Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop for the week ending the 11th of August, 2024. I have rounded up all of the most important social media marketing news that you need to know to DIY your social media marketing for your business. Let's dive on in.
First up, Instagram is shaking up its metrics. Now, Instagram has announced that a change is coming to insights, and moving forward, views will be the primary metric, views. Now, this will be across all content types, so reels, lives, photos, carousels, stories, and that includes the content that you pay to boost and the organic content, the content that you don't pay to boost. Now, why on Earth is this big news? Well, in the past, when we check our posts to have a look at our insights to see how they have performed, we would see all sorts of different metrics. We might see plays, reach, impressions, all sorts of things. It was really difficult to compare different types of content. This shift will make it really easy for us to compare our content's performance regardless of what type it is, regardless of whether it's a reel or a story or a post.
Now, of course, other insights will still be available, but the primary metric, the number one metric, will be views. That leaves us with the question, what the heck What is a view? Well, a view is simply when your content appears on someone's screen. When it pops up in the feed or in the Explorer, or whether it's even on your own profile, when they click on that content and see it on their screen, that is counted as a view. Now, with reels, it's a little bit different. So a view is when the reel starts to play or it starts to play again. So if someone watches your reel, say two or three times, that will be counted as two or three views. But this is such a good thing. So we get that really consistent metric across all of our content. Now, the head of Instagram has also reiterated the importance of send per reach. Now, if you have listened to the Social Smarties group for a while, you know that I reported when he previously emphasised how important this metric is. So send per reach, the number of times your content is sent as per the reach that you get. So say, for example, your content is only seen by 100 people, but it is sent by 50 of those people, that would be a massive achievement to have such a high send per reach. And of course, that's a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it? If your audience is loving your content so much that they're sending it on to other people, so sending it to their friends, their family, their connexions, or even sharing it on their own stories, then of course, you know you're doing pretty good content. You're onto a bit of a winner there. So this is a really cool update that's rolling out, and I think it is a really good one.
Okay, next up in the social media marketing world, Instagram. Again, another Instagram update. Instagram is testing a rectangular grid. Now, we have just got used to the square, haven't we? We have figured out how to create a really great-looking grid using all those little squares, and now Instagram is thinking of shifting things up and switching to a rectangular grid. Now, this one just annoys me a little bit. I feel like we don't necessarily need this change. It does make sense, though. I mean, Instagram is putting so much effort into reels, and reels are vertical and often don't look great when they are shared in the grid. So it'll be interesting to see if this one does roll out wider. I actually haven't seen it personally, so I've only seen screenshots. But yeah, be quite a change if this actually rolls out.
Next up, Facebook has rolled out the ability to add two action buttons to the top of your business page instead of just one. If you go into your settings on your Facebook business page and you edit your action button, you can now select two buttons to show on your page. I went ahead and selected two buttons. I chose learn more, sending people to my website, and I chose sign up, sending people to a signup form for my email newsletter. Now, what I did then is I had a look at my page and I could not see those two buttons. I checked it on desktop, I checked it on mobile, I did the view as, so you can view as someone external looking at my page rather than an admin, and I could not, for the life of me, see these two buttons.
I'm going to leave it as is. If you want to head along to my Facebook business page, you'll find me at @socialsmarty.co have a look. If you can see those two buttons, please let me know because I don't think this feature has worked as it should or as I anticipated it to. Definitely let me know if you can see those two buttons there. Next up, Instagram is increasing the limit for carousel posts. Carousel posts are those multi-image posts, and up till now, we've been allowed to add 10 images. So 10 images or tiles that people can swipe through. Instagram is increasing this limit to 20. We will have 20 images that we can add to carousel posts.
Next up, Facebook is testing a dedicated video feed. So as you're scrolling through your feed, you'll be able to switch over and just see videos. Now, I'm not quite sure how this is different to the reels feed. I mean, obviously, it will include videos that aren't reels, but I would have suspected that Facebook would be pushing us more into reels, so this is an interesting one. The Instagram may be moving our highlights from the top of our profile to their own dedicated tab.
If you have a look at your profile now, you'll see highlights are the stories that you have saved, and they're usually a circle sitting towards the top of your profile. Then as we scroll further down, we have our grit, and then we have a number of tabs. You might have your grid, then you might have a reels tab showing all of your reels, and then you might have a third tab that shows any content that you've been tagged in. Now, this is where highlights may be moving to. There may be another tab there which is your story highlights. This one has been spotted by a reverse engineer, so it isn't even in testing yet, but it will be interesting to see if this one goes any further.
Now, Threads is working on the ability to create custom feeds using keywords and hashtags and multiple keywords and hashtags. I think this is really cool. So effectively, you might have a topic that you're really interested in, and so you might create a feed that is going to populate content that is tagged with a number of keywords relating to that topic or hashtags, again, relating to that topic. So you can basically curate a feed of content around a topic, which I think is really cool, and I think this is a great addition to threads. All these updates that threads making, I think, are really good in helping people get better at using the platform because we all jumped over there when it rolled out and then we all abandoned ship. But slowly people are coming back and getting more engaged with the platform as cool features like this roll out.
Next up. This is an interesting one from Facebook. Facebook has started helping creators avoid penalties by offering a online course. Say, for example, you post something and you get a penalty, you get a notification to say that you've had a warning. What Facebook is then doing is encouraging those creators to go and do this in-app training so that they can learn about the rules and how they may have violated them, and then they can avoid those penalties in the future. I think this is really... I mean, it's a positive step. No one wants to have their account removed for the silly little errors that you might not have known that you've made. This is interesting to see how they will roll this out.
Lastly, Facebook is launching two new features for reels, translations and audio dubbing in the user's language. Now, I don't have any more details on this, but I assume this will be really useful for creators who have audiences who speak different languages, global audiences, so that they can create content to meet the needs of those different audiences. So this one will be interesting to see how it rolls out. As I said, very little details at this stage.
And there you have it. There are your social media marketing news and updates for the week ending the 11th of August, 2024. If you'd like to continue the conversation, you'll find me all over social media at socialsmarty. Co. I'd love to hear from you. Until next week, stay social.
