Social media have become a fixture in our daily lives. As the young and the old have become familiar with the various features, the novelty has worn off. In order to remain exciting, individual channels continuously develop new features to keep people engaged and remain relevant. In the following, we present recently (or soon to be) introduced features of Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram that might benefit your marketing activities.
YouTube and Co. better watch out – FacebookWatch is coming soon!
With Watch, the social media giant wants to compete with YouTube, various other streaming services and even the good old-fashioned TV set. Exclusive content such as entertainment shows are to be streamed on the new service.
Even though Facebook already has an own video area, Watch will be a much larger and more personalized video streaming site. Both shorter series (about 5-15 minutes length) as well as TV-length series (with about 30 minutes length) will be featured. Content recommendations will be personalized according to friends' viewing preferences. Users will see what friends have liked and what they talk about. This is the main difference to YouTube and Co: Consuming content together.
LinkedIn introduced optimized search function
In addition to a new home feed, the introduction of a new messaging service and calendar chatbots, LinkedIn has also implemented a new and improved search feature. Users can now search across the entire platform according to the keywords they enter. It is therefore no longer necessary to search for the various categories. A single keyword shows results from the categories Jobs, Companies and People. The so-called "top hits" are immediately visible. Searching for specific keywords has been greatly facilitated with this optimization.
Instagram allows multiple media in a single post
It is now possible to post several media, i.e. photos and videos, on the popular app Instagram in bulk. All users have to do is choose the "select several" option when preparing a new post. Up to 10 media can be published at once. Subsequently, a filter can be selected for all photos. Photos can be edited individually as well. However, the caption of all photos is the same. This feature is ideal to show different perspectives or features of a product or event. Impressive panoramas can be created as well.
All in all, social media keep marketers on their toes as they have to discover, try out and assess new features to test if they can be used to the benefit of their marketing strategy.
Read more about Social Media Marketing.
