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 Nick Rishwain!
Watch This Week’s Social Media Updates
Pinterest Adds Pin Engagement and Website Retargeting
In Pinterest news, they have added pin engagement and website retargeting.
If you advertise on Pinterest, you can now create audiences based on an action a user takes with your pins and actions they take on your website.
You can retarget Pinterest users based on the following:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Saves
- Likes
- Closeups
Why Pinterest Pin Engagement and Website Retargeting Matters
If you are using Pinterest a lot for your business, you’ll love the new pin engagement and website retargeting features.
This will allow you to serve up content to customers who you know have taken some action or visited a specific page on your website.
You can then put more relevant content in front of them and drive them further down the sale funnel, helping lead to a sale of a product or to get them to sign-up for a service that you offer.
To learn more about Pinterest website retargeting go here.
Instagram Stories Added to the Explore Tab
This week, Instagram rolled out Instagram Stories in the explore tab.
According to Instagram, ”more than 100 million people visit Explore every day to discover photos and videos from people they don’t yet follow. The new suggested stories section highlights the most interesting stories from across Instagram’s vast global community — and like the rest of Explore, the stories you’ll see are personalized to your interests.”
Why Instagram Stories in the Explore Tab Matters
First impressions mean everything. Because your Instagram Stories will potentially be in front of people who are not familiar with your business, you want your updates to look their best.
Therefore, if you are using Instagram now, the one thing you can do to prepare your business is to sharpen the quality of your posts.
This means taking a look at your posting schedule, what you’re posting and how often your posting.
It might even be a good time to setup an Instagram business profile so that you can see how your account is performing as a result of Instagram Stories being in the explore tab now.
Read more about Instagram Stories on explore here.
Facebook Messenger Conversation Topics
This week, Facebook Messenger conversation topics were spotted in the Messenger app.
Here is an example of Facebook Messenger conversation topics.
Clever: @messenger now suggests conversation starters based on things your friends have done recently. pic.twitter.com/9MfOwu3n11
— 🕸Chris Messina (@chrismessina) October 16, 2016
Messenger conversation topics are a way to suggest conversation starters for you.
We particularly like this feature because not only can you learn about conversation starters, but you can also quickly see what some of your friends have been up to.
Why Facebook Messenger Conversation Topics Matters
One thing we’re really excited about with Messenger and the new conversation topics is that as a business owner, you can use this in conjunction with the “add and manage labels” or the “notes” section found inside your Facebook Page Message area.
This way as you are meeting new people and making connections with them, you can begin to create a buyer persona based on the information you gather from Facebook Messenger conversation topics.
You can learn more about Facebook Messenger conversation topics here.
Schedule Facebook Live Video
Also this week, Facebook rolled out the ability to schedule Facebook Live video.
“This week we’re rolling out the ability for Verified Pages to schedule live broadcasts, starting with live videos published via the Facebook Live API.”
Here is some additional information about scheduling Facebook Live updates.
“Scheduling a live video makes it easier to build anticipation and buzz with your audience before your broadcast begins, so you can start strong with an audience already assembled. When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to News Feed letting your fans on Facebook know that the broadcast is coming. People who see the post can opt in to receive a one-time reminder notification that will alert them shortly before your broadcast begins. Your fans can then join a pre-broadcast lobby directly before the live video starts, where they can connect and interact with other viewers.
You can schedule a live broadcast up to one week in advance, and people can join your lobby three minutes before your broadcast begins. Once you’ve scheduled a live video, you will be able to share a link to the broadcast or embed it in other places, such as websites or blogs.”
Why Facebook Live Video Scheduling Matters
While Facebook Live video scheduling is only available to verified pages at the moment, there’s not question scheduling is going to be important.
As a business owner, if you begin to plan ahead and schedule your Facebook Live videos, they won’t be an afterthought.
For us, we use the last week of each month to plan out the our blog content, Social Snacks episodes and Social Chatter show.
Go here to learn how to schedule Facebook Live videos.
Improved Facebook Page Creation Process
This week, Facebook also started rolling out a new Facebook Page creation process.
Here is what the old process looks like.
This is what the new process looks like.
One thing you’ll notice (besides a cleaner look) is that you’re given instructions to help you with the page creation process.
