“Engage with Instagram, convert with Facebook”. This was the unanimous mantra spoken by Facebook execs at conferences (remember those?) around the world.

But Facebook’s actions didn’t correlate. The rollout of Instagram’s shoppable posts in 2018 and a separate shop-front in the app, which was cleverly named… “Shop” has proven Instagram has a role at every stage of the marketing funnel. Later in 2018 Instagram launched shoppable stickers for Instagram Stories. Then in October 2020, they announced shoppable functionality in both IGTV and their latest format Instagram Reels sealing the deal for e-commerce enablement across all 4 media types in the app (Posts, Stories, IGTV & Reels).

I spoke about this with Ticker TV’s Ahron Young:

With the shopification of Instagram now complete, the app is not only taking on the heavily impacted bricks ‘n mortar retail industry but also the online behemoths: Amazon, eBay and the long tail of e-commerce stores.

Instagram is serious about shopping. Its proven this through the aggressive roll-out of shoppable content throughout the app (Instagram Reels being the most expedited – just 3 months from the launch of the format to the first testing of shoppable Reels). Add to this, the launch of Facebook Pay – Facebook’s own payments platform for handling in-app payments in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. At the time of writing Facebook Pay has launched into 146 countries and is growing. While Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with payment technologies, they’re doing everything they can to capture a slice of the global payments pie – an industry McKinsey & Co estimate to be worth $2.7 trillion dollars globally by 2023.

In the lead up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2020, Instagram made their boldest move yet. I spoke about it with Ticker TV’s Alana McLean:

Instagram replaced the Compose tab and Activity tab in the navigation bar with a new Reels tab and Shop tab respectively. While this may not seem like big news, its actually the biggest change Instagram have made to their navigation bar in 10 years.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram said in a blog post “we don’t take these changes lightly – we haven’t updated Instagram’s home screen in a big way for quite a while.”

But as with every change Instagram makes, users weren’t happy with the Activity tab being replaced by the Shop tab…

WHY did IG put the shopping tab at the bottom and not the top????? I give more fucks about the interactions on my posts than shopping. Did they not think that would be more useful?????

— ali the holly jolly hoarder 🎄 (@hardbackhoarder) December 2, 2020

Why did insta replace the notif section with a shopping tab, who tf shops on Instagram

— t (@AhhEtssMhee) November 29, 2020

I refuse to go into the shop tab on Instagram

— Luis 🌞 (@lv_in_lv) December 3, 2020

In fact, this one might take the cake…

I hate the new Instagram layout, so I designed the Shopper Stopper so I never click the shop tab when I really wanted to go to my notifications. pic.twitter.com/FiLDQQLOJt

— Unnecessary Inventions (@mattyxb) November 23, 2020

If history can teach us anything about user behavior and app changes its that the initial outrage dissipates pretty quick and we all move on and accept the new changes.

The Shop tab at its heart is an algorithmic curated feed of the perfect products for you based on what you’ve bought, who you follow, where you browse around the web, what you interact with and many other signals. We can expect to see curated shopping feeds roll out on the other social channels too but for now Instagram is a first-mover.

Like what we’ve seen with the News Feed and its ability to create echo-chambers of information to reinforce and clarify one’s world view; we’ll start to see algorithmic shopping feeds heavily influence what we buy and don’t buy. These algorithms will pattern-match and make product recommendations based on lookalike behaviors among other people. These algorithms will be incredibly successful at putting the right products in front of us at the right time. It’ll almost feel like the algorithm knows what we want to buy before we do.

These changes on Instagram hint to this brave new e-commerce world but its not in the distant future, its here today. Interesting times ahead!

The post Instagram bets the house on Instagram Shopping appeared first on Social Status.

So what’s Instagram Reels?

In July 2020, Instagram rolled out its new Reels feature to users in India, with other parts of the world receiving the update the following month. Reels allows users to create videos up to 15 seconds long using filters, text and (most importantly) other people’s audio. Sound familiar? Reels has been touted by critics as a “TikTok competitor”, using a lot of the same features such as short-form videos and choosing popular songs to add to your content.

On paper, it sounds like the perfect time to launch Instagram Reels. US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to ban TikTok, suggesting the app handles user data poorly and risks seeing US citizens’ information falling into the hands of China’s government. If TikTok were to be banned, users would have a few places to go. One option is Byte, a creation from the people behind now-defunct video platform Vine. Another is Instagram Reels, which has a more advantageous position; many of TikTok’s users are already on Instagram.

