Snapchat has released the latest version of its
This B2B social media marketing guide is what you need to grow your brand.
Social media has always been seen as the playground for B2C companies. While it’s true that many of the top brands leveraging social media operate in the B2C segment (such as Nike, Starbucks, and Applebee’s), it doesn’t mean that B2B companies don’t have a place in the social media arena.
There are companies of all sizes that have already tasted success with B2B social media marketing, and continue to grow as a result of tapping into the major social networks for more customers.
B2B Social Media Marketing
However, it’s easy to find a travel company making the most of Twitter or Facebook in terms of marketing and customer service, but what about a residential management company? Or a trade staffing agency? Or a PR firm? Take any B2B business that you can think of, the question is, can it successfully tap into the world of social media and grow as much as a B2C company?
The answer is a definite yes. If you look around, you’ll find hardcore B2B companies killing it on social media. Whether it’s IBM on Twitter, Cisco on Instagram or Intel on Facebook.
The problem that many B2B companies often face is: a lack of knowledge and an awareness of social media. Many of them still believe social media is not for them, which is costing them sales. Or they don’t have the right staff/resources to run their social media campaigns. That’s where our social media experts at Barodian Advertising come in. We completely create, schedule, run, and monitor your social media so you never have to lift a finger – all while seeing great results! Contact us today if you’d like to get started.
It’s important to keep in mind that if a B2C company that sells fashion products can use social media to market its products, then a B2B company dealing in office supplies has an equal shot at it. But in order to see real-world results, such companies need to embrace B2B social media marketing with full throttle. And stop relying solely on old-age marketing tactics such as attending networking events, cold calling and direct mail.
Getting great results with B2B social media marketing is not rocket science. In fact, it can be as effective as B2C social media marketing, as long as the fundamental goals are not ignored.
Any B2B company can grow awareness about its products and build a stronger brand by strategically leveraging popular social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
So if you think it won’t work for your B2B company, then think again. By not jumping on the social media bandwagon, you are in fact leaving money on the table.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Omobono, a global B2B creative and technology agency, conducted research that found B2B marketers can see real results with social media. And if done right, B2B social media marketing can prove to be the best marketing technique to promote their products and services.
Omobono basically surveyed 115 marketing experts working in B2B companies and found that a whopping 79% of them felt social media is the most effective channel for marketing. What’s more, 38% of them said if they had access to extra budget for the coming year, they would want to invest it into B2B social media marketing.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Even though data shows that B2B companies are eagerly investing in social media, there is a need to focus on increasing revenue.
While there is no doubt that social media is a powerful marketing method, it has to be done effectively to achieve a high return on investment.
For successful social media marketing, a B2B company needs to take a strategic approach and execute their campaign with precision.
Below we’ve outlined three steps that are crucial to create a profitable B2B social media marketing campaign.
How to Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Campaign
Step #1: Define Your Marketing Objectives
Without defining the right objectives, you’ll find it difficult to make your B2B social media marketing campaign profitable. Why? Because your return on investment depends on setting marketing goals that contribute to your company’s overall growth.
Having measurable goals that are relevant to your big or small business will help you create a winning B2B social media marketing strategy. You need to ensure that each goal you set is smart and measurable in nature so that gauging success becomes simpler, and more scientific. Venngage does an excellent job outlining how to do this in your social media plan.
Every decision that your company makes towards getting more prospects and converting them into customers should reflect these goals. And more importantly, how you plan to achieve them.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Also, companies using B2B social media marketing need to realize the importance of gaining visibility in the competitive social landscape. Social news feeds today are crowded, and your company has to stand out of the crowd without losing focus of its core objectives.
Let’s look into a few objectives that you can consider for your B2B marketing company.
- Generate Targeted Leads:
It’s a fact that B2B companies operate differently than B2C companies in more than one way. The techniques that work well for a B2C firm, may not be that viable for a B2B business.
For instance, B2B clients are known to make bigger investments, which brings down their chances of impulse buying. So if your B2B company wants to leverage social media for marketing, it makes sense to do so for lead generation rather than sales.
If you’re a business that thinks long-term, and if you truly want to get a healthy ROI from social media, then your top priority could be about generating new, quality leads. Above all, each lead that you generate via social media gives you the confidence and direction to gain even more leads in the future.
