Last month, Lisa and I attended the Brightstar NZ Social Media Forum, chaired by Loren Tomlinson of The Social Collective and sponsored by yours truly (for clarification: MasterJack, not me). The two-day conference featured presentations from various social media platforms, business owners, marketers, and creators. We arrived early on Tuesday morning, raring to go and excited to learn!
Across the two days, we heard from over 20 speakers with varying perspectives on the social media industry. Here are just some of the cool things that I learned or enjoyed hearing and wanted to share…
First up, Bradley Richardson from Jakob Andrew pointed out the importance of ‘vibes’. In every piece of marketing you create, remember that if something doesn’t feel authentic to you, it certainly won’t feel authentic to your customers. I’m a big fan of this philosophy!
Kathryn Marsh from LinkedIn defended her platform, which is sometimes considered boring or only for the older generation. LinkedIn is the most trusted platform, meaning that brands and creators with wisdom and honesty to share will thrive there. So, make the most of its networking opportunities, and don’t let it be just a ‘nice to have.’
We were treated to a couple of speakers from Mosh Social Media Agency, who had lots of interesting news to share. One tip I hadn’t heard before was that apps prioritise content that is made in-app over, for example, a reel you created on Instagram, saved to your camera roll and then posted on TikTok.
I had forgotten about Pinterest since my teenage bedroom makeover era. Vanessa Jones shared a refreshing insight: Pinterest wants you to log on, be inspired, and then take those new ideas out into the world! Unlike other platforms, Pinterest is not interested in devising ways to make people spend longer on its app; instead, it simply aims to leave its users satisfied after a quick scroll, knowing that they’ll return for their next creativity boost.
Are you completely missing your potential customers in China? Jessica Miao and Izzie Guo gave us an update on Chinese Social Media. Meta is banned in China, so these are the main platforms used there instead: WeChat (similar to LinkedIn & Facebook), Little Red Book (similar to Instagram) and Douyin (developed by ByteDance, who also created TikTok).
Have you discovered the world of AI Imagery yet? Nick McDonald from Likeable Lab gave us some advice for getting started. Midjourney, the leading AI imagery platform, requires detailed prompts to create the image you are looking for. To avoid fake-looking models, use phrases such as ‘average-looking people’ and ‘photo-realistic.’
Cultivate also gave us some tips on hiring for marketing roles. When searching for a new candidate, they split potential candidates’ CVs into skills and experience, behaviours and attributes, and motivation and career drivers. But which do you think is most important? Well, we got it wrong! The answer is that motivational fit is a key determiner; in hindsight, it makes sense. Your ideal candidate must be attracted to your benefits, culture, and working environment, as well as how you could be mutually beneficial to one another.
Dr Chandra Harrison from Access Advisors gave lots of great advice on making your content more accessible to everyone. Some of it was simple: adding subtitles and providing photo descriptions for screen readers. Others included adding alt text to photos and writing your hashtags in CamelCase, e.g., #masterjackcontentmarketing should be #MasterJackContentMarketing.
Special mention
Finally, we discovered an amazing NZ brand that we want to showcase. True Stock provides stock images from local photographers that reflect the true vibrancy of Aotearoa. Unlike most stock image sites, you can select royalty-free images from a range of categories on their website to find a photo representative of our diverse country. Below are just some of their incredible images.
Hopefully, you found some of these takeaways interesting, and I look forward to sharing more after our next conference!
