Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop, your weekly update of everything that's happened in the past week in the world of social media marketing for the week ending the 24th of November, 2024. Let's dive on in.
First up this week, Instagram is making some big changes to hashtags. Now, you may have noticed when you logged in to Instagram, you had an announcement at the top of your feed, declaring that Instagram is removing the option to follow hashtags. Now, the announcement also noted that any topics that you already follow, so those are hashtags that you already follow, will no longer display posts and reels in your feed. Now, what the heck does this mean for you? Well, essentially, Instagram is doing this to help reduce spam and all that irrelevant content that we get clustering up our feeds. What happens is some people will create a post and they'll share it using hashtags that are irrelevant to their post, but the poster knows that they're popular, so they will help them get more reach on that content.
Now, this can be really frustrating because if you wanted to follow, for example, posts that are relevant to your local area, so you might follow. For me, it might be #hawkesbay, but other people will post content using that hashtag that's not actually relevant to Hawksbay. I I don't want that content in my feed. I only want relevant content. This is Instagram's way of stopping this from happening. So effectively, we won't be able to follow topics anymore. So again, if we were interested in Hawke's Bay content, I would search for the hashtag #hawksbay, and I would click the Follow button so that I could see any posts that have that tag on it. Now, that will not be happening anymore. So basically, you cannot follow topics like that anymore. And If you are already following topics or hashtags, content using those tags won't be popping up in your feed anymore.
Now, does this mean that you should stop using hashtags? Absolutely not. So hashtags are still really helpful for giving context to your post, helping the algorithm understand what your topic is. Obviously for search, so we can still search using hashtags. So I don't think this means that we'll see a massive change in the way that we use hashtags. But obviously, if I can give you one piece of advice Plus, it's to make sure that you're using relevant hashtags. Don't just add any old hashtag to your post, which I don't think you would be doing.
Next up, another update from Instagram. So Instagram has confirmed on the record that it does not penalise sponsored content. So sponsored content is the post that creators are paid or incentivized to create. They might have been given free product or payment to create that content. And usually, these are marked with a paid partnership label. Now, there was a bit of a rumour going around found, if you did declare that this was paid or sponsored content, that your reach for that post would be reduced. So Instagram has come out publicly and said, No, that is absolutely not the case. We really want you to be declaring those paid partnerships, that sponsored content. Obviously, countries have different laws around it. There's different guidelines. So it's really important that we're transparent and we make sure we declare that content.
Also from Instagram this week, Instagram is now displaying how many inactive profiles are among your followers. So head into your Follower list and you'll see there's a section there now to show you how many inactive or which of your followers are inactive, which accounts have been disabled. So you can go through and remove those from your audience. Now, I just did this this morning. I removed a whole bunch of accounts that have been disabled. They're not relevant. They don't need to be in my following count. Yes, okay, it did reduce the number of followers that I have. But what's the point in having followers that are not, they're not going to even see or engage with my content, so just get rid of them.
Now, Facebook appears to have added the option to post stories exclusively to subscribers. If you have If you have subscribers over on Facebook, if you have people who pay to see your content, you can now share stories exclusively to those people. Instagram is testing a way for people to reset the content recommendations that they see in their Explore, Reels, and Feed. Recommended content is getting more and more common in our feeds. So again, an Explore reels and in our feed. Now, over time, Instagram learns about you. It learns about your interests, and so that content that's recommended to you is specific to you.
Now, if you start seeing a lot of recommended content that is really not relevant, what you can actually do is reset those recommendations recommendations. So effectively, that puts your account back to as if you're brand new on Instagram. So it's like Instagram knows nothing about you, and over time, it will relearn your interests. Now, Instagram did recommend that we We won't all jump in there and reset our recommendations. Now, there's a reason why the algorithm is so smart, and it shows us content that we're interested in. If we were to reset that, it's probably just going to show us recommended content that has the highest engagement on the platform, and it will take time for the algorithm to learn your interests again. You may find that the content you're being recommended is really not relevant if you do that reset. Just have a good think about it before you jump in and actually reset that.
Now, this one's an interesting one. Instagram appears to be moving the story highlights. You know on your profile, you've got those little circles at the top where you can keep some stories around as highlights and you can group them into different groups. Now, that appears to be moving into a tab. On our profile under those circles, we usually have our grid, so we see all of our posts. Then we have another tab which shows us all of our reels. Then we usually have another tab that shows us any content that we have been tagged in. This change would see another tab added to those three there, and it would include those story highlights. This is going to be a very different display. Instead of that little circle right at the top, really prominent in our profile, it's going to be hidden away a little bit, and it's going to be more of a... From the screenshot that I've seen, it's more of a vertical layout, so very similar to the current reels tab. It'll be interesting to see if this one rolls out to everyone. It's still in testing at the moment.
Facebook has been spotted inviting some creators to use licenced music for their reels. Now, if you create a lot of reels, you'll know over on Instagram, we can find ways around getting access to the good music, the licenced music. But over on Facebook, it's often been a lot harder. Now, this is very interesting. From the screenshot that I saw, it appears that if you do choose to use the licenced music, it means that you will share revenue with the licence holder. So effectively, your reel might get pushed out and there might be some earnings alongside that, but those earnings would be split with, obviously, whoever owns the licence to that music, and also yourself. So it'll be interesting to see if this is going roll out even wider or if it will just stick with the creators who are monetised and have the ability to earn through posting reels.
Linkedin has launched a new Create page to really help you build your personal brand. Now, It's full of tips for writing engaging posts, how to understand your analytics, how to grow your audience. If you are a LinkedIn user, it's well worth checking out. I'll pop a link in the show notes.
Instagram is testing a feature only on iOS, so only for Apple devices. That will allow users to create small groups of followers and then send them posts based on their interests. You can group together followers and then just send out content to your posts to those groups. Now, I feel like this is going to be far more useful to me personally than the close friends feature. I think I would use it in a similar way to help me segment my audience, but I just think the ability to post that content and then share it rather than only sharing it to close friends, I think that would be far more useful for me.
Threads has announced a change to its For You page, showing you fewer posts from accounts that you don't follow to really help me focus on the content posted by the people that you do follow. Now, this one pricked my ears because every other platform seems to be leaning more into the recommended content. So showing you what it thinks you might be interested in rather than content from your connexions, your network, your businesses that you follow, that thing. So this seems to be a bit of a step in the other direction, going back to actually focusing on showing you the content from the people that you follow.
Lastly, this week, Instagram appears to be testing its own version of Linktree, but only for meta-verified users, so only for those users who pay for a subscription. But it looks very similar to Linktree, like a single landing page with lots of different links. You can share them, showcase them all in one, really simple, easy landing page.
There we have it. There are your social media marketing updates for the week ending the 24th of November, 2024. If you'd like to continue the conversation, come on over and find me on social media. You'll find me @socialsmarty.co, pretty much everywhere. I'd love to chat. Until next week, stay social.
