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A quick rundown of recent updates in the world of social media marketing…
Questions? Ask anytime! Check back weekly for more updates and insights ✨
Transcript:
Hello. Happy Earth Day. Today is Monday, April 22nd. I have a couple of things to update you about for this week. I'll try to be brief because I do have a couple of events coming up later this week, and some of you watching right now may be expecting an email or a phone call from me. I promise I will get to you. It's on my list right next to me. I just wanted to check in and do my weekly live with a couple of updates, especially since I have received several messages from people in my sphere, whether professional or personal, asking, What the heck is this Meta AI business? I did want to come on and address that. It's a new artificial intelligence feature that's been added to Meta products, so Instagram and Facebook. You'll see it in your search bar. It doesn't mean you can't still search in the way that you used to be able to. If you click on that, you can still just type in someone's name, an account, or a term that you want to find, and it will still search the way that you expect. But it does also offer some other features.
You can think of it like Siri or Google Home or Alexa. Sorry if I just turned on anyone's devices by saying those words out loud. But it's just a way to search, recommend new things. It's in the very early stages, so we do expect to see some updates and changes over time. But if you You notice the Meta AI feature popping up when you log into your account, it's just a new way to search and connect your things. You can still use that feature, the search bar tool, the way that you were before. This is a similar idea. Also on Instagram, I did want to talk about some updates to stickers. So when you're doing stories, also a little bit when you're doing reels, but you'll notice this when you do stories, they've changed the layout and shifted how they offer some of the stickers there. I do encourage you to go in and check that out. Play around. You may want to take some time looking at it and going through what's available now and where things have moved before you really need it. So play around with some of those sticker options and see what you can do.
You can also still the way that you could before. So if the way the stickers look or where they're located is confusing for you, just type in what you're looking for, whether it be music, a location tag, a mention, things like that. They are still there. They just look a little different.
We can also talk about Instagram flip side. This is something new. You may have gotten an alert on your account about it. You may not have, like we've talked about in previous videos. They slowly roll out different features to different accounts, so not everyone gets things at the same time. But Flipside is basically the Instagram official version of a Finsta, which used to be a fake Instagram account. If you had a public-facing Instagram, you could also have a private Instagram that you shared only with friends, family, or people that you wanted to see specific things that you didn't necessarily want the public to know. So Flipside is a new thing that's coming to Instagram that allows you to tailor who sees what you post and how they receive that information and allows you to have a personal persona and a public one as well.
We'll see more information about that come out over the next few weeks, months, et cetera. If anything changes, I'll let you know. We have also observed, just as a social media marketing community, a decline in the use of hashtags. I've done some tests on a few different accounts to see if that impacts my views negatively or if it impacts my reach. Posts without hashtags are doing just as well, if not better in some cases, than those with. If you have hashtags, you can certainly still use them. I got my motion sensor light going off. You can certainly still use them. If you have a system or if you schedule your content out in advance and it's very easy for you. There's You have a reason not to do it, but if it is creating extra work or extra stress for you and you want to leave that behind, if you don't like the way that it clatters your captions, you're certainly welcome to skip those for a little bit for now. Just run some experiments and see. Go ahead and look at your insights. But what I've observed anecdotally is that it's actually not as detrimental as I had feared that it would be, and posts without hashtags are doing fine.
What we are seeing is an uptick in longer captions that have a lot of keywords, very similar to what hashtags were doing. If you drop all the keywords in your captions about how people want to be matched with you, that can be helpful. I do think, again, this is just my observation, we'll learn more about it as time goes on, but I do think the decline in the hashtags as a search is somewhat due to the Meta AI feature because now you can ask Meta to find things for you, and you don't necessarily need to click through hashtags to do that.
They have also updated the Explore pages and how you see things there. So all of these updates are tied together. And we'll just keep an eye out, keep an ear out and see what happens there. I promise to keep this short this week, so let's jump into the next topic. Ties in nicely with what I was just talking about, This is for Threads, so separate from Instagram, but an extension of it. It's really Meta and Instagram's answer to the artist formerly known as Twitter, aka X. It operates very similarly, but it's used just like Instagram is more organic and creative than, let's say, TikTok, where it's a lot about trending and things like that.
Threads is more organic conversations, people going back and forth. It's not so much sharing links and doing promotions. People are starting conversations there. What they've started doing, instead of adding the traditional-looking hashtag, they've put keywords and things that are trending, just like on what used to be Twitter, that turn blue and have a hyperlink. It's very similar to a hashtag. It just doesn't have that symbol in front, and it operates a little differently when you click on it. But you can see trending topics.
You may have observed this if you were following along for any of the Taylor Swift stuff last week, that Swifties was a trending If you clicked on Swifties, it turned blue. They also did some fun things there where if you liked a post related to her album release, it released white hearts all over the screen. There's some fun updates and things going on there. I am hoping, wishing I'm praying for the day that they will add an API that allows us to schedule threads. That hasn't happened yet, but as soon as it does, I will let you know because I'm very much looking forward to it.
No news on the TikTok front today.
As always, if you have any questions, if you have a topic request, something you want to know about... if you log in like my mom did today and you don't understand what meta AI is and you want to send me a message, go ahead and I will address that topic here so that everyone that might have that question is able to learn a little bit more about it.
So I'll be back next week. In the meantime, send me a message, comment below, all those fun things, and I look forward to connecting with you.
Thanks. Have a great week.