How are people reacting to Instagram Reels?

Instagram’s newest feature has been met with a mixed reception from creators. Some are seeing the benefits of sharing their content on two similar platforms, especially those who spend hours writing, filming and editing videos. For these creators, repurposing their content for Reels (whether it’s posting the same video across both channels or editing it to fit Reels’ 15-second max length) means their video will reach even more people.

On the other hand, not everyone is sold on Reels. 75% of TikTok creators said they wouldn’t move to Instagram Reels, citing similarities to TikTok as their main reason for not jumping ship. It takes a lot to get someone to change their primary platform, and when you consider TikTok’s runaway success and continued growth, the hesitation is understandable.

It’s understandable why people may be hesitant to leave TikTok for Instagram Reels. The latter lacks many features of the former, most notably the For You page which delivers videos based on what the app thinks you like. If you watch a lot of cat videos, your For You Page will populate itself with even more cat videos. In contrast, Reels are mainly served via your own feed and the Explore page, which only shows a handful of (sometimes seemingly random) Reels mixed in with other content.

This takes us to another reason people aren’t resonating with Reels; it makes the Instagram app feel bloated. What was once a photo and video sharing platform now has Stories for spontaneous updates, IGTV for long-form videos, an expanded messaging service and now Reels for short-form videos. If users are spending ages curating amazing feeds and keeping Stories updated, will they also want to share Reels on a regular basis? Will they fit with their other content?

One of the most interesting developments with the launch of Instagram Reels has been creators uploading their TikTok videos directly to Reels. TikTok’s clever idea to put their logo and people’s usernames on downloaded videos means even when someone’s watching the video on Reels, it keeps their mind on TikTok. On the flip side, it means a lot of audio from TikTok can now be used on Instagram Reels; if the former falls out of fashion, the latter can easily pick things up.

How have brands started using Instagram Reels, and how does it compare to TikTok?

The 15-second limit for Reels may be a lot less than TikTok’s 60-second limit, but that doesn’t mean brands are struggling to make the most of the platform. Netflix’s comedy account, Netflix Is A Joke, uploads snippets of stand-up performances from the likes of Pete Davidson and Dave Chappelle. The channel already uploads longer stand-up segments to IGTV, and Reels contrasts that by focusing on a single joke by a comic.

Using Instagram Reels is a great tactic for Netflix to entice people towards IGTV, followed by watching the full comedy show on Netflix. Their Instagram presence is also far larger than their TikTok presence; Netflix only has a single TikTok account, but on Instagram it’s divided into various specialist accounts based on region or type of content.

View this post on Instagram

“So sometimes life is a little unfair”

A post shared by Netflix Comedy (@netflixisajoke) on Aug 5, 2020 at 11:12am PDT

Some brands are creating different videos for each platform, but with a similar style. Gymshark have been killing it on TikTok for a while, regularly racking up hundreds of thousands of views on videos. Their style involves showcasing the athletic prowess of their influencers and offering fitness tips without heavily branding their videos. It’s easy to figure out the influencers are wearing Gymshark athletic wear, but as a viewer you’re not bombarded with calls to action asking you to buy anything.

Their Instagram Reels presence has a similar vibe – athletic people doing unbelievable things or showing their silly side. While some of the videos were originally on TikTok, some have been made exclusively for Reels. It’s a move that’s paying off for Gymshark; so far, every single Reel they’ve posted has been viewed over a million times!

@gymsharkIt’s been one year since this video went viral 😱 @ginascarangella_ ##gymshark ##calisthenics ##foryou♬ Party Girl – StaySolidRocky

Meanwhile, some brands know that Instagram Reels lends itself well to their existing TikTok content. RuPaul’s Drag Race, the award-winning drag queen TV show, found quick success after joining TikTok. Their posts include behind-the-scenes footage and TikTok challenges, but one of their biggest successes is uploading iconic moments from the show. The moment when guest judge Nicki Minaj told contestant Heidi N Closet she hates her hair has been used in over 800 other videos, combining the quotability of the show with TikTok users wanting to create their own content.

With their Instagram Reels presence, RuPaul’s Drag Race are hoping to emulate the same success. So far all of their videos have been viewed over a million times, but the uploaded audio (including the famous “Miss Vanjie” line) has not been reused much by fans. Perhaps it’s a sign of where Instagram Reels will differ – audiences will love viewing these 15-second clips but won’t be as interested in creating their own content like with TikTok.

