"How Social Media Has Changed": Key Takeaways from Hannah Anderson’s Webinar
Author:
Categorised In:
Share:
I attended a fantastic webinar with Hannah Anderson from Social Chain this morning, organised and presented by The Marketing Meetup‘s Joe Glover.
It’s not often I can sit through an entire webinar and the FAQ’s – it’s very rare to find them useful, informative and worth missing an hour of the working day for, but this was one of those rare ones!
For those with short attention spans who can’t watch the recording or another talk by Hannah (although both are highly recommended by me), here the key things that I learned from the session:
Facebook’s Identity Crisis
Hannah believes that Facebook is having an ‘identity crisis’ and doesn’t seem to understand what content their audience wants to see or what their own algorithm is promoting. When she’s on calls with her contact at Facebook they say that they are promoting long-form video content (over 1 minute long), but then they are rolling out test features with much shorter TikTok style video content. Also, when you analyse performance of video content, it is shorter content that is performing better in terms of impressions and reach.
Facebook have also said that they are promoting original content above all else – something else that seems to be at odds with what we see in the newsfeed.
Hannah explained that paid advertising is still a great way to promote your brand on Facebook, which I completely agree with – we’re getting fantastic results with paid Facebook ads for clients here at Embryo. This is down to the incredible targeting options available; to quote Hannah ‘you can target what people have eaten for breakfast’, but growing an audience organically is getting more difficult because it’s hard to understand what kind of content to create and publish because of these mixed messages.
Take Advantage Of Instagram’s New Features
Marketers & brands should take advantage of the newer features Instagram have rolled out, as the algorithm is heavily pushing content posted to these onto users feeds.
Instagram Reels was released just over 2 weeks ago (at the time of writing) and is a TikTok style (read: a rip off of TikTok!) feature promoting “short, entertaining” content which is up to 15 seconds long.
Instagram are also really pushing IGTV, which was a feature first released in 2018. They are soon to be rolling out IGTV ads which will boost engagement with this feature even further, so it’s a great addition to your paid social advertising.
Ride The Carousel
Steven Bartlett’s (the former CEO of Social Chain) Instagram following has grown enormously during lockdown, and Hannah puts it down, at least in part, to increasing the use of carousels.
Carousel content means that individuals have 8 x more content they can engage with, so the likelihood of your audience sharing your post increases with every different screen they can share.
Time To Mention TikTok
You can’t go to a webinar about Social Media at the moment without a mention of TikTok. Lockdown has resulted in a huge rise in TikTok users, even amongst older audiences. Hannah shared some examples of some very well established brands who are using TikTok really well, such as The Washington Post, Chipotle & Converse.
@washingtonpost
Need to practice more ##socialization
♬ original sound – washingtonpost
If it’s right for your brand and reaches your audience, add TikTok into your social channels, but it’s important to make sure it looks like TikTok content. Film it on a phone, keep it original & ‘homemade’ – don’t just share your polished company videos and expect that it would have an impact.
All in all, a really informative session. Thank you to Hannah, Joe Glover at The Marketing Meetup, and the event sponsors for the session!
