Spilling The Social Media Tea
Are you ready to Spill The Social Media Tea? Grab a cup of English Breakfast and settle in! My name is Beth and I work as a Social Media Manager in Hong Kong. A majority of my time is spent literally studying social media from recent trends to interesting developments in the social media marketing world. Now that algorithms are firmly in place, social media never sleeps and in fact, changes shape every day. So this series is meant to compile and disseminate the information that I read constantly and hopefully give you a little clarity into what the heck is going on in the apps we use every day!
Facebook Climbs to 2.5 Billion Monthly Active Users (!!!) But Rising Costs Impede Income Growth
This is a pretty incredible number but it should be noted that “Facebook” also includes Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp. Remember when everyone boycotted Facebook for a month but still used Whatsapp and Insta? It’s still Facebook.
As explained by Facebook:
"Our Family metrics represent our estimates of the underlying number of unique people using one or more of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp (collectively, our "Family" of products). We define a DAP as a registered and logged-in user of one or more Family products who visited at least one of these products through a mobile device application or using a web or mobile browser on a given day."
As you can see here, across its app 'family'', Facebook now serves 2.26 billion people every day, a huge breadth of reach which far outpaces any other social network. But if you look a little more closely, this is likely presented this way to hide that the company's costs and expenses have increased 51% year over year thanks to the overhaul efforts to clean up the platform and improve content moderation.
This won’t directly affect you or how you use the platform but it does show that Facebook is serious about making changes, even at a financial detriment.
Instagram Is Adding a New Way to Find and Share Stories that Mention Your Profile
This could be an interesting one for brand accounts on Instagram. Looking to further tap into the rising popularity of Stories, Instagram has added a new Stories @ mention option, which highlights any Stories that mention your profile, and enables you to easily re-share them into your own Stories stream.
The new option will appear as an @ symbol in your Create mode options. When you slide over to this option, it also says 'See all 3' at the top of the screen, signifying how many Stories @mentions your profile has at any given time. When you tap on the 'See all 3' button, you're taken through to a display of thumbnails of Stories frames which mention your profile. You can then select any of the frames listed, and re-share them into your own Stories feed (until they expire).
The option could be great for brands looking to showcase relevant mentions, which could include customer feedback, endorsements, influencer marketing partnerships, etc. It may well be worth taking a look through your Stories mentions regularly, with a view to amplifying relevant messages, adding a level of social proof via customer comment.
It may be worth checking your Instagram Create mode options to see if you have it - as noted, for brands, it could be a helpful option for amplifying customer and fan mentions.
