Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop for the week ending, the 23rd of June, 2024. I've rounded up all the latest news in the social media marketing world that you need to know from the past seven days. Let's dive on in.
First up, Instagram is encouraging users to send their post to friends after posting. Now, a notification has been spotted on Instagram, which encourages you to send your post directly to your friends after posting. Meaning that as soon as you've posted something, maybe a photo or a carousel post, you are being encouraged to then Direct message that post, so directly send that post to your friends. Now, this is rolled out not long after the head of Instagram revealed during a Q&A session that she is per reach is a priority metric. Now, what the heck does that mean? Shares per reach is how often a post is shared when compared to how many people saw it. So if you have a high number of shares to reach ratio, then that is what is going to inform Instagram that your content is good content and to push it out to more people. So this is a way of doing that, meaning that you can get more shares on your content, but rather than waiting for other people to share your content, you would be taking the reins and sharing it yourself.
So again, you post a new post and then you direct message it or you directly share it to your friends or your connexions on Instagram. Now, in theory, it sounds great, right? We all want to get more views on our content. But can you imagine how annoying it would be every time someone that you follow or one of your friends posts a new piece of content, they then directly share it to you. I can see this becoming incredibly annoying really, really fast. So if you are going to use this tactic, I would proceed with caution. I do not love this new feature. Next up, Instagram is rolling out the ability to livestream to close friends only. So we've had the ability to create a close friends only list for quite some time now on Instagram. And this is a curated list where you add people to it. So rather than just having your normal followers or your normal friends or connexions on Instagram, you create a curated list of special people. Now, for businesses, that can be anything from your top spenders or your best customers. It can be your members if you have a membership.
For me, I've created a list of local people, so other accounts that are local to me so that I can share local content with them rather than sharing it to my whole international audience. So the ability to livestream just to that close friends only list can be really beneficial depending on how you use it. So I can't imagine all businesses or all creators will use this functionality, but if you do have that curated close friends list, then it may be relevant for you. Meta has finally rolled out the Threads API, which means that Third-party scheduling two threads is on the way. I'm really excited by this because I do batch a lot of content. I create content in advance and schedule it. Up until now, we haven't had a way of scheduling two threads that will post directly We're actually into threads. So this is really exciting news. Also an exciting news, TikTok is testing the ability to add clickable links in videos. So much like Instagram, where we can't use clickable links unless we pay for advertising, TikTok has been the same until now. So TikTok is actually testing the ability to add clickable links, so through to your website or your online store in your videos without paying for ads.
So these are organic videos or organic posts over on TikTok. I can't wait to see how this rolls out. I would love this ability. But in saying that, we need to think about the way that people use TikTok. So you often get sucked into that convey about that never-ending feed of videos. So are people likely to click on those links and leave TikTok to visit your website or your online store? We will see. Now, Instagram is working on in-chat widgets. So far, we can see three different widgets, One is a countdown, one is a pinned content widget, and the other a time zone widget. Now, this just really does reinforce that Instagram is putting a lot of effort into chat or direct messages. Now, Meta has developed a new tool called AudioSeal. Now, this adds a watermark to any AI-generated speech. That's audio or speech that is created by AI, artificial intelligence, to mimic human speech. Now, up until now, it has been to detect whether speech is the actual person speaking or whether it is AI generated. So this tool will help to detect and, what would you say, highlight any text that is AI generated.
So that would be a really good addition, I believe, to all social media platforms. Now, Facebook has added the ability to share videos and reels starting from a specific timestamp. Over on YouTube, this has been around for a for a long time. You can share a video with a friend, but you can have it so that it starts at a particular point in the video. This is really good for long content where you want to highlight or share a specific part of the video. Now we have the ability to do that with Facebook as well, which is great. Lastly, TikTok has launched a new app. It is called We. I think I'm saying that right. It's WHE. It's basically just an Instagram clone. It's all about sharing images. It basically allows you to share it with your friends. Just like on Instagram, you have a list of friends and you push out content or push out photos. Have a look in the app store. Whatever app store you use on your phone, search for Whee, W H E E, and download the app. Very, very easy to sign up. You use your current TikTok credentials, so the same username, and it will also look for your friends.
So the friends that you have over on TikTok, it will pull those through. And there you have it. There are the latest updates in the social media marketing world for the week ending the 23rd of June, 2024. If you want to continue the conversation, come and find me on social media. You'll find me everywhere @socialsmarty.co until next week, stay social.
