recently-axed Fox News firebrand Tucker Carlson announced he plans to bring his show to Twitter.

Musk said that Twitter is open to anyone from the left or right bringing their content to the platform, and he claimed that no deal was signed with Carlson to bring him on board.

But Carlson’s brand of hard-right ranting is pretty well aligned with Musk’s own political leanings, based on his tweets and Twitter network, and Musk isn’t shy about telling lies, so there could be a lucrative deal here for Carlson.

Yaccarino also seems to be something of a political fellow traveller of Musk and Carlson, and previously served on a committee for Donald Trump when he was President. Will people who aren’t right-wing want to bring their content to Twitter?

That said, the far-right conspiracy crowd have been freaking out about her links to the World Economic Forum, so maybe she’s going to upset both sides.

Politics aside, Yaccarino would be a strong player for bringing more advertisers back to the platform. But with Musk planning to continue to oversee the tech side of Twitter, she might have her hands full managing her boss and keeping the product aligned with advertiser expectations.

This week, Twitter launched a first version of encrypted DMs, but the initial version can’t be trusted yet and was criticised by experts

Launching half-baked encryption isn’t a great move it you want to become “the most trusted platform on the internet”. Recommending animal torture and mass shooting videos doesn’t help either.

Neither does announcing you’ll be purging old accounts (something Twitter has tried and cancelled more that once under previous management) without consideration for all the treasured dead people’s accounts you’ll be erasing.

Oh and vague, unmeasurable metrics like ‘unregregetted user minutes’ don’t help either.

So Linda–if you’re reading this–good luck. You’ll need it.

If TikTok wanted to build a better reputation for itself around the data it collects, this won’t have helped:

While this data has supposedly now been deleted, it shows how social media companies, thirsty for ad targeting data, continue to disregard users at the expense of revenue. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this from Meta over the years, where internal targets have trumped concern for user wellbeing.

Even if TikTok has since cleaned up its act with regard to tracking viewers of gay content, headlines like this make the company’s life no easier as US politicians continue to look for any reason they can to get the app banned.

This week saw not one, but two big opinion pieces calling out Mark Zuckerberg’s now seemingly largely sidelined push into the metaverse.

First, Ed Zitron for Insider looked at how Mark Zuckerberg managed to get the tech industry, from Microsoft, to startups, to marketing consultants, excited about the metaverse long before it was ready to deliver on any of its promise.

With the reality of platforms like Horizon Worlds and Decentraland not living up to what Zuckerberg promised would eventually be possible, the concept quickly became boring.

Riffing on Zitron’s piece, John Herrman at New York Magazine suggests that a mix of Covid lockdowns and tech’s increasingly desperate search for its ‘next big thing’ led many to simply to take Zuckerberg’s vision as the best option in a world where we were spending a lot more time indoors.

Meta insists it’s still committed to the metaverse as a longterm vision, and only this week it published a report that claims a crazy-high future economic impact of the metaverse.

But when A.I. is a cutting edge, ‘next big thing’ technology delivering real benefits to users today, and getting better by the week, the company shouldn’t be surprised if most people are happy not to hear about the metaverse again for a few more years.

😆 LOL tweets

This one is painfully true…

And don’t miss:

📈 Trending memes

The King’s coronation provided plenty of fodder for memes last weekend.

And the ongoing Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool is also meme factory, as the final looms tomorrow night.

Don’t miss:

📈 Gone viral

LinkedIn is always good for poking fun at, and Fiverr reaped the rewards when it did just that. Here’s Jack Appleby’s analysis 👇

😬 We’ve all been there

A shout out to everyone who’s ever done this… Check your captions, folks. And then check them again!

Meanwhile, remember to check your hashtags before you post! 😮

😮 WTF?!

Don’t mess with Zuck!

Also, remember that time he killed a bison?

📣 PSA

Little things worth knowing…

🤦‍♂️ FAIL

This is absolutely NOT what you want to do in your social app…

🪦 RIP

Will many people miss Messenger for Apple Watch? Notifications are almost certainly enough for most people…

🪲 Bugging out

Most social media bugs are nothing more than annoying, but this one turned into a saga.

First, a Twitter engineer spotted WhatsApp seemed to be accessing his Google Pixel phone’s microphone while he slept…

Then, Elon Musk stirred the pot (unsurprisingly, as Twitter’s encrypted DMs were about to launch):

Eventually, WhatsApp announced that it actually seemed to be a Google bug after all.

So, it seems like nothing for WhatsApp users to worry about. Still, Twitter got a nice bunch of attention for encrypted DMs, didn’t it?

🪧 New guidance

As we learn more about how social media affects young people, advice for how they should use it evolves.

New recommendations for teens focus from the American Psychological Association include common sense tips such as:

🤖 A.I.-mazing

How A.I. is transforming social media:

A lot of LinkedIn posts read like they’ve been written by robots already, but soon they really could be:

Also:

💡 New feature spotlight

This is a good one for creators looking to boost their profile:

👀 Must-read

Forget A.I. becoming super-intelligent and taking over the world, what about A.I. becoming a ‘super-influencer’?

“The ‘super-influencer’ could be an avatar that looks like a real person, a bot that is automating social media messaging, or some combination of those things.”

💬 You can quote me on that

When I’m mentioned in the news, you’ll find it here first:

The Times asked for my thoughts about the downfall of social-first news publishers

📊 Stats of the week

Now THAT’s what I call a growth hack:

Also:

📈 Charts of the week

Also:

New features and tests:

Facebook:

Instagram:

Messenger:

WhatsApp:

The rest: Creator Studio/adtech/Quest and more:

New features and tests:

Insights to give you an edge at work:

New features and tests:

💥 More social media news and updates

New features and tests:

💲 Advertise in Geekout

You should advertise in Geekout! Get in touch: matt@mattnavarra.com

📖 Weekend reading

😳 And finally...

Being a successful YouTuber takes hard work, dedication, and lots of creativity. But DON’T crash a plane just for the views.

The guy who is pleading guilty to doing just that faces as much as 20 years in prison 😬

📅 Back next week...

…And that’s a wrap. Geekout download. DONE ✅

One last thing before you go…

I’d love you to check this out. I built it for people like YOU! 👇

Sarah and 550+ others ❤️ Geekout PRO…

Goodbye, geeks.

– Matt

_______

This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant