Welcome to the October 2023 edition of Social Commotion, Motion’s roundup of the latest social media news. Check out our top updates from this month.
Instagram Experiments with New Stickers to Accelerate Holiday Season Engagement
Deck the halls with new engagement tools. Instagram is developing more engagement elements to have ready for the holiday season, including:
- “App” sticker: A way for creators to directly promote other apps within Instagram and seamlessly send viewers to another app directly from Stories.
- “Secret” sticker: Creators can set custom reactions for users that respond to a Story, which would only be visible to those who engage. A creator can also enable who receives these secret messages and could be a great way to boost direct response and engagement.
- “Music Pick” sticker: A mixtape for the digital era. This sticker allows creators to enable respondents to share their top music tracks of the moment. Curate a group playlist, engage with your audience and foster online communities with audience-first content.
How Brands Can Use Social Listening to Improve Their Business
Social media listening is the process of monitoring social media conversations to identify and track mentions of a brand, product or service. It can be used to understand customer sentiment, identify potential crises and track the performance of marketing campaigns.
Brands use social media listening in a variety of ways to strengthen their social media strategy. Here are a few great examples of how brands use social media listening:
- Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola uses social media listening to track the performance of its marketing campaigns. For example, when Coca-Cola launched a new campaign, they used social media listening to track how many people were talking about the campaign and what they were saying.
- Dell: Dell uses social media listening to track customer sentiment and identify potential customer issues. Then, if Dell sees a lot of negative tweets about a particular product, they can investigate the issue and take corrective action.
- Starbucks: Starbucks uses social media listening to identify customer trends and develop new products. When Starbucks noticed that many customers were tweeting about their love for pumpkin spice lattes, they decided to offer pumpkin spice lattes all year round.
Reddit Removes the Option to Opt Out of Ad Personalization
In an effort to continue to evolve its platform to keep up with competitors and increase ad dollars, Reddit announced they have removed the option to opt out of personalized ads in the app.
“Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in,” said a statement from Reddit.
The majority of users will not see a change in their ads on the platform, and users who previously opted out of sharing on-platform activity will not see more ads.
So, what will this change do? It will allow Reddit to enable more customized ad targeting, so users will simply see ads that are more relevant to them based on activity.
Reddit is also adding a feature to opt out of specific ad categories such as alcohol, dating, pregnancy, weight loss and gambling. This will allow users to limit unwanted ad exposure related to these sensitive topics.
Reels May Be Here to Stay, But Don’t Say Goodbye to Carousels Yet
Carousels allow you to post multiple photos or videos in a single post, which can be a great way to tell a story, showcase a product or service or keep an audience engaged on a piece of content longer. Here are some of the benefits of using carousels on social media:
- Higher engagement rates: Carousels tend to get more likes, comments, and shares/saves than individual photos or videos because they are more interactive and require users to swipe to see each component of the carousel.
- More reach: Carousels are also more likely to be shown to your followers in their feeds. This is because platforms like Instagram see carousels as more engaging than other types of posts.
- More storytelling opportunities: Carousels allow you to tell a story or share multiple perspectives on a specific topic. This can be a great way to keep our audiences engaged and informed, and to hear from multiple POVs in a single post.
- More product-focused opportunities: Carousels are also a great way to showcase products or services. You can use carousels to show different angles of a product, feature customer testimonials or highlight various features and benefits.
