In this week’s Social Media News section, we have these stories to look into:
Instagram’s Tips On Using Reels For Marketing
Twitter Moves To Next Stage of Testing Its ‘Status’ Indicators
And
TikTok Employs A New Approach To Promoting Its Live Stream Shopping Tools In The US
Instagram’s Tips On Using Reels For Marketing
Instagram has just launched an updated version of their how-to guides, and one part of it is particularly interesting if you’re thinking about adding Reels to your IG marketing tool roster. It’s a thorough overview of how brands can use Reels for promotion and community building, and it includes a range of notes and tips on the effective use of Reels. The overview itself is a hefty 23-pages long, so we’ll be looking into key tips in this article.
First off, Instagram talks about why you should use Reels and what are the main strengths of this format.
Then, the guide goes on to talk about Reels creation, including pointers on ‘safe zones’ – that’s where the main view focus should be if you want it unimpacted by on-screen display overlays.
Creation of Reels takes up much more space than just than on Instagram’s guide and even talks about the importance of effects from the viewer’s perspective.
Of course, Reels ads are also mentioned in the guide, which goes as deep as to mention the right video formats for any paid promotion:
And there’s even a section on working effectively with creators:
As well as insights into utilizing paid partnership labels, Shops, product tags, and more. So, basically, an almanac on creating Reels, using them, and benefiting from them. All of the tips are emphasized by additional data and engagement rates, thus making them seem even more veritable and useful. Definitely worth taking a look at if you’re thinking about incorporating Instagram Reels into your digital marketing approach.
If you missed the link above, you could download the full Instagram guide here.
Twitter Moves To Next Stage of Testing Its ‘Status’ Indicators
Okay, so pouring your heart out into 240 characters is no easy feat, and Twitter understands it. That’s why the platform is developing a set of tweet status indicators that will eventually provide an easy way to add context to your tweeted message. This, in turn, might be helpful in communicating meaning and intent.
However, the status indicators are present (meaning you can only use one of the provided), and some of them are definitely inclined toward the younger generations. What on Earth does the Touching grass status indicator mean? Take a look at what’s also in store:
Well, okay, it’s a pretty unique combination of trendy sayings and popular activities, so it might actually help in communicating with the Internet in a more clear and more eloquent way. Or it might not.
So, when added to your tweet, the status will appear below your username, adding immediate context to your tweeted message. Like so:
What’s pretty fun is that the status indicators will be searchable – a user could click on it, and it will take them to a listing of all the tweets that have applied the same activity.
It appears that these searchable status indicators might become an interesting way to discover and engage with the topics you care about (who doesn’t care about Pet of The Day?), and it could also be a handy way to sort out relevant tweets.
And while there’s no official plan in place for Twitter’s status updates as of yet, it is highly likely that they are coming pretty soon.
TikTok Employs A New Approach To Promoting Its Live Stream Shopping Tools In The US
While user interest in live-stream commerce has been relatively low compared to that which users shown in China, that doesn’t mean that TikTok is dropping its original plan to push on with it in European and the US markets.
Okay, so it did scale down its live commerce push in Europe, but now, in turn, it is taking a new approach in the US, where it is to partner up with an established live shopping network called TalkShopLive.
TalkShopLive hosts a variety of live shopping streams, covering a wide range of topics and product categories and is on a solid path to becoming a thing in online product discovery and shopping. That’s largely because an array of popular celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton, and Paul McCartney, just to name a few) have signed it to sell goods in the app. Sounds a bit like TV infomercials, doesn’t it?
TikTok will presumably form a relationship with the app that will see its own live shopping broadcasts cross-posted to TalkShopLive, which would help it reach more engaged, active shoppers and further promote live-stream shopping activities on TikTok itself.
Of course, TikTok is also partnering up with various influencer agencies to get popular creators on board with its live shopping tools.
So, TikTok is looking to maximize its reach to people who are looking to shop while at the same time employing influencers to show them how they can do it on the platform.
While live-stream commerce is huge in China, we just cannot predict if it will take on in the Western markets. So far, it has been met in a very lukewarm manner both from customers and potential partners.
So that’s it for this week – stay tuned as we bring you the latest stories each Tuesday!
