LinkedIn post templates
Sometimes you have something to say and you need to say it now. But it’s not that easy when you are creating content for social media. You need to make an image, write some decent copy (and if you’re on LinkedIn long, long copy), it’s a lot of work.
Soon it could get easier, on LinkedIn at least. For those short, snappy updates LinkedIn is rolling out ‘templates’. These are almost an exact copy of Facebook’s text on background posts.
The advantage is that rather than a short snappy update getting lost, it will stand out in the feed and grab attention.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lean-visual-content-creation-linkedin-keren-baruch/
New Reels Features
Instagram is throwing new features at Reels. This week the boss, Adam Mosseri announced three new ones.
The Add Yours sticker will now be available to add to your Reels, this could be a great way to get more engagement on your Reels.
Crosspost your Reels to Facebook, at last! That means if you have a larger following on Facebook you’ll be able to reach them too.
And finally, extra stats for Reels on Facebook, which will be great for seeing the impact of crossposting.
The problem for businesses is that Reels are a commitment, they take a while to create and the more Instagram push, the poorer the quality of the Reels we will see, which in turn makes the whole thing less interesting.
A Third of Teens are still using Facebook
Teens just love YouTube, more than any other platform, even TikTok. According to research from Pew, 95% of teens say they use YouTube and 1 in 5 use it ‘almost constantly’.
TikTok comes in second at 67% with Instagram in a close third with 62%.
What’s most interesting to me is that yes, the trajectory of teens using Facebook is in decline, but still almost a third of them use the platform (although only 2% of them constantly).
What does this mean for business? If you are targeting a younger demographic it’s not all about TikTok. YouTube and YouTube shorts could be a better investment of time (although test this).
It also means that those same teens may ‘grow into’ those Facebook accounts in the future, no need to abandon it completely.
1 Million Snapchat+ subs
The Snapchat+ subscription service appears to be doing well. They launched just over 6 weeks ago and have 1 Million subs already.
In the world of social media with billions of users, this may seem small but it looks like it’s been a successful launch so far.
This week they’re adding even more exclusive features including, making your story replies more visible to ‘stars’ or celebs.
That could be especially enticing for the snapchat users, but like priority boarding on Ryanair, when everyone subs to Snapchat+ it will once again be hard to get noticed.
https://newsroom.snap.com/en-GB/augustsnapchatplusdrop
Reels Scheduling for Facebook
More good news for social media managers and businesses that work from desktop. You can now schedule Facebook Reels from Creator Studio on your computer.
However, the only editing available is to resize your video format to vertical. No stickers, no annotations, no clips. That means, if you want to do something fun you’ll need to edit elsewhere before you upload, or stick to the app.
More Meta ad AI
The problem with Meta ads is that they are incredibly complex. Someone approaching the ads manager for the first time can feel totally overwhelmed.
But Meta wants to make life easier using AI.
Advantage+ is a set of AI tools that make creating and optimising ads easier. Instead of managing the optimisation process yourself the AI will adjust creative for each individual in your audience, help you create better audiences. Plus, just announced, it’s going to work with your e-commerce site to automatically create ads for you.
This is good news for both small businesses and agencies who until now, have spent a large amount of time testing and split testing creative. Instead of doing this for the masses, Meta will be able to optimise for each individual in your audience. In tests, this has resulted in a lower cost per purchase, which is nice.
How do Instagram recommended posts work?
Instagram has an agenda, it wants more engaged users. And in its own words:
“Anecdotally speaking, users who stay engaged keep finding newer sources of interests to follow.”
That means they need to throw all those ‘suggested posts’ into your feed. How do they do this without annoying you (or possibly why annoying you)?
It’s complicated. Essentially they look at your behaviour on Instagram, what accounts you follow, what posts you engage with. Plus the posts and accounts that the people you follow engage with.
From all that stuff, they find the posts they think you’ll enjoy so much that you won’t even notice it’s from a stranger.
As businesses, if we want to appear in the feeds of the right people our content needs to be bang on topic, we need to talk about and share the stuff that taps into the interests our audience has, not just in general but while browsing Instagram.
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