Quick Guide: How To Use Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels, the platform’s built-in TikTok competitor, has officially launched for all users in the United States.

Reels are short, looping videos similar to Instagram’s Boomerang feature except they can contain multiple clips and audio. If an account is pubic and a user creates a Reel featuring original audio, that sound may then be used by others.

To begin creating your video masterpiece, open the Instagram Stories camera and select Reels from the bottom menu.

From here, there are multiple options.

Record:

Users can begin recording a video right away by holding down the Reels icon. Similar to TikTok, recording can start and stop multiple times during the maximum 15-second video period.

Add Audio:

Music from Instagram’s audio library can be added by selecting the note icon. This function works exactly like the music sticker feature for Instagram Stories where users can search for audio and trim their selection to the part of a song they want featured in their video.

Speed:

The play icon allows for the adjustment of video recording speeds. Currently, slow motion options of .3x and .5x are available as well as fast forward options of 2x or 3x.

Effects:

Instagram’s AR filters or effects are also available to apply before recording with both the back and front-facing camera. Users can choose from the filters shown or scroll all the way to the right to browse more effects.

Timer:

The stopwatch icon leads to a timer that allows users to select how long they want each clip within their Reel to be. When selected, the timer allows for hands-free recording and offers a 3-second countdown before that recording begins.

Align:

Once a recording occurs via the timer option, an align feature pops up that offers a video overlay so users can match up the next sequence in their video.

Add Footage:

Video content from the user’s camera roll can be added to a Reel by tapping the square in lower left corner. If the video selected is longer than 15-seconds, a trim tool is available to selection which portion of the video should be added.

GIFs & Stickers:

After a recording is complete, a number of Instagram Story features are available to decorate the captured footage. Among these are a number of Instagram Stickers, the draw and text tools, and GIF tool.

Once a Reel is finished, users can choose to share the video exclusively to Reels (where it will appear under a separate tab on their profile and within the Explore feed) or to both Reels and their Instagram Feed. These options include the ability to add captions and hashtags, and even custom thumbnails.

Alternatively, the Reel can be shared as an Instagram Story.

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Introducing & Setting Up Facebook Pay

This week, Facebook rolled out its long-awaited Facebook Pay tool to all users in the United States. The feature will facilitate on-platform payments, providing an easy and secure way for people to buy products on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

For now, Facebook Pay is limited in its use for fundraisers, in-game purchases, event tickets, person-to-person payments on Messenger, and purchases from select pages and businesses on Facebook Marketplace. If your page qualifies to accept Facebook Pay, you’ll receive a prompt asking you to link a bank or PayPal account to receive payments. Facebook will collect these bank transfers and credit card payments with a 2.5% fee.

Users can easily start using Facebook Pay by following a few easy steps:

1.) Go to “Settings” > “Facebook Pay” on the Facebook app or website

2.) Add a payment method

3.) The next time a payment is made, select Facebook Pay 

When customers make a purchase via Facebook Pay, your page will be responsible for providing real-time support via Messenger chat. These interactions will impact your page’s Customer Satisfaction Score, where unsatisfactory responses could lead to more expensive ads that reach fewer people. Read our full explanation of Facebook Customer Satisfaction Scores here.

Instagram Scheduling with Facebook's Creator Studio

Instagram scheduling has been a pain point for social media managers for years – leaving marketers dependent on clunky and expensive third-party apps. This week, there’s a collective jump for joy within the industry as Facebook rolled out native Instagram scheduling capabilities via Creator Studio.

The new scheduling feature is only available for Instagram business accounts that are linked to a Facebook brand page. It’s worth making the connection as doing so unlocks other benefits.

Instagram Content Library

Users can see all content that has been published on Instagram (including videos, photos, carousel posts, stories, and IGTV videos) through the content library. Here, posts can be drafted, scheduled, viewed, archived, and sorted by date or within a specific timeframe. Note: Instagram Stories cannot be scheduled yet.

Post Insights

All of Instagram post and story insights available via the mobile app are accessible through Creator Studio as well. This is the first time Instagram analytic data is available from desktop. Users can track the number of interactions, profile visits, accounts reached, follows, impressions, website clicks, likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, and (for stories) how users navigated while interacting with or replied to content.

Page & Audience Insights

Instagram insights from the last seven days are also available through Creator Studio. These include the number of posts made, totals for each interaction taken on the account, the number of accounts reached, and total impressions. Followers can be measured via age or gender breakdowns and the top five countries and cities where an account’s followers live is also displayed.

Unlike Facebook post, page and audience insights, Instagram analytics cannot be exported at this time.

Facebook Implements a Problematic Content Plan: Remove, Reduce, Inform

Scammers, fake news creators, and suggestive content creators will have a range of new Facebook features to deal with in the coming weeks. With attempts to remove contentious content from the site, reduce the reach of those that aren’t taken down, and inform audiences when they’ve encountered such material all in the works, we’re breaking the action items below.

Holding Groups Accountable

As Facebook users and brands shift their conversations away from the news feed and into niche groups, the company is attempting to thwart the spread of offensive, divisive, and inaccurate content that may get shared – even privately. In a blog post, Facebook claims that an unnamed technology allows them to, “proactively detect many types of violating content posted in groups before anyone reports them and sometimes before few people, if any, even see them.”

What group administrators and moderators should know is that they will now be held accountable for posts that violate the platform’s Community Standards. When member posts contain violations, Facebook will look at who approved the content for Group visibility and could remove the entire group if they believe the admins have acted recklessly.