@rupaulsdragraceNicki Minaj’s guest judge critiques for Heidi, Jackie, and Widow…👑 What do you think of her advice? ##rpdr ##dragrace ##omg ##nickiminaj ##drag♬ original sound – rupaulsdragrace

Should I use it?

The answer depends on how you use Instagram. If you’ve got a solid user base and regular engagement, then there’s no harm in using it. Your audience is already there, and it’s another way to sell your brand. As we’ve seen with Gymshark and RuPaul’s Drag Race, some brands are getting a lot of views on their Reels.

If Instagram is a big part of your social media strategy, it’s a no-brainer to use it. The key is to figure out how to balance your feed, Stories, IGTV and Reels. How they differ, and more importantly, how do they complement each other? You may use Reels for your lighthearted content, which would show a more human and less polished version of your brand. If that sits alongside professional-looking IGTV videos and a consistent curated feed, it showcases your multifaceted brand.

If you already have a million channels to manage, or if you don’t have a decent Instagram presence, you may want to give it a miss. For some marketers it’ll be an exciting new feature, but for many it’ll be another thing that flies under the radar.

Do I need to choose between TikTok and Instagram Reels?

Not at all. Like how some brands use Snapchat and Instagram Stories differently, you can make TikTok and Instagram Reels separate entities. Despite the similarities in style, the two platforms offer some noticeable differences such as video length. There’s a good chance your audience will be different on both platforms, too.

On the face of it, Instagram Reels may feel like a carbon copy of TikTok. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it or share the same content over the two channels. If you have the time to invest in both channels (or at least adapt content), there’s no harm in trying to make them work. For instance, think of TikTok as a standalone platform and Reels as a supplement to your main Instagram content. Both can be an integral part to your strategy.

Your decision to use Instagram Reels comes down to a few things. Do you have the time to use it? Does it seem like a better option than TikTok? Do you already have a solid Instagram presence? If the answer to all of these is “yes”, it’s worth trying. Who knows – it might be your next big success!

The post Instagram Reels vs TikTok appeared first on Social Status.

What is a social media evaluator?

A social media evaluator is a person tasked with assessing the performance of an organization’s organic and paid social media content. Their remit goes beyond just quantitative (data) insights but also seeks to assess the qualitative (creative) aspects of the organization’s social publishing.

Companies like Appen Global and Lionbridge are actively recruiting for Social Media Evaluation roles in 2020:

What does a social media evaluator do?

In the example above of Lionbridge’s UK job description for a social media evaluator, they’re specifically looking for people to review social media ads across 5 criteria:

1. Content: this relates to the quality of the image(s), headline, ad copy, ad description and call-to-action (CTA). Of course “quality” is subjective so what one person may rate as high quality, another may rate as “low quality”. For this reason, companies hire multiple social media evaluators and take the average responses from their aggregate ratings
2. Appearance: this relates to how the ad looks in the News Feed or Stories Feed alongside organic posts. Does it stand out? Is it eye-catching? Does it motivate the user to want to tap the ad to find out more?
3. Relevance: is the ad relevant to the target audience? Does it use appropriate language, terminology and/or slang? If people are depicted in the ad – do they adhere to the target demographic age, ethnicity and demographic profile?
4. Overall quality: based on all factors above, how does the ad rate overall?
5. Cultural relevance in Great Britain: since the Lionbridge role is based in Great Britain and involves evaluating ads targeted within Great Britain, this criteria relates to how the ad creative resonates to local audiences. Of course, this can only be truly evaluated by local residents who understand the cultural dynamics across Great Britain.

Tools for social media evaluators

There are several powerful social media tools that can help you if you’re planning to apply for a social media evaluator role. These tools give you the functionality to make your application stand out and help you impress your future employer. Tyler Tringas from Earnest Capital says it best:

How to apply for a job and instantly be in the top 1% of candidates: do a small sample of the work you’re applying to do and share it.

— Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas) August 6, 2020

1. Facebook Ad Library

Ever since the 2016 US Presidential Election, Facebook started implementing more transparency tools to provide all users with greater oversight across advertiser activity. Facebook Ad Library enables anyone to search for any organization by name and find the ads they’re currently running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp or the Audience Network. It’s an incredibly powerful tool.

