The three BIG changes in social media this week and what they mean for your business
Social media is a free – and relatively easy – way to help boost a business online.
In a bid to fight back competition from newcomer Snapchat, the big two – Facebook and Twitter are releasing new features, which until now, have been strictly reserved for big brands with even bigger budgets.
With social media as noisy as it has ever been, these features are giving small businesses a chance to rise above the parapets.
Facebook reactions
The world has been reacting to, well, Facebook reactions this week, as the social media platform has released additional ways for people to interact with content. Until now, people could only Like content as a way to show endorsement or recognition for something. But what about all of our other emotions?
If you hover over the “Like’ icon, you are now greeted with 5 new ways to express your emotion. Choose from Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.
What does it mean for your business?
Despite this being something that everyone has dreamt of having, it’s still early days and well, people are still reacting to the new change. Most people have welcomed the change, but it’s still unknown what impact it will have on businesses.
Facebook reports still need to catch up, but businesses will be able to better understand the sentiment of fans around individual pieces of content. Business will be able to find out if people find content funny, or if they love something or if they’re angered.
Twitter gifs and personalised timelines
Everybody loves images, so what could be even better? Moving images in the popular gif format of course!
Twitter this week made it even easier for people to search through a bank of popular gif images and post them on it’s platform. Twitter is one of the only social media platforms where gifs can be uploaded and posted.
What does it mean for your business?
It’s a sign that social media sites are moving towards more animated content such as videos, so you definitely need to consider using this format in your next marketing campaign. Businesses can search and use Twitter’s gif database as well, however it remains a relatively grey area on the legality of using it. For example, using a motion clip from a popular film could land you in hot water.
To be safe, we’d always recommend that you create your own custom gifs or videos.
As well as gifs, Twitter users can now opt to show only relevant content in your home feed, as apposed to showing every single tweet in realtime. Again, the reaction to this has been mixed, as realtime content is one of the charms of Twitter. But the word is that this is going to grow in popularity.
It isn’t clear how Twitter deems what content is more relevant than others, but like Facebook, it’s scaring businesses that their content will no longer be seen by even half of their followers. Businesses will need to think about their audiences more and only put out the most relevant tweets. Quality, not quantity as they say.
Snapchat on-demand filters for brands
Snapchat is one of those things, you either love it or you hate it, and we love it!
Snapchat announced this week that it’s opening up it’s custom photo filters to even more businesses (and individuals too!). It means you can now create your own on-demand geofilters to use at events and parties.
Let me show you…
To try out Snapchat’s new on-demand geofilters, we created our own “I Love Llandaff” photo filter.
The photo filter is accessible by anyone using Snapchat in an area of our choosing. For the purpose of this test, we created a geofence around Cathedral Green, so anyone in this area using Snapchat would have access to our photo filter.
What does it mean for your business?
For your business the possibilities are endless. Everything from promoting exclusive content or special offers to your audience.
Creating these filters do cost, and varies depending on the area that you’ve defined and the duration of the campaign. You can run campaigns from 1 hour to 1 month, and cover areas from the size of an office to several streets. The feature costs from $5, but at this price, it’s accessible to even the smallest of businesses.
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