It’s the beginning of a new year, so it makes sense to revisit the world of social media and marketing. There’s been a lot of updates. Some of them pertain more to personal use, and others can be handy for building your brand.
Influencers and Content Trends
It’s good to stay on top of trends. CMO published an article about how people check email less, smart speakers are getting more popular, and young people are using Instagram, but not Facebook.
With that in mind, it may be worth trying to work with influencers in social media to try and make more people familiar with your work. Sprout Social explains what to look for, depending on your niche, and how to work with people. Tips include identifying your goals, building relationships, and work collaboratively. Keep in mind that the influencer market is changing.
Stories
Stories are a popular way to connect with people. On the Instagram front, you can now build up the hype around your Instagram stories with countdowns for your stories, to build up more excitement around them. And you can choose to share them with everyone, or with only your close friends (via a close friends list).
On a side note, Facebook (which also has a Stories feature) now has a way for you to only share content with certain friends and family members, with its collection feature. They suggest collecting holiday recipes, but it could also be for book collections or reviews.
To make your Instagram stories stand out, you can play around with the fonts. This includes adding background colors, animating text, and and adding other effects.
If you want to make your stories ahead of time, you can use Buffer to schedule them in the future.
You can also ask friends to send you songs via a music question sticker on Instagram. Then when you tap on the song, you can take a photo or video while listening to the song.
For YouTube creators with more than 10,000 subscribers, there’s now an option to share stories on the video platform. It sounds very similar to Instagram and other platforms, though Stories are available for 7 days instead of 24 hours.
LinkedIn is even getting in on the popularity of stories, and is testing the feature (though not everyone thinks this is a great idea).
Search, Visuals, and Shares
Searches are becoming more visual. Google now tracks your search activity with activity cards, to make it easier to retrace your steps if necessary.
Snap is testing ways to search for products on Amazon from your Snapchat camera.
As always, visuals are important when it comes to sharing content online. With that in mind, here are 101 Photoshop tutorials that teach you everything from whitening someone’s teeth to creating a poster.
There are also tools for easily making charts, tables, and GIFs.
And there are many ways to share content as well. Two of the newest ways include Google Podcasts, where you can share shows and episodes, and Instagram, which now allows you to regram posts to multiple accounts.
Direct Messages and Other Features
Instagram now has a walkie-talkie feature, where you can record short voice messages for people via direct messages. You can also use quick replies to respond to direct messages faster.
In Facebook Messenger, now if you accidentally send something, you can unsend your message within 10 minutes.
Instagram also now allows shopping from the app. If you’re a big enough brand, you can add products in videos, stories, and feeds.
With all these features, if you’re wondering how much time you’re spending on Instagram, you can now check your daily average via the Your Activity dashboard. You can do the same with Facebook.
And if you want to know which parts of your website are most popular, Quora has a list of answers of the best heat map tools.
Last, Twitter users can now choose to see a company’s “top tweets” or their latest tweets, with the sparkle button.
Any new features you’re excited about? Let me know in the comments!
