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It’s Prime Meridian Day, Reader... We’re looking at you, Greenwich! 

In today’s edition:

• 🚫 Ad-free Meta 💶 subscriptions for Instagram and Facebook roll out in November

• Building ⛓️ Trust With Content

• 🛍️ Product tagging via the Instagram Marketing API

• ➕ Followers contributing to Instagram Carousel posts

• 3 updates announced for Instagram's API

• Meta is working on a Developer API for 🧵 Threads

• Community Notes corrections will ❌ demonetize corrected posts on X

On Monday, Meta announced that starting in November, people in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland will have the option to pay a subscription fee to stop seeing ads on Instagram and Facebook or continue using the platforms for free with ads.

The fee for a web subscription will be €9.99/month and the fee for a mobile subscription will be €12.99/month on iOS and Android; the higher pricing for mobile access accounts for fees charged by Apple and Google. 

Until March 1, 2024, the initial subscription fee covers all linked accounts for a subscriber. After that date, an extra €6/month on web or €8/month on iOS and Android will be charged for each additional linked account.

The Impact on Advertisers  

In 2022, YouTube’s Music and Premium products had amassed 80 million paying customers in 2022. The question now is whether Facebook and Instagram users will follow suit. 

Would you pay for ad-free Instagram or Facebook?

Trust in businesses has seriously eroded over the past few years. In fact, American consumers are in a crisis of trust. So how can you start rebuilding trust with skeptical consumers—especially in a crowded, noisy marketplace?

How to Prove Your Integrity and Honesty With Content

Whenever you make any kind of claim about your business, you should be prepared to back it up with proof.

This changes how you create content from the ground up. Instead of posting what people want to hear, you’re only posting content that’s definitively, demonstrably correct. 

Before you overhaul your content strategy, there are two things you need to do:

1. Decide which claims are the right ones to reach your target audience and objectives. There’s no point in creating proof for something that your customers don’t care about. 

2. Audit your existing content for accuracy and proof. As part of building trust with consumers, you need to make sure that your content is consistently reliable, even if that means deleting or reworking previously successful posts.

When that process is complete, you can start creating the three types of content you can use as proof.

Corroboration: 3rd Party Evidence

Corroboration means finding people who agree with your marketing claims and who have the trust of your audience. There are two types of corroborators you can use in your content:

Find industry experts or academic authorities who’ll support your claims. You could ask them to share a quote, make an official endorsement of your product, or use their influence through their social media channels. Expert corroboration is the best strategy if you’re trying to promote information such as details about product features.

Find people who’ve seen the truth of your claims firsthand. They could be clients, customers, or even employees! Ask them to share their experiences through testimonials, reviews, or a “day in the life.” Witness corroboration is the best strategy if you’re trying to sell an experience.

Once you have these quotes, stories, and testimonials, you can share them in any format that works for your audience. Think website copy, social media posts, white papers, eBooks, printed books, videos... however your target audience prefers to consume information.

Documentation: Your Own Evidence

This content offers primary sources of evidence so your prospects can see the proof and assess its value for themselves. There are two broad categories of documentation:

Tell a story that illustrates your marketing claims. Instead of just asserting facts and figures, create a story with its own emotional arc. For example, if you sell fair trade products, you could have a farmer tell the story of how fair prices have helped their business and community. You can tell stories from customers, vendors, employees, suppliers, or anyone else with a connection to your business! Note that stories are different from simple witness corroboration because they show a process: how life was changed or improved by your brand.

Show the process or story of your impact through more factual kinds of documentation. Think side-by-side comparisons, diagrams, explainer videos, audit results, statistics, certifications, awards, case studies, or even checkbox matrices. With this kind of documentation, you effectively do the audience’s homework for them, presenting key evidence in the most convenient format possible.

One very powerful way to collect stories is through user-generated content (UGC) on social media. You can run active campaigns to collect UGC by offering rewards and perks but you may also find that people post stories about your brand spontaneously. When they do, get in touch and get permission to use that content as proof in your content marketing strategy. 