Why A New Facebook Page Creation Process Matters
The new wizard for creating Facebook Pages is there to help you as business owner.
As a social media strategist for many B2B and B2C companies, I’ve worked with many businesses who give their page a name that isn’t consistent with their brand, business or organization.
Most of the time it’s because the one they wanted to use wasn’t available and so they chose one that was available.
With the new page creation process, this should help businesses who are new to creating a Facebook Page learn why each of these steps is important when setting up their page.
Getting Things Done with Help From Friends
Also this week, Facebook announced new features to help you get more things done with the help of your friends.
“Whether traveling to a new place, looking for a hair salon, or searching for the perfect place to eat, people already turn to their friends, family, and local Groups on Facebook for advice. We’re rolling out a new tool that makes it easier to get and organize all those recommendations in one place.”
“When you write a Facebook post looking for advice on local places or services, you’ll have the option to turn on Recommendations for that post. If you turn on the feature, your friends can comment on your post with suggestions, and you’ll see all of them mapped out and saved in one place. You can also go to your Recommendations bookmark on Facebook (desktop only) to ask a new question or help your friends.”
They are also helping local businesses as well.
“We’re introducing some new ways for people to take action faster once they’ve found something they want to do or a place they want to go.”
Here are some of the things you can do from Facebook with local businesses.
- Order food
- Request an appointment
- Get a quote
- Get tickets to movies and events
You can read more about this announcement here.
Why Facebook Help From Friends Matters
With Facebook help from friends, you can rely on personal connections to help you get more done.
This way you don’t spend all of your time researching. Instead, you can get advice from people you’re connected with who probably can answer your question because they live there or have visited a business.
In addition to help from friends, the new local business interactions for Facebook Pages are particularly interesting.
As a business owner, this is important because if your business has a presence on Facebook, you will want to be sure your page has these features enabled when they get rolled out.
Not only will it make the transaction for customers easier, but as a business owner, this will be one less “thing” you have to do and another way for you to strengthen your relationship with customers and increase sales and information sharing.
Save to Facebook From Messenger
One last piece of social media news this week comes from Facebook.
In their latest app update, you can now use the save on Facebook feature from within Facebook Messenger to quickly save links to content that someone sends you.
Why Save to Facebook From Messenger Matters
The new “save to Facebook” feature from Messenger is particularly important because it can save you a lot of time.
Instead of opening the link and waiting for it to load, if it’s an article you know you want to read later, you can quickly save it to Facebook with just one press and a tap.
By using the “save on Facebook” feature, this will also trigger an email at the end of the week to remind you of what you’ve saved to Facebook.
While Facebook Messenger is full of all sorts of tips and tricks.
This one is particularly useful because you can quickly save links just by pressing on a link someone sends you in a few seconds.
Here is a quick video to show you how to save to Facebook from Messenger.
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.
Easil
Easil is a desktop application for creating images for your social media channels. For example, you can create images for Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and more.
It is very similar to other design tools like Canva and Relay.
When choosing a visual design tool, we recommend using all three services. Each seems to offer a different set of stock images and designs.
This can be useful so that your branding doesn’t look like everyone else’s on the web.
Easil offers a free plan as well as paid plans starting at around $9.
Download EasilWorkbot for Slack
The next tool we wanted to share with you is called Workbot for Slack.
Workbot is an add-on for Slack (iOS | Android).
What Workbot does is instead of using Slack and other business tools separately, when you add Workbot for Slack, you can access your favorite tools such as Box, Salesforce and more right from within your Slack channels.
If you are a heavy Slack user, this can save you a lot of time overall and help you stay focused on getting your work done, while communicating in Slack.
Try Workbot for SlackBynd
The last tool we wanted to share this week is an app called Bynd.
Bynd (iOS) is a mobile app that can help you see all of your social media updates in one place.
Bynd currently works with Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and over 50 channels to help you see updates from many popular accounts without the need to go check each one.
Overall, this can help to save you a lot of time because you can see all of your favorite social media channels in one convenient place.
Download ByndWrap-up
That’s it for this week’s episode of Social Chatter.
Be sure to tune-in to our next episode of Social Chatter 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.
No Comments