Studies have shown that any businesses (B2B or B2C) that uses social media to generate leads can be in the position to earn 24% more revenue. Whether you choose to use LinkedIn for generating leads or Twitter, depends on the kind of business you are running and where your audience tends to hang out the most.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Capturing leads and nurturing prospective buyers can be via social media as long as you do the following effectively:
Build a strong, positive network and grow your reputation
Add clear call to actions to your social media pages, profiles and posts
Improve your brand and focus on establishing yourself as a thought leader
Leverage paid ads to consistently generate quality leads
Track and measure your social media performance/progress
With B2B marketing, it’s important to take a unique approach in order to generate high-converting leads and achieve a bigger ROI.
- Build Your Brand
Your social media optimization efforts can make a positive impact on your company’s brand development. Being on a social network such as LinkedIn is not enough to enhance your brand. Your business needs to be active when it comes to protecting its reputation and giving away value. One wrong step on social media can diminish your brand’s value.
According to a 2017 survey, brand building is one of the top digital priorities for B2B marketers.
top b2b priorities
Here are three efficient ways to enhance your brand and get the most out of your B2B social media marketing efforts:
- Create an Online Brand Persona: Similar to a persona of your ideal customer, an online persona of your brand will take you a long way. Creating an online brand persona helps your prospects and customers connect to your core values on social media, which affects the overall results you get. In order to successful an online brand persona, focus on the voice you will be using on social media. Keep your long-term vision in mind when doing so.
- Have a Crisis Management Plan Ready: There may be times when you’ll see the unhappy side of your customers on social media. This is when your brand’s reputation can go for a toss if no steps are taken to resolve the issues. When you have a crisis management plan ready, you’ll be in the position to deal with a problem when it arises.
III. Connect with Media: Connecting with your prospects and customers is an obvious step when you’re using social media. But being a B2B company, you shouldn’t stop there. In other words, you also need to interact with bloggers and journalists who are actively writing or creating content in your niche. By using social media for reaching out the right kind of media and building strong relationships with relevant media contacts, you will be able to get on their radar.
- Offer Better Customer Service
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are great for improving your customer service and give better value to your B2B customers. Social media gives you the opportunity to see how your customers are interacting with your content and what they’re talking about your brand. By taking the right steps, many customer problems can be resolved without having them escalated further.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Here’s how you can do it effectively.
- Go Beyond the Major Social Networks
Where are your hanging out? What websites are they using to talk about your brand and as well as your competitors? You need to do a bit of homework to find out where your customers are spending time on, so that you can connect with them. Just because you’re running a B2B business does not mean your focus should only be on LinkedIn.
Sometimes you need to go beyond the traditional social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. For example, if you’re running a travel business, you may want to keep a tab on your customers by being active on a website like Flyertalk. This is the site where your travel customers would be discussing everything airline related. Join these discussions to learn the concerns of your customers and come up with solutions to make them happy.
Regardless of the industry you are in, you should try and learn what your customers are talking about you, before it’s too late. The more you study and participate in these discussions, the better it is.
- Keep an Eye Preferred Networks
The best part about social media is it allows you manage your reputation. By monitoring the major social networks and forums, you’ll not only be helping out customers in need but also avoid any negative effect on your reputation.
In order to make the most of social media in terms of customer service, you need to use professional tools that let you track your mentions and listen to customer queries aired. You can start by setting up Google Alerts, and later on move to a more premium tool when you’re ready. Remember, a tool is only as useful as you make it out to be.
- Respond the Right Way
An important rule of serving customers via social media is to that you take care of their issues without making the situation ugly. In other words, you need to deal with customers the right way instead of getting into heated arguments. Since your discussion is happening on a public platform, you want to avoid any unnecessary debates.
Most of the time the issue can be resolved without any verbal spats. Sometimes the customer is genuinely wrong, and this is when you deal with the issue privately and resolve it quickly. Try to cooperate with the customer as much as you can, even they are difficult. Responding the right way is the key to building better business relationships.
