Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop for the week ending the 15th of September, 2024. I've pulled together all of the news that you need to know in the social media marketing world as a business owner, so let's dive on in.
First up this week, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has confirmed that adding a cover image to your reel has little impact on the performance of that reel. Now, if you think about when you post a reel, we have the ability to choose a frame from the video to serve as the cover, or we can upload an image. Now, when we create an image, we, of course, need to think about how it's going to look in the grid, how it's going to look in our reels tab. We're often adding some text to tell people what the reel is about. We make sure it's on brand. We use our brand fonts and our brand colours. It can take quite a bit of time to create those covers for our reels. But are they actually having an impact on the performance of that piece of content? Well, according to Adam, no, they have a little impact.
What he did say was that when people see that cover, obviously it tells them what the reel is about, so it gives them an indication of what they're about to watch. But the only time they will see that cover is on your feed or on the Explore tab. So what we need to think about is how many people are actually discussing discovering your reel in those two places. And I would say that it is pretty minimal. Most people are discovering reels in their feed or even over on the reels feed. So while your cover image may look great, it may look fantastic in your grit, just remember that it's not going to have a huge impact on your performance of your reel, so maybe think about skipping it next time.
Next up, another update from Instagram. Instagram is currently testing a carousel mode for reels. So this This is where you would post a carousel post, so multiple images, but as a reel, as a video. Now, already you have the ability to add images together, to create a slideshow, to create a reel. You can do it right there with an Instagram. I'm not quite sure what's going to be different about this format, but I'm all for any hacks or tricks or tips to make creating reels easier because we all know the impact that reels can have on our business and reaching those brand new eyeballs and growing our audience. So the easier we can make them, the better, in my opinion.
LinkedIn has been spotted promoting other creators' work at the bottom of newsletters and articles. Now, previously, when you read an article or a newsletter, you'd get to the bottom and there would be links through to other articles or newsletters by that creator. So basically, it's keeping that reader within your content ecosystem. But what's happening now is LinkedIn has started to promote content from other creators creators. So when we get to the bottom of your article, we'll be encouraged to read an article by someone else, which I think is just a little bit annoying. I would rather keep people consuming more of my own content than helping them discover new creators. But I guess there's nothing we can do about that.
Next up, Instagram DMs are getting a bit of a makeover. We're seeing new stickers, photo editing, and new themes. Instagram for a while now has really been pushing those DMs and their private communication on the app, understanding that people are more likely to spend time on there when they're communicating in those private spaces. So it makes sense that they're adding new bells and whistles for us to play with.
Threads now shows you when someone follows you from your post. Now, this is really Great. This is a metric I often look at with an Instagram. What I like to see is which pieces of my content generate the most followers. They're so enticing and so sticky that people want to follow you to see more of that type of content. So it's great that we can now I see this metric over on threads as well.
Next up, Instagram appears to be rolling out the ability to add gifs to direct notes. Now, I have only recently got access to notes, so I'm still having a bit of a play around, but I guess I would call them a little bit more like a status update, maybe. And adding a gif, I think, is just fun. I love GIFs. I think they can communicate so much and have lots of fun with them. I think this is a really welcome addition.
Now, last week, I reported I've heard that Threads has been spotted as an ad placement in Meta Ads Manager. So when you're creating your ads, you can choose Threads as a placement which suggests that ads are about to roll out on the platform. But another placement has been spotted, and that's Facebook notifications. So reading between the lines, what I understand is that we can run an ad and we can have it showing in the notification. Imagine being on Facebook, you're on the app, you've got a whole lot of notifications notifications, things like where people have tagged you or liked your post or commented on your post. But amongst all of those notifications, you've also got paid ads. I don't know. This just feels like Meta is getting a little bit desperate for ad placements. Ads are everywhere now.
And last up this week, Meta is continuing to work on their smartwatch. If you didn't know, I already have the Meta sunglasses, the Meta Ray bands, which I love. So Meta Smartwatch, take my money, sign me up. Where do I buy one? I want to know more about this.
And there we have it. There are your updates for the week ending, the 15th of September, 2024. Short and sweet this week. It's actually been a pretty quiet week in the world of social media marketing. But as always, if you want to continue the conversation, come and find me all over social media. You'll find me @socialsmarty.co and until next week, stay social.
