With the end of 2020 fast approaching, it’s easy to miss the latest social media news, but we’ve got you covered. In November, we saw Twitter rolling out Fleets, Instagram’s new navigation tabs and ‘guides’ feature, Pinterest helping holiday shoppers with a gift guide, and Snapchat stepping into the Spotlight with new TikTok-esque feature.
Fleeting Tweets? Fleets! Twitter Launches New Disappearing Content Feature
Twitter launched the new ‘Fleets’ feature this November, as a “low pressure” alternative to the “permanency” of tweeting. Similar to Snapchat and Instagram stories, Fleets are only available to view for 24 hours, allowing you to share text, photos, videos, other tweets, and more, on a time limit. With their disappearance after 24 hours, Fleets “helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings” according to the feedback from Twitter’s tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea.
For social media marketers, Fleets can be used similarly to stories on Snapchat or Instagram, such as to promote limited-time offers, host giveaways, and interact with your audience. If your business or clients already use Twitter, Fleets are a great way to keep current and engage with users on a more personal level.
Fleets are available now for all Twitter users.
New Home Screen Tabs For Instagram, and ‘Guides’ Launched
In October, Instagram celebrated its 10th birthday by rolling out a host of new features, followed by even more features in November. Instagram saw multiple additions in November, such as the ‘guides’ feature along with new navigation tabs for Reels and shopping.
Instagram’s new home screen layout sees the addition of tabs for Reels and Shop, with the Shop tab cleverly placed where the notifications icon once was (taking advantage of the muscle-memory habit to tap that space). While shopping features have been present on Instagram for a while now, with the addition of the Shop tab comes personalised recommendations and curated product collections to discover new businesses and products, with your favourite brands/retailers also featured.
The Reels tab provides a stage to discover more content, allowing Reels creators to find a new audience and share their creativity. Both the Reels tab and Shop tab provide businesses of all sizes with growth opportunities on Instagram, with the Shop tab being particularly useful for eCommerce brands.
Along with the Reels and Shop tab, Instagram has also released the ‘guides’ feature, a brand new way to share content on the platform. There are 3 types of guide: Places, to recommend locations to your followers; Products, to recommend products (which are available in Instagram Shop); and Posts, either yours or saved posts from other accounts, to create a customised thread.
Instagram’s new update is available now.
Pinterest Released Its Holiday Gift Guide
With Christmas just around the corner and the rise of online shopping due to Covid-19, Pinterest has released its Pinterest Shop: holiday collection along with better support for sellers. The collection reveals the top searches for holiday gift ideas on Pinterest in the form of a “shoppable inspiration guide”.
For 2020, Pinterest is cranking it up a notch with new features for sellers, such as “better discoverability, enhanced design features, and a mobile-optimised shopping experience.” Thanks to direct integration with retailers’ pages, the guide is also useful by always being up to date on price and details.
The Pinterest Shop holiday guide is live until 21st December.
Snapchat Steps Into The Spotlight
Snapchat jumped on the bandwagon of implementing TikTok-esque features with its new Spotlight feature. Spotlight, similar to TikTok’s For You page of algorithm-curated content, is Snapchat’s way of keeping up with the times, offering a feed of vertical up-to-60-second videos filled with dancing, singing, and memes. But that’s not all it’s good for – with the popularity and success of video advertising, social media marketers can make use of the feature to expand their cross-channel campaign reach.
Snapchat’s Spotlight Guidelines encourage creativity and safety, and discourage the use of copyrighted content and selling or soliciting. This sounds like it could be hurtful to brands, however, if used within the guidelines, Spotlight can add an extra element to your social media marketing strategy, especially with features such as lenses, captions, sounds, and GIFs readily available.
The new feature is slowly rolling out across multiple countries – keep an eye out for the update.
