As the power of social media grows exponentially as a marketing tool, so media owners are adapting these platforms to sharpen their toolkits. Are you staying up-to-date with the latest changes? We compiled a list of the major changes in 2018 to give you a birds-eye view and what it means for your business.
The biggest changes so far are related to advertising on the platform. Facebook has introduced two new A/B testing options. The first is Dynamic Creative which uses the Facebook’s algorithms to find the best combination of images, headlines, and text. This new element will make it easier to facilitate and it is built into Facebook Ads Manager.
Dynamic Creative enables you to include up to 30 creative assets when creating a Facebook ad. Once the ad is published the algorithms do some clever mixing and matching to determine which variation delivers the optimum results.The second is the new ‘Test and Learn.’ We think this is a magic feature and can be used to guide you to the best strategies that optimise your results and achieve objectives. It enables you to ask questions such as, “which campaign has the lowest conversions,” or “how many conversions my Facebook ads are yielding?”. Then Facebook indicates which test to run to answer your question. Rather nifty as a marketing efficacy tool.
Furthermore, Facebook’s been making major changes to its News Feed to provide more trustworthy content for its users. Consequently, you can expect to see fewer business posts on your News Feed as they shift their emphasis to personal posts.
What’s the Impact?
Businesses who remain on Facebook for marketing purposes will have to use personalised content and smarter calls to action to make their ads more appealing, targeted and less commercial. Tough ask!
On Instagram users are now able to follow specific hashtags on the platform, in addition to profiles, with posts using those tags appearing in your main feed.
As explained by Instagram:
“Following a hashtag is just like following a friend. To get started, search for a topic you’re interested in or tap on a hashtag from any post. You’ll see relevant hashtags displayed in your search results along with related accounts. When you find a hashtag you like, open the hashtag page and tap on the follow button. You’ll begin seeing top posts from that hashtag in your feed and some of the latest stories in your stories bar. You can always unfollow a hashtag at any time.”
The ‘regram’ option is another feature that’s been on the wish lists of Instagram users for a long time, and the platform is now investigating options, including the capacity to share other peoples’ Instagram posts within your Story. Users have been doing this regardless by taking a screenshot of other people’s posts. With the ‘regram’ feature, however, the original poster is properly credited.
In addition to this, Instagram’s also reportedly testing a ‘Cinemagraph’ option for Stories. Cinemagraphs are images with a section of the image animated, not the whole thing, adding a spark of life to otherwise still shots.
Facebook is doing a strong push on ‘Stories’ and Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that he sees this as the future of social sharing. He recently noted that ‘Stories’ may surpass the feed as the primary social interactive option.
What’s the Impact?
The follow hashtag option allows businesses to monitor your brand more closely and that of your competitors. It gives you insight into which hashtags are performing well and promoting the most engagement. In terms of the regram option – user-generated content (UGC) is an important part of sharing updates. This option will make it much easier to share UGC and other kinds of content
LinkedIn is also upping their game with several major updates worth noting. One of these updates is a refresh for LinkedIn groups. Due to the influx of spam, LinkedIn’s groups feature became less popular among users and engagement dwindled. In an effort to encourage more people to use groups, the business-orientated platform has made the feature accessible from the homepage, with the latest content from groups available in notifications too. In addition, users can now post videos for group members to view. LinkedIn’s also updated its Sales Navigator app to make it easier and quicker for businesses to access information on their existing and prospective customers.
Other updates include:
- Redesigned the account pages
- Improved the available search filters
- Introduced Email alerts
- The feature allows users to transfer data to corporate accounts with a self-serve tool
What’s the Impact?
For businesses, there is enhanced benefit with improved account and data management. The improved Communications tools should encourage further connection and engagement and the entire LinkedIn experience.
Staying on top of the changes
To keep up with this constant evolution you must be willing to adapt to the changes and experiment. This way you’ll be able to ensure your input is spot on trend and use the latest features to attract and engage customers more effectively. This will give you that competitive edge too.
At Creative Imagineering we are a group of ‘girl geek’s’ who make it our business to stay on top of changes on the social media landscape so that you can remain focused on your business goals. Chat to us about making use of these new social media features to ensure you keep your competitive edge. Email us.
Original article source: www.socialmediatoday.com