Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop, your weekly roundup of social media marketing news for the week ending the 17th of November, 2024. Let's dive on in.
First up this week, LinkedIn has shared tips on posting short form video in the app. Okay, so the LinkedIn vertical video feed is officially here, meaning that it's finally rolled out to me. I know others have had it for a while, but I finally have access to it. It's really obvious that LinkedIn wants us to post videos, but what the heck should we post? Well, LinkedIn has shared some tips with us on how to get started. First up, we want to be posting vertical video. Just like we do over on Reels or YouTube Shorts, we want to have that vertical video, and we want to keep it nice and short. So think short form, 15 seconds to maybe two minutes long at best. Now, here are some other tips from LinkedIn. I'm going to read these out to you. First up, you should be creating videos that offer stand-alone knowledge, meaning that they make sense in their entirety if you watch just that one video. Now, obviously, LinkedIn wants us sharing industry-related content. That's what the platform is all about. And workplace humour, as long as it's appropriate. So they don't want us sharing anything inappropriate. Now, they have suggested that we make sure we have clear audio, a fast-paced rhythm, and a captivating hook to engage the audience throughout. Now, that is just standard for any short form video, and also videos that drive the viewer to reshare or comment with their thoughts. So LinkedIn there is reminding us the importance of engagement. Now, LinkedIn also pointed out that your content doesn't need to be exclusive to LinkedIn, meaning that you can take some of your work-related videos from other platforms and repurpose them on LinkedIn.
So my advice is to go to your Instagram or Facebook and scroll back through your reels. Now, pick out some of the best ones, the ones that may that you performed really well or that you're proud of, and repurpose them for LinkedIn. Now, in the show notes, I have shared a tool with you. It is from Publer, which is my favourite social media scheduling tool. It is a great little tool that lets you download your reels either from Facebook or Instagram without the watermark. You could literally go ahead now, use that tool, download some reels, and then share them to LinkedIn. Now, don't stress too much about trying to create content specifically for LinkedIn. I think this is a good strategy, repurposing, seeing what works. This will give you more clarity. Actually, getting some content out there will give you better clarity, and it will help inform what you should be creating. Do some testing first, and then you can get stuck into creating more video.
Next up, Instagram is working on the ability to add a photo or a video to a carousel post after you have posted it. How handy is this going to be? We can go back and edit that multi-image or multi-video post, add in the one that we had forgotten. Now, I think that's going to be super, super handy. Instagram is adding a Story Replies tab to your DM Inbox. This will be super useful to help you sort your story replies from your other direct messages. I think this is a great idea.
Now, back to LinkedIn. Linkedin is retiring a whole lot of those celebratory post templates. You know the little, not animations, like little cartoon-y style templates, like if you wanted to celebrate something with one of your colleagues, it create this really boring post template. So LinkedIn has announced it's going to be retiring a whole lot of those, which I think is a great thing. I mean, those were never really that engaging. And I think that even just posting with text without that boring template can do just the same job, really.
Okay, next up. Meta is reportedly planning to test ads on threads as early as January next year. Now, those close to the threads team or a Maybe even some of the team themselves have come out and dish this information, so we don't have the official word yet, but it is no surprise. We know it's meta. We know the ads are their main source of revenue. Of course, it makes sense that a meta platform would have ads on it. I'm actually surprised that they've waited this long, but it will be very interesting to see how this rolls out. I suspect it's just going to be a placement with an ads manager, so we will create our ads for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads, and we can choose our placements in there. I also suspect there'll be the ability to boost posts as well because we know the Ads Manager is very complicated. The easier that Meta can make it for us to hand over our cold hard cash, the better. I really do suspect there'll be the ability to boost posts as well.
Now, Instagram is continuing to work on the ability to add multiple profile pictures to your account. Now, I really don't think this is a priority. I'm more than happy with just one profile picture, but it seems that the work is happening in the background.
Now, Facebook reels has just added a new feature that allows you to add a message button to your reels. Now, this obviously encourages viewers to start a conversation with you, either on Messenger or on WhatsApp, so that you can move them from that content into your DMs.
Another update for Instagram. Lots this week. Instagram has updated its professional dashboard once again. It's now providing insights into the top sources of views for your reels. When you have a reel, you can see how many views it had, but also what are the top sources for all of your reels? I think this is really important so that we can see where those views are coming from.
Another really important metric that Instagram has been rolling out is showing what percentage of viewers watched past the first three seconds on a reel. Now, we all know how important that metric is because if we can hook them in for those first three seconds, then we get them over the line from that very first section and into our actual video and hearing more of our message. Now, this is an important metric for Meta, obviously. We can see how many people are getting past that three-second mark. If we're consistently not getting a high percentage, then we know we've got some work to do on our hooks.
Facebook appears to be allowing some users to add a title to their group post. Now, I personally spend a lot of time in Facebook groups, and I love this idea. Imagine if you're scrolling through a busy Facebook group, lots and lots of content from different members in there, but each post has a title, so you can get an understanding of what the post is about before you read the whole thing. I think this is really cool. I haven't seen it in the wild yet. I've only seen a screenshot, but I really love this idea.
Instagram has rolled out an AI image expander tool in stories. If you have a great image, but it might be square or horizontal, which doesn't necessarily work for stories, we want to fill up that full vertical screen, Now, this tool allows you to expand that image and fill the screen. Now, we know with AI, it doesn't always get things right, but I think this could be a little bit of fun to have a play around with and see what it thinks the rest of your image might look like.
And last up this week, after Instagram announced that it was switching to views as its primary focus metric way back in August, Meta has now announced that Facebook is going to follow suit. So what does this mean? Well, over on Instagram, we know that the main metric on our content is now views. So there's lots of consistency across reels, static posts, carousels. We can see exactly how many views we have received on our content. So now we have cross-platform consistency. We can see over on Facebook how many views our content has received there. I just love this. I love consistency. I think this is a really great and really expected change for Facebook. We are now comparing apples with apples. We can actually see across the platforms which of our content is getting the most views.
There we have it. That is your social media marketing news for the week ending the 17th of November, 2024. As always, I would love to hear from you. Come and continue the conversation. You'll find me all over social media @socialsmarty.co Until next week, stay social.