Your image and brand are critical, and you need to safeguard those by showing everyone that you truly care for your customers. Any prospective customers monitoring your discussions will be in a better position to do business with you. At Barodian Advertising, we are experienced in handling tough situations when it comes to reputation management. Additionally, our specialists monitor client accounts every single day and respond to comments and messages within 24 hours.
Step #2: Identify Your Target Audience
Social media is made up of diverse people, so not everybody is going to be interested in the content you share. Which is why it’s important to reach out to an audience that connects to you and your content. You want businesses who pay attention and listen to your advice. Being in the B2B segment, this not only helps you build a list of followers, but also lets you create real authority and a positive brand in your niche.
Identifying your target audience is the first step to sharing information with businesses who have interest in your area of expertise and possibly have goals that connect to your product or service. If you manage to build a relationship with an audience that shares the same level of passion about your industry, then the updates you share with them will get even more exposure.
The last thing you want is to deliver your content to an audience that is least interested in what you’re sharing. And that can easily happen if you don’t know who exactly you’re targeting.
target audience
You want your business to deliver value to other businesses because it helps you gain influence in your niche and increase your reach. By adding more value to your social media content, you will slowly but steadily differentiate your business from other companies that are not putting the effort in B2B social media marketing.
1) Know Your Priorities
Your goals and your priorities shape up your marketing. Using social media to grow your business is what you’re aiming for, but how do you want to accomplish that? What do you want to get out of your B2B social media marketing? How do you plan to increase your business with the help of social media?
2) Analyze Your Competitors
Every healthy business has competition, and so do you. Which is why you should spend some time analyzing the social behavior of your competitors. Find out what how they are interacting with their customers and utilizing each social networking platform. You also get an opportunity to understand the kind of content they’re creating, and which of it is helping them generate engagement.
competitor analysis
Your aim is to fully analyze and grasp the social media tactics of your competitors so that you can do better in those areas. For instance, if your competitor’s posting frequency is low, you could ramp up yours by sharing high quality content more regularly. Everything that you learn from your competitors will help you improve your own B2B strategy. Which will have an impact on the overall results you achieve from your B2B social media marketing efforts.
3) Decide on What Content to Share
If you already have a content marketing strategy and content development team, you already know what type of content you will be producing for social media. But in order to find your audience and make B2B social media marketing work for you, you need to know what type of platforms will be receptive to your content. The more clear you are about this, the better results you will see.
For instance, if you publish a case study in the form of a long-form blog post, then it would make sense to distribute it through Twitter and LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you have a video version of the same case study, you should share it via YouTube and Facebook. As long as you know your audience is there on a certain platform, there’s no reason to not share your content with them.
4) Create and Assign Personas
Knowing your audience is not enough, you also need to put them in appropriate categories or “personas” according their needs/requirements, their overall buying behavior or based on the different kinds of responses. This sorting out is crucial to serve your customers better and give them an experience like never before. This step allows you to create a specific strategy for each customer persona you create. Which in turn improves the chances of getting more sales.
B2B persona example
Step #3: Choose the Right Social Media Platform
Every social media network is different. And the people that use it have different interests and priorities. When your B2B company experiments with social media marketing, it’s important to understand the importance of selecting the right social media platform.
Your social media efforts need to be directed in the right direction because unlike a B2C company that deals with end customers, you work with companies and businesses. Which makes your choice of social media platform a crucial part of your B2B social media marketing strategy.
B2B Social Media Marketing
Many B2B marketers have tested and analyzed social media platforms to find out what works best for their B2B brand. Why? Because finding out the best social media platform is essential to your business’s success.
We have worked with both, Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads, and have found Facebook to be a more viable B2B advertising solution.
The reason being simple: Facebook ads are likely to be cheaper than LinkedIn ads in terms of cost per click. For example, you could spend $5 per click on LinkedIn that would cost you $1 or less per click on Facebook. And the quality of the lead would be the same. It’s a no-brainer.
Even though LinkedIn is a pure B2B channel (one of the reasons it’s more expensive), Facebook ads can help you get similar results. Why? Because Facebook has two billion monthly active users. And there is every chance that your B2B audience logs into Facebook as much as they do on LinkedIn, if not more.
Your social media efforts should focus on not only forming the right marketing objectives but also on building a strong relationship with your target audience. Which can only happen when you are focused in the right direction.
