Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop, your weekly roundup of everything you need to know in the social media marketing world for the week ending the seventh of July, 2024. I have dived deep into all of the social media marketing updates, and I am here to share them with you. Let's dive on in.
First up this week, we have another update to unpick from the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. Now, when Adam shares a reel or shares a story or shares some information about Instagram, all of our social media experts go crazy trying to unpick it all, and that's what we're going to do this week. In a recent reel, Mosseri shared that Instagram uses the metric sends per reach as a major metric to help rank content. Sends per reach is also known as just how often viewers send a post others. If you reach, say, 100 people with your content and 10 of those share it with their friends, their network, their connexions, then that's a really good indication that this is good quality content and obviously to push it out to more people. So what does that mean for business owners like you and I?
Well, it basically just means that we want to focus on creating some of our content that is purely shareable. So the type of content that people will see and they'll find it so interesting or so informative or so funny or so humorous or so exciting that they're going to share it with their friends, their family, and their connexions. Now, this is not an Earth-shattering revelation. This is the stuff we already knew because it makes sense. If people are going to share our content with their connexions, then, of course, we're going to reach more people. So again, it's nothing new. We already knew this, but I guess it's a good reminder that we shouldn't just be creating promotional content content or content to sell our products and our services, that we need to create content that has different purposes, and some of that content should really focus on being shareable content.
Now, next up, Instagram is testing the ability to see publicly how many times a piece of content has been shared. So this links back to our first update this week. But it will be interesting to see when we're scrolling through our content, we will be able to see how many times that content has been shared, which is, of course, a good indicator of how well that content has resonated with an audience.
Now, the other update that comes alongside this is that Instagram is also giving us the ability to turn off or to hide that public share count. Let's take a step back. First of all, we're saying that content that's being shared is really important. We create content that is being shared. Then Instagram is saying that they're going to roll out the ability so that people can actually see how many times that content is being shared. But in the same brief, Instagram is also giving us the ability to hide that public share count. It's really quite interesting how the focus this week is really on that shareable content.
Now, next up in social media marketing news this week is a massive change that is coming to direct messages on Instagram. Now, moving forward, Instagram will be changing the default settings on direct messages, allowing only the people you follow to message you unless you choose otherwise. Now, this notification popped up on my account, but some users say they haven't actually seen this change roll out yet. But for business owners, this is really important. If you think about direct messages as a way for potential clients, customers to get in touch with you, of course, you're not going to be already following all of your potential clients or customers.
What we need to do is make sure we change that setting so that we are not blocking anyone who we don't follow from messaging us. Keep an eye on your Instagram account when you open it up, you'll find that when it has updated, you'll get a notification that will pop up. Now, make sure you read that notification carefully because you do need to change those settings. So keep an eye out for that one. Next up, TikTok has added the ability to download your TikToks without the watermark. So until now, when you download your own TikToks, they a nice big TikTok watermark all over them. And of course, we know that other platforms like Instagram don't love it when you upload videos that have other platforms' watermarks on them. So this is a great change. This means that you will be able to repurpose and reshare your TikToks across platforms like Instagram, like Facebook, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, etc, without having that TikTok watermark all over them.
Now, Instagram has added a new feature to their professional dashboard. This allows you to turn on a collaboration status so that it makes it clear that you're open to collaborating with other people. Really awesome for content creators, influencers to turn on this new status.
Now, Meta is updating its AI content label. Up until now, there has been a new label on Meta, where you post content that is created using AI, is the label that says made with AI. But the tricky thing is, is sometimes you may use AI to modify the content, but you didn't actually create it with AI, which means that some content is being inaccurately labelled, saying made with AI, when really it's only just been maybe retouched using AI tools. The new label is going to say AI info. It's going to be a lot clearer that there has been some influence on that content, but it hasn't been necessary really created completely using AI tools.
Now, Instagram has rolled out the ability to post quietly on profiles to more people. Why is this useful? Well, I reported on this a few weeks ago, but the ability to post quietly means that you can share content so that it appears on your grid, but it doesn't get pushed out to your followers or out to the feed like it normally would. This is really great if you want to create an aesthetic look on your profile grid Often I will have some tiles across the top of my profile, which will have a promotion that I might be running or a special offer, that thing. But I don't necessarily want those to go out in the feed, so I can't wait for this to roll out to my account. I've checked it this morning. It isn't there yet, but keep an eye on it for your account. You'll notice when you go and click on that plus button and when you go to create and you choose a reel story, a post, you'll see there the option to post quietly.
Lastly this week, Threads celebrates its one year anniversary. It's been a whole year since Threads launched on the fifth of July, 2023. As at the time of recording, I can see there are 178 25 million users on threads, and we've got a whole year without any ads on threads. So I suspect that ads will be coming soon. Meta, of course, needs to monetise this platform, so it will be interesting to see how that rolls out. And there you have it. There are your social media marketing updates for the week ending the seventh of July, 2024. As always, I'd love to continue the conversation. Come and find me all over social media. You'll find me @socialsmarty.co until next week, stay social.
