November 2020

Instagram – Shop & Reels

Let’s kick things off with Instagram this month – you may have noticed that the Shop and Reels tabs  have been added to your home screen. Is this Instagram’s way of pushing Reels, and sales for Shops?! It will be interesting to see the results. Only time can tell.

Instagram – Keyword Search

One update we believe will be a huge help to users and promoters on Instagram is the addition of Keyword Search, where users will be able to search for certain keywords that may not have been used as a hashtag or username. This will be easier for us all to find what we are looking for and eliminates the need for multiple hashtags in posts.

Instagram – FAQs

Instagram are also testing a new FAQ option – allowing brands to highlight FAQs where users tap and get an answer straight away. When a user goes to message your page, they will be able to click FAQ’s and if these answers are not what they are looking for, they can then proceed to message the account. We have seen this on other platforms of course but this may be a welcome update for social media mangers, as it should cut down their time spent on replying to customer queries.

Twitter – Carousel Ads

Now, let’s move onto Twitter where they have announced a new carousel ad option. Advertisers on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram will be familiar with these, and in our experience, they work well on these platforms. Our thinking is that it is a good addition to Twitter’s ad options. Unfamiliar with carousel ads? These are single ads with multiple images that you can flick through and click through to purchase – quite common for retailers, which we are sure you’ll have seen on your feeds.

Twitter – Fleets

Staying with Twitter, the most notable update has been the release of Fleets to more countries. Just in case you don’t know what Fleets are, they are pretty much a copy of Instagram Stories. However, due to some blips in the process, Twitter have announced that they are slowing down the rollout to fix some performance and stability issues. If done right, Fleets could be a great way for Twitter to generate revenue with enabling advertising on Fleets. Will Fleets be an exact replica of Instagram Stories or how will they go about differentiating themselves?

LinkedIn – Issues

To finish up this month’s Sparks, it’s not really an update, but certainly a must-know. Here goes – LinkedIn has announced that they have found two measurement issues with LinkedIn ads, resulting in over reporting on sponsored campaigns. It is believed that over 418,000 customers have been affected. LinkedIn will be providing accounts that they overcharged with credit as well as working with the media rating council to perform an audit of its metrics. Even though this shouldn’t have happened, it’s good to see LinkedIn owning up to their mistakes.

So, there you are now, that’s our story for November! Catch y’all soon for the December edition!

Let Us Know About Future ‘Sparks’

If there’s anything in particular you want us to cover in our future Sparks Roundups, or if you need help planning and implementing your digital marketing campaigns, just pop judy@h-c.ie an email and we will be happy to get back to you.

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