LinkedIn recently released its annual Top 50 Startups list, and we noticed an interesting data point: 23 of the 50 startups had “social media marketing” filed under their “most common skills.”

• According to Callie Schweitzer, LinkedIn’s creator programs lead, “The top skills highlighted on the list are based on the most common skills employees at those companies have on their list.”
• She added that other common skills include Adobe Photoshop, data analysis, and customer support.

Why it matters: During the pandemic era, social media marketers made it clear they’re no longer interns—they range from folks just out of college (or who made their way into the industry without a degree) to director-level hires with more than a decade of experience.

And according to multiple companies we spoke with who made LinkedIn’s list, working in social media marketing now should elbow its way to the strategic table, given how integral it is to businesses, and how important it will be to businesses in the future.

Big picture

Anthony Hagan, content agency Mustache’s head of social media, told us that the startups have a plethora of skilled social media marketers in their ranks because, well, they’re startups.

• “The barrier of entry for a startup marketing budget is likely lower than traditional marketing avenues,” he said. “You can exist on social and carry consumers through the entire funnel from awareness to acquisition through a single channel [if done well].”
• Hagan argues that it’s easier for startups to build a foundation around social media than it is for older brands to convince traditional, storied marketing departments to pivot their focuses, as they can invest in social from the get-go.
• “It’s extremely telling that even some more tried-and-true forms of advertising, [such as] billboards, TV ads, [and] even brand swag, are all being thought of through a social lens,” he explained.

Getaway car: DTC hospitality company Getaway’s (which got a “Top 50” nod from LinkedIn) VP of marketing, Rachel Mansfield, told us that the company is “driving most of our traffic from social.” So it’s not surprising that social media marketing knowledge is a core competency for her team.

Out of Getaway’s channel attribution, social drives the most traffic at around 25% (with a combo of paid and organic). Email follows somewhat closely at about 15%.

Bottom line: “It’s certainly not a trend at this point,” Mansfield said. “It’s been 13 to 15 years since we’ve been using all of these platforms. And I think any marketer would say [social media is] a huge portion of their spend and a big portion of where they’re focusing their time and their energy. As a result of that, I think they’re just becoming more important across the entire business.”

Read the full story here.—PB

It’s well established that (some) brands are absolutely wildin’ on Twitter. We’ve all seen the tweets. Questionable or not, there’s a method to the madness, and creative agency MullenLowe thinks it has cracked the code with a tool it calls Speedbag.

Created specifically for Burger King, which became a MullenLowe client in 2017, Speedbag is “social listening on steroids,” explained José Aniceto, SVP and head of behavioral sciences at MullenLowe US.

Essentially, it’s a tool the agency can sell to clients if they want to track specific subcultures or niche audiences on Twitter, then insert their brand into key moments.

• Subcultures can be either tailored for a brand or pulled from nearly 100 prebuilt cohorts including sneaker heads, hype heads, art appreciators, status chasers, and outdoor adventures.
• Using AI, these subcultures are built by tracking keywords and jargon a group might use.
• Speedbag then weighs tweets from these groups and orders them based on how quickly they’re ranking up engagement.

Then, when something’s picking up steam within a certain subculture—like a meme or viral moment—the creatives huddle, put an idea together, pitch it, and tweet it within about an hour. Because of the fast pace, clients are told to expect to approve tweets by either text messages or WhatsApp.

“It’s a really nice way to talk to consumers that are very skeptical of advertising because you’re speaking in their voice, you’re coming to them,” Aniceto told Marketing Brew. MullenLowe is currently working on building out Speedbag for Reddit. The agency declined to talk pricing, but did say it upsells the proprietary tool.

• Tweets inspired by Speedbag have an 88% higher average engagement per post and 53% higher average impressions per post compared to evergreen branded posts, according to Aniceto.

Examples galore: Monitoring the sneakerhead community, MullenLowe saw that people were ticked that Nike’s SNKRS app kept crashing—giving birth to this tweet. Or, when Nicki Minaj announced a surprise retirement? There’s a tweet for that. And of course, there’s the tweet about former president Trump misspelling (deep sigh) hamburgers, although BK probably didn’t need Speedbag for that.

Other brands that have used Speedbag include JetBlue (taking advantage of Kim Kardashian’s tropical, Covid birthday) and the whiskey Angel’s Envy, jumping on the “Wow, ok, unfollowing now” meme.

What’s the point of all these tweets? Though they may not immediately sell a Whopper, the thinking goes that if a brand is organically engaged with these subcultures, they’ll be top of mind when a skater or sneakerhead is hungry for fast food.—RB

Welcome to the first week of October, aka the start of Q4. Between the holiday season and the looming Super Bowl, it’s a busy time for marketers. If you need a quick distraction breather, check out some of our most popular stories from the past three months:

• Brands are still playing ball with clickbait ad sites
• Do marketing roles need to require college degrees?
• Why you’re seeing the same streaming ads over and over
• “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany” campaign sparks backlash
• AI is crunching copy for marketers

Enjoy the reading. And if you’d rather spend the beginning of spooky szn searching for a Halloween costume for your Home Depot skeleton, it looks like Budweiser’s got you covered.—MS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Big questions: If you’ve ever Googled “what is everyone on the internet doing right now at this very minute” at around two in the morning because you couldn’t sleep and found zero satisfactory results (just us?), we finally found one.

SEO: To www. or not to www.? That is the question, and this is the answer.

Hashtags: Are they still a thing on Instagram? Find out here.

No more guesswork: How do you measure the ROI of brand building? Or track brand performance with accuracy? With Attest, of course. Get your first survey for free and start brand tracking like the best today.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content}

Vintage Ad Browser

Can’t stop thinking about him (from a 2000 PayDay ad).

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• How ghost kitchens market themselves without physical locations
• TikTok partners with Integral Ad Science to give marketers more brand-safety options
• Digitas just became the first company to partner with Cameo for Business for recruiting