Can your business now reach nearby audiences with Instagram’s new story feature?
After introducing ‘Stories’ back in August 2016, Instagram is carrying out a new test of a ‘Nearby’ feed for them. The ‘Nearby’ feed would display publicly shared content in the user’s locality.
This feature would open up new exposure opportunities to local businesses by targeting their story and reactive content based on geolocation – therefore driving increased engagement levels.
Many believe that this is Instagram’s response to rumours of TikTok creating a ‘Nearby’ feed in the main user interface after replicating a key element of the Chinese version of TikTok, called “Douyin”.
“Douyin” has a local feed which is used as a promotion by many businesses including new ad offerings and services. TikTok may use this as a revenue driver to help push its e-commerce in-app press.
Read more here.
Facebook Rooms now a thing of the past
Meta has announced that the option of Facebook Group Rooms will be axed.
The feature was first implemented in 2020 due to Covid to enable video chats with up to 50 members and businesses began utilising this feature further to create smaller communities within groups for interactions and community management in a more intimate setting over video chat.
Smaller businesses enjoyed this as there were no subscription costs and it enabled relationships to be built and developed simply. Larger businesses used the feature for competitions as an exclusive, ‘first come, first served’ for those who were quick enough to get on the link.
Meta has made this decision as part of its ‘Year of Efficiency’ pledge hoping to cut costs.
However, it is not all doom and gloom because Meta has said that hosting video chats will still be available for users via video calls.
Read more here.
Threads introduces polls and gifs to boost user engagement
Threads is becoming one step closer to ‘X’,. Meta has developed the composer option menu to now allow users to post and react to content with polls and gifs.
A timer can be added to any poll created which sends voters a notification to see the conclusion of the poll and should enhance engagement and retain audiences better. Businesses can use this to understand their audience’s psychographic values, opinions and wants deeper to tailor their content more effectively.
GIFs may be used by businesses to be reactive and add a more personal touch to content to shape their brand’s tone of voice and can drive engagement as they have been proven to land well with audiences in terms of being relatable and simple to understand the key messaging.
X’s user base is reportedly declining at a record rate, therefore opening up the opportunity for Threads to encourage users to switch to their platform by adding new and in-demand features such as polls and gifs.
Is there more to be added soon?
Read more here.
Are LinkedIn’s ‘record engagement levels’ in 2023 accurate?
Microsoft has put to bed the rumours of the decline in demand for the professional social networking site LinkedIn in its recently-published 2023 Q1 report. But to what extent are these claims accurate?
Amongst its 985 million there has been a 12 per cent increase in session times across users which highlights the relevance and continual development of the platform. Businesses can maximise LinkedIn by posting content on company updates and case studies on current and past projects to build a brand presence, credibility and showing a strive to become industry leaders.
However, in Microsoft’s quarterly summary report, the same “record levels of engagement” have actually been the same since 2018, which has raised suspicions about accuracy.
As the platform is growing in users rapidly (55 million since May), engagement levels are expected to increase but that doesn’t necessarily mean on a per-user basis that engagement levels are increasing.
Takeaways from these reports are to not always believe what you see on the tin and to take a dive deeper into the potential reasoning behind the ‘ground-breaking’ statistics released.Read more here.