Social media is always changing, offering new ways for businesses and individuals alike to express themselves. Remaining aware of updates provides countless opportunities to create cutting-edge social media campaigns – and ensures that you’re using each platform to its full potential.
This year, trends toward transparency and positivity seem to be driving many changes. Meanwhile, other new social media updates are purely tech advancements that take the user experience to the next level.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the social media tools that will be available to marketers and individual users in the coming months.
Over the summer, Instagram began testing an in-app stop motion tool. This feature lets you put engaging movement into your Instagram stories without the need for time-consuming activities like capturing and editing video. This camera mode can capture up to 10 frames that play in rapid succession as a stop-motion video. The social media outlet intends to make this feature easy to use by putting a faded or ‘ghosted’ image overlay of the previous picture over the camera view. That way, you can line up your video perfectly to ensure a flawless finish.
Since June, Instagram has been slowly rolling out the placement of sponsored posts on the Explore tab. The Explore tab shows users photos and videos that they might like from accounts they aren’t following yet. Since Instagram bases the content of the Explore tab on the user’s interests and viewing history, ads can be highly targeted to reach your demographic of choice.
According to code found in Instagram for Android, the platform may be getting ready to let users make their saved Collections public. Today, Collections serve as private bookmarks only visible to the individual account holder. Upcoming changes could make it possible to make a Collection visible to the public and tag others to contribute. If these updates come to fruition, Instagram will have functionality that rivals Pinterest’s content-curation capabilities.
Instagram is currently testing out hiding like counts in seven countries – Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Users will still see the number of likes on their own posts, but others won’t be able to view those stats and vice versa. This move is likely in response to the growing number of studies that show the negative impact of “like obsession” and peer comparison on mental health. There are no current plans to hide follower stats, and it’s still unknown how concealing likes will affect the app’s algorithm for ranking.
In August, YouTube announced that they would be making changes in response to an upsurge in copyright claims against very short clips of music. This includes background music that’s captured unintentionally in videos. The video platform is trying to make things easier on content creators by taking away copyright holders’ ability to earn money on videos where the clip is heard.
Copyright holders now have two options for short audio – set it so that the video creator can’t earn money on it or block the video entirely. youtube hopes that record labels back off of content creators when it’s no longer worth their while monetarily. The changes are set to roll out this month (September 2019), so YouTubers will have to wait and see if this change will help them as intended or result in more blocked videos.
Social media is always changing and evolving – and you need to stay on top of changes to ensure you’re taking advantage of every available tool. Luckily, Zero Gravity Marketing is here to help. Our expert team can help you create a robust social media strategy utilizing the most popular and effective platforms and resources.
For more information about our social media services, contact us today!