If you set up or film more structured interviews, remember that in the process of telling a story, people may have to revisit negative or difficult moments. Ask open questions without putting pressure on them to react a certain way. Try using phrases like:

• “Talk to me about what it was like when...”

• “Can you share more about...”

• “Tell me a story about a time...”

Education: Content Consumers Can Experience

The goal of educational proof is to let people experience your claims for themselves. There are two ways you can do this: by providing valuable information for your customers and coaching them through challenging tasks or situations.

Support the decision-making process with information and advice. If you work in a specialized industry or one where most customers are first-time buyers, your audience may just not know how to make purchase decisions. This is also a valuable strategy whenever the buyer isn’t your end user. For example, if you sell cybersecurity systems to companies, the person making the purchase is probably not the same person who’ll have to run the security system. You need to empower the buyer by giving them information that they can share with others. 

Coach your audience through a new task or experience while showing off your expertise. Coaching is a more hands-on approach and includes providing things like step-by-step guides, tutorials, templates, free audits, or taster experiences. For example, many wedding websites offer free planning templates and checklists to support their audience.

Pro Tip: Your sales and customer service teams are a valuable source of information to learn what kinds of educational content you need. Ask your team the following questions and use their answers to guide content educational content:

• What makes people hesitate before a purchase?

• What are the most common questions people ask you?

• What do people often misunderstand about our business?

• What do people object to about our business? 

Today's advice is provided with insights from Melanie Deziel, a featured speaker at Social Media Marketing World.

Level Up Your Skills and Business

With your All-Access ticket to Social Media Marketing World, you get an extra day of workshops covering important marketing topics, including:

• J.J. Peterson: Using the Power of Storytelling in Business

• John Jantsch: How to Make Referrals Your Most Effective Marketing Channel

• Ben Amos: Leveraging a Proven Framework for Repeatable Success With Video

• Alex Cattoni: How to Build Trust, Create Believability, and Inspire Action With the Written Word 

• Jeff Oxford: How to Create Content That Delivers Search Traffic

• Melanie Deziel: From Ideas to Production: The Complete Content Marketing System

Check out all of the incredible content!

🗞 Instagram Marketing API: To eliminate friction for third-party platform users, updates to Instagram now allow advertisers to easily create and promote posts with Product Tags through the Instagram Marketing API. This applies to feed photos, carousels, and existing feed videos. Source: Meta

🗞 Crowdsourced Carousels on Instagram: Instagram is testing a new feature that allows users to crowdsource content for their posts. When creating a carousel post, you can now enable the option for followers to submit their own photos and videos. As the original poster, you can review these submissions and choose which ones to include in your carousel. Source: Adam Mosseri

🗞 Instagram API Updated: Three main updates for the platforms were announced. First, support for Collaboration Posts will allow third-party platform users to take advantage of Instagram's existing collaboration feature that lets users invite and work with other users and accounts on Reels. Second, the team will expand the range of organic Reels insights available. Third, early copyright detection will detect if a copyright issue would block a Reel after publishing. Source: Meta

🗞 Threads API: Meta acknowledges the need for a Developer API and says it is working on one but expressed concern the API will result in an imbalance of publisher content versus creator content. Source: Adam Mosseri

🗞 X Community Notes: The platform’s owner announced that any post corrected by Community Notes will be ineligible for shared revenue. The announcement was followed by a caution that warned against weaponizing the feature to demonetize others. Source: Elon Musk

TOGETHER WITH YOUR BRAND

What makes for a great newsletter ad? 

Do you have a useful resource for marketers? For example, a report, guide, or ebook? Is it gated behind an opt-in form so you can collect leads? If so, you might be a perfect candidate for a newsletter ad in this very publication. 

If you want more brand exposure OR to bring in qualified leads for your sales team, why not chat with us and see if you're a good fit?

Contact Emily to place your ad here.

Did You Know?

🐝 Bees have five eyes!