Social Media News: September

September is the month in a year when you have already said goodbye to the hot summer and getting ready for the colorful world by preparing your closet with new fall fashion pieces. Well, social media giants have brought to us some amazing even colorful updates and changes which will affect the way you do social media marketing.

Facebook News

Reach customers who have purchased offline…

Select businesses are now able to create ads and reach customers who have visited their brick and mortar stores. This way they can effectively retarget their visitors and bring them back to make an additional purchase or convince window shoppers to actually make a purchase.

Another amazing thing is that advertisers are able to create lookalike audiences from the custom audience made of store visitors. This brings a new potential to find the relevant customers for your business.

Ads Manager and Power Editor will merge…

In our opinion, the reason why Facebook has two platforms for ads and campaign management is that they want to A/B test which platform is better for advertisers. Therefore, they have decided to stop the development of the Power Editor (due to lower usage) and implement the most popular features into the Ads Manager.

In ads Manager, you will be able to create drafts similarly as in Power Editor. Choose Power editor or Ads Managers Creation flow and updated Ads manager gets the activity and history reports of power editor but keeps the old breakdown, summary rows or customized columns.

How to stalk your competitor’s “tactics”

Facebook has given another option to push advertisers to do even more ads but also an option to see what ads objective is using your competition. When clicking on the drop-down menu next to the sponsored add it will allow you to create a similar ad. It will get you to your ads manager and show you the particular objective used by such add.

Is the ad objective not enough for you to uncover the tactics of your competitors. Click on why I am seeing this and it will show you basic ad’s targeting and your interests. This can give you quite a brief idea about the targeting criteria used by your competitors.

Colored Comments

No explanation needed. Facebook is testing colorful comments. Perhaps they’ve already got the autumn feeling. One thing is sure, the colorful comments will allow you to stand out of crowd. Or not…

Instagram News

4-across photo grid

Instagram is testing on some users 4 image row grid, which already has received a lot of hate, especially from bloggers and celebrities.

Noone really understands why they have decided to switch the 3 across photo grid to 4. Instagram must know that brands have been working on their perfect grid over a time. We just must wait and see if this will be a change in all profiles.

More options for Stories

Facebook and Instagram want to be more connected when it comes to stories Here are few updates allowing you to better manage stories.

• These two giants are already testing cross-posting of stories.
• Integration with Facebook Canvas, offering a seamless extension of the full-screen experience of Instagram Stories.
• Organic stories will be eligible for boosting from Power Editor or Ads Manager
• Placement optimisation to run “stories” campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network.

Twitter News

280 character count

I’ve got a feeling that it was not only me who had always struggled to express an idea, opinion or even explain some advertising message in just 140 characters. The tough days are over. Twitter is releasing the new 280 character count for tweets. I am excited what new opportunities this brings.

Twitter’s algorithm similar to Facebook’s one

Twitter will prefer to show tweets with more engagement than the ones with lower engagement. This way, Twitter will increase the quality of your tweet feed. Also, Twitter will show you even tweets from people you do not follow. How? If the people you follow engage with a tweet of the person you do not follow Twitter simply shows you such tweet based on a popularity of the particular tweet.

LinkedIn News

Videos, Videos everywhere!

Videos are ruling the social media world. And LinkedIn does not want to be left behind.

Enough said LinkedIn will allow you to upload/record native videos into the feed. The video must be less than 10-minutes long and it autoplay without sound.

LinkedIn introduces 

Audience Network ad placement is nothing new in the social media advertising. And now you might ask, what has LinkedIn done better? Well, their unique targeting criteria based on companies and job titles gives a laser focus targeting options. Since LinkedIn is a professional network, people tend to keep the information about them updated. The opportunity in LinkedIn ads for B2B or recruiting companies is much better when comparing to Facebook or Twitter.

Unfortunately, this feature is available only for selected advertisers.

Pinterest News

Pinterest Taste Graph

Each month 200M people come to Pinterest to search for ideas to design their life. Pinterest, claim that they really understand the categories and interest of their visitors. Therefore they have introduced Pinterest taste graph for advertisers. This gives marketers an option to target their ads more precisely.

The really cool thing is that you are able to choose from more than 5000 interest. More importantly, the taste for each person evolves over a time. Therefore, you advertisers will hit with their ads the audience which is the most likely to engage with the ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWC8L-wKEU

Google+ is still alive

Google is clearly not paying as much attention to its sinking boat. However, they have realized that G+ still has over 1.6 Million active daily users. Which is not a small number at all. Here are 3 updates which brought our attention;

• Hiding low-quality comments. In other words, moderate the discussion under the posts.
• Google events are coming back. This is a decision based on the growing popularity of G+ communities which were widely using Events before.
• With the development of Google Photos, G+ had focused on the quality of the images and now the higher resolution allows you to zoom in and see images in better quality.

September has brought to us so many things to be excited about. What is your most exciting update? Doubled Twitter character count, Create similar ad feature or LinkedIn videos. Tell us in comments. It always makes us happy:)