How do you do that? By working on both, leveraging the right social network and as well as understanding the behaviors of your target audience. And since these keep evolving, it’s crucial to move with changing times.
For example, take the industrial companies and manufacturers that are using social media for their advantage. Many B2B companies in this sector are using videos to reach their marketing goals. In which these are being uploaded to video focused social media networks such as YouTube. These sales and marketing videos are helping add to the bottomline of companies by helping with demonstration of products and the functionality of each equipment.
In fact, 83% of marketers say that video marketing increased their revenue. Although compared to writing blog posts or making infographics, creating videos will require more budget. But here are some tips you may try to create engaging videos without spending too much:
For webinars or Q&A videos, you can record them using Zoom.
Have you ever tried live streaming? Try Facebook or YouTube for that and be sure to choose the one with the more engaged followers.
After creating these videos, you can now promote them on your other social media accounts.
When selecting a platform, it is important to assess how it can be used to reach the organization’s main objectives and build an audience. Instead of starting with the question, “What platform is the best?”, your B2B company should ask, “What platform aligns the best with our marketing objectives?”
Need Help with B2B Social Media Marketing?
When talking about B2B social media marketing success, the focus is usually on how amazing the results have been. Or how the B2B company managed to make the most of social media marketing at a limited budget. But it’s important to understand that these results are possible only due to effective preparation and a flawless execution of the campaign.
B2B social media marketers need to think long-term in order to see real-world results, and continue growing. Focusing on immediate results will only hamper the sustainability of your social media efforts. With efficient planning and preparation, even the biggest challenges can be overcome.
If you need help with your B2B social media marketing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Barodian Advertising team. Using our vast social media marketing experience, we will help you formulate a B2B social media marketing strategy that aligns with your company objectives.
‘Snap Chatter’ monthly report, which highlights all the key topics and trends that are seeing significant increases in mention volume among the app’s users.
And given Snapchat’s popularity with younger audiences, the Snap Chatter reports can be a great indicator of rising trends in general – the monthly listings include key topics of focus in different regions, trending entertainment, celebrities and catchphrases.
You can get a full rundown of each element on Snapchat’s business s
ite, or check out the infographic overview below.
It seems that it’s not only Facebook’s main app that’s putting more focus on private groups – over on Instagram, reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong has uncovered a new ‘Join Chat’ sticker option which would enable Stories viewers to join a private chat group, direct from a Story.
As you can see here, the ‘Join Chat’ sticker prompts the user to add a note on what the chat is about, with the lower note saying: ‘People who view your story can request to join this group chat’.
Along with Facebook more broadly, Instagram has been putting increased emphasis on messaging, with more than half of the app’s users now also using Instagram Direct. Instagram Direct has also proven to be a strong driver of engagement and connection on the platform, with around 85% of the messages shared on Instagram distributed among the same three friends, as opposed to broader groups. 
This new option looks to put more emphasis on this, prompting private group discussion and sharing, which aligns with the above-noted trends, while also sparking interest in yet another aspect of the Instagram experience.
For brands, if this is indeed launched, it could provide another way to build stronger community connection, and bring your biggest advocates closer by sharing exclusive content and/or seeking consultation. That could be particularly helpful on Instagram, given the power of influencer marketing on the platform – if you can build stronger connection with your top followers, that could give your brand building efforts a significant boost.
There’s no word as yet from Instagram as to whether this feature will be released, but we’ll keep you updated as we hear.
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In its recent quarterly update, Microsoft, the parent company of LinkedIn, reported that the professional social network continues to see ‘record levels of engagement‘, with on-platform sessions growing by 24%.
LinkedIn engagement has been on the rise for some time – but where, exactly, is that growth coming from and what types of content are generating more interest on the site?
Delving deeper into this, LinkedIn has published a new infographic, which outlines a range of updated engagement stats, which may help you better plan your platform strategy.
Among the data points listed:
- Top publishers have seen an average 120% growth in Page followers YoY
- Video is the content type most likely to spark conversation
- Messages sent have increased 35% YoY
After recently launching a new Interest Targeting option for LinkedIn ads, which is based on the content people engage with on the platform, LinkedIn is now broadening its ad targeting toolset even further, with the addition of three new options to help hone in on your specific target audience.
