This week on the Digital Coffee,
Snapchat finally embraces business.
Pinterest tweaks its algorithm to help us burst out of our bubbles.
And YouTube is going to show us the other videos that our
audience watches. All that and more after this
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And welcome to the Digital Coffee.
This is your weekly dose of digital marketing and social
media news for small business. My name is Amanda Webb,
Did you know that Snapchat users still
exist? Yeah, they do.
Snapchat users are aged in general between
ages 13 and 24. Did you know that in the UK?
And I know some of you are based in the UK.
There is 18.5 million users of Snapchat.
Now of course we're tiny in Ireland. So it didn't give me statistics on that,
but we kind of know that if it's a trend in the UK,
it's probably a trend here too.
And did you know that 61% of Snapchat users are female?
Why am I telling you this? Well, maybe if that is your audience,
if those are the people you want to reach, it is time to look at Snapchat again,
because this week Snapchat have started rolling out dumdumdum,
business accounts,
which surprisingly we've never had before.
Actually they're calling them brand accounts.
And at the moment they're rolling them out to a select few businesses.
And they're big brands like this example here, it's a big brand,
but they are planning to roll this out to all businesses by the
end of the year. And this I'm finding quite exciting.
What do you get from a business account on Snapchat? Well, firstly,
you're going to get highlights. So, you know,
like in your Instagram and you can highlight specific stories,
you're going to be able to do that on your business account.
You are going to be able to feature lenses,
which I'm guessing most small businesses aren't going to have an AR lens,
but this could be something to invest in, in the future.
Cause of course they can be used on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook,
all over the place now. And you're also going to get more analytics.
So you're going to be able to find out the demographics of the people who are
engaging with your account. I like the AR lenses just to skip back.
I like the idea of that because of course,
if you've gone to all that hassle to create an AR lens and nobody knows about
it, nobody's ever going to use it and they're kind of hard to find.
There's so many lenses in Snapchat that people actually have to search and find
your lens.
This way you could just direct people to your account and they'll be able to
click and use your lens from there.
Shops,you're going to be able to integrate ashop via Shopify if you're using Shopify
and I'm sure they'll roll this out further.
Just like you can with Facebook and Instagram.
So they're going in on e-commerce too.
Of course everyone is because this trend towards e-commerce isn't going away
when lock down is finally over when this horrible thing is finally over,
there is still going to be massive e-commerce so they're supporting that too.
You'll also be able to access from the web and be able to use teams to
update your account. So I think this is great.
If your audience is people between 13 and 24,
mostly female,
it's definitely worth taking another look at Snapchat.
I know most of you don't but if you are using TikTok for your business,
where do you think you might migrate to?
If it all goes belly up for TikTok,
a lot of people are talking Instagram, but some people might look at Snapchat.
And I think that makes sense. Doesn't it? Because they share a demographic.
It is that younger audience.
So that's your audience and you're on TikTok and you're successful there,
time to go back to Snapchat. I think, and Snapchat recognise this too.
Snapchat are preparing for the invasion of TikTok
users by testing a new navigation.
So I think when Snapchat came out, one of the things that oldies like me,
couldn't get their head around with the navigation on Snapchat.
So it's all like left and right.
It's very easy now.
Cause we all tap things left and right on all the story platforms that we use,
but it seemed kind of new. So Snapchat are going to change this.
It's still going to be you tap left to move on to the next story element
or tap, tap, right? Tap left to go backwards.
But if you swipe, instead of moving onto the next story,
you're just going to exit out of stories. The new navigation will,
when you want to go onto the next story, you'll swipe up. And that,
that is very TikToky because the TikTok navigation is a swipe up to go
from video to video on TikTok. That's what you do.
Why are Snapchat doing this? Well,
I think probably they are anticipating getting some users over from
TikTok. And by using this navigation system, they are making those users,
who may never have been on Snapchat before,
a little bit more comfortable with the network.
And I want you to think about that or we should think about that as a group.
Really. I need to,
to think about when we get customers coming from other places,
what are their expectations from who they worked with before?
And maybe we do want to throw those out the window,
but maybe the some things that we can implement that will make them feel at home
and comfortable and make it a little less of a jarring experience for them
to move.
The problem with algorithms on social media is they kind of keep you in a
bubble. Yes, they work.
They work because they work mostly on the people that you engage
with. They know you like those people.
So they tend to show you more posts from those people or more posts similar to
that. And what happens is you often see,
and I see this a lot on Facebook and Twitter,
the same posts coming up over and over and over and over again because somebody
else has engaged with that post and it pops up again.
So the content becomes a little bit stale and also you just keep seeing
content from the same people. It's,
it's very rarely that something new from somebody new pops into your feet.
And this is why we get these bubbles, these social media bubbles,
where we don't really see outside our own space.
So we don't see aspects of the world that aren't included in the
people that it shows us posts from.
And Pinterest has noticed this.
Pinterest has noticed that the content we see is too similar and it is stale,
and they want to do something about it. So yes,
they are still going to do things with our algorithm that will prioritise
content for the people that you engage with the most.
But they're also going to add a new layer of signaling to decide what they're
going to show you in the feed.
And this is going to include more video content,
more video content.
And actually let me get the exact wording because it's interesting,
more video content with actionable ideas. So to me,
that means tutorials. And when you think back to what's been popular,
what Pinterest was about a lot of the time,
it was those infographics that would show you step by step,
how to create something, how to do something.
So they're looking for a video version of that.
If that's something you can do,
and I know there's some of you here that can then definitely
embrace video.
They're also just going to surface a lot more new content rather than showing
you the same content all the time. They're going to surface some new content,
make sure you're seeing more variety in your feed.
