New this week: Instagram adds Shop tab, Twitter gets hacked, and Buffer launches an audio conference

Hi there, 

I’m Sophie Gil, an audience marketer at Buffer. It’s a pleasure to meet you. 👋

I want this newsletter to support you in reaching your marketing goals, and I want to make sure that I’m sharing high-quality content that educates, entertains, connects, moves, and provides unique insights into the ever-evolving world of social media. So, with this in mind, I’d love your input:

What content would help you reach your marketing goals and maximize your social media strategy?

Feel free to reply to this email or send me a Twitter DM to let me know. 

These past couple of weeks have been bursting with social media updates, including some great news from Instagram on Shops and some not-so-great news from Twitter on its worst security breach ever. At Buffer, we’ve also been heads down over the past few months working on our new audio conference for brand builders -- the first ever of its kind, packaged up for you to listen in from anywhere in the world, and completely free to attend. Secure your seat for free here.

Now… let’s dive in! 👇

• Facebook, Google, and Apple announce new emoji updates for World Emoji Day
• Google Area 120 launches Shoploop, a new video shopping platform
• A Reddit conversation: Has social media reached its peak in terms making a new unique platform?
• While growing an empire, Shopify manages to play nice
• How this agency brilliantly reimagined the identity for Iceland’s National Soccer Team
• How Hulu’s self-serve ad tool could open streaming’s floodgates
• Social media marketing post-COVID: marketers predict the future
• Snap reported an increase in both users and revenue in Q2
• Spotify is unveiling the first version of their new video podcast feature

Instagram adds new 'Shop' tab in Explore

Instagram is rolling out the next stage of its on-platform shopping experience with the addition of a new Shop section in the Explore tab that makes it easier to shop from brands and creators within a single feed. 

Takeaway: In this new shopping era, many people are heading to Instagram and Facebook to discover new brands and products. Setting up your Shop on these platforms will give you the chance to be discovered by new audiences that you wouldn’t have been able to reach in the past. 

Twitter says 130 accounts targeted as part of bitcoin scam

What a wild couple of weeks it’s been for Twitter as it faced its worst security breach ever: the Twitter accounts of 130 users were targeted as part of a bitcoin scam. Some of the affected accounts belonged to Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, and more. Twitter attributed this to a social engineering attack on its employees with access to internal systems and tools.

Takeaway: These types of attacks raise questions about whether Twitter is doing enough to protect users’ information and privacy. In fact, Twitter will need to work hard to improve its processes to provide assurance that it's working to reinforce its systems. 

Instagram Stories Hack

When it comes to designing content for your feed, it’s important to have consistent branding across all your social channels, including Instagram Stories. Brand consistency is especially important because it makes your brand stand out from the crowd, and it helps build brand awareness. 

Having consistent branding in your Instagram Stories is a bit more challenging since Instagram doesn’t allow you to add in your own brand colors. An easy hack for adding in your own brand colors is to copy an image and paste it over your Story. Here are the steps: 

1. Add an image that contains your brand color palette to your phone’s camera roll
2. Copy your brand palette image from your camera roll
3. Paste the image onto your Instagram Story post by double-tapping the screen to pull up the “Paste” option
4. Use the color dropper tool to pick up the exact color from that element. Voilà!

Mojo Video: Creating Animated Stories

As part of my role at Buffer, I create content for our social channels. From experience, I can confirm that keeping content fresh, varied, and constant on social media can feel like a full-time job. To cut down on content creation time, I decided that I’d embark on a journey to find an app that could create beautiful, on-brand video content in a matter of minutes. 

After many weeks of testing various apps, tools, and websites, I finally found the app I was looking for: Mojo.

With Mojo, you can create stunning animated videos for your Instagram Stories and social media feeds. They have tons of templates to choose from, and the editing tool is very simple to use. The best part is that you can create the most stunning animated videos in just a couple of minutes. Score! 

Introducing Built to Last — the first ever audio conference for brand builders. ️🎧

Join us on August 19 and 20 to learn the best strategies and tactics for building lifetime audiences, from some incredible speakers you won’t want to miss. You’ll learn how to:

• Increase LTV by crafting a brand customers love
• Create thumb-stopping social media content
• Unlock organic growth and turn customers into advocates

How to Pre-Launch on Instagram: The Inside Story of Jot Coffee’s Social Media Strategy

In this post, we give you a behind-the-scenes look at how Jot Coffee, a newly launched DTC coffee brand, built excitement for its launch on Instagram and how to create a community from day one.

The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product

After a great decade with many accomplishments and interesting challenges, we’re looking for an experienced and driven product executive to partner with me as CEO to shape the future of Buffer.

Buffer Is Moving to a 4-Day Workweek for the Rest of 2020

We’ve decided to conduct a long-term pilot of the 4-day workweek. See our results so far and what we're adding next.

Measuring Social Media Success Using Data

In this episode of The Science of Social Media, we’re going to help you to define what success might look like for your business and specifically how you can use data to measure success, thanks to some expert advice from Alfred Lua, Buffer's Product Manager. 

And that’s a wrap for this week! 

Thanks for reading along. Don’t forget to sign up to our Built to Last podcast conference (it’s free to attend!), which will take place on August 19 and 20. 

Cya next week! 👋

Warmly, 

Sophie Gil

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