Aside from being able to see the ads an advertiser is currently running, you can also see the ad variations as part of the ad set. While Ads Library does not show you how the advertiser is targeting these ads, the variations can provide some insight into the thinking behind the advertiser’s social paid strategy.

Related: Paid Media Mistakes B2B Companies Make.

Take the example below from The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). We can see they are currently running 210 ads in the United Kingdom – they are a highly active advertiser!

The number in the top left of each ad shows how many ad variations the advertiser is running. Usually these variations are simply to cater for the different ad placement types that Facebook offer (eg: News Feed, Stories, Right Column, Instant Articles, etc). However, sometimes you can see some interesting creative differences. Take the 1st ad as an example:

Here we can see variation 2 on the left has a CTA button linking to Google Play Store with the button text of “Download”. While variation 3 has a slightly different CTA button text (“Learn More”) linking to Apple App Store. There is no difference in the ad creative or ad copy however in the top left-hand corner you can see the profile picture of RBS in variation 3 has been switched to their LGBT version.

These kinds of subtle creative differences are an example of what a social media evaluator must identify and assess. Whether they are doing this across “owned” content or competitor content.

2. Social Status – Ads Analytics

While Ads Library shows what ads an organization is running, it can’t show the actual ad performance. As a social media evaluator, you’ll need to link the ad creative differences to ad performance metrics like Impressions, Cost Per Click, Cost Per Conversion, etc. Social Status Ads Analytics is an industry-leading tool for analyzing owned ad performance across the Facebook family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Audience Network).

Ads Analytics enables you to connect any Facebook Ad Accounts you have Admin access to – even the lowest level called “View performance” is sufficient. Once connected, you can explore all historical ad performance for the ad account including creative and ad performance metrics for all 14 of Facebook’s ad objectives.

Best of all, you can export Ads Analytics reports to Acrobat PDF, PowerPoint PPTX or Google Slides. As a social media evaluator, this tool will be instrumental in understanding the connection between ad creative and ad results. An ad which subjectively looks great may not perform as well as another ad which comparatively looks not as good.

3. Social Status – Profile Analytics

Profile Analytics is another tool from Social Status which enables you to look at all performance metrics in one place for Facebook Pages, Instagram Profiles, YouTube Channels, Twitter Profiles and LinkedIn Company Pages you have Admin access to:

You can quickly see all post creatives and performance metrics together in the same view. This makes the task of evaluating social media posts a breeze! To do this manually across multiple channels would take hours of effort.

Applying to be a social media evaluator

With demand for social media evaluators increasing, now is the time to practice and refine your skills for this growing career opportunity. You can try all the tools mentioned above for free. Facebook Ad Library is free and Social Status offers a 14-day free trial as well as a Free-forever plan. Check out all the Social Status plans.

The post The rise of the Social Media Evaluator appeared first on Social Status.

Some of the biggest names in this space include Hootsuite and Sprout Social, both of which are used by many Social Status users to plan content, schedule social posts and manage multiple social media accounts in one place. But recently we’ve been hearing about another social publishing tool gaining more and more traction: SocialPilot. So we decided to see what all the fuss was about and give it a trial run for ourselves. Needless to say, we were initially impressed with its pricing model. Comparing plans, its several times more cost-effective than Hootsuite and Sprout. Furthermore, SocialPilot is feature-packed with integrations into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, VK and Google My Business. There’s functionality for boosting posts, message management, bulk scheduling, content curation and even analytics too. In this review, we’ll focus on a handful of features we thought were really useful and that set SocialPilot apart from other tools.

Scheduling functionality

Setting up the account was a breeze and we were up and running in no time after connecting our Facebook and Instagram accounts. SocialPilot has a really comprehensive Getting Started guide which runs through all the platform features in one place. We connected our Facebook page, Instagram profile and created a new “Social Status” group. This grouping functionality is great for agencies who need to organize their social accounts across lots of clients. SocialPilot also enables agencies to invite their clients to collaborate on their specific group and manage content approvals.

When it comes to the actual content scheduler, SocialPilot offers a full-featured composer which supports rich media (images, video and GIFs) and native Facebook functions such as organic audience targeting and location tagging. This is really handy for brands with global fans on just one Facebook. They can publish country-specific content relevant to location-based audiences.

