Hope you’re well and looking forward to lock-down easing a bit.
We’re switching up our monthly round up again following some feedback. Hopefully you find it interesting and useful. Please let us know what you think.
What we’re thinking about this month
2020 has been one roller-coaster of a year, but it may be the catalyst to greater change too. While the world tries to recover from a devastating pandemic an old disease has been thrown back into the public eye – racism.
The Black Lives Matter movement has taken over our social feeds in the last week or so following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, at the hands of a police officer. The movement has sparked us to think more about what we can do to understand racism and be part of the solution.
No-one has all of the answers and this is just the beginning but after #BlackOutTuesday, where we went quiet on social media and listened and learned from those affected, we decided to put together some thoughts on what we could all be doing to help facilitate change.
Check out our Insta to read our thoughts. 👇
It’s been great to see social media being used to amplify these messages and we’re happy to see many people using these platforms for positive change, but with positive always comes negative and with factual news always comes ‘alternative news’.
So we’d like to encourage you to think critically when scrolling through your feed, don’t react before doing your own research. Educate yourself with various credible sources of news and information, we recommend using Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity, and other fact checking resources.
Now, let’s get to the hottest social media news you may have missed in May 2020.
#SpottedInTheWild
Social media news and updates already in play
- Introducing Facebook Shops: Helping Small Businesses Sell Online, via Facebook Newsroom.
- Helping People and Businesses Find Their Online “Main Street”, via Facebook for Business. New ways for people to support and discover small businesses, along with more tools for keeping businesses informed and connected with their customers.
- Facebook expands Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers, via Facebook for Business. Go a learn about this, it’s important!
- Facebook Adds New Setting to Stop Private Groups Being Switched to ‘Public’, via Social Media Today. Heads up for Facebook Group admins who want to scale their communities.
- Supporting Well-being with Guides on Instagram, via Instagram. A new way to more easily discover recommendations, tips and other content from your favourite creators, public figures, organisations and publishers on Instagram.
- New ‘Support Small Businesses’ sticker launched, via Instagram. If you’ve not used it yet to big up your local businesses get to it, and encourage others to as well.
- DM me sticker now available, via Jane Manchun Wong. A nice way to encourage direct messages, find it in your Stories stickers.
- You can now share Instagram Live Broadcasts to IGTV, via Instagram.
- Testing, testing…new conversation settings, via Twitter blog. Many have the update already and are now able to choose who can reply to a tweet, with three options: everyone (standard Twitter, and the default setting), only people you follow, or only people you mention.
- Twitter Rolls Out Native Scheduling Within the Tweet Composer Window on Desktop, via Social Media Today. As announced by Twitter “Not quite ready to send that Tweet? Now on www.twitter.com you can save it as a draft or schedule it to send at a specific time –– all from the Tweet composer!”
- Twitter launches ‘Retweets with Comments’ on iOS, via Twitter. A nice update which we’re sure will come to Android soon enough too.
- Twitter’s updates it’s approach to misleading information, via Twitter blog. Including “new labels and warning messages that will provide additional context and information on some Tweets containing disputed or misleading information related to COVID-19.”
- Understanding dwell time to improve LinkedIn feed ranking, via LinkedIn Blog. This is a VERY interesting article if you want to learn how to improve your LinkedIn engagement. It discusses LinkedIn’s ‘dwell time’ metric, which is now being factored into its feed algorithm, which determines what each user sees. This is calculated from how long a LinkedIn user spends looking at an update or link. The upshot? You need to think more deeply about how to grab attention and keep it!
- Tapping into the Power of Your Professional Network with Polls, via LinkedIn Blog. Only a few years behind Facebook and Twitter but worth a go.
#OnTheHorizon
Hot social media updates being tested.
- Instagram: Instagram is Adding Some New Font Types for Stories, via Social Media Today.
- Twitter: Twitter testing warnings for potentially harmful tweet replies, via Twitter Support.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn Stories is Now Available to Users in Brazil, the Netherlands and the UAE, via Social Media Today. Won’t be long until we see wider tests.
Recent learning from our clients
James spoke with Tom Gibbons, Marketing Director at The TEFL Academy, about how they’ve adapted to find the opportunities available to them during the COVID19 crisis and what other businesses could be thinking about at this time and into the future.
What’s coming up
Want to learn how to break through the noise on social media, create attention-grabbing content and build real relationships with your audiences? Then we have the virtual learning session for you!
We’ve teamed up with Brighton Chamber of Commerce to deliver an insightful two hours of learning to help you better understand social media and create attention grabbing content! In the session James will cover the psychology of social media, why people share and engage and the tactics you can use to grab attention, engage the people you want to engage, and see meaningful business results from social media.
Bite-sized Learning (virtual): The psychology of attention grabbing social media
Thu, 9 July 2020. 09:30 – 11:30 BST
And that’s all folks. Need help with social media? You know where we are, get in touch.
Until the next time, stay safe and keep learning.
Mel and James.
Join us and over 6,000 other local business every Thursday on #SussexHour 10am until 11am. Network, share ideas, events and tips, and get to know each other.
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