Welcome to this week's episode of Social Chatter, the longest running social media marketing talk show where we cover the latest social media news from this past week.
As a reminder, each episode of Social Chatter is available as a blog post, video or you can listen to the Alexa Flash Briefing.
For those of you who missed last week's show, you can find it here.
Let's see what's new in social media this week with your host, Christian Karasiewicz.
Social Media News Updates
A Tool To See Time Spent On Instagram And Facebook
In Instagram news, they are rolling out a tool to see the time spent on Instagram.
Why A Tool To Manage Time Spent On Instagram And Facebook Matters For Your Business
Instagram (and Facebook) are rolling out a tool to help you manage the time you spend on their platforms.
You will get a tool with a dashboard to see your activity along with a daily reminder and a way to limit notifications that you receive.
All of this is in an effort to improve our mental health.
Right now, these tools to measure time spent on Instagram and Facebook are only available from their respective mobile apps.
How to Manage Time Spent On Instagram and Facebook
- From the Instagram app, tap on "Your Activity." On Facebook, tap on "Your Time On Facebook"
- You will see a bar showing time on Instagram or time on Facebook
Additionally, you can tap on "set daily reminder" to alert you when you've reached the time you allow yourself for these platforms.
You can also tap on "Notification Settings" to mute push notifications for a period of time that you specify.
As a business owner, you often may need to focus on a task (or just need a break). By using this new tool to see time spent on Instagram and Facebook, you can work on improving the time you spend checking these platforms and more time focusing on building out your business or spending time outside of your business, away from the constant buzz of notifications.
You can read more about managing your time spent on Instagram and Facebook click here.
Updates To Facebook Video Ad Metrics
In Facebook news, they are making updates to video ad metrics.
Why Updates To Facebook Video Ad Metrics Matter For Your Business
Facebook is making updates to the video ad metrics you see. These include changes to 3-second and 10-second video view counts, new video plays, moat verification and removing 30-second video views and video percentage watched in an effort to help you get more accurate results from your Facebook video ads.
First up, Facebook used to count a video view if a viewer rewound or rewatched a video. This could lead to inaccurate Facebook video ad metrics.
As a result, they will no longer include this in your video metrics.
They are adding a video plays metric.
With this new metric, you will see actual video plays versus having a video count when it was displayed in your News Feed, but wasn't played.
Facebook is also adding Moat to verify this new Video Plays metric, which is from Oracle Data Cloud, which can determine Facebook video ads plays.
Lastly, Facebook is removing the 30-second video views metric and video percentage watch. These are redundant Facebook video ad metrics.
As a business, if you're running Facebook video ads, you should find these new metrics helpful.
Remember, Facebook is constantly working to improve the data they show you so that you can improve the videos you upload on Facebook.
To read more about these new video ad metrics, click here.
Making Digital Skills More Accessible
Also this week, Facebook began working on more ways to make digital skills more accessible.
Why Making Digital Skills More Accessible Matters For Your Business
According to Facebook, "by 2024, more than 1 million computing and digital jobs will be open in the US. Filling these jobs is critical to our economy and our communities – and we want to help more people learn the skills they need to thrive in the digital world."
In an effort to reach this goal, Facebook is working no providing training to over 1 million people and small business owners by 2020.
This week, they are rolling out their Facebook Community Boost program to Columbus, Ohio. In particular, Columbus State Community College and the National Urban League.
As a business, if you feel you need these free trainings and you aren't in those locations, you should check out the Facebook Community Boost program to find one near you. This way you can begin building your digital skills.
Facebook Developing Singing Talent Show
Facebook is testing a singing talent show to compete with Musical.ly.
Why A Signing Talent Show On Facebook Matters For Your Business
Do you have aspirations to be a singer? Facebook is working on a feature called "Talent Show."
This new feature would let you complete by singing popular songs and submitting your audition for review.
On the surface, this doesn't seem like a useful feature for business; however, Facebook recently started working to acquire music licensing rights for their platform to use when making your own videos.
If approved, this feature would help further cement using music on Facebook without fear of having videos with copyrighted music removed.
The Facebook Talent Show feature isn't available yet, but we'll let you know when it is.
You can read more about this new singing talent show feature here.
Snapchat Speech Recognition Lenses
In Snapchat news, they are launching speech recognition lenses.
Why Replacing Snapchat With Venmo Matters For Your Business
Snapchat is launching new Snapchat lenses.
This new series of lenses will animate when users speak English words such as "hi," "love," "yes," "no," and "wow."
Here is a look at how Snapchat speech recognition lenses work.
These new speech recognition lenses are another way for you to add animation to your videos that you create and share with your customers. They may not work in every situation, so you may need to spend time building out a solid social media strategy for Snapchat.
You can read more about Snapchat speech recognition lenses here.
The Snapchat Ad Marketplace
Also this week, Snapchat rolled out the Snapchat Ad Marketplace.
The new ad marketplace will help a select group of Snap partners monetize their content.
Why A Snapchat Ad Marketplace Matters For Your Business
Snapchat is rolling out the Snapchat Ad Marketplace as well as commercials to Ad Manager.
If you wanted to purchase six-second video commercials, you had to do that through Snapchat.
Now you can do all of this through Ads Manager.
As a business owner, if you use Snapchat, once you become a Discover partner, you can start to tap into these new features.
You can read more about the Snapchat Ad Marketplace here.
Tools
In addition to sharing the latest news from this past week, we also highlighted some great social media tools and apps for you to check out.
Plann For Instagram
The first tool that we have discovered this week is called Plann For Instagram (iOS).
Plann for Instagram is an Instagram scheduling tool.
You can use it to plan out your Instagram content, identify groups of hashtags to use in your Instagram posts, schedule Instagram Stories and more.
Plann for Instagram is available as a freemium download.
You can try Plann out from the following link.
Download Plann For InstagramVideorama
The second tool that we have for you this week is Videorama (iOS).
Videorama is a powerful video editing app for iOS.
You get a powerful editor to make it easy to create videos that you can promote on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
With Videorama, you can take your photos and videos and turn them into memorable slideshows with transitions or create promo videos for your business.
Videorama is a freemium download. You can upgrade to Videorama Pro for $4.99 per month if you need access to premium content and features.
Download VideoramaWrap-up
That's it for this week's show!
To watch next week's episode of Social Chatter, your weekly social media marketing talk show, tune-in here to find out what's new in social media!
If you have any questions about of the social media news or tools that were mentioned this week, please share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.
