29 Oct October 2018 Social Media Updates
Brands and content creators are in full swing developing their holiday plans! Social media networks take this Q4 push to provide updates and release new products, while also providing tips and tricks on how to boost traffic, drive sales, and increase video views. Grab your pumpkin spice latte and catch up on the October Social Media Updates.
Facebook continues to evolve with the roll out of three features this month: Premieres, Video Polls and Top Fans. These features allow business pages to interact with their fans in new and innovative ways. Facebook took a page from YouTube’s book and created their own version of Premieres, which gives pages the ability to schedule live videos. Premieres has all the elements of a Live video, only now videos can be scheduled up to a week in advance. During the testing phase of Premieres, Facebook still saw engagement and value in creating content this way.
In collaboration with Live videos, Facebook has now distributed Video Polls. By receiving real-time feedback from these polls, content creators are able to understand their audience better and in turn, produce live and on-demand videos that their audience will want to tune in to.
Lastly, Facebook announced Top Fans as a feature to business pages. Top Fans highlights a business pages’ most loyal fans by including a badge next to the user’s name. Users earn this title by being an active member of the community. Top Fans gives business the ability to communicate with and reward their faithful fans. These new features from Facebook give businesses the chance to share their content in a way that their audience can appreciate.
To no surprise, Facebook is dominating the video ad spend market. EMarketer’s latest research shows that by the end of 2018, Facebook will account for nearly 25% of all video ad spending over the last year. $6.81 billion dollars will have been put toward online video advertising on Facebook (including Instagram), which is up 30% from 2017. Twitter and Snapchat fall behind Facebook in video ad spending, but are still continuing to hold steady in the market with 2.3% and 5.1% shares, respectively.
Finally, Pinterest lists what they predict will be the top trends to gift this holiday season. The trending categories for 2018 are home décor, jewelry, wellness, toys, hosting, and tech accessories. These categories have had significant growth in Pinterest searches over the last year, which is how the site determined these trends. Pinterest noted that 62 million users will go to their platform to search out the best present for their family and friends.
Don’t want to fall behind on the latest social media news? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Social You Should Know, by subscribing below.
