Lately in Social Media: 8/4/17
The big social media platforms are constantly changing, but we’re always tracking which updates have the biggest benefits and implications for marketers. These were the most newsworthy developments in July:
- Google wants you to have a fast and mobile-friendly website, and now Facebook does too. An impending update to the mobile news feed detects how quickly a link will load based on the page loading time, the website’s general speed and the user’s internet connection, and displays the fast-loading links higher in the feed than slower links.
- No more modifying link previews (because fake news), unless those links belong to you. It’s been a rough transition.
- Turn the users who engage with your Instagram business page into a custom audience for your Facebook advertising.
- Get your six-second ads ready – you’ll be able to use them on Facebook soon. Also, Messenger ads have gone global, and the viewability of your video ads might actually be a lot lower than Facebook led advertisers to believe.
- Do you use Facebook Stories? (Lol.) Well, they’re public now, and they’re coming to desktop soon, in case that matters to you.
- We’ve been told it’s smart to participate in Groups as part of your Facebook strategy, and now Groups for Pages will enable brands to manage a group for their own community.
- To appease publishers who are struggling to reap the benefits of Instant Articles, Facebook is sharing data on how many views those fast-loading mobile articles get in comparison to their mobile web equivalents. Maybe an upcoming option to let publishers offer paid subscriptions could turn things around.
- After years of making GIF-sharing notoriously difficult, you can finally upload GIFs directly, share GIFs in comments and search through a library of options, Twitter-style. Facebook mobile even wants to let users record their own GIFs within the app.
- It’s been a rough year – user growth has stalled and two million active U.S. users abandoned the platform in the previous quarter 😢 So, don’t beat yourself up too badly if your follower count hasn’t grown much lately. It’s too soon to write Twitter off yet, but it’s looking less appealing as an advertising platform.
- If you don’t want to hear from users you don’t know, mute them by filtering out your notifications.
- Multi-image posts are ideal for sharing a small batch of design samples, or a photo album from a recent event.
- Looking for a career mentor? A new Tinder-like feature can connect you to someone in your network, which could potentially help younger marketers benefit from the wisdom of more experienced professionals in the industry. Or it could be really uncomfortable, tell us if you try it.
- Use the “What people are talking about now” trending news items to join relevant conversations and find timely ideas for your own content. Also, you can customize your notifications to cut through the clutter.
- Campaign Manager has new cards that share quick insights and recommendations to aid your ad performance, and the expanded demographic reporting takes a look at the industries and professionals you’re reaching.
- Coming soon – improved demographic data of users who visit your website from LinkedIn. If you already have the LinkedIn Insights Tag on your site, you’ll be good to go once the update hits. Having more detailed data can better inform your marketing efforts, and help you keep tabs on how your target audience responds to your ads.
- LinkedIn briefly removed a couple features from the desktop version, then added them back when users threw a fit.
- Take your engagement efforts up a notch by responding to other users’ Stories with photos or videos – just like you already could on Snapchat.
- Influencers and brands can denote ads with a new “Paid partnership with…” tag on sponsored posts, which aims to clear up the ongoing #spon and #ad disclosure issues with FTC.
- Users can now access Lens from the top of their feed, making it easier to use quickly. Pinterest reports that users are taking advantage of visual search to stumble upon ideas when they don’t have a firm sense of what they’re looking for. Most users don’t search with a brand name, which could help competition between advertisers.
SNAPCHAT
- You wanted to add links to your posts. Now you can. You can also make your Snaps snazzier with voice filters and background colors (on brand, of course), and you can film up to six 10-second snaps at once.
Interested in chatting with us about social media marketing strategies for your business? Give us a call at 804-577-8679 or fill out the form below to contact us.