Industry News, Internet Marketing Strategy
This Week in Social Media
Jun 21 2013
It was another big week for social media – Instagram released videos this week, providing a new rival for Twitter’s Vine application. Vine released a few updates, and Facebook has some new additions as well. Get the top social media news and updates with our weekly re-cap, and remember to stop by our blog every Friday to catch up on the happenings in social media each week.
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom officially announced Instagram’s new video function Thursday to an audience in San Francisco, according to Mashable. Instagram’s new video feature was described as “everything you love about Instagram – and it moves.” The new video addition is focused around simplicity, beauty, and community. Instagram wanted this feature to be easy to use, but with all the beauty and visual stimulation that encourages the interactive audience on Instagram. Videos are limited to 15 seconds, and the software will be available on both iOS and Android operating systems. It will include 13 custom filters designed just for video. Users can also edit videos and remove certain segments, unlike Vine’s set-up.
What does this mean for your business? The web is growing more and more visual every day, so we recommend downloading this new addition immediately. It’s a great way to share your product or service and get your fans and followers excited about it. Try filming a short video of your office, your latest product, or a customer’s happy review of your business! Read more about the Instagram video addition on Mashable.
Most likely in response to Instagram’s addition of videos, Vine is getting plenty of upcoming design changes. Mashable reports that co-founders of Vine, Don Hoffmann and Rus Yusupov, tweeted out Vine videos on Wednesday that demonstrated some of the app’s new design changes. Some of the additions include full-screen videos, private messaging between users, and, potentially, some curated categories such as cats, fashion, science and technology, and more. Apparently you can also save drafts and create multiple Vine posts at one time. You can check out the examples of the new Vine changes here – be sure to also check out the example below.
If your business isn’t already active on Vine, you can learn how to set up Vine in our blog post. Vine is a great way to spice up your Twitter account, interact with users, and make your brand more visible.
In an effort to focus on visual social media marketing even more, Facebook has introduced the ability to add photos to comments. Product Engineer Bob Baldwin said this new feature is “the most exciting photos feature I’ve shipped to date” and that it originated at a hackathon with other Facebook engineers.
This could be a great way for your business or brand to interact with fans on your Facebook page. If they have a question on a product or service, or something generally related to your industry, try commenting back with a photo and a brief description. It’s a much more interesting way to get the point across as opposed to boring text.
You can check out an example below.
Facebook is inviting a select number of Facebook page administrators to participate in a testrun of changes to page insights. Changes will include updates to the “people talking about this” metric. The test was announced in a post on Facebook Studio blog, stating that the goal is to make metrics more clear and simple for page admins to understand, and to help them figure out better ways to improve their page and encourage fans to interact with their content.
Facebook expects to make the updates available to all admins by the end of the summer, and that during the test period, the current version of page insights will remain in place for all others.
Once Facebook makes this available to everyone, this will be a great way for your business to figure out what’s working and what’s not on your Facebook page. Since a “like” doesn’t always mean action, this will be a great way to see what people like about your page, what people are talking about, and how you can encourage more visibility of your brand and ultimately help increase sales, awareness, and more.
So far these new page insight updates look amazing, and we can’t wait until they’re available to everyone!
Remember to stop by next Friday for more news and updates in the social media marketing world, and let us know if you have any suggestions for this new Friday tradition!
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