Tag Archive for: Social Media News

Instagram Launches Official Account Dedicated To Helping Businesses

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Social media marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and raise awareness for your business, but getting started can be difficult. Every social network has its quirks and kinks to manage and you can’t use the same recipe for success across all platforms.

That’s why Instagram is launching a new official account, dedicated solely to sharing business tips and case studies to help inspire your marketing and advertising on the popular social photo platform.

The aptly titled @instagramforbusiness launched yesterday, starting with a showcase of Ben & Jerry’s, a company that has been marketing itself on Instagram since the platforms very early days in 2011.

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Instagram says business has always been an essential part of Instagram from its very start, and it expects even more to follow suit following the launch of Instagram ads.

In the future, the company will be sharing content through the account designed to inspire and motivate marketing and advertising efforts on Instagram. Here’s what you can expect to see shared on the new account:

“Each week, we’ll run exclusive, behind-the-scenes stories that inspire, inform and showcase the work done by three important groups in our business community from all around the world—brands, small businesses and creative agencies.”

In the coming week, the account will be sharing stories from a local Chicago florist called Flowers for Dreams and New York creative agency BBDO.

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Facebook Experiments With Letting Some Brands Post GIFs

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While Facebook users have been able to share animated GIDs on Facebook since this spring, businesses and other Page owners have been left out in the rain. Now, Facebook is testing the animated image format with a small selection of Pages, suggesting the feature may be available to all Pages in the near future.

As reported by TechCrunch, Wendy’s and Coca-Cola’s Brazilian brand Kuat unveiled the small test by posting GIFs yesterday.

Facebook has since confirmed that a small number of Pages have been given the ability to post GIFs as an experiment, saying in an email:

“GIF’s can be a fun and compelling way to communicate, so we’ve started testing GIF support in posts and boosted posts for a small percentage of Facebook Pages. We will evaluate whether it drives a great experience for people before rolling it out to more Pages.”

As with posting GIFs on personal profiles, GIFs are posted on Facebook by pasting in a link from a third-party source such as Giphy, Imgur, or Tumblr. They will still not be displayed if directly uploaded into the Facebook platform.

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Facebook Gives Page Owners a Warning About Upcoming Drops in Likes

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Faceboo LikesIn the next few weeks, you are likely to lose at least a couple likes on your Facebook Page. It isn’t a sign people are losing interest in your brand however. Facebook has just announced they will stop including likes from memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts in the totals for likes on Pages.

The company issued the warning in a blog post yesterday, saying the move will help give businesses more accurate information about the people following their Page and improve ad targeting efficiency.

As the post explains:

Over the coming weeks, Page admins should expect to see a small dip in their number of Page likes as a result of this update. It’s important to remember, though, that these removed likes represent people who were already inactive on Facebook.

According to Facebook, Page owners should not expect big drops. The average Pages should only lose a few followers, but any Pages who have paid for Likes or used other artificial means of inflating their total may see substantially larger losses.

Facebook is also warning Page administrators with an alert within Insights:

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Instagram Purges Fake Accounts, But Large Brands Are Largely Undisturbed

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Instagram LogoMany celebrities and popular internet figures were shocked last week when they lost thousands upon thousands of followers in the Instagram Rapture. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, as Instagram gave warning they would be deleting fake and spammy accounts, but the purge of useless accounts still caused an uproar across the social network.

Celebrities were the hardest hit, as Justin Bieber lost over 5 million followers, or 15% of his total followers. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million, but rapper Mase received the most embarrassing lost as his 1.6 million followers dropped to only 100,000 in under 20-minutes. His account was deleted quickly after.

Instagram was clear the purge would be coming in their announcement they had hit 300 million active followers. They noted spammy accounts had already been deactivated for violation of community and were not included in the count.

“When we remove accounts from Instagram that don’t follow our Community Guidelines, you may see a decrease in your follower count,” the company wrote in its blog post. “This shouldn’t affect engagement from authentic accounts that like and comment on your posts.”

Celebrities may still be reeling from their large drops in followers, but most marketers are celebrating and larger brands haven’t seen much of a change. For marketers, the deletion of spam accounts means better analysis of how many people are being reached with each post.

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Twitter and Facebook Want To Keep You Up To Date With World Cup 2014

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We are just a day away from the start of World Cup 2014, and this year’s competition will be the most socially connected yet. Social media use is at an all-time high, and Twitter and Facebook are locked in a battle for the place as the dominant platform users turn to for keeping up to date with scores, game times, and fan response.

Though soccer is often treated like a novelty in the US, the sport actually has a strong and passionate audience across the country – not to mention the unbelievably large fan base around the world. FIFA claims that around 3.2 million people watched at least one game of the last World Cup in 2010, and this year seems likely to get even more viewers.

As Twitter and Facebook made clear with announcements yesterday, both platforms are hoping to get a piece of the action by rolling out campaigns aimed at promoting soccer and encouraging fans to turn to their specific platforms.

Facebook’s Trending World Cup Page

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Facebook’s News Feed algorithm isn’t exactly well-suited for keeping up with real-time conversation like Twitter is, but it is offering a Trending World Cup page designed to help fans follow the latest scores, match highlights, and conversation. The page will even allow users to click through a global map which displays the Facebook popularity of top World Cup players.

Several people, including Marketing Land, have already used the global map to discover some fairly interesting statistics, such as England’s Wayne Rooney being strangely popular in Namibia.

As with all of Facebook’s trending pages, the World Cup page will also show the latest posts from friends, players, teams, and the media making sure you never miss a spectacular goal or scandalous foul.

Facebook users will be able to filter conversations based on the specific match they are watching as well, once the games have started.

Twitter’s World Cup Landing Page and Hashflags

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Twitter users can already access a dedicated World Cup landing page via the hashtags #WorldCup and #WorldCup2014, which offers a scoreboard and updates with conversation about the event and games. Similar to Facebook, Twitter will also allow users to organize what content they are seeing by selecting “match timelines” that only show tweets about specific games.

This is fairly standard for users, but Twitter users from the last World Cup may be excited to see that “hashflags” are returning for the latest competition. Introduced for the 2010 World Cup, the feature displays flag icons of people who include appropriate three-letter hashtags in their tweets. Before the games kick off on Thursday, Twitter will also unveil “The World Cup of Tweets” bracket.

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The social platform is also acting to retain new users who choose Twitter for their World Cup 2014 social needs by adding soccer suggestions to the sign-up process throughout the games.

“After you sign up and choose your username, you can select the team you’re supporting,” Twitter’s Xiaolei Li wrote in a blog post. “Then you can choose from a number of profile and header photos that represent your country. (Of course, you can upload your own photos too.)”

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Twitter Announces Their Submission For IPO

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Twitter LogoIt may not come as a surprise to those who have been watching closely, but this week Twitter put the rumors to rest by officially filing for their IPO. Twitter was naturally assumed to be the next major online technology company to file for an IPO after Facebook went public.

Twitter announced their submission of an S-1 to the SEC exactly how you would expect; they tweeted the news yesterday. The announcement read: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

One of the most interesting factors of the filing is that Twitter filed a “secret” IPO, and the terms will be kept secret under new regulations from the JOBS Act, which allow small businesses to keep their financial information from the public.

According to The Verge, Twitter is the first well-known web company to file for a “secret” IPO, but it also confirms that Twitter has less than $1 billion in revenue. They will eventually have to release their financial information, but not until “the road show part of their public offering,” as Search Engine Watch explains.

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