12 February Social Media Updates to Jump On

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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??