This month in social media (January 2021)

As we head into the new year, we have taken a look at some of the biggest stories in social media to come from the last month of 2020 and how these will have an impact on us as businesses and creators throughout next year.

 The new year brought plenty of new social media features and updates from the likes of Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, for both consumers and businesses. However, January seemed like a wild ride, with more and more people coming to social media for trending topics and news, we saw Donald Trump get banned, Bernie Sanders memes take over the globe and Redditors fighting back on Wall Street to name a few.

Below we take a look at some of the more useful updates on social media, and how they might be beneficial for your own social media strategy.

Instagram introduces the “professional dashboard”

It seems like Instagram have finally got to grips with the increase in businesses turning to the social channel for their marketing efforts. Their latest update is the “professional dashboard”, a hub for businesses and creators with a professional/business account to get more advice and tips from Instagram on how best to use the platform.

The new dashboard, which is available at the top of your profile when on the mobile app, has been created to help you make better decisions and stay informed about everything Instagram wants you to know, such as new updates. It consists of three features – discover insights on your performance, tools to help grow your business and a bunch of educational resources to read and improve your knowledge. Pretty handy right? It comes off the back of 82 million accounts visiting the previous hub which was being tested, so be sure to check it out.

Take control of your LinkedIn comments

The latest update from LinkedIn is one businesses can use to fight the increase in bullying and spam on the social channel. The new update now allows you to take control of your LinkedIn comments when you publish new content, meaning you can now restrict certain accounts from commenting, everyone as a whole and also curate your own feed.

The three updates from LinkedIn regarding this are – restricting audiences from individual posts (target just connections or those who have RSVP’d to an event for example), restricting just the comments (so people can still see the post) or curating your own feed on the channel so you don’t have to see all the posts from connections you don’t want to see.

This update is currently for personal profiles, but expect to see if for business pages in the future too.

Dedicated pages for hashtags on YouTube

This is along the lines of something we have previously reported on, with YouTube pushing its discovery pages, allowing for people to find more content than ever before. The latest update is the next step to this.

YouTube is finally creating dedicated pages for hashtags, allowing you to follow and discover content based on the hashtags you are most interested in, pretty similar to most other social channels, so we feel this is a bit late, but still handy.

To find these hashtags pages, if you are watching a video on the channel, click on the hashtag to then see a full page of every video on YouTube that has also used the hashtag. This is great for consumers and audiences who are watching the videos and want to see similar content, but it is also useful for businesses too, meaning there are more opportunities for your videos to be watched and discovered if you optimise them properly with hashtags when you upload.

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