They're also going to show you pins that are more representative
of a diverse community. And I think that is brilliant.
I think that is huge.
It's really mad to see a social network embracing diversity to that
extent. I think we have to applaud Pinterest for it,
but what does that mean to business? It's actually good news.
If you're not big on Pinterest or even if you are,
your content is going to get shown to more people,
it's going to get shown to people outside that normal bubble that engage with
you.
It's going to draw new people into your account. And of course,
if you create video, you're on a winner.
So a big thumbs up to Pinterest from me, even,
even though I'm not really a Pinterest user.
How much do you know about the people who consume your
content? How much do you know about what other sorts of content they consume?
Cause that would be really useful, right? If we knew that information,
we could tailor our content more specifically to the people
that we want to reach. And we'd also know,
are we actually reaching the right people?
Are we reaching the people that we intended to? Well,
this week YouTube wants to help us with that.
Youtube are launching a new section in analytics that will
show you the other videos that the people who watch your videos
watch, this is brand new. I do not have it yet.
They are currently rolling it out.
But I think this is important because it's really important that we know our
audiences. And a lot of the time we just have to guess, we just have to guess.
So now we can look at the videos they look at.
We can gauge the style we can know,
is that style good for us?
Would it work for us if they liked that sort of video?
If it's completely off the wall to what we normally do,
why did they watch our video? If they like that sort of stuff,
maybe we want to incorporate that style in also topics.
What topics are they looking at? And sometimes you're going to find that,
just looking at exactly the same topic of the video they looked at for you,
which means they were just looking at a hundred videos that were going to answer
your question. And in fact,
they didn't find the answer or they found the answer there, but if they haven't,
it could inform you on other topics that you could be creating videos around
that might attract your audience. And if it's completely off,
if you think your audience is completely off, which I found out many years ago,
that I was attracting completely, completely the wrong audience on YouTube.
It's either time to completely redo your strategy or maybe look at another
channel.
is now actually a good time to advertise on TikTok.
Even with the potential bans of TikTok in the
US the UK Australia,
the actual ban of TikTok in India.
Could it be a good time to advertise? Well,
TikTok may be responding to all this bad press.
They have just launched the ads platform,
self serve ads to all businesses.
And not just that. They're also going to give you free advertising credit.
So it could be a way to learn how TikTok ads work and to
do it for free. Now, my advice here would be,
if you are not using TikTok for business,
don't make the first thing that you do on TikTok an ad,
because you really need to go to TikTok, understand the platform,
understand how the posts work, so that when you do create an ad,
it fits in it doesn't jar with the platform.
But if you are using TikTok, this is a massive opportunity.
It's a massive opportunity to get out there, to reach people now,
while Tiktok is definitely still a thing,
cause it's definitely is still a thing.
And to start building an audience that maybe you can push somewhere else,
Snapchat that we were talking about today or Instagram or somewhere else,
it's an opportunity for you to learn the advertising system,
which is similar to Facebook.
A lot of the social ad platforms have a similar self-serve thing.
So it should look familiar and
definitely to try it out. However,
if you've never used TikTok now is definitely not the time to start.
What if you could have
virtual meetings on LinkedIn?
Would that be cool? So virtual meetings like you might have on Zoom,
like you might have in Facebook rooms on LinkedIn? Well, it could be happening.
Reverse engineer,
Jane Manchun Wong spotted this week that in
messenger,
you will be able to hook up your own meeting software and schedule and
host meetings from LinkedIn messages.
And I love this. I love this. I think this is such a good idea.
Not for the types of meetings,
group meetings you might have on zoom or training.
But if you're in a conversation on LinkedIn and it turns into, Oh,
we should have a chat instead of setting a date and a time to meet,
because that doesn't really happen anymore.
And particularly if you are dealing with people overseas, you can just say, Oh,
let's hop on a call and you'll be able to have a video call.
Whether it's a sales call, a discovery call,
just a chat to get to know that person better.
And I think this is really important because we do feel like we're now we're
living in this world of virtual meetings.
We do feel when we meet someone face to face like this,
that we are beginning to get to know them. So I'm excited about this update.
If it happens now, Jane is a reverse engineer,
which means she dips into code. And I don't know how she does it.
She hacks stuff to find out what these new features may be.
But I do think that would be brilliant. Do you,
what do you think, would you use this?
If you are an admin on a Facebook group,
or even if you're in an active Facebook group,
it is so hard to see all the new posts that appear in that group.
Because when you go in,
you have the announcements and then you have all the posts that people have.
They may be old posts,
but they were the posts that people had commented on or they've engaged with.
And Facebook pushes them up to the top of the group feed.
And you can actually scroll for ages and totally miss a new post.
And Facebook knows this is a problem. Facebook is going to fix this problem.
It is going to add, or it is testing,
adding a little bafhr to the top right hand side of
posts on your Facebook group that you haven't seen with a little blue dot on it.
So that means when you scroll through,
it's going to be so much easier for you to actually just straight away spot
the posts you haven't seen, which is going to be huge. I think the admins,
they need to do something about this in a way, right?
Because I miss spammy posts. I have to rely on,
on users to flag spammy posts. And you know,
I might see them a few days later and delete them if I see them at all in my own
group and it's not even massively active, it's just a nice little community.
If you're in a really active group, it could be a nightmare.
Also for the group that I, groups I pay to be in.
Obviously if I'm paying to be in that group,
I want to see all the content in that group. That's important too.
So if I was able to log in once a day and just find those ones with a little
blue dot, to be honest, it would be nice if they just gave me a tab, but hey,
hey, Facebook, that would be so much easier.
I think this is a brilliant update from Facebook and I can't wait to
get it in my own group.