The three new options being launched are ‘lookalike audiences’, ‘audience templates’, and the addition of Microsoft Bing search data to beef up interest targeting. Here’s how each will work.
Lookalike Audiences
Digiday reported back in January that LinkedIn was working on its own variation of Lookalike Audiences, and now, LinkedIn has officially confirmed the addition.
As per LinkedIn:
“LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences combine the traits of your ideal customer with our rich member and company data to help you market to new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts. Since these members are already on LinkedIn, they’re in the right professional mindset to engage and respond to your brand.”
Similar to how the process works on other platforms, Lookalike Audiences will enable you to upload an email list from your CRM, for example, or a list of people who have visited your website, then LinkedIn’s system will match those details against its database to come up with a new audience of users who share similar traits.
Lookalike audiences have proven highly effective on other platforms, taking some of the effort out of identifying and focusing on the right audience. If the system is able to detect relevant, similar traits, this can be a great way of reaching new people who are likely to be interested in your offerings.
This may actually be even more potent on LinkedIn, as it will be able to detect new user segments based on job title and position information, which could help ensure you get your ads in front of the exact right decision makers, and capitalize on industry trends and shifts.
LinkedIn says that the option has proven effective in its initial trials:
“Customers in our pilot were able to improve their campaign reach by 5-10x while still reaching the kind of high-quality audiences that matter most to their organizations.”
This could become a key consideration for all LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Audience Templates
Audience Templates, meanwhile, aim to make it easier for people who are less certain about their target market, or have less training data to go on, to reach relevant users on the platform.
As you can see here, the Audience Templates option – shown on the right of the screenshot – will enable advertisers to search for a market segment that relates to their offering. You just enter in the type of people you’re trying to reach and LinkedIn will provide a match based on its system detail.
At this stage, there are around 20 predefined B2B audiences to choose from, though LinkedIn notes that is expanding.
After testing it out for the last few months, Facebook is now rolling out its new ‘Dark Mode’ for Messenger – but they’ve hidden the function, Easter egg style, behind an in-app emoji trick.
Here’s how you can activate the new function – and a disclaimer, this may not be available to all users as yet (I tried it on two devices, on one, it worked, on the other it didn’t).
First, ensure the Messenger app on your device is updated to the latest version.
Next, go into any chat and head into that specific conversation’s settings by tapping on the name of the person, or people, in the discussion at the top of your Messenger window.
Within the chat settings, change the chat emoji to the moon image. Now, head back into the chat and send the same moon emoji as a message.
For some users, this is enough to activate Dark Mode (you can see the prompt in the third screenshot above noting that ‘You’ve found dark mode’), but for others, you may have to actually double-tap the moon emoji within the chat. I had to tap on the moon emoji a few times – eventually, it sparked a flood of moons falling down the screen, then the dark mode prompt appeared.
Once you’ve ‘found’ dark mode, you can tap on the prompt to head to settings and activate it.
As noted, this may or may not be active for all users at this stage – some are saying it’s not active for them, and as noted, I tried it on a couple of devices with differing results.
Either way, it likely does mean that Facebook will roll out dark mode to all users soon, not just those who know this trick. Facebook first previewed Messenger dark mode as part of its broader app revamp announcement last May, while code hacker Jane Manchun Wong shared screenshots of the option in development back in October.
Ahead of a potential IPO later in the year, Pinterest is ramping up its eCommerce tools, this time through the addition of new product catalogs and personalized shopping recommendations, in order to maximize business potential.
First, in addition to the ‘More like this’ option beneath each Pin, which uncovers visually similar items, Pinterest is also adding a ‘More from [brand]’ option, which will showcase a broader range of product Pins from the same business.
As you can see in the above example, when you scroll down from a Pin, there’ll be a new option, where available, to also tap on the ‘More from [brand]’ list, which will showcase similar items, but confined to that provider. That’ll definitely prove popular with brands – at present, the ‘More like this…’ option can take users away from their offerings, even if they might have similar product in their catalog that would fit the bill. This option will enable businesses to keep users around for longer, and help facilitate brand loyalty on the platform.
