10 Aug Facebook to Start Explaining News Feed to Marketers | Social You Should Know
Facebook has promised to explain News Feed to marketers, but I think it’s actually the beginning of an important shift in Facebook’s approach to surfacing content. Plus Instagram allows video importing and new data on how brands annoy on social media in this week’s Social You Should Know.
News Feed Explained
In a somewhat strange move, Facebook held a media event to announce a new blog series written for marketers like us, as well as some tweaks to its algorithm. News Feed FYI will be a series of articles that explain more about how the News Feed works as well as outlining changes it plans to make to the feed. The first change, Story Bumping, is designed to “bump” older stories up near the top of the News Feed if the user didn’t scroll down enough to see them. Facebook says this leads to an 8% increase in likes/comments/shares on organic stories from businesses. I think this is a welcome admission that its News Feed needs work. More and more people are telling me they’re bored with Facebook and data shows that engagement is short lived. That’s a real threat to the platform and this change is hopefully step one toward fixing it. I take a more in depth look at the implications in this short video.
Instagram 4.1 Allows Importing of Videos
Instagram 4.0 was the major update that introduced 15-second videos to the platform to compete with Vine’s 6-second play. But, neither service allowed much editing because you couldn’t import a video from your phone. Instagram 4.1 changes that, meaning you can shoot content of any length, narrow it to the best 15-seconds and then run it through the app. That should also allow us to run videos through an approval process, which is great for many of our clients. Nice move by Instagram.
New Research on How Brands Annoy on Social Media
Poor spelling or grammar was the number one pet peeve of consumers in regards to brand updates on social media, according to a survey of 1,003 UK consumers. Interestingly, the 18-24 age group care far less about grammar or spelling. Their chief complaint is that brands don’t post often enough. That surprised me. Posting too often was their least concern. Those in the 45-54 demo say that “salesy” updates are their second biggest turn off, after grammar. So let’s keep spelling correctly and sharing updates that aren’t “shilly.” Wait, is “shilly” bad grammar?
