Lately in Social Media – 7/4/16
SNAPCHAT
Snapchat just introduced the Memories feature, a camera roll-style archive of your snaps that you can search and share. Swipe up from the camera screen to access Memories, and tap and hold to edit or share it again to your current story. (There’s also a pin-protected “My Eyes Only” section to hide all your nudes, finally.) Since Snapchat is famous for its ephemeral nature and real-time sharing, it’s interesting that Memories will allow you to save your snaps to Snapchat’s server so you can keep editing and sharing them forever. We’re curious to see how users respond to the update, but as of now it doesn’t look as though marketers will have the opportunity to advertise through this feature.
There’s a new app in town to help businesses join the Twittersphere. Dashboard combines tweet scheduling and analytics capabilities, which have long relegated to third party apps, with new feed customization options that highlight tweets relevant to your business, instead of just mentions. The app even provides tweet ideas and suggestions tailored to your business and industry. Twitter admittedly isn’t the easiest platform to adopt, but Dashboard gives businesses of all sizes an easier way to tune out the social noise and jump into the right conversations. And, since virtual stickers are now a universal social media thing, Twitter now lets you add them to your photos. What sets Twitter’s sticker game apart from other apps like Snapchat or Tumblr is that users can search for stickers like hashtags. Marketers, please use this power responsibly.
The social giant that owns the internet is about to shake up your worldview yet again, and this time it’ll have a bigger impact than the redesigned like button. Prepare yourselves for the next big algorithmic change: Your newsfeed will now prioritize your friends’ posts over outside publishers/branded content. There are a few motivations behind this, the first being that Facebook wants users to post and share as much personal content as they did years ago. At the same time, branded content and paid ads have flooded users news feeds and drowned out posts from their friends in a fierce competition for eyeballs. By making this change, Facebook is encouraging users to share more personal photos and information while scaling back brands’ hold on the news feed. The biggest takeaway for marketers is that your branded content will likely suffer. Brace yourself for a drop in reach and traffic to your own sites, and plan ahead as the prices for promoting content will probably go up.
It’s not all sad news, though. Nonprofit marketers will be happy to learn they can soon share the Fundraiser feature with their supporters. In the next few weeks, individual users will be able to add the feature and create fundraiser pages that raise money for verified nonprofits. Facebook also hopes to increase users’ engagement with new Chrome Extensions: Save to Facebook and Share to Facebook. If you’re already a Chrome user, these tools could give you an easier way to store and curate content for simpler sharing.
The best app for window-shopping just announced a few exciting changes. Buyable pins, which came out last year on the mobile app, are now available on the web as well. A new “Shopping Bag” feature allows users to shop buyable pins across multiple websites through the app, and then check out with a single transaction. If you’re an avid Pinterest user, it goes without saying that this could be very dangerous for your wallet. Another cool update is a feature that lets you search within a pin itself. For example, you could look at a pin of an aggressively-staged living room, then tap the “Visual Search” option in the top right corner to see a new display of the light fixtures, throw pillows and other buyable products featured within the photo. Merchant profiles also got a makeover, with new filtering options that allow users to search by “what’s on sale” or “what’s popular on Pinterest,” etc. For marketers, it’s simply an opportunity to change up how you advertise products.
Do you advertise to professionals through LinkedIn? The platform just launched programmatic buying as a way to access LinkedIn display ads, which already have specific targeting abilities. LinkedIn says they already have major brands advertising with them, so you should do it too.