6 social media tips and trends for June 2022

1. Social media news: Catch up on the latest platform updates

Stay up to date with the biggest social media platform news and developments for June 2022:

• Twitter is limiting the visibility of duplicate (“copypasta”) Tweets to combat spam.
• YouTube launched a new feature that highlights the most-replayed part of a video.
• Instagram is testing a TikTok-style full-screen home feed.
• Meta is introducing recurring notifications, which enables brands to send automated messages via Messenger.
• Facebook is removing support for podcasts starting June 3, less than a year after launch.
• LinkedIn is working on a new “funny” reaction.
• LinkedIn is reducing the reach of polls, as well as posts that explicitly ask for engagement with the intent to boost reach.
• TikTok launched a new insights platform with a range of filters and data points to help inform your strategy.

2. Snapchat ad tips: Maximize visual contrast and minimize text

After analyzing more than 14,000 Snap ads over the last 3 years, VidMob reveals the key Snapchat ad creative best practices for the entertainment, CPG and financial services industries. These were their findings that applied to all 3 sectors:

• Give your visuals a high degree of contrast. Make your lead image stand out from the background by using contrasting or bold colors, and/or differences in brightness. High contrast visuals led to a 40% higher swipe rate for entertainment ads, double the average screen time for CPG ads, and a 15% higher swipe rate for finance video ads.
• Reduce the amount of text on screen. When the text took up less than 5% of the screen, the view rate was 175% higher for the finance industry and 85% higher for CPG, while the swipe rate went up 23% for the entertainment industry.
• Get a celebrity endorser. Opening an ad with a celebrity spokesperson saw a 39% and 17% higher swipe rate for finance and CPG ads respectively. For the entertainment sector, the swipe rate was 18% higher when the celebrity talent directly faced the camera.

Read the reports for more data specific to each industry: entertainment, CPG and financial services.

3. Social media tip: Boost your brand with clever humor

Research published last month found that brands using clever and witty humor on social media see an increase in brand attitude and engagement.

Jokes must be clever and ideally related to your audience (their interests, your product, or your competitor’s products). Such humor will signal that your brand is competent (smart enough to come up with these funny mental connections) and warm (we feel closer to a brand that makes references not everyone would understand), which in turn positively influences attitudes and sales. Generic humor won’t work.

For example, Tweets from brands like Netflix and MoonPie are retweeted more and get more replies the more clever the humor they use.

4. Instagram tip: Customize your Stories link stickers

Instagram currently offers 4 different default designs for your Stories link stickers. But did you know there are ways to further personalize both the look and text of your Stories links?

Whether you want your stickers to look more eye-catching or more on-brand, High Season Co. shares 2 tricks to customize your links:

1. Use Instagram’s default text feature: Add your link sticker to your Story as you normally would. After that, simply use the text feature to cover the sticker and create your own custom call-to-action text. Users will still be able to tap the link that is now hidden behind your text box.
2. Create your own (branded) stickers: Design your own custom stickers with the look and feel of your choice, such as your exact brand colors, fonts and CTA button format. Then send it to your phone, and insert it into your Story as an image. You can now place your custom sticker on top of the Instagram link sticker to create a new button.

5. Social media tip: Work faster with social media shortcuts

Want to make your social media process more efficient? Hootsuite put together a list of 111 social media keyboard shortcuts to help you work smarter.

These include shortcuts for creating new posts, engaging with content, navigating to different pages and more, for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, plus a few standard shortcuts to review your basics.

These were 3 of our favorites:

• Twitter: Search for positive and negative brand sentiment Tweets with : ) + company name or : ( + company name respectively (removing the space between the colon and bracket of the emoticon). Use the same formula to search for sentiment on any other term.
• YouTube: Use number keys to skip forward and backward when watching a video: 1 = 10%, 2 = 20%, 3 = 30%, etc.
• Facebook: Scroll through photo albums with J (previous) and K (next). Be sure to enable Facebook keyword shortcuts in your settings first.

6. TikTok trend: The rise of 60+ TikTokers

Recent research has found an increasing number of TikTok accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. These TikTok creators are often using their account to defy ageist stereotypes, and racking up a huge number of views and even good earnings along the way.

At the same time, the number of people aged 60+ who are accessing the internet and owning smartphones has also drastically increased in recent years. So it might be time to consider how you can tap into this increasing older audience.