In the screenshot below you can see we’ve composed a Facebook post and used the audience targeting feature to organically target Australian users in the Facebook News Feed:

Canva integration

On the composer toolbar, you’ll notice a really unique integration with Canva, which enables you to quickly launch the tool in an overlay modal window and create images directly in Canva. Once you’re done, you can click “Publish” in the top right and the image automatically embeds into your draft post in SocialPilot’s composer:

Coming up with interesting visuals and eye-catching content is often the hardest part about social publishing and we think this Canva integration makes it simple and quick to create visually captivating content for all your social channels.

When it comes to the actual scheduling part, SocialPilot offers a unique set of options:

• Add to Queue: schedules the post according to your pre-defined time slots (more on this below)
• Share Now: immediately schedules the post
• Share Next: slots the post into your queue in 2nd place
• Schedule Post: define a custom day/time to publish
• Repeat Post: set up repeat posting at given intervals for a set amount of time (especially handy for Twitter)

Pre-defined time slots

This is a great feature of SocialPilot. When you connect a social account, you can define specific days and times to post. Once you’ve done this for each social account, its just a matter of loading up your queue with content and then SocialPilot will post at your pre-defined days and times. You can always adjust these settings and your post scheduling will adjust accordingly. We really like this feature because marketers have a pretty good idea about what days and times work best for them (If you don’t know this for your social accounts, login to Social Status and check Profile Analytics for your post performance split by day and time). By setting up these pre-defined time slots, it removes much of the repetition involved when manually scheduling posts:

Content curation & RSS

Functionality for effective content curation is lacking in many social publishing tools. We really liked SocialPilot’s functionality to follow RSS feeds and automatically publish new content to your social channels based on timing criteria. In the screenshot below, you can see we’ve created an RSS feed for Social Media Today which checks for new posts every hour and publishes no more than 1 post at a time directly to our Facebook Page appending the hashtags #socialmedia and #socialmedianews:

Here’s an example of a resulting post on our Facebook page:

URL Shortening

Another feature we like is SocialPilot’s support for multiple URL shorteners. Rather than forcing you to use their own, SocialPilot supports multiple 3rd party URL shorteners such as Bitly, Rebrandly and Sniply – all of which are solid options for URL shortening. For best practice link sharing on social media, you should create unique URLs for each social channel with full UTM tracking using Google’s Campaign URL Builder, then shorten the URL with one of the aforementioned shorteners.

Facebook Lead Ads integration

When initially launched, Facebook Lead Ads were more of a B2B ad type but these days they are used more broadly by all marketers to capture user details such as email address and any other qualifying information. SocialPilot recently integrated with Facebook Lead Ads so you can create and manage these ads all within SocialPilot. For more information check out their article about Facebook Lead Ads setup.

Try SocialPilot free for 14 days

Like Social Status, SocialPilot offers a free 14-day trial so you can test it out for yourself and see how you like it. We believe its the best social media management tool for the price and you won’t find anything else that can compete feature-vs-feature at the price point they offer. In fact, here’s a price comparison straight from their website:

Let us know what you think in the comments!

The post SocialPilot Review: All in one social media management tool appeared first on Social Status.

Earlier this year, Pinterest partnered with digital advertising and technology solutions specialist, Kenshoo, to bring you ‘Search Ads for Pinterest’.

With search ads on Pinterest, our clients can promote visually engaging ads as consumers search for relevant products. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Pinterest to provide search marketers with an innovative new way to engage earlier in the buying journey, when their customers are most open to new ideas – Will Martin-Gill, Chief Strategy and Development Officer, Kenshoo

And it seems after initial trials with Barilla, eBay, Garnier, Walgreens and The Home Depot, these search solutions are available to every business through the Pinterest Ads Manager.

So what exactly are we working with here?

We’ve talked about it before – Pinterest is investing a LOAD of money into monetising the platform.

With 97% of their 2 billion searched pins unbranded, the platform is an oasis for advertisers who are struggling to compete on other crowded social platforms.

So what can advertisers expect from the platform?

• Broad, Phrase & Exact Match Keywords: offering advertisers precise control over where their pins pop up in searches
• Exclusion of Negative Keywords: so your add for “loafers” won’t show up when someone is searching for that perfectly baked, gluten free, low carb loaf of bread – saving you $$ in wasted advertising dollars
• Search Term Reports: to help you optimise your search term strategy

What’s new with Taste Graph?

