Joe: Hello and welcome to this Lead Forensics webinar. am your host Joe Ducarreaux from Lead Forensics and I am joined once again today by returning guest Christina Garnett, Principal Marketing Manager at HubSpot. Christina, it’s wonderful to chat to you again.
How are you doing?
Christina: I’m doing very well. Thanks for having me.
Joe: It’s an absolute pleasure. It’s always a pleasure to chat to you, Christina. And yeah, we’re going to talk about something we have talked about previously. So, I know that you’re extremely knowledgeable on this subject, so I’m looking forward to picking your brains for to see what social media The strategies have installed for us in 2024.
So, with that in mind, my opening question to you, what are those key factors that in the B2B social media landscape that businesses should be aware of in the forthcoming year?
Christina: You have to be aware of the fact that we are constantly determining which platforms we need to be on. We’re seeing this with X and advertisers deciding whether or not they want to put paid there.
We’re seeing a lot of people shifting back to LinkedIn as like their safe platform of choice. But then we’re also, video still wins, like video is still capturing people’s attention, and so as always, you got to stay on your toes and you got to be really thoughtful about what do you engage with? What makes you stop scrolling?
What is your audience like doing? A B testing in your social things like that.
Joe: So just let’s touch on the X or the platform formerly known as Twitter. There’s obviously been a massive down swing in users and part of that is going to be companies and that sort of thing. Do you think is there a possibility that by the end of this year?
X will have changed in such a way that will it have accrued a huge new audience? Or do you think it will stay roughly the same? Do you think it will lose users? What do you suspect is going to happen with it? Obviously like we can talk about this in wider terms, but then. Talking about B2B users, what do you think?
Christina: I think that unless there are specific changes in leadership, you will see the continued downward spiral. And at the end of the day, you’re walking into an economy where people are trying to make cuts, and paid is a really easy place to cut, and X or Twitter, whatever you want to call them, are making it really easy to cut that budget.
And it’s not even just whether or not it’s safe there, it’s, there’s been reports of ad placement beside of anti-semitic remarks, or hate speech, or other things. it’s just really, it’s really difficult to make a case for why advertisers should be there, when it’s basically a minefield. And brand safety is huge.
And if I could spend my money there, Or I could spend my money somewhere else. Brand safety is a huge contributor into how I make that decision and where I put my money. And I think you’ll see a lot of B2B places, a lot of B2B companies maybe experimenting with organic more on Twitter and X. To see if it’s viable there at all.
But then again, like organic slipping there too. You have to almost say something incendiary in order to get reach. And so, I would see, I think you’re going to see a lot more pivoting towards threads. Threads is starting to add a lot more features. They’ve added the ability to do keyword search. So now you can do like very basic social listening on threads, which is huge.
And so, I think you’ll see a lot of people pivoting to threads to see, does this scratch the itch organically? And if it scratches the itch organically, then we can look at paid. And then it being able to, they know what advertising is like with Zuckerberg. They know for better or for worse what that, what they’re jumping into if they decide to pivot there.
But I think you’re also going to see a lot more advertising put in LinkedIn, on Instagram. People are looking for the brand safe spots. And that’s where they’re more likely to put money. And just, like, you’re just providing variables that don’t need to be there. And brand safety is going to be on the top, on a lot of leaders’ minds.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Particularly when, it’s, I had a thing once and, the cheapest hour, the cheapest emotion to sell is outrage. So, you tell your point about saying something incendiary. Yeah, so moving back to the,
Christina: If you look at, sorry, if you look on Twitter and you look at the people who are in the advertising program to get a share of it and you look at the people who make the most money, most of them are firebrands.
Most of them are saying things that literally pissed like a whole subsection of the internet off. And so, when they talk abou
