We talk about what’s new with social media marketing often, and of course, it’s happened once again. There have been some big changes to Instagram this past month, similar in significance to the summer 2021 changes to Instagram. Will these changes impact how your business performs? Maybe.
As we head into Spring we look at the trends in social media marketing as a whole to help us develop a plan for the next season, and more importantly, the next year. It’s important for all businesses to work on a swivel, you should be nimble and ready to pivot because digital marketing is an ever-changing elusive beast.
So what are the 4 big changes we are seeing in social media marketing?
We have previously posted that Instagram was King when it came to social media. The app formerly was outranking almost all other apps, gaining more and more users every month. Facebook also rained supreme in many markets. However the past month has proven to be quite a turn for the social media giant with flat growth for both Meta and the “family of apps” including Instagram.
What does that mean for your business? This may be a precursor of things to come. So if people aren’t engaged in Instagram and Facebook where are they going?
Instagram has been rolling out changes quickly in an effort to compete with TikTok. It seems almost every change they have made recently is in direct response to this “new” growing social media platform.
The introduction of Reels, was the biggest attempt to maintain user engagement. And although Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri swears that reels take priority in the algorithm, we have tested (and tested, and tested) this media and most often a reel performs far worse than a standard post or video.
Although we agree certain accounts can be hugely successful with Reels, overall businesses may want to save the time and energy and just post engaging video or carousel content.
Today the CEO stated, ‘Creators can now share their Instagram Reels as recommended content on Facebook for more visibility and reach. We are deeply invested in Reels across Meta.”
So maybe we need to keep waiting for Reels to take off on Meta… but we aren’t holding our breath. We still believe when users want this type of content they flock to TikTok. Check out our previous post for more information about Reels vs. TikTok for marketing purposes.
Earlier this month Instagram rolled out the new feature on Stories, “…you can now send some love by liking people’s stories without sending a DM.”
But why? Users can ‘like’ any Story on their feed, and let the creator know, without having to start up a DM conversation. It’s not all about the likes. This is more than likely in response to the complaint about cluttered Inboxes on the app. It also helps with engagement. To be clear, Instagram hasn’t indicated that this will be used to rank the content. But you would assume that with another means of user insight, Instagram will use this data to show them more of the type of content they want to see… and this is the key. By keeping a user engaged, they will scroll longer and see more ads!
This other change is more than likely in response to the slow growth of the app over the last few months. The initial ability to add the reminder was a PR push in response to the negative impacts of social media. But, we always talk about how Facebook is a business, and their primary goal is to increase revenue, so they need users to stay engaged so they see more ads, create more sales opportunities for businesses, who will then spend more money on ads.
The moral of the story? The social media marketing team at South Made are testing the impact and ROI of using TikTok for local business. We are also very aware of the need to keep users engaged on business’ content and test various ways to do that for all types of businesses.
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