Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop, your weekly update for everything you need to know in the world of social media marketing for the week ending 8th December, 2024. Let's dive on in!First
up this week, why your Instagram content might not be seen and how to fix it. Now the Instagram for business Instagram account recently shared a post with lots of tips to help your content get seen by more of your followers. And it also explained why it might not be reaching as many of them in the first place. So here are some key tips that the post included. First up, making it engaging. Content that gets comments, shares, and saves is more likely to be shown to others. Yes. We already knew that. Posting at the right time. So using Instagram's insights to find out when your followers are most active and scheduling your posts accordingly. Analysing what works. So checking your insights to see what content resonates most with your audience. Experimenting with new ideas, so trying different hooks, formats, and styles. They even suggested that Meta AI can help with fresh ideas. And then lastly, showing up consistently. So focusing on entertaining, inspiring, educating, and engaging your content with valuable sorry. Engaging your audience with valuable content.
Now there's nothing earth shattering here, but these tips give you some actionable steps to improve your reach and make the most of your content efforts. I think it's also a good reminder that your Instagram insights actually hold a lot of the clues you need to see what is working. I know when I dive in there, I often are looking at which posts have had the most saves, which posts have had the most engagement, and which posts have generated the most follows, if you are looking to increase your audience. And then I have a look at those posts and I think, how can I replicate those? What was the format? What was the messaging? How did I structure those posts? And how can I do more of that?
Next up, Instagram is testing the ability to send voice messages longer than 1 minute. Now if you are an Instagram voice message user, you'll know how awkward it is when you get cut off at the 1 minute mark. So longer voice messages are welcome. And I've actually received a couple of these, even 5 minutes long. So I think that's a really good update.
Now next up, we have a Facebook, update. So this is a new feature, which is auto clipping for longer videos. So imagine you post a long video on Facebook, but you also want to use reels to promote that video. So this new feature allows you to auto clip some reels, some shorter videos from your long video, which of course we know when we post reels on Facebook, we can now link back to a longer video. So I think this is a really good feature. It means you can create those reels. You can get that extra promotion right there within the platform without having to use third party tools.
Now, threads is testing individual post analytics. Thank goodness. Now up until now, we have only had profile or account level analytics. So we can see sort of general, very, very basic analytics. So it's going to be awesome to see some individual post level analytics. Now I suspect this is happening because we are going to get ads on threads soon. So this obviously ties in because we will need, obviously, analytics to feed through on our, ads or if we're boosting posts. So that makes sense.
Facebook is now showing a new topics that may interest you carousel. So imagine you're scrolling through the Facebook feed and a carousel pops up with some suggested topics that you may be interested in. Now when you click through, you can see content that relates to those topics. Now from a user's perspective, you might think, oh, well, you know, it's another way to discover new content, but not really relevant for me. But from a business perspective, it is just a reminder that we need to be letting Facebook know what our content is about. So that is where our captions, any text on screen becomes really important so that the platform can understand what your content, what topic your content is about. So then it can push it out to the right people or push it out via these topics that you may be interested in.
Now, Meta now lets you run traffic campaigns to send traffic to an Instagram profile, a Facebook page, or both, which is awesome. So if you've ever boosted a post on Instagram, you'll know that you can choose your Instagram profile as the location that you're sending people to. This is usually what we would do with a campaign or, you know, how we would boost a post if we want to increase our following, strive people to our profile. So now we can set this up as a campaign right there in Meta, ads manager, and we can choose a traffic campaign with our location as both our Facebook page and our Instagram profile. Now, of course, I'm always a believer in creating campaigns that drive sales. So I would much rather have a pixel set up, have my conversion events set up, and have a campaign that is driving sales. But if you are particularly a new account maybe and you want to drive that following and really get people to engage with your profile, then this could be a good way to do it.
Next up this week, LinkedIn has rolled out a new option to add an auto revolving slideshow of images as your banner on your profile. Now if you have ever set up a LinkedIn profile, you will know just how awkward that banner space is. It is so wide. It is so short. It's a very, very awkward format. We know that our profile image often covers the left hand side. And now, not only do we have to come up with 1 image, but we can, if we want to, come up with multiple images so that they scroll through in a slideshow. This would be interesting to see if many people jump on this. I don't have access to it personally yet.
What I was thinking I might do though is have create some really simple images that are basically just text. I'm using my brand colours and fonts. And then maybe each 1 could highlight a different service or digital product that I offer. So, effectively, when you visit my profile, you'll see a slideshow at the top. It automatically sort of flicks through the different images, and it could show you all the different offerings that I have. I'm not quite sure yet on how many images we can have in that slideshow, but that would be the way that I might trial it.
Now TikTok has shared a wrap up of the year. Now it is very US focused. I'm not in the US. But there was some interesting stuff in there. I've popped a link in the show notes if you wanna go and check out that yourself. Instagram has added a new early access to features section in the settings. Now I've had a little check and I don't have this in my account yet, but jump into your settings, scroll down, and look for early access to features. I'm the sort of person who loves to get that early access and try everything out for you and report back. So I can't wait to have this feature available in my account.
And, of course, Threads is also jumping on the bandwagon. So Threads is reportedly working on an early access setting as well. At this stage, it hasn't rolled out. It's not even in testing, but it has been spotted by a reverse engineer.
YouTube is rolling out the ability for more users to upload 3 minute shorts directly in the app. So previously, shorts have been up to oh, let me think. Was it 1 minute or 90 seconds? Much shorter than 3 minutes. So this ability to roll out slightly longer shorts, I think, is really welcome. It's in line with other platforms that are increasing the length of those short vertical videos, so it makes total sense.
And lastly, this week's Instagram has launched a hub for Threads creators. Now it is very basic, but if you are new to Threads and you're wondering what it's all about, how to use the platform, how best to use the platform, then this guide might be worthwhile for you to check out. I have popped a link in the show notes.
And there we have it. That is your social media marketing news for the week ending the 8th December, 2024. As always, if you want to continue the conversation, come and find me @socialsmarty.co I would love to connect with you. Until next week, stay social.