Next up, Pinterest is also adding in new personalized shopping recommendations:
“Alongside style, home, beauty and DIY boards, you’ll see in-stock ideas related to what you’ve been saving, to match your style. Just click “more ideas” then the shopping tag to start shopping ideas picked for you. Tap + to quickly add the Pin to your board, or click the Pin to go straight to checkout on the retailer’s site.”
The addition will provide more ways for Pinners to find available products similar to what they’re interested in, with direct buying options, making it easier to get more shopping ideas.
Pinterest will also now enable brands to upload their full catalog to the platform, and turn their products into dynamic Product Pins. This compliments the platform’s recent announcement of automated ‘Shop the Look’ Pins, which are able to identify products within Pins and connect them to buying options. Uploading your product catalog will ensure your products show up for more of these automated recommendations, boosting your business potential on the platform.
In addition to this, Pinterest is also making its Shopping Ads available to all businesses through its self-serve ad tool, and it’s expanding its ‘Shopping search’, in order to showcase more products to buy for related on-platform queries.
As noted, the updates expand Pinterest’s eCommerce potential, adding in more ways for users to find, and buy, relevant items, related to their search history, their interests and specific brands. That will make the platform more inviting for businesses – already, research has shown that Pinterest drives far higher purchase intent than other platforms, with some 90% of Pinnersusing the platform to plan for or make purchases.
Pinterest may have relatively fewer users (250 million) than other social platforms – but Pinterest has repeatedly stated that its, in fact, not a social network. It’s become a ‘discovery engine’, ‘a catalog of ideas’, and in that sense, Pinterest, in many ways, is in a league of its own – a sort of middle ground between Google search and Amazon product listings, but more driven by your personal preferences and interests.
It’s taken a while, but Facebook is now rolling out its promised ‘time spent’ dashboard within its main app, enabling users to track the time they’re active on Facebook each day, and set prompts to limit their use.
As you can see from the above screenshots, the new dashboard is available within the functions listing, and through it, you can see your total time spent, set daily reminders, and change your settings to make better use of your time.
The options are very similar to what Instagram launched last week, which are part of the broader ‘digital wellbeing’ push within tech circles that’s been initiated in response to a range of reports about the potential negatives of overuse of digital platforms.
Facebook itself commissioned a report which found that passive engagement on social can lead to negative mental health impacts. That finding puts Facebook, as a business, in a tough position – on one hand, it needs to make you come back to the platform and use it as much as possible to boost its usage stats (and attract more ad dollars), but on the other, there are user welfare concerns with the same.
In this respect, Facebook’s new tracking tools seem somewhat like a red flag being waved by a matador – yes, they seek to address the core issue, but not really.
As noted by Techcrunch:
“Facebook and Instagram’s versions are particularly toothless. There are no options to force you to ease off your usage, just a quick daily limit notification to dismiss. iOS 12’s Screen Time at least delivery’s a weekly usage report by default so the feature finds you even if you don’t go looking for it. And Android’s new Digital Wellbeing dashboard is by far the most powerful, graying out app icons and requiring you to dig into your settings to unlock apps once you hit your daily limit.”
Really, the apps themselves are not responsible for how you use your time – if you choose to spend your free hours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, that’s up to you. The providers can give you access to tools to highlight the potential problems with this, but they can’t necessarily enforce any ‘rules’ around use. It is possible that they could do more, as TechCrunch notes, and Facebook could also provide more insight into how, specifically, you’re spending your time in its apps, which may help to guide your usage. But the tracking dashboards are, looking at the other side of the argument, at least a first step.
So long as people go looking for them. Will you check out your Facebook usage stats?
I’m willing to bet the majority of users of both apps won’t bother – because who wants to know how much time you’ve wasted? Who wants to be shown the hours they could have spent doing something more productive? Hence, the red flag analogy – yes, Facebook is providing tools to help, but really, they’re somewhat meaningless in the broader scheme. You’ll keep on using Facebook and Instagram the same way regardless.
That’s not to denigrate Facebook for making the effort – and who knows, maybe they will prove beneficial, and will limit our time spent, and the negative impacts. But I wouldn’t count on it.
