Welcome to another edition of “This week on Social Media”. We have quite a few stories to recap. This was quite the week on social media. So read on :
Twitter doubles its character count for tweets
This week saw a big change for the micro blogging website twitter as it doubled its character count to 280. There are different ways to look at this big change. Twitter hopes that the increased number of characters will result in users spending less time editing tweets. Which may in turn increase engagement? In a test run over preselected individuals, twitter claimed that the increased count resulted in only 1%of tweets running up the character limit as opposed to 9% historically.
This could result in extremely long tweets in the near future as users take advantage of the extended count. What this could also mean is that the tone of tweets will change and messages instead of being pithy will be more descriptive. Which could mean discussions can be more thoughtful?
Twitter also increases the display name to 50 characters
What good is the increased character count if the display name is just 20 characters? So twitter announced yet another update including more characters. This time it’s the display name. Now imagine how many emojis you can pack in your name. Companies could even have their taglines in them; Instead of your middle names you can now also add all your aliases. It would be interesting to see how creative users are when using the extended character count for their display name. Our guess is it would require a lot of moderation.
Instagram could allow you to follow hashtags
Wouldn’t it be great if you could follow an event on Instagram? Well this hashtag follow feature allows you to do just that. Now you can keep tabs on topics that really matter to you. Events and news are just two top of mind possibilities. As a marketer this could mean that you have additional avenues to create awareness, it could also mean greater longevity for a campaign. Sounds really exciting! Can’t wait for this feature to roll out!
Facebook Stories for Business Pages
Facebook’s stories will come to business pages by next month, which mean businesses can post videos and pictures at the top of their news feed. Stories can work well as a customer engagement tool as long as your content doesn’t resemble an advertisement. People will want to be entertained, expect authenticity, and be interested in knowing your brand beyond the marketing/promotional messages they’re accustomed to.
Some possibilities are
- Behind the scenes
- Inside look at your business
- Meet the team
- Celebrations
Essentially all non marketing messages that can have greater engagement with consumers.
Interactive Poll Sticker in Instagram Stories
Instagram has introduced an interactive poll sticker that allows you to ask a question and see real-time answers from followers. You can add a two-option poll on top of your Stories, and poll results will be available for 24 hours. There is no news on whether the binary option will evolve into multiple-choice answers. However, it is expected to assist businesses with social media analytics and listening.
Musical.ly deprioritizing Music?
Musical.ly has decided to deprioritize music in favor of more UGC. Features like next wave, FIRSTLISTEN and artist hashtag contests have been discontinued. Their intent is for marketers to utilize their muses to create more remakes of the artist song. This means that the unlicensed original sound will be used more and become more popular than the official audio of the artist. This will make marketing music to a highly engaged community of muses very difficult.
It definitely makes musical.ly less attractive to artists as their names do not get featured in the track but it drives better engagement and greater number of