B3’s Top 5 October 2021 #SocialHitList

                                                                        (Social Platform Updates)

October brought about some major changes. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were offline for several hours in a global outage causing the world’s influencers to panic, a dog on TikTok controlled the masses with a “Bone or No Bones” play, and the biggest change came from Facebook, the social media platform formally known as Facebook, becoming – Meta: A Social Technology company. (It also sounds like an intro to a new Marvel superhero movie.)

Social Media has been on a wild, but fun ride over the past month so let’s get to the news you can actually use in your social calendars, strategies, reports, and community management efforts. 

                                                                       Our Top 5 #SocialHitList

While Facebook clearly made news with the name change to Meta, Instagram took the lead this month by implementing a number of new and useful features for social media managers, community managers, and brand strategists alike. 

#5 – New IG Metrics For Instagram Insights

For the first time, Instagram rolled out their “Product Week” where they announced the addition of three new analytics metrics for Instagram Insights. Not only are we excited to have more data to report on for our clients, but the information will directly help businesses get a better understanding of their content performance – an ongoing process to improve. The new metrics now available are: 

• Engaged Audience – This metric provides you with demographic information (includes age & gender, cities, and countries) for fans who engage with your account and content, regardless of whether they are your followers. 
• Reached Audience – This metric provides demographic data into all people reached over a period of time. 
• Accounts Engaged – This metric tells you how many accounts, in total, have interacted with your Instagram content over a period of time.

Instagram didn’t stop there, they rolled out a number of incredibly useful features including:

#4 – 60-Second Time Limit for IG Stories

Instead of the usual 15-second segment breaks for IG Stories, we found out from a developer on the team that IG is testing out 60 second story formats. This comes on the heels of the announcement that Instagram was expanding its video formats, so it makes sense for them to increase the ability to make longer content to increase fan engagement. This update will essentially allow you to upload your 60 second reel clip into your story. Now is a good time to revisit your top-performing reels to begin incorporating them into your content strategy.

#3 – Instagram Collabs – #FTW

Another interesting feature Instagram announced was Collabs, a new way for brands and influencers to collaborate, in real-time, on content creation (either a post or a reel). As shown in the example below, both parties appear on the header, you can leverage both author’s audiences, both accounts’ profile grids get the content, and you can share the views, likes, and comments. This feature has the potential to be big with brands as it has the potential to regularly open them up to brand new audiences. They began testing this feature earlier in 2021 and now it has been rolled out to all eligible users. 

#2 IG Story Links For All

Instagram has freed the use of links for all, not just those with over 10K followers. This is huge for brands utilizing micro-influencers with bases under 10K. Now anyone can share a link to content or products with their family, friends, and fans alike. When planning your upcoming influencer activation, using the link feature with Stories can be a game-changer when it comes to tracking conversion actions. 

#1 – Instagram Introduces Desktop Publishing

From my fingers to your eyes, this has been a feature social media managers have asked for since the beginning. Instead of having to upload photos and videos from your phone, you can finally use desktop publishing to manage and maintain your IG presence.

While you are able to post photos and videos that are less than a minute, it, unfortunately, does not include the functionality to post Stories or Reels (sorry guys). As you may or may not know, we’ve had the ability to upload IG posts from the desktop for a while now if you use the device selector in Inspector mode on the website. However, this update improves the entire process, making it an official, streamlined process. 

We selected this feature update as #1 because it is clear to see that Instagram is creating more ways for the Instagram experience to be shared with fans, making the lives of social media managers and digital marketers just a little easier by improving the process. 

Bonus Platform Update – Twitter

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday season, it is more important to give, rather than to receive, so we wanted to share an additional feature update that Twitter made. 

At the end of October, Twitter rolled out a new update that now includes an option to remove followers from the platform. But it also added new management features for Twitter Spaces, which includes a “Privacy” feature that prevents followers from seeing which Space you are passively listening to. The good news about this update was that it is all about giving users greater privacy controls on the platform. 

If you’d like a complete list of all the new, updated and fixed features, head over to Twitter and check out their release notes. 

Partnering With B3

Our team loves staying on top of what’s happening on social media. That is why top Fortune 500 brands trust us to provide them with relevant recommendations, social listening & monitoring reports, community management, and unified metrics reports. Through the use of a number of social tools and our robust social media audit, we take a deep dive into a brands’ presence as well as their competitors to understand what’s working and what’s not. We are always mindful of any new trends and relevant platform features which helps us identify any opportunities on which they can capitalize. Learn More about receiving a free Social Consultation from the team at B3 Media Solutions.