This Week in Social Media | Instagram’s Keyword Search and more.
Social Media is always changing, it’s a moving target that is nearly impossible to keep on top of, and that’s why we are publishing a semi-weekly entry in our blog that aggregates social media news, insights and updates from across the world wide web. We will narrow it to the hits we think are most relevant, will highlight key points and add some perspective to help you understand “so what?”
Week of January 4, 2021:
3 Ways to Use Instagram's New Keyword Search Option to Grow Your Business
As some of you may know, Instagram launched the ability to now search captions for keywords. Previously users could only search by profile name, location, and hashtags. SEO becomes an even greater considered as we believe that your social copy strategy should even more consider the research you have done and align with your keyword strategy for your brand. We predict that Google will be drawing on cues from social media even more now that they are putting more emphasis on keywords in the copy.
While the keyword search option on Instagram is still fairly barebones, we see potential in utilizing it for discovery as well outreach as it becomes more refined. The article talks about how it can be used for market research/competitor analysis, customer engagement and account growth, and it can help you get found by your ideal customer.
We think the biggest update that needs to be made to the feature before we can actually start utilizing it for outreach and real time discovery is that Instagram is needs to add a “recent” tab to it. Right now, when you keyword search, the posts that come up are not in chronological order.
Optimal Posting Practices for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in 2021
By now we hope that you and your company have adopted a tailored approach to each of these channels, but if not, this article provides some great insight and recommendations for best practices on how to post to each of them uniquely.
For Facebook, the article states that inspirational, funny, or practical posts typically get the most engagement from consumers. A report from BuzzSumo identified the following posts types as key engagement drivers: practical hacks, inspirational content, food and recipes, cute animals, music videos, quizzes, travel and adventure. We we are already utilizing many of these tactics in our client’s posts, which is great, bu definitely a great reminder. It also mentions that the optimal length for copy on Facebook is between 25-55 characters ( this seems really short right?…), because on the mobile app, any post with over 80 characters gets cut off and prompts the “show more” option, which can cause consumers to scroll past it. Definitely a hot tip to apply folks!
For Twitter, take note that using hashtags can actually impact your posts performance, acting as a distractor and taking away from the CTA of your post.
For LinkedIn, we knew that with the introduction of hashtags opportunities for marketers were going to open up, but now that they’ve been in place for a bit we are seeing that they aren’t going anywhere and are making waves. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has been working to increase the usage of hashtags on posts as a means to better categorize content. There's no definitive, optimal number of tags per post, but a couple of the most relevant tags may help with distribution, without impacting readability. Also, LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other post.
Donald Trump Permanently Suspended from Facebook and Twitter
This is a whole can of worms that may seem incredibly detached from the day to day of your average social media manager or marketer, but it does bring up some hot topics surrounding the rules, regulation, policy surrounding free speech & social media… the path forward is not a simple one. As social media managers, athletes, ambassadors or business owners, how would you feel if you got permanently suspended from social media? It seems highly unlikely as what you might be doing seems relatively harmless or non-consequential relative to what went down with Trump, but its a slippery slope.