2017 is already a big year for social giants Facebook and Instagram. For users there are many new features that make both platforms engaging and fun to use. These changes will have a deeper impact for brands and marketers.

Facebook

In-Stream Video – With the Audience Network launch last May, Facebook now runs In-Stream Videos which allows Facebook’s 4 Million Advertisers to reach more people with pre-roll and mid-roll placements. This also includes Facebook Live. In-Stream Video has proven to increase overall CPM results and continuing to show potential as the popularity of video increases. If you have quality video to share, this may be an option for your next campaign.

Messenger Advertising – Facebook Messenger has changed extensively in the last few months. Some say it has officially emulated SnapChat with the use of filters (and stories). However, The good thing about Facebook Messenger in terms of business is the ability to interact with fans in real-time and has changed the ecommerce space entirely. For example: Jasper’s Market – The user has clicked on the call-to-action button which started a messenger chat including the 20% offer. From there a real-time conversation can begin.

Instagram
Carousel Photos and Videos – For a few weeks now, social marketers and users alike have been excited with the carousel photo and video feature that is now available on Instagram. The Carousel Ad has been in the Advertising space for a awhile but now the Carousel option lets you create a single Instagram post with a slideshow of up to 10 images and/or videos. Users can scroll them. You can tag users on individual slides within the post and marketers can upload their product catalog to the mix. This will allow for users to click on items within the photo, see how much it costs and purchase the item in just a few steps. Amazing!

Instagram Stories – With 300 million daily viewers and 500 million monthly viewers, Instagram is leagues ahead of Snapchat when it comes to the ability of advertising reach within stories. At first, Instagram only allowed 30 brands to participate in advertising within the new feature and now it is a placement option for all with access to Business Manager and Power Editor. Of course, this option should be used only if you have quality imagery and video to connect with appropriate target market.  Airbnb was one of the first brands to capitalize on this awesome feature. As the year continues, look for many new trends with video content, advertising and metrics. Remember, don’t be afraid to try new objectives to fully optimize your social campaigns.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend among social media marketers lately: they are trying to cram more and more content into each social post. I thought it was common knowledge (not to mention commons sense) that shorter captions tend to perform better on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. I’ve always tried to hold myself to conveying one idea and one idea only in each post. This trend came into focus for me last week in a meeting where the client was actually advocating for paragraph-long captions on their Instagram posts in order to “convey the full story.” I was dumbstruck. But I’m always willing to challenge my own assumptions so we dug into our initial research on optimal post length to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.

We here at Pandemic Labs are big fans of The Nerdist. Using the Watchtower Analytics platform, we took a hard look at their Facebook Page. View the infographic here, and read below to see what we found.

The Nerdist posts a lot of links. Many of those are Facebook posts announcing the release of a new episode of The Nerdist Podcast. That’s cool, guys. But consider posting a single photo (Of the guest? Of the scene while recording?) and linking to the new episode from the image’s caption. Your EdgeRank will improve, and your clickthroughs will follow suit.

Weekend posts from The Nerdist Facebook Page result in proportionally higher interaction numbers than posts on other days of the week. Don’t spam people with too much weekend content, but time your weekend posts so that you’re hitting folks at the right times. Finding those times depends on where in the world your Fans are. People the world over use Facebook at generally the same times. Those are: “before work”, “around lunch” and “after dinner / kids are put to bed”.

In previous blog posts, strategies for the development and deployment of smart Facebook fan acquisition campaigns have been outlined. In this post, we’re going to look at two houses, both alike in dignity. Using Watchtower Analytics, we analyzed the Facebooking of the two biggest comic book publishers out there. Here’s what we found.

Both brands lean heavily on the 12:00 pm Eastern posting time. This suggests a mechanical schedule that isn’t optimized for the times at which each brand receives proportionally higher engagement, as detailed below.

Both brands are neglecting the peak engagement times, as reported by Watchtower’s data. Note that on the infographic, we’re using GMT -4 when commenting on times of day. DC is posting most frequently on Wednesdays (for those that don’t know, that’s when new comics are released for sale each week), and Marvel posts primarily on Fridays (a less-than-stellar day in terms of engagement metrics)

Looks like you’re enjoying an extra 2.5 million interactions this month thanks to that NFC Championship win. The extra interactions brought your engagement rate up from a somewhat respectable 0.70% to a whopping 1.59%.

You’re approaching the Super Bowl and Facebook Page dominance, but there are still a few areas where you can improve. Most notably the timing of your content. Take a look at the graph below.