Lately in Social Media – 2/24/17
Here’s the lowdown on the biggest updates this month, and how they’ll impact marketers.
- Remember being told to hide your Facebook profile from future employers? Those days are gone. In a move clearly meant to compete with LinkedIn, Facebook introduced a Jobs feature that lets marketers post open positions directly to their brand’s Page. Although Jobs has the potential to help these listings reach a larger audience, the tool isn’t perfect and marketers have a lot to consider. For example, whether they want to sacrifice valuable Page real estate for a listing that doesn’t allow users to attach a resume. Besides, isn’t it weird to put a prospective employer one click away from your personal (and possibly questionable) profile? We shall see.
- Although Facebook is notoriously unfriendly to GIFs, marketers can now use GIFs in ads by uploading them into a single video format ad. Ads Manager also added a new tool to compare the results from different date ranges, and an estimated budget and reach graph for ads to help you visualize that bigger spending = bigger reach.
- Also, auto-playing sound is coming back to Facebook videos, so adjust your volume levels accordingly. Facebook also made a few other changes to videos, including a picture-in-picture view that lets users play a video in the corner of their screen while continuing to scroll through the news feed.
INSTAGRAM
- Why share only one photo when you can share your whole shoot? Instagram’s new album feature lets users upload as many as 10 photos and videos to a single post, which could be really cool for sharing events or featuring products. Learn how to do it here.
- If you’re already using LinkedIn to find the right prospects for your business, new “Engagement Insights” could help you identify what kinds of content and topics will help you get their attention. Engagement Insights allow B2B marketers to filter interests and opinions of professionals by industry, job title, function and more, enabling them to target these users with a more personalized approach. Plus, having access to this kind of information can make it easier to break the ice when you finally reach out.
- Following in the footsteps of Twitter and Instagram, LinkedIn introduced new tools to report abusive comments, and users can even disable commenting on long-form posts altogether. Keep in mind that doing this will delete all existing comments and could shrink your audience, since LinkedIn gives more reach to content based on engagement.
TWITTER
- Good news – Twitter is trying to clean up its act with new algorithm filters that will automatically remove “low quality and harrassing replies” from the timeline and from search. Twitter also said it would take new steps to prevent banned users from making new accounts, and to prevent graphic or explicit content from appearing in search. Whether you enjoy Twitter or only use it for work, this should hopefully make your experience more pleasant.
- The platform also introduced a new customer service option that shows custom profiles in DMs, which let brands highlight that the user is interacting with a real human instead of a faceless brand account or a bot.
SNAPCHAT
- Snap Inc. officially filed for a $3 billion IPO earlier this month, and Snapchat Spectacles are finally available online. Whether or not Snapchat is part of your marketing plan, it’ll be interesting to see how these changes impact the platform and video content creation down the road.
PINTEREST
- Lens, a new discovery tool in the mobile app, can detect objects in the real world and show search results for related items – kind of like a Shazam for objects. This tool also led Pinterest to create a new kind of search result that shows objects in context. For example, pointing Lens at a sweater could return results for different ways to style a sweater, or pointing it at a zucchini would show results for zucchini recipes. Marketing aside, it sounds like the future of visual search is going to be a huge help to our wardrobes and grocery lists.
YOUTUBE
- YouTube has heard you and they’re finally doing away with those unskippable 30-second ads in 2018. However, marketers will be glad to know that users will still have to suffer through their unskippable 15 or 20-second ads. And those six-second mobile “bumper ads”, also known as “little haikus of video ads,” are probably going to get a lot more popular.
- Good news for influencers: The video platform has also expanded mobile live-streaming abilities to users who have 10,000 subscribers or more, while promising that the rest of us will be able to do this soon. YouTubers can also monetize their live videos with SuperChat, which lets users pay to prominently highlight their comments during the live stream.