Social Media in 2020
Staying fluent in social media means keeping up to date with the latest features, changes, and trends. Not always an easy thing to do considering the sheer number of social media platforms out there that are constantly churning out new stuff. 2020 especially has seen explosive growth for social media use, and these platforms have responded brilliantly to meet demand.
Social media platforms are constantly developing ways to improve their platforms. Refining the user experience, creating new ways to create and interact with content, and designing features for everyday users, bloggers, vloggers, influencers, and businesses are all top priority for development teams.
Part of our job is to stay on top of these changes to social media. So, we’ve put together a list of some of the more interesting updates recently released by the bigger platforms. And we may as well start with the biggest social platform out there: Facebook.
Facebook wasn’t the first social media site to emerge on the net, but it is undoubtedly the biggest with over 1.69 billion users in 2020.
Source: Statista
Facebook has been steadily rolling out new features of late, especially for the Facebook for Business platform. These features improve the user experience for admins and make promoting your business on Facebook simpler, which is always good for time-poor business owners that manage their own socials.
Facebook Shops
A recent update to the Commerce Manager for Facebook (and Instagram) Shops enabled the ability to create discounts, sales, and promo codes. This is a great feature for clearing out stock and encouraging customers to make purchases.
Currently, this is only a feature that U.S. store owners can use. We’re hoping it comes to Australian stores soon!
To learn more about how you can use this new feature in the future, check out the Business Help Center here!
Image Visual Effects
Although not unleashed across the board yet, Facebook is creating a new set of visual effects that can be applied to images. These effects apply simple animations to a static image, creating a video-like motion – like a focus or zoom.
In providing content curators with options like this, the creation of more dynamic, attention-grabbing imagery is possible.
20% Text Limit
To the frustration of many, Facebook ads were once ruled by a 20% text limit on all ad images. Facebook recently lifted this rule, and there now appears to be no maximum text limit.
In Facebook’s best practices for photo ads, they still advise keeping text to a minimum.
Instagram is the influencer platform, and many businesses thrive on here when they use hashtags correctly and curate a visually interesting feed.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, recently re-launched the Pages Manager as the Facebook Business Suite, an app that allows for cross-app management of messages, posting, notifications, and access to the analytics features.
As an app designed with small businesses in mind, which may have small teams and lack a dedicated social media manager, this is a useful tool for managing two of the most popular social media platforms.
Learn more about the Facebook Business Suite!
Snapchat
Snapchat isn’t for every business. Those that do find themselves leaning on the niche platform may discover Snap Connect to be a useful educational tool.
Marketers and social media managers can get a crash course in direct-response advertising on Snapchat through the three Snap Connect certifications on offer. Straight from Snapchat itself, these certifications officer “fresh insights, product solutions, creative best practices, and client success stories – all tailored to your industry and region”.
Currently, these three video-based courses focus on Mobile Gaming, Apps, and E-Commerce in relation to advertising. There’s currently no word on if new courses will be added to the roster in the future.
TikTok
Thinking about how your business can venture into the world of TikTok has to be a head-scratcher no more. Meet the Learn Feed, a dedicated stream of educational videos that users can tap into at will, much like how the Following and For You feeds work.
With this new educational-focused feed, businesses can create informative content on this creative platform. This feature is still in the testing phase and only accessible to a limited number of users. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how this feature develops!
LinkedIn is the B2B social media platform. It’s always been the place to create new industry connections online, especially after networking events. Two new features on the platform make that even easier.
LinkedIn Live
Live-streaming has skyrocketed in popularity over the past year, and it’s not a surprise. In an effort to provide businesses with the ability to stream, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Live, a platform for creating virtual events with real-time streaming.
LinkedIn Live has already been shown to earn more engagement than other types of video too. Used correctly, this tool can be a great asset for businesses, and LinkedIn even outlines some good guidelines for best practice live-streaming.
Invite to Follow
Growing your engagement and following on LinkedIn became so much easier when the platform introduced the ability to send out Follow invitations. Admins on your business’s LinkedIn page are able to invite 1st-degree connections to like and follow the page.
People are able to opt-out of this feature if they don’t want to receive invites, which is fair enough. Still, this makes the post-networking event much more interesting as you can immediately create connections between people and your business page, not just through your own personal LinkedIn profile.
This is a particularly useful feature for creating industry connections between your business and others.
And That’s A Wrap
The updates and features that we covered in this article are just a snippet of what’s new in social media for 2020. We’re curious to see what 2021 will bring!
