Top 5 Social Media Updates You Need to Know
In the vast sea of social media, it’s sometimes hard to stay updated on all the changes that take place. A larger issue emerges when marketers and business professionals miss the opportunity to jump on trends that engage consumers.
Without adapting to current trends, marketers lose influence over consumers in every media consumption shift; this happens daily. With that being said, here are the social media updates you need to know:
1. Snapchat Context Cards
Snapchat has been the pioneering force behind image filters since their inception. They are continuing to push forward with context cards, creating a great opportunity for marketers.
Context cards are a new feature that inserts contextual information into pictures and videos on public stories when using a specified geotag. This is a mutualistic relationship between marketers and users. Users have the ability to quickly get information about a business such as contact, business hours, location and reviews. Marketers get to increase their reach, engagement and sales through crowdsourced content.
2. Two-Person Instagram Live Video
Instagram stories are taking off, with over 250 million daily users. As its popularity increases so too does the popularity of live video.
To keep things fresh, Instagram is introducing ‘Go Live with a Friend’. This new option allows users to invite another person into their live video story. This opportunity has a wide range of functionality for both casual users and marketers allowing for more dynamic and captivating entertainment. Instagram is proving that two heads are better than one.
3. Instagram Polls
In recent history, the use of polls has been reserved to the social media giant, Twitter. Now, Instagram is pulling rank and introducing polls into their stories.
The simple feature lets users insert a poll with two options, of which the user can creatively rename beyond a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This is a great new tool for marketers to really get a good read on how much engagement they are receiving on their Instagram stories, rather than just relying on the inanity of views. However, a word to the wise. The polls are not anonymous and user’s votes are able to be seen by those who posted them which has turned out to be a hilarious misconception.
4. Facebook Explore Feed
Facebook has a massive number of followers who spend a massive amount of time on their platform, so it’s hard not to notice any type of change. But if you haven’t noticed, Facebook introduced a new discovery-focused feature to their platform, called ‘Explore’.
This option steers users through a cluster of new content so they can, as you can imagine, explore new content that expands beyond content that is posted by their friends, family or Pages that they follow. This has practical uses from allowing a greater reach for Pages to uncovering a new highly engaging target segment that was previously unseen. It even has societal changes to help reduce the echo chamber effect that is prevailing on social media, especially Facebook.
5. Twitter Bookmark Feature
This has been a long time coming. Most other social media platforms allow users to save content for later and Twitter has finally joined the club.
Twitter is soon unveiling a bookmark feature that lets users save a tweet for later. For many Twitter users, this helps alleviate using the “like” feature as a stand-in bookmark because they were still accessible. In turn, this creates an opportunity for marketers to better understand the motivation behind particular engagement from their consumers. Now when a tweet is liked, it is because they truly enjoy the content rather than are saving it for later for another completely different reason.
Allowing your brand’s voice to successfully be heard can be a tough task. Our duty as marketers is to provide our clients with every resource currently available. The willingness to adapt as a brand is not easy, but with our assistance, you will not be a victim to modern evolution. Contact or stay social with us! We’re just one call, like, follow, retweet, favorite and DM away.