Photo via StockSnap
Social media platforms are constantly evolving, and as a business owner, it’s crucial to stay on top of the latest capabilities to ensure you’re using them to maximize your ROI. We’re here to help you decode how these changes can help your business grow. Here are the latest updates to keep in mind from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Google:
Instagram adds analytics and special business profiles.
Instagram is beefing up its in-app analytics to make it easier to measure the impact of your posts and learn about your followers. Its new “Insights” feature will give marketers valuable insight into their audience and engagement levels by focusing on follower demographics and post interaction, including impressions, reach, and clicks to your website. More details on analytics are available here.
Instagram is also rolling out new profile features that will treat your company’s Instagram profile more like a Facebook page, complete with a Contact button, linkable location tag, and category tag for your Instagram profile.
Facebook ads expand to non-Facebook users.
Facebook’s expansion of its “Facebook Audience Network” means that your company’s Facebook ads could soon appear not only on newsfeeds, but also on other apps and mobile websites, using the same data that fuels targeted ads inside Facebook. This means that non-Facebook users could start seeing your ads on mobile apps including Shazam, The Huffington Post, and the Kardashian games.
Twitter is changing basically everything.
Twitter recently announced several changes, the most notable for marketers being that videos and photos will no longer count toward the 140-character limit! Neither will GIFs, polls, or quote tweets. Twitter has stayed true to its character limit since its inception, so this is a big deal for marketers who crave that extra space to squeeze in more details or links.
If you’ve ever tried to begin a tweet with someone’s name, you probably noticed that Twitter considers this a reply and omits it from most users’ timelines. Users worked around this by beginning the tweet with a full stop before the user’s handle (.@name). Twitter has done away with that, so now you can officially start a tweet by addressing another user.
Also noteworthy for companies wanting to revive previously published tweets and prevent them from getting buried on users’ feeds is the new ability to retweet and quote tweet yourself. Group conversations will also be easier, as Twitter will no longer count @names toward the tweet character limit, which will allow you to tag all the relevant parties to the conversation and still have room for your message.
Snapchat is becoming pay-to-play.
Snapchat, the fastest-growing social media platform, is taking a cue from Facebook and developing an algorithm that will give it more control over what branded content is seen by its audience.
Currently, Snapchat users see messages from companies in chronological order, but the new algorithm would allow Snapchat to serve as a gatekeeper between the publisher and the audience, picking and choosing who sees what.
The change, which affects only professional accounts, would still allow companies to publish and share content for free, but for some extra cash, your post can be exposed to more of your followers—much like Facebook’s boosted and promoted posts.
Google tries social media again.
After the fizzle of Google Plus, Google is taking another stab at its own social networking site—Spaces, designed for sharing experiences with small groups via group chats. Designed to streamline the numerous sharing apps where small groups share links, photos, videos, documents, and conversations, Spaces allows users to search Google and YouTube straight from the app, and share the results in the group chat without leaving the stream—saving time that would otherwise be spent switching from app to app. Only time will tell if Spaces catches on to the masses.
Contact a member of our team to learn how we can help your business maximize its social media presence.