This month in social media (January 2020)

The first month of 2020 sees many new updates for LinkedIn, along with Facebook testing out new features for WhatsApp, such as dark mode. A blast in the past for users of the popular Vine back in the day, as they have announced their return, named Byte, which will be rolling out shortly for all

Below, though, we take a look at some of the biggest news from January, and how these are beneficial for both users, and for businesses as we head into the new decade.

Three new features to LinkedIn Pages

It seems like every time we write one of these monthly social media roundups, we are including LinkedIn in there, with more and more features being added to the channel. This time, they are focusing on their “Pages” section, with three new updates announced in January.

The first of these updates is the “invite to follow” feature, which does exactly what it says, allowing admins of pages to grow their community by inviting their first-degree connections to follow the LinkedIn page. This will be a very useful feature for growing your community, allowing you to target the right interested people with your messages. 

Owners of pages can also now stream to their community with “LinkedIn Live”, which has been known to be a post format that can gain up to 24x more comments than a normal video post. The last of these new features is the ability to now post as either a member or an organisation, by simply using the toggle switch to flick between the two.

Direct message on the web through Instagram

This is something a lot of social media managers have been crying out for, the ability to send, receive and respond to direct messages on Instagram, but without having to use your phone or a third party software.

It is currently only available to a small percentage of global users at the time of writing this blog, but through the Instagram website it will eventually be easier to communicate when running your business account. This is something that Facebook have dipped into last year, with them announcing their option to combine Instagram and Facebook accounts, but this will now all be in one place. Keep an eye out for this in the near future.

“Promoted Trend Spotlight” on Twitter

Something for the paid social marketers amongst us, there is now a new option to target new audiences on Twitter, with the ability to take over the Explore tab on the channel, an area Twitter has been updating quite a lot recently.

So what will this offer? Well, it is a new ad unit, titled “Promoted Trend Spotlight”, and it supports six-second videos, GIFs and static images, which will be on mobile devices. When paying for your business to be included in the Explore tab, users who visit the tab will see your placement as a “Promoted Trend” with the asset you have chosen, for their first 2 visits to the page in a day, giving you an opportunity to target more audiences who might be highly interested in your brand.

This feature is quite exciting for marketers, as apparently users spend 26% more time looking at the Promoted Trend Spotlight than a standard Promoted Trend, due to the visual element of this.

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