Lately in Social Media: 5/26/17
With so many updates making news this past month, we’re keeping thing short and sweet by focusing on the new features with the biggest implications for marketing and advertising on the top platforms. These are the biggest changes that could impact your campaigns going into June:
- Facebook wants you to share quality stuff, so they’ve put out a whole set of guidelines to help brands make better posts.
- Good news for restaurants: Facebook just made it a lot easier to order food from the app’s main navigation.
- If you’re abusing live videos by posting still images as countdowns, or if you’re asking people to vote with reactions, Facebook would like for you to please stop. Thing is, those kinds of posts get the biggest engagement on the platform, so it’s up to you whether to sacrifice your reach (or integrity) for those “haha” reactions.
- A new feature simplifies the Canvas ads creation process by automatically pulling in images from your links.
- If you use Facebook lead ads, you can connect your CRM, point-of-sale or call center systems to your Facebook ad campaigns to track offline conversions and more easily connect Facebook activities to ROI. You can also add conditional answers to prompt more detailed responses.
- Make sure you’re sharing top-notch links, because Facebook is slowly rolling out updates to prevent users from seeing links to low quality pages with too many ads and too little substantive content. According to Facebook, this means that “Publishers that do not have the type of low-quality landing page experience referenced may see a small increase in traffic, while publishers who do should see a decline in traffic.”
- If you’re a nonprofit or media organization, your Page can create posts with buttons that encourage your followers to contact their local representatives.
- Facebook is testing an option to let users follow topics, which would theoretically help users break out of their “filter bubbles” to enjoy content from a wider variety of sources. If this test proves successful, there’s a chance this could become a discovery option for branded content.
- Direct Message Cards is a new ad style that encourages users to initiate DM conversations with businesses. The ads prompt users to click on an automated reply, which initiates a one-on-one chat in Direct Messages.
- Mobile ads are coming to Moments – just like they did in Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
- Easily view “Your Twitter Data” to see and edit how advertisers can target you.
- You can now share links in DMs! It’s not what we really want (links in captions), but we’ll take what we can get.
- Are you creating Stories ads? When these launched back in March, the primary objective was Reach. Now businesses can choose from a range of new objectives: Video Views, Traffic, Conversions and Mobile App Install.
- Location Stories in the Explore tab could boost discoverability for brands. Also, keep an eye out for the launch of hashtag stories, which allows IG to randomly select users’ Stories that share a hashtag or location.
- Next time you’re second-guessing a post, or second-guessing whether you should have deleted it, just visit your archived posts for the option to restore it to your profile.
- You still can’t post from desktop, but now you can at least post on the mobile site. As if you would use Instagram on mobile without having the app, but whatever floats your boat.
- New auto-play video ads start playing as you scroll through your feed. Pinterest plans to make this a more affordable ad option by charging for impressions, not views, and adding enhanced view-ability metrics.
- Now you can analyze how each of your pins is performing individually, and make more informed decisions about which pins you want to promote.
- When users tap on the white circles over pins (i.e. Instant Ideas) to reveal related content, Pinterest will now serve them matching Promoted Pins in those results to give advertisers more exposure.
- Bonus: Thanks to a new dish compatibility feature, you can snap a picture of your food with Lens to see similar recipes. Lens just keeps getting smarter and more capable.
SNAPCHAT
- Custom Stories are meant to be invite-only, but if you can invite any user within a geographic range of you, does that open the door to branded possibilities?
- Promotional World Lenses allow users to superimpose themed graphics and logos on their snaps, Smart Geofilters have improved personalization options for businesses, and both features are getting enhanced targeting abilities.
- Since Snapchat’s growth last quarter was a little disappointing, the platform is reportedly offering discounts and incentives to ad agencies and media buyers in hopes of boosting numbers this time around. They’re also rolling out a self-service ad buying tool to make it easier for both large and small businesses to buy snap video ads.
YOUTUBE
- Good news for baby channels: You no longer need to have thousands of subscribers to go live!