To help keep track of these violations, a new Group Quality feature for admins (similar to the Page Quality tab that was introduced earlier this year) will provide an overview of flagged content and false news found in the group. A group with multiple violations, or one that shares links to malicious or false news websites, will have their reach downgraded.

In addition to these new features, members will soon be able to remove all of their posts and comments from a group should they choose to leave it.

Penalizing Fringe Link Sharing

For years, fringe publishers have been using shocking, divisive, and partisan headlines to provoke engagement on Facebook. Now, articles from those sites will begin to see a decrease in reach as the platform stifles their influence on the news feed.

The new ranking signal, known as Click-Gap, “looks for domains with a disproportionate number of outbound Facebook clicks compared to their place in the web graph. This can be a sign that the domain is succeeding on news feed in a way that doesn’t reflect the authority they’ve built outside it and is producing low-quality content.” In short, the algorithm will now cross-check the performance of links both on and off Facebook in order to determine if its hosting website is reputable.

Moderating Risky Instagram Content

Even if your photo and video content doesn’t unequivocally violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines, that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Posts that the platform finds inappropriate (including sexually or violently suggestive content) will now be excluded from Explore and hashtag search pages.  

Bringing Verification to Messenger

As Messenger use increases, Facebook will begin displaying Verified Badges on conversations with brand pages that have earned the checkmark. The move hopes to help users avoid scammers that use fake accounts to pretend to be someone they are not.

Once those fake accounts are identified, users will be able to easily block them through an updated block option and list of settings that will help them control whether people “such as friends of your friends, people with your phone number or people who follow you on Instagram” can reach users via Messenger at all.

Don’t Break the Internet: How Content Creators Can Fix It Instead

2018 was a tumultuous year for social media. The Facebook algorithm shook up publishing habits for brand pages; Mark Zuckerburg, Jack Dorsey, and other social network executives faced congressional hearings; Twitter cracked down on millions of fake accounts; GDPR compliance rolled out across Europe; and we were all left wondering how to survive yet another breach of privacy or personal data hack.

The tech world is in a tailspin trying to figure out how global social media platforms can operate on a singular set of rules that will protect users, stop the spread of misinformation, and, you know, safeguard the legitimacy of democratic elections.

As new practices and policies pop up, the results rarely favor brands or businesses from a marketing perspective. Social publishers have noted significant decreases in organic reach, lower financial returns on their ad investments, and stagnated follower growth.

Many marketing agencies (Deph Digital Media included) are offering practical solutions: Focus on engagement! Increase your niche audience ad spend! Collaborate with influencers! But if we’re being totally transparent, these are temporary fixes to a much bigger problem.

In a recent episode of the podcast Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Nicole Wong, who is a former legal director of products at Twitter and former senior compliance officer at Google, made an interesting observation about the shift in our online values. When Google began assembling the structure of the Internet as we know it today, they had three pillars of search:

Comprehensiveness – Users should have access to all of the information they could possibly want.

Relevance – When looking for specific information, or answers to questions, users should be delivered a pertinent response.

Speed – Responses should be generated quickly.

In the years since, Wong claims that social media has changed the way digital companies interact with their users. Their new principles consist of:

Personalization – As opposed to showing all available content, social algorithms provide users with information they believe the user wants to see, based off their interests and activity history.

Engagement – Rather than giving direct responses to queries or providing baseline data, social networks deliver content that is meant to keep users on their platform for longer periods of time.

Speed – Users still expect content and information to be delivered quickly.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s what happens when social platforms are committed to these values. The consequences include woefully uninformed users, manipulative digital activities, and disastrous user experiences.

Somewhat naïvely, marketers have aided tech giants in building the crisis situation by not holding their content to higher standards.

Advertisers have, through overly broad interest-targeting, pushed promotional messaging under the guise of personalization. However, it is to the extent where users can’t pinpoint why they’re being shown certain ads, making the blind consumption of such media vulnerable to manipulation.

In order to expand their reach, publishers have flooded timelines with content that’s focused on virality with hopes of being re-shared and increasing engagements. Often, we’ve been guilty of trying to satisfy user cravings for instant communication by jumping into social conversations before having complete and accurate information, thus amplifying partial or inaccurate news.

Taking cues from Wong’s brainstorming session during the Recode podcast, here are three social content pillars that publishers should consider for 2019:

Accuracy – Content or information should be truthful, cited, and appropriate for the page’s audience.

Authenticity – Publishers should place quality over quantity and create content that users will resonate with, not simply react to.

Context – Due to the non-chronological nature of social, delivered content should be comprehensive and complete at all times.

Applying these values would not only impact a brand’s social output, but completely transformation typical marketing objectives. Companies would have to create super specific target audiences with the intention of building community, as opposed to increasing ROI. Link clicks would have to be earned by distributing wide-ranging and thought-provoking articles instead of late-breaking headlines that trickle out information in waves.

That may not sound like something content curators would want to get behind but, although monthly marketing reports may take a hit, studies show that 91% of customers value authentic social activity from brands they follow, with 63% of those customers likely to make purchases. If speed and virality has to take a backseat in order to reach those numbers, publishers are bound to concede.

Until that happens, or until social network executives take meaningful actions to fix their platforms, it’s up to the users and publishers. If all of the content online adhered to these standards, then perhaps fake news wouldn’t be an issue.