As you’re no doubt aware, Facebook Stories aren’t as popular as Instagram Stories, the most successful version of the format which Facebook copied from Snapchat (at least in western markets). But, even so, Facebook itself remains convinced that Stories is the format of the future, including on their main platform.
At their F8 developer conference earlier this year, several Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, noted that the Stories format is on track to overtake the News Feed as the most popular social sharing option, and that that will happen sometime this year.
Given that Instagram Stories is now at 400 million users, and WhatsApp ‘Status’ is up to 450 million, the growth of the option is clearly evident – but Facebook Stories, at 150 million daily actives, is still lagging behind.
But that slower rate of growth doesn’t appear to have dampened any enthusiasm for the potential of Facebook Stories in Menlo Park, with The Social Network releasing a new blog post promoting the potential of the format for businesses.
As noted by Facebook:
“The rise of stories is clear: people want fast, immersive and fun ways to share photos, videos and text with their friends and family – and stories offer just that. People use stories to share and discover content they’re interested in for movements as big as Pride and moments as small as the coffee they’re drinking. We designed stories on our platforms to fulfill people’s need to interact and share in engaging and playful ways on the vertical screen.”
I did laugh a little at the ‘we designed’ note – though probably not as funny to those at Snap Inc.
In the post, Facebook outlines the potential of Stories for brands, and their capacity to help marketers connect with their audiences, noting that a third of the most viewed stories on Instagram are from businesses.
But ads in Stories are where Facebook suggests there’s the most brand potential.
“Businesses are already seeing results using ads in Instagram Stories. For example, Tropicana ran video ads in Instagram Stories for its summertime product promotion campaign, achieving an 18-point lift in ad recall and 15-point lift in purchase intent among males. OpenTable used ads in Instagram Stories to drive online restaurant reservations, resulting in a 33% lower cost per reservation compared to other ad formats. And Overstock ran video ads in Instagram Stories to acquire new customers and increase sales, and generated an 18% higher return on ad spend and a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition.”
Right now, however, you can’t run ads on Facebo
Just a week ago, Instagram launched its new video sharing platform ‘IGTV.’ Now the company is rolling out new features like group video chat, new camera effects with custom AR filters, and redesigned explore section. So, let’s tell you about them brief:
Instagram’s Video Chat: How to use it?
The video chat option is available in the Direct Messaging section. To start a one-on-one video call, open an existing message or start a new thread. Then tap the new camera icon at the top right.
You can also make a group video call with up to four persons by creating a group that includes the recipients you would like to chat with. While chatting, you can minimize the window to multitask on Instagram by viewing photos, sending texts on DM, or post stories.
The camera icon turns blue when a video chat goes active and for joining an ongoing conversation, just tap the blue camera icon. Tapping on the red phone icon will end the calls.
In case you want to prevent a user from video calling you, blocking them would do the trick. You can also choose to mute users if you do not wish to receive notifications from them.
Explore Section: What’s new? What’s changed?
Instagram gets millions of visitors each day who check out the Explore tab to discover interesting picture and motion content. Now the platform has made it easier to find out specific content by creating topic channels.
On opening the Explore tab, you will see a list of channels which will show contents of a specific genre. The first one is “For You” that offers curated posts based on your personal interests.
There are other topic channels such as Food, Humor, Fashion, Beauty, Art, etc., and a list of hashtags to explore more specific and trending content topics.
In case you want to remove a channel from the list, just tap and hold the channel and select ‘Mute’ from the popup menu. It will stop showing content from that specific channel, and you can unmute it at any time by visiting the end of the list.
New Camera Effects
Another interesting update is the custom AR filters for Stories. For the first time, Instagram allowed third parties to create filters and they have been launched by celebrities Ariana Grande, Baby Ariel, YouTuber Liza Koshy, and famous channels like BuzzFeed and NBA.
These new Instagram filters can be used to augment a picture or selfie with objects and virtual effects. In case you come across a new AR filter being used on an image or video in other users’ stories, you will be offered an option to add it to your effects toolkit and try it out.
Instagram is also addressing the issue of online harassing and bullying on the platform by launching a new “bullying filter.” Based on machine learning tech, this filter will hide language that may seem offensive in nature.
CREDIT : FOSSBYTES