Meta, the social media giant, is reportedly paying BuzzFeed millions of dollars to help attract more creators to Facebook and Instagram.
As part of a reported $10 million deal reached last year, BuzzFeed is said to be helping generate creator content for Facebook and Instagram and training creators to grow their presence. This move is part of Meta's strategy to boost engagement as creators flock to TikTok, whose users grew 18% last year. Meanwhile, Facebook's growth stalled and Instagram grew less than 3%. Both Meta and BuzzFeed have been struggling with slowing growth and shrinking profits and have announced job cuts last year. They are both investing more in creators.
B2B marketers can learn a few key things from the reported deal between Meta and BuzzFeed.
First, it highlights the importance of investing in content creators, as both companies are looking to grow their creator networks in order to boost engagement. This can be applied to B2B marketing by creating engaging and informative content that resonates with the target audience, which can help to attract and retain customers. We strongly espouse the use of Community-Generated Content sourced from industry experts.
Second, the deal also highlights the importance of staying ahead of the curve when it comes to media trends. With creators flocking to TikTok, Meta and BuzzFeed are taking steps to ensure they remain relevant on Facebook and Instagram. They used to be first movers in the social media and viral content spaces respectively but have fallen behind in adapting their focus to being on individual content creators. B2B marketers should also be aware of these trends coming to our industries. There is often a lag between B2C and B2B, but the shift from larger media producers to individual contributors is happening in the B2B world now as well, it is just a little less visible.
Lastly, the use of AI in content generation is a topic that came up around this news as well. BuzzFeed's stock shot up on the news of the partnership and statements that they are experimenting with AI to help generate content. The utilization of AI for content marketing in the B2B space is going to have a massive impact, but more on that later.
My takeaway? The deal between Meta and BuzzFeed serves as a reminder of the importance of investing in content creators, staying ahead of social media trends, and carefully considering the use of AI in content generation.
Video Transcript:
Good morning team. I saw an interesting article that I wanted to share with everyone here. So Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reportedly had a $10 million deal with BuzzFeed to generate content for creators on those social platforms. This is super interesting because the shift away from kind of classical journalism or news sources to creators has been really at the forefront of their strategy in combating the rise of TikTok. So TikTok has had massive double-digit gains in users over the past year, while Instagram has owned only about a 3% increase in users and Facebook has been static. In order to try to pull people back to those platforms, they're trying to encourage people to share more, take the individual expert or the individual creator, and put out more content just like you're seeing on TikTok. And it's really interesting that they're partnering with BuzzFeed, a more institutionalized creator of viral content to coach and train individuals on how to do that. So the training part was really interesting to me in that in the B2B space, we often come up with really knowledgeable people who would be great on camera, but they feel like they're not a creator. It's one of the biggest hurdles that I think the B2B side of the world has is the feeling of, okay, well, I'm just an engineer or I'm just a salesperson. I shouldn't be talking about this. Those are exactly the people that need to be sharing the stories because they're at the heart of understanding their offering, their products, the industry, what the pain points are, what's coming next. Those are the individuals we need to empower to share their knowledge and their expertise and to become creators. So obviously here at MarketScale, it's our mission to make that easy and seamless through technology and our platform, but remember this, this is something that even digital creators, people who are out in kind of that forefront of the space on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they need the support of BuzzFeed and coaching and all of those things. So when you have someone who's new to it, an engineer who hasn't been on camera before, take the time to invest in training them on best practices for being camera ready, make sure they look great, encourage them and put all those things together so that as they do come on camera, they can share their voice and it's going to be authentic. It's going to be a little bit unnatural at first, but once you start going with it, that's when you unlock the most valuable information out there.
Comments