As with every month, albeit slightly late this time, we have lined up a list of February’s social media updates that are relevant for your business:
Facebook – Connecting Businesses with Relevantly Skilled Applicants
Facebook – Keeping Up With Your Customers via Lists
Facebook – Cleaning Up Ad Metrics
Facebook – Downvoting or Dislike?
Facebook – Enrolling Businesses in Community Help
Snapchat – Possible Expansions into e-commerce
Snapchat – Analytics and Insights to Measure Your ROI
Instagram – Carousel for Stories Ads
Instagram – Type Mode for Simple and Direct Communication
LinkedIn – Automate Your Talent Recruitment Scheduling
Twitter – Bookmark Tweets to Read Later
Twitter – Introducing Adaptive Rate Limits
Facebook – Connecting Businesses with Relevantly Skilled Applicants
LinkedIn is perfect for recruiting professionals but for lower-skilled employees? Not so much. Hence, Facebook has decided to gain market share and close this gap by becoming a platform that helps businesses hire relevantly skilled employees.
Businesses can now post job openings through your Page’s Jobs tab, Jobs dashboard, Facebook Marketplace and Newsfeed Ads which can be found on your potential candidates feeds. Following which, you can use Messenger to start a conversation, schedule interviews and send automated reminders.
Read more: Facebook – Helping People Find Jobs and Local Businesses Hire
Facebook – Keeping Up With Your Customers via List
Apart from keeping up with Facebook’s algorithm changes, it’s also time to update yourself on what your customers’ wants and needs are. A new feature, Lists was released to encourage users to share a list of anything – to do, bucket list, new year resolutions, or problems to be solved.
According to TechCrunch, “the lists are also designed with the idea that friends could copy each other’s lists to share their own opinions about the subject at hand.” While it may be brow-raising for some, lists could be a potential way whereby you can promote your business as well by highlighting how you can solve a problem or fulfil their wants. By directly reaching out to your customers, it could be an easier way to create an opening for business discussion, or even seal the deal there and then!
Read more: Techcrunch – Facebook pushes for more personal updates with launch of new Lists feature
Facebook – Cleaning Up Ad Metrics
Ads can be confusing at times. There are so many metrics with no exact definition as to how they are being calculated. Hence, Facebook has stepped forward and clarified that their ad metrics are either “estimated” by sampling, or “in development” for those calculated based on still-improving algorithms.
Coming July, an estimate of 20 ad metrics that have been reported redundant will be removed. Such an example would be social reach metric, not to be confused with reach metric.
Read more: Facebook – Making Ad Metrics Clearer
Facebook – Downvoting or Dislike?
If you haven’t heard, there is a big buzz surrounding Facebook’s downvote button tested among 5% of Andriod users in the U.S with language set to English. Facebook insists that that it is a button that “lets people express their dislike,” rather than a simple “dislike” button, in hopes of disencouraging negativity. Tapping on the button hides the comment from the user and allows users to report the comment as “Offensive”, “Misleading” or “Off Topic” for Facebook’s analysis. The button can only be seen on public Page posts.
A double-edged sword, the button can make it easier to minimise trolling and hate speech, but also be used maliciously to mass downrank and troll others. At least for its testing stage now, the button does not affect the ranking of the comment, post or Page.
Read more: TechCrunch – Facebook confirms test of a downvote button for flagging comments
Facebook – Enrolling Businesses in Community Help
Facebook’s Community Help was launched last year to aid communication between those affected in times of danger or natural crisis. Today, businesses and nonprofits can participate to extend their help as well. Facebook is currently partners with Direct Relief, Lyft, Save the Children, and more. In order to post in Community Help, businesses must have a verified page and are not allowed to post promotional content.
Here is how Direct Relief responded to Montecito’s mudslide and Lyft to Hurricane Irma.
Read more: Facebook – Making it Easier for Organizations and Businesses to Help People during a Crisis
Snapchat – Possible Expansions into e-commerce:
Apart from being a time-limited instant messaging service, Snapchat is exploring into the world of e-commerce. During the NBA All-Star Weekend, Snapchat, Nike and Shopify had an interesting partnership. Concert attendees were able to scan a Snapcode at the event and purchase the new Air Jordan III “Tinker” sneakers in-app, via Shopify. Looks like Snapcode isn’t just for filters.
