TikTok and Universal Music Collaboration. Hiring the First Marketer. Facebook and Instagram Updates. Insights from 22 Million Business Posts

TikTok’s, Instagram’s, and Facebook’s new functions, new musical possibilities for TikTok users, what to look for when hiring a marketer, new insights on social media, and much more from the world of digital marketing in our new episode of the RGray Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest.

• TikTok provides more and more opportunities as an advertising platform. Find out more about TikTok’s latest functions in our weekly digest
• Check the key points you should keep in mind when hiring a new marketer to your team in our article.
• Learn how you can make direct orders on Instagram and Facebook with the Shop Pay function provided by Shopify.
• If you are striving to increase your brand’s performance, take a look at the infographic developed by our team on the latest social media research with insights from 22 million publications. 

TikTok and Universal Music collaboration + New TikTok features

So, let’s start with the music! TikTok and Universal Music Group started to collaborate. This means that users will get more music to use for free and “equitable compensation for recording artists”. 

As for e-commerce, there is more and more news in the world. If you consider TikTok as an advertising platform in the US for your products, then you will definitely be interested.

According to The Financial Times, the app will release three new features in the US:

• Internal tool in TikTok that will allow you to post a link directly to the product and receive a percentage of sales;
• Showcase catalogs for brands;
• Remember TV shopping channels? So, TikTok will launch a similar function, where any user can immediately make purchases.

By the way, according to reports from Facebook, this type of shopping is already quite popular in Asian countries.

Things to remember when hiring your first marketer

Finding a good marketer candidate for the first time and hiring him is not as easy as it sounds.

But MKT1 took care of this for you and prepared a huge list of questions to ask when interviewing a potential marketer for your company.

Moreover, they have even developed a specific framework for these questions that will help you determine if a candidate meets the needs you have set.

So, usually, founders often make one fatal mistake when hiring a marketer – take a newbie. The training of such a person can be quite unstable: you should make sure that your prospective marketer has experience in at least two of the mentioned below areas:

• Drawing up and implementing marketing plans: today there are few marketers who have practical experience in different areas of marketing. And you need a person who can quickly figure out what needs to be done, draw up a plan of action and implement it.
• Owning marketing strategy: evaluate how your employees understand the work of the marketing areas together and how well they can determine the strategy that suits your specific business.
• Working at an early-stage startup: if a person has experience only in the later stages, then it is likely that he can’t cope with the difficulties that arise in the initial stages of a new project.
• Marketing should fit your business model: moving from a B2C model to a B2B model is not an easy task, but having experience matching your business model will be valuable.
• Managing qualities: most likely the first marketer you want to hire will take a leadership role. Therefore, a candidate without leadership experience may find it difficult to manage a team and execute it at the same time.
• Owning the marketing sub-function you need most: What kind of marketer do you need? Do you need someone specialized in growth marketing, content marketing, or product marketing?

First, evaluate your current team’s expertise, the business model, and the current growth plan.

After, determine which marketer you still need. Remember to look for someone who is an expert in one area, but has an understanding and a basic overview of all of them.

Facebook and Instagram launched a new option

Social networks keep releasing new features and updates. Last week we got acquainted with the new functions of Instagram, this time they have prepared something interesting for us, too!

Starting today, you can easily increase your conversion rates if you use Shopify. All company’s merchants can take advantage of a new feature called Shop Pay (Shopify tries to make online shopping safer and faster) which is already available from now on. 

With this feature, users don’t have to leave the app as they can purchase straight from the Instagram/Facebook posts with a convenient payment function that takes only a few clicks to make an order!

Of course, the Shop Pay function has already been implemented in 2020 but with Instagram and Facebook, it took a really big step. Shopify claimed that in 2020 over 135M orders were completed with the help of Shop Pay. What numbers should we expect in 2021? What’s the next network?

Insights from 22 million business posts on social media in 2020 [Infographic]

What are the latest trends in social media engagement in 2021? How can you use them to improve your brand’s performance?

The Socialinsider team recently conducted a study that compared and analyzed more than 22 million business publications on various social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, based on brands from 35 industries in different directions.

The analysis found the top trending networks, the markets that are seeing the most engagement, the key types of content on social media shared across all platforms, and more.

The infographic below gives a short summary of the main study’s insights.