“What should we watch?”

The rallying cry should ring familiar. Netflix, Hulu and their ilk use sophisticated algorithms to provide tailor-made recommendations based on your viewing habits, and those of your friends.

And Chill takes this to the next, logical inflection: a chat bot you interact with in natural language. The bot analyzes words and phrases to deliver personalized movie recommendations, complemented by a YouTube trailer for the flick it’s suggested. Coolness factor aside – because chatting with an A.I. as if it were a human is nothing if not cool – And Chill is just one more bot heralding the renaissance of chat.

Instagram has been all over the news the past weeks with changes to its algorithm, influencer marketing news, and recently, an announcement about its new business manager platform. This tool, although primarily a funnel to get businesses to promote their content, will provide some much needed data on a channel that to-date has been a bit erratic.

Here is what you need to know:

This is the first in what’s to be a recurring series on “Context Over Dogma”; posts marked #NoFilter are brutally candid assessments of social media trends, best-practices, and industry watchdogging. Call it “truth-to-power”, call it “playing the fool”, but these are the places in which the team from Pandemic Labs will wax politically incorrect (read: more truthful) than an agency probably should.

Today’s topic comes from the recent news that Instagram will roll out an algorithmically-ranked newsfeed, forsaking the reverse chronological order that has, to date, ruled the user experience. Under the new system, which won’t roll out fully for at least another 6 months, posts with more relevance to a user (according to Instagram’s algorithm) will appear more prominently in the newsfeed, upon opening the app. So, the stuff you are more likely to engage with, or find interesting, is to appear at the top of your feed. A few things:

A handy list of do’s and don’ts, for achieving social media success in 2016.

1. Don’t rely on organic reach.

It should be no shock that organic reach on Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk is on a steady decline. When developing social media content, and planning your social media marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you set aside budget for promoting that content. To succeed, social media content must reach the right users, at the right time, and with the right message. Facebook (and now Instagram) offer unprecedented targeting parameters for online advertisements. You want to hit the 1,000 people outside Omaha who eat Oreos, watch Supergirl, listen to Kanye and spent money online in the past 30 days? You got it, dude. Set aside part of your production budget, to promote the content you’re creating. You’ve spent time and money crafting a story; it should be told the right way.

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.