It’s time for our round-up of the latest social media updates from this month. From developments on Instagram stories to a new Facebook algorithm, if you use social media for your business, here are some updates you need to know…
- INSTAGRAM STORIES
Instagram have been focusing on the ‘stories’ feature on the platform a lot over the past few months with key updates being introduced on a regular basis. Here are just a few of the updates that we feel are most important to be aware of:
- Font development; rather than the standard font style Instagram used for so many years, there are now numerous different layouts and styles that you can jazz up your stories with!
- GIF support; you can now add moving stickers/people/patterns to your stories making them that little bit more exciting (and eye-catching)
- Instagram Ads; this is an important one for brands, you can now add 3 pieces of media to your carousel ads rather than 1, making the ads more eye-catching, engaging and easier to fit more information in.
- WhatsApp stories; Did you know WhatsApp have their own stories feature? Well you can now add these stories straight to your Instagram feed (WhatsApp is now also owned by Facebook so they are making it easier for you to engage in all 3 platforms)
- FACEBOOK ALGORITHM
Don’t panic! Facebook has recently undergone some big changes to its algorithm, but they shouldn’t have a negative impact on your business page, in fact, as long as your content is useful for your audience and engages with them, these changes could be a great asset for your social marketing.
It was said by the man himself, Mark Zuckerberg, over on Facebook (obviously) that they will be focusing on showing more high quality, trusted news to their users on the Facebook newsfeed. This is a way to ensure Facebook isn’t just a fun platform but also has a positive impact on its users well-being and for the whole of society. This will focus mainly on local news and will be initially rolled out in the USA.
- INSTAGRAM SCHEDULING
It’s been a long time coming, but you can finally schedule and publish posts onto Instagram automatically without having to manually push them out, when using a publishing tool platform such as Hootsuite.
One key thing to note with this is to ensure the time of day you post is correct in order to reach your target audience. By this, we mean you need to analyse your Instagram Insights to see what time of day your audience is online and schedule your content around this. With the ever changing Instagram algorithm, it is making it harder and harder to receive engagement on your posts, however, the more engagement you do receive, the higher number of users your content will reach. But how can you achieve the engagement on your Instagram posts? Here are our top tips;
- Include Hashtags; we all know this is the basic rule of getting your content discovered, and it is still just as important in today’s social media world, particularly as Instagram users can now ‘follow’ hashtags
- Create engaging content; ensure your captions are interesting and include a ‘Call to Action’ – ask your followers a question to encourage them to comment on your post
- Utilise Instagram Stories; social media users are always looking at the ‘here and now’, the Instagram stories feature has become increasingly popular since it launched and often includes posts that are a more ‘up to date’ version of people’s lives – use this to get your content discovered
- PINTEREST LENS SEARCHES
Were you aware that Pinterest added a feature back in 2017 called ‘Lens search tool’? It allowed users to search for items based on images that were taken with the Pinterest camera. A year after the launch, they are rolling out a feature that allows users to add Lens images to any text search, beginning on iOS and rolling out to Android in the near future.
This enables results to be even more accurate for users as the search results on Pinterest are based on both the text and image element. You can read more information about this here.
Some other key pointers to remember –
- 93% of buying decisions are influenced by social media
- It is estimated that this year video will account for over 2/3 of mobile usage
- The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is grandparents
- 2 people join LinkedIn every second
Do you want some help with your social media marketing? Contact us on 01904 863511 or email info@pickandmixms.co.uk, we promise no marketing jargon!