Instagram Puts Focus on Shopping

Just in time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday shopping season, Instagram has unwrapped new options aimed at solidifying the platform’s position as a point of purchase.

Shop on business profiles: A new Shop tab for Instagram business pages will feature available item details, such as name and price, in addition to posts featuring those tagged products. 

Shop in feed videos: Users can now tag their products in video posts. These product tags will be featured in the bottom left corner of the video, similar to tagged users in videos which was unveiled a few months ago.

Shopping collections: A new built-in collection to help Instagram users organize their saved items, called Shopping, can serve as a wish-list of sorts. When users tap a product tag they’ll be given the option to save the item to their Shopping collection so they can easily access the product at a later date – when they’re ready to purchase. 

Don’t miss the opportunity to showcase your products online during the year’s most intense shopping season. Let Deph Digital Media connect with your merchant provider to make your items stand out.

Explore The New LinkedIn Pages

LinkedIn company pages have received their first major upgrade in quite some time. The platform unveiled a slate of new features that aim to make it easier for businesses to generate engagement and join topical conversations. Here’s a complete list of the new functionalities:

• Mobile Integration: Admins can finally post from and manage their company page from the official LinkedIn mobile app.

• Hashtag Association: In a move to increase the discoverability of relevant content, admins can now follow specific topics or hashtags as their page – making it easier to chime in when important industry conversations are occurring online.

• Document Sharing: In addition to updates featuring standard images or native video, companies can now attach documents such as PowerPoints or PDFs to their posts.

• Employee Engagement: Pages have the option to discover, interact with and share public LinkedIn posts from employees on the site, as well as any posts the company is tagged in.

• Recruitment Outreach: New Career Pages allow job-seekers to easily get a feel of a brand’s company culture by exploring job availabilities, team leadership, employee testimonials and more.

• Third-Party Benefits: Developers like Hootsuite and Crunchbase have been given enhanced access to LinkedIn’s partner API, allowing the sites to provide LinkedIn notifications and funding insights on their respective platforms.

Take advantage of these new features with a company page overhaul courtesy of Deph Digital Media.

Facebook Introduces Instagram Account Analytics

Compiling Instagram analytics for monthly or quarterly reports can be a burdensome undertaking for social media marketers. Some insights, such as followers gained, are only accessible in week-long periods, making it difficult to accurately report on an account’s growth for a certain block of time. Now, it seems that a new addition to the Facebook Analytics dashboard may provide data-seekers with more convenient tools.

According to Facebook, Instagram Account Analytics (which are currently undergoing beta testing and are expected to roll out globally within the coming months) will give page admins better access to connected Instagram Business account insights as well as the ability to:

• Discover whether people who comment on or like Instagram posts have higher retention rates.

• Compare the lifetime value of people who interact with an Instagram account to those who don't.

• Create segments: e.g., all the people who commented a post—and analyze the value they bring to the business.

• Understand how an Instagram audience overlaps with the people downloading owned apps, or visiting claimed websites, or even engaging with associated Facebook Pages. 

To request early access to Instagram Account Analytics, fill out this form or contact Deph Digital Media to begin familiarizing yourself with your Instagram following like never before.

The Power of GIF

Successful brands understand the important role social media plays in their communication strategy. Copywriters spend hours drafting concise, informative posts that will hopefully catch the attention of their audience long enough for their message to resonate. Unfortunately, no matter how great that messaging might be, studies show that people remember only 20% of what they read. Even worse, people are likely to remember only 10% of that information within three days.

Social media users have long understood the entertainment value of a GIF, but could these moving images remedy our reading retention problem as well? Studies suggest that people can recall 65% of information they’ve read three days after the fact if there’s a relevant image they can associate with the piece. And what images are social audiences crazy about these days? GIFs. On Giphy alone (the services that supports Twitter’s built-in GIF search), more than 100 million active users watch more than 2 million hours of GIFs every day.

Shareability is additional benefit of adding a GIF to your social content, with visual posts 40x more likely to be shared. The New York Times pulled some data on how GIFs spread and the results were staggering. Every day, five million of them are sent via Facebook Messenger. On Tumblr, that number increases to 23 million.

The power of a GIF in terms of comprehension and share-value are undeniable. Factor in that GIF usage can also lead to a 42% increase in click rate, and there’s no reason every social marketer shouldn’t be using them.

Want to learn how to create your own original GIFs? Contact us.

Facebook Implements New Ad Quality Restrictions

Participants of our webinar “Is There Really a Facebook Apocalypse?” know that the social media giant’s algorithm doesn’t take well to engagement-enticing verbiage. Now, the advertising side of the platform is pledging to take action against such characteristics too. Effective immediately, Facebook will disapprove or severely limit the distribution of ads containing the following low-quality attributes.

Engagement Bait: Ads with spammy wording asking audiences to engage with the ad in specific ways, such as requesting likes, comments or shares.

Withholding Information: Ads that purposefully withhold information to entice people to click in order to understand the full context.

Sensationalized Language: Ads that use exaggerated headlines or command a reaction from people but don't deliver on the landing page. Avoid using superlatives such as ‘amazing’ and ‘mind-blowing’, or phrases like ‘you won't believe’. 

The penalties for violating the new rules are steep. Multiple ads being flagged as low-quality can impact the performance of ALL future ads from that advertiser.

Need some help ensuring that your Facebook ads pass the quality test? Contact us.