It’s the last week of 2018, and 2019 is just around the corner. Here are the latest social media updates you should know as a social media marketer going into the new year.
Facebook is rolling out Facebook Stories for Facebook Groups. In addition to being able to share stories to your Profile or Page, you can now share them with your Groups.
Stories have been an easy way to encourage engagement on your profile or Business page and now you can share stories in Groups. This could be tips, fun moments, upcoming events, or reminders.
Stories for Groups will have admin tools to allow you to manage Facebook group Stories. It’s another opportunity, and an increasingly popular one, to stay top-of-mind with your community.
Instagram rolled out a new feature that allows you to send voice messages in Instagram Direct.
As Instagram voice messaging is only out to profiles at the moment, in the future the voice messaging feature can be used to answer customer questions. It’s another way Instagram in expanding the ways you can keep in context with your consumers/audience. This can offer a way to personalize a message, a way of cutting through the clutter and building trust with your followers.
Need a recommendation for music or want to get feedback during a live video? Well, Instagram added two new features to let you do just that.
There is a new music icon in the stickers of Stories. You can post this on your story and add a comment or question and your followers can respond with a song. You can view the responses and test out the songs right there.
Instagram also added a feature where you can add a question sticker to your Live video. This gives you another way to interact with the viewers instead of just the comment stream. You can get the feedback and address the question in the Live video.
With Instagrams growing engagement and popularity, these new features continue to expand the ways you can interact with your followers. Use the tools to “wow” your community and communicate in the “way of the web” today!
YouTube is rolling out auto-plays on YouTube videos.
With so many people publishing videos you have to find ways to stand out and catch the viewer's attention. Showing a brief portion of the beginning of a video is a way to entice viewers to watch the whole video making it important to have a good intro for your video. Is it good? Will viewers like this? We’ll see.
In a blog post previously in the year, we talked about AR and things that were to come. Well, here it is! On Snapchat Adidas has a new ad campaign that lets you pick a pair of shoes which are placed on the ground via the camera. Using the camera you can merge them onto your feet to “try on” the shoes.
Giving users interactive experience with your product is a great way to enhance your advertisements. Brands and Businesses can utilize Snapchats Lens Studio to create engaging and interactive experiences for the app’s young audience. This is beyond most small businesses at this point but it is something to watch and be aware of and we look ahead to 2019.
Which do you prefer; algorithm-defined new feed or most recent tweets from who you follow? Well now on Twitter the new ‘Sparkle’ button lets you opt-out of the algorithm-defined feed if you prefer to see most recent tweets first.
For those engaging on Twitter, the algorithm was sometimes a pain in the a**! This gives you an option to view things in order which can be very helpful for time sensitive or specific tweets you don’t want to miss.
With that, it’s a wrap on social media updates for 2018! Have they been helpful? It changes quickly and consistently and the only way to perform well in social media marketing is to keep up-to-date on the latest tools and tactics.
See you next year!
