Once again, the world of social media has been keeping us on our toes with plenty of updates, announcements and new features to each platform. Here are some of the changes we’ve spotted throughout the month…
CAROUSEL POSTS ON LINKEDIN
Does anyone else HATE the way images are displayed on LinkedIn when you post more than one at a time? Well, we do! Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn has a tendency to squish your images so they only display a really narrow image preview until you click in to view the full image.
Well, LinkedIn are said to be introducing Instagram-style carousel posts! So, instead of cramming the images in side-by-side, multi-image posts will soon display in a slide-show like style. Users will see the first uploaded image, with arrows to the left and right allowing you to click through to view the next image.
LONGER INSTAGRAM STORIES
If you’re regularly active on Instagram stories, then you’ll be thrilled by this news! Instagram have just introduced longer stories, meaning videos over 60 seconds long will no longer be broken up into segments.
If you’re tired of being cut off mid sentence, or facing a glitch when going from clip-to-clip, those days should now be over. Woohoo!
SCHEDULING FOR INSTAGRAM REELS
Instagram Reels are kind of taking over at the moment, but one thing that stops many people using them, is that they can’t be scheduled in advance, and have to be published from a mobile device.
This month, we saw Facebook’s Creator Studio introduce the new ability of scheduling Reels to Instagram! This means, you can now create your Reel ahead of time, before scheduling it to both Facebook and Instagram, all in one place!
Though this does sound pretty amazing, we have to say, we’ve noticed the Reels we’ve trialled scheduling via Creator Studio haven’t got anything like the number of views of those published directly through Instagram. So maybe not so great after all. 🙁
NEW ‘ADD YOURS’ STICKER ON INSTAGRAM STORIES
We love using stickers to jazz up Instagram stories and include ways for followers to interact with them. This month, we saw Instagram introduce a brand new sticker for stories, called ‘add yours’.
This new sticker allows your followers to add their own photo to your story, creating a whole new way of interacting and connecting via stories.
So, when would you actually use this? Say you posted a tutorial on Stories, you could use the ‘add yours’ sticker for your followers to add a photo of their attempt. Pretty neat!
If you’re struggling for inspiration of what to post to your Instagram stories, check out our blog post covering our top sticker recommendations.
TWITTER ALT TEXT REMINDER
You may remember our blog earlier this year all about alt-text and how to use it to make your social media posts more accessible. In this, we recommended an alt-text reminder, so you never forget to include alt-text in your images.
Well, it now looks like Twitter have created their own alt-text reminder, so you can do all this from within Twitter itself. A great move for making Twitter more accessible!
FACEBOOK REELS COME FIRST
Reels have been a thing on Facebook for quite a while now and Facebook are making a big push for more video content.
But have you noticed that Reels now appear right at the top of your Facebook Home Feed, next to stories? So Reels are now the very first thing you see when you open Facebook.
INSTAGRAM SCHEDULING COMING SOON
As we’ve already mentioned further up this round-up, Instagram scheduling is possible through Creator Studio. But it sounds like a built-in scheduling tool is currently in development, meaning you may soon be able to schedule Instagram posts (including Reels!) from within the Instagram mobile app itself.
We’re not yet sure when this will be launching, or even if it will go ahead, but if it does, it will be a gamechanger for Instagram users!
SORT YOUR HASHTAGS
If you use Creator Studio to schedule content to your Facebook and Instagram accounts, you may have noticed a new tool, enabling you to create Hashtag Groups.
This is a great feature for storing different types of hashtags for when you’re posting about different things, or even just saving all your main hashtags in one place, so they’re easy to access and use every time you post.
FACEBOOK INTRODUCES FEEDS
Do you remember the melt-down of last week when 50% of Facebook users were seeing a load of random rubbish on their Facebook feeds and pretty much everyone thought they’d been hacked? If your feed wasn’t affected then you probably at least heard about it somewhere!
Well this all kicked off on the same day that Facebook introduced a new section called Feeds. On the Feeds tab, you will see several display options/filters so you can select whether to see content from people, pages, or groups that you follow.
There doesn’t seem an awful lot of point in this at the moment, but soon, Facebook’s Home screen will be an area for discovery and recommended content, and you’ll have to navigate directly to your Feeds to see the content that you actually follow and want to see… Yeah, we’re not thrilled.
EXCLUSIVE CONTENT FOR INSTAGRAM SUBSCRIBERS
Want to create some extra revenue from Instagram? That’s just what their new Subscriber feature aims to do. Now, people can choose to subscribe to your account for a monthly fee, and receive exclusive content in return.
So just like you can create stories only seen by your Close Friends List, you can now create stories, reels and lives exclusively for your paying subscribers.
TIKTOKS NEAR ME
TikTok are rolling out the ability to add a geo-tag to your videos, to share your location with your followers. They are also testing a ‘Nearby’ feed in Southeast Asia, making it easier to discover relevant content created close to you.
As this is only in testing, it could be a while before this feed is introduced to UK users, but if and when it is, this could be great for creators and businesses to reach local audiences.
THAT’S ALL FOR THIS MONTH
We hope you enjoyed this month’s round-up and we can’t wait to see what September has in store! Be sure to keep an eye out for next month’s update to see what’s changed!
Don’t forget, you can also get our monthly updates straight through to your inbox when you subscribe to our newsletter here.
Is there something we’ve missed? We’d love to hear any other changes you’ve spotted in the last month, so be sure to share them with us on social media.