Welcome to this week’s episode of Social Chatter where we cover the latest social media news from this past week.
Each episode of Social Chatter is available as a blog post or video.
Let’s see what’s cooking in social media this week with your hosts, Christian Karasiewicz and Vincent Orleck!
Watch This Week’s Social Media Updates
Instagram Rolls Out 60 Second Videos
This week, Instagram announced they are rolling out the ability to shoot longer videos.
This means you'll be able to shoot 60 seconds of video.
This is great news if your business uses Instagram a lot. Now you'll be able to shoot shorter videos for teasers about new products. If you like, you can increase that to 60 second Instagram videos.
We plan on testing out new types of Instagram videos on our Instagram channel to see what kind of reaction we get from our followers. We suggest you do the same with your channel.
This should also give you new ideas on how you're using Instagram. Longer videos means you can create all sorts of new types of content to engage your followers.
Snapchat Introduces Chat 2.0
Also talked about this week were upgrades to Snapchat.
No longer is Snapchat just for teenagers. This week, they introduced the ability to send chats and to "start talking or video chatting instantly with one tap." If they aren't there, you can send them an audio note or include stickers.
Snapchat also introduced auto-advance stories. This new feature will move you to a new Snapchat story once you've finished the one you're on.
With so many different means of communicating with your followers using Snapchat, you should start considering it. They have made great strides over the past few months to position themselves as a powerful tool for communicating with your followers. They've also made it quite fun too!
Twitter Image Descriptions
Also this week was an announcement from Twitter. They announced Twitter image descriptions.
While the aim of Twitter image descriptions was to improve accessibility on Twitter, they've essentially added in the ability to include alt text, which if you have learned anything about SEO, alt text also helps make your tweets easier to find because your images now include keywords to help Google better understand your content.
While there was no mention that this would directly impact SEO and help surface your tweets better, they do allow you to include 420 characters, which should be enough for you to include a few important keywords to tell your followers what your image is about.
Even if Twitter image descriptions don't help your content come up when people are searching on Google, you are able to make your tweets more accessible to others. This can help expose your business to new audiences. So be sure you take a few minutes to include Twitter image descriptions when you're sharing images with your tweets.
To turn on Twitter image descriptions, be sure you're using the latest version of the Twitter mobile app. Then go to the gear icon and look under accessibility.
Facebook Delivery Insights
Another announcement this week was from Facebook.
They've announced Facebook delivery insights.
You can read more about delivery insights here.
The purpose of Facebook delivery insights is to "help advertisers make better ads." "The new tool surfaces ad sets that are underdelivering and not reaching as many people as they could be. Delivery Insights gives the advertiser information about why the ad set is underperforming and offers optimization recommendations to make the ad set more competitive in the auction."
Advertisers can find Facebook delivery insights under the "delivery" column when looking at the campaign level and the ad set level. This is located under the tools section in Facebook Ads Manager.
Tools
In addition to sharing the latest in social media news from this past week, we also highlighted some great tools and apps to check out.
Koji Go
Do you ever wonder how to create a certain stylistic look to your videos?
One way is to color grade your video after you have shot it.
Normally, you need to use tools such as Screenflow or Final Cut Pro in order to edit your videos that you took on your mobile device.
Now you can make those adjustments right on your iPhone with the help of Koji Go.
With Koji Go, you shoot your videos and instead of waiting until you're back at your computer, you can make adjustments right on your mobile device!
This way you can share them on your social media channels rather than wait until later.
Download Koji GoFilmic Pro
With this week's announcement about being able to shoot longer Instagram videos, we thought we would highlight some powerful tools for shooting videos and taking photos that you can then share on Instagram.
One tool we really like using for video is Filmic Pro.
Filmic Pro is a powerful app for taking videos for your business events. It also is handy for capturing videos for your social media channels, such as Facebook native video.
What makes Filmic Pro so powerful is that you can control what you're focusing on in a video, adjust the brightness of your video, change the speed of your video - in case you want to shoot slow-motion videos and more.
This is an app that I've been using for years to shoot my own YouTube videos and can't recommend it enough!
Download Filmic ProA second Instagram tool we love is Afterlight.
Afterlight is a tool that let's you color correct your photos, apply filters, borders, text and more before you share them on Instagram. Essentially it is a one-stop shop to help you take great photos for Instagram!
Typically, before we share any photos on Instagram, we start by taking them with Afterlight. This way we can make adjustments to make sure they look their best before posting them.
We also love how they create a backup on our devices camera roll in high-resolution. This way they can be shared on our blog or used in other projects.
Download AfterlightShootlr
The last tool we wanted to share this week is Shootlr.
Have you ever wanted to experience what your friends are experiencing? Or maybe you want to have your employees share photos with you from an event they are attending for work?
Rather than wait for the event to finish, you can use Shootlr to take photos and have them shared with you.
The way that Shootlr works is you send a request to someone you're connected with on Shootlr. They can choose to approve the request or not. If they approve it, it will launch their camera on their mobile device and take a photo, which will then be shared with you!
Shootlr is a free app available for iOS and Android and should help save you a lot of time instead of having to wait for someone to share photos with you.
Download ShootlrWrap-up
That’s it for this week’s episode of Social Chatter.
Be sure to tune-in to our next episode on Blab to find out what’s cooking in social media!
If you have any questions about anything mentioned this week, share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.