A separate but interesting ad trend adopted today is in-banner checkout from Reve AB, one of Sweden’s fastest growing tech platform for e-commerce. In-banner checkout allows web visitors to complete purchases in the same window, without being redirected onto additional pages. Similar to Snapchat’s in-app purchasing example, by shortening the purchase process and giving customers what they want directly with no fuss, it creates a frictionless shopping experience that reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions.
Read more: TechCrunch – Nike teamed up with Snap and Darkstore to pre-release Air Jordan III ‘Tinker’ shoes on Snapchat
Snapchat – Analytics and Insights to Measure Your ROI
Snapchat has introduced analytics features in hopes of winning back their influencers after the recent redesign backlash. The sleek dashboard displays an overview of:
- Total view count
- Time spent
- Unique story viewers, and
- Viewer demographic including gender and interests.
With this update, you and your influencers do not have to rely on 3rd party applications. Also, you can now measure your return on investment (ROI) and verify the effectiveness of your influencer marketing strategies. It can also come in handy when choosing the most influential influencer you want to work with for an upcoming campaign.
Read more: TechCrunch – Snapchat finally gives creators analytics
Instagram – Carousel for Stories Ads
3 times longer ad time, 3x more highlightable content. With Carousel option, you will be able to upload 3 instead of 1 media piece per Stories ad, and add depth to your ads. This gives you more room to convey more information about your campaign without experiencing the trade-off dilemma when there was just one image or video. Additionally, you get to incorporate other Instagram features such as drawing tools and stickers.
Check out Gap’s Logo remix campaign here. The feature is currently tested with Coca-Cola, Renault and Paramount.
Read more: Instagram – Bringing Carousel Ads to Instagram Stories
Instagram – Type Mode for Simple and Direct Communication
Instagram has always been centred around visual content but now, users are able to share just text stories with the new Type Mode.
Type Mode allows you to send plain texts such as notifications or simple updates decorated with different styles, highlights and backgrounds to your followers through Stories. There is beauty in simplicity. Understanding what requires a nice picture to go with and what doesn’t can help you create more efficient workflows.
Read more: Instagram – Introducing Type Mode in Stories
LinkedIn – Automate Your Talent Recruitment Scheduling
More for human resource managers, LinkedIn has released Scheduler, a brand new interview scheduling tool in LinkedIn’s messenger, InMail.
Scheduler automates your candidate interview scheduling process by syncing your Google or Microsoft 365 Calendar to InMail. After which, your candidates can select their preferred interview timing directly via LinkedIn.
Read more: LinkedIn – New LinkedIn Feature Lets You Share Your Calendar with Candidates
Twitter – Bookmark Tweets to Read Later
Unlike “Likes”, bookmarking tweets allows you to read selected tweets privately after, without others finding out, not even the author. The tweets will be saved in the order they were bookmarked.
Read more: Twitter – An easier way to save and share Tweets
Twitter – Introducing Adaptive Rate Limits
If you have been using Twitter’s Direct Message API to communicate with your customers, here’s some good news! With the new adaptive rate rule, you can rest assured while delivering consistent customer support to your clients, even when your inbound volume is high. Previously, businesses were limited to 1,000 messages per day which means that there’s a chance that you may not be able to reply to some customers. Now, you can send up to 5 replies over 24 hours to each customer’s DM. Each time a customer responds, the limit resets. Technically, you can have never-ending conversations with your customers!
Read more: Twitter- Making sure businesses can always respond to customers Direct Messages
Conclusion
That’s a wrap from February. Most of the updates seem to revolve around improving current features with the exception of LinkedIn and Snapchat. Regardless, we are excited to see what updates will be coming around in this month! Till then??
Hi! Would you mind if I share your blog with my myspace
group? There’s a lot of folks that I think would really appreciate your content.
Please let me know. Cheers