Pinterest’s ‘Taste Graph’ compiles data from over 100 billion pins, to profile users based on what they like, how those interests change over time, and basically directs them down specific pin paths most relevant to them.

This technology allows Pinterest to target users with more specificity, resulting in an increased likelihood that users engage with the brands shown to them = better spent advertising $$.

Pinterest announced that they would be testing auto-targeting, backed by Taste Graph, “as a way to extend your keyword campaigns into more searches” – simplifying search.

To get started, head to the ‘Ads’ section at the top left-hand corner of your Pinterest feed. Remember, you’ll need to have a Pinterest Business account and it would be a good idea to install the Pinterest Tag on your website. If you’re just starting out, check MeetFox’s guide on why you need to have a good website.

The post Search Ads for Pinterest – Offering Targeted Advertising for Businesses appeared first on Social Status.

Since then, a lot has changed.

You asked and we listened – our social media analytics platform has gone multi-channel!

Our multi-channel platform allows users to pull in data from both their own, and their competitor’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram pages.

Read more: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter – Now Live on Social Status

Our automated custom reports have gotten much more sophisticated as well.

We deliver the following level of insight into our customers mailboxes either weekly, monthly, quarterly or per campaign;

• Page and Profile Insights from Reach to Conversion
• Social Ad Performance and Ad Metrics for each Campaign Objective
• Competitor Analysis and Industry Benchmarking
• Influencer Performance for the Influencer’s you work with or anyone that uses your Brand Hashtags
• Insights and Recommendations

Originally posted on siftery.com

Automate your Social Media Reporting with Social Status

Social Status is a social media analytics platform used by thousands of marketers, businesses and agencies that enables marketers to quantify the impact of their social media marketing. Save countless hours by automating your social media reporting and benchmark against your competitors. Provides actionable insights to improve performance by finding optimal days, times, frequencies and media types to post.

Social Status also helps you measure the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Kevin William David interviewed Tim Hill, CEO at Social Status to know more.

Hi Tim, so tell us about Social Status?

Social Status is a social media analytics platform that automates social reporting for over 2,800 brands and agencies all around the world. We’ve just launched Custom Reports — a new feature which enables any brand or agency to order beautiful PowerPoint reports covering all their social pages & profiles, competitors, paid performance and influencer performance.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

There’s a general perception that there are many social media analytics tools out there but if you speak to any digital marketer or social media marketer, the majority of their social media reporting is actually manual. Most marketers still spend countless hours in Excel wrangling data for their reports and manually creating charts and graphs. There still isn’t an effective social analytics platform built for the mass market which effectively automates social reporting. That’s the problem we’re solving.

Interesting. So what’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Social Status?

Our main competitors are Socialbakers and Simply Measured. The main difference with us is the power of our reports. Users receive our automated reports in PowerPoint format covering all their social performance metrics from channel insights to paid performance, competitor analysis, influencer analysis, customer service performance and more. No other platform can produce such high quality, boardroom-ready reports like Social Status. We’re also half the price, which helps 😉

Pretty useful for any marketer to automate social media reporting!

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Social Status?

We have a very diverse user base from small businesses all the way up to global corporations. Although our user segments are very different, their fundamental needs are exactly the same. They all need to quantify the value of social media to their business, understand what is insightful from all of the data and report to management or their clients. Typically, the roles of our customers are marketing managers, digital marketing managers or social media marketing managers for brands. We also have many agencies using Social Status and these roles are typically Digital Strategists, Planners, Account Directors or Community Managers.

One of our earliest customers was Anytime Fitness, one of the largest fitness brands in the world. We also have customers spread across many industries including Retail, Government, Travel, Finance, CPG, Automotive, Insurance, Sport, Media, Education and Non-profit.

How are your customers using Social Status? Could you share a few use cases?

The biggest use case is social media reporting. It takes the average marketer 8 hours per week to compile their social reports manually. We think this is insane. It should be easier and pain free, that’s why we built Social Status.

Benchmarking against competitors is another use case which is popular. For many marketers looking at their social performance stats, it is difficult to know if a 2.48% Engagement Rate is good or bad. With Social Status, they can compare performance against competitors and against industry averages and know exactly how they’re performing.

Have their been unique use cases for Social Status that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Tracking brand performance is a popular use case but one of the more unique use cases we’ve seen is in Retail, with the official social accounts of shopping malls. Rather than tracking competitor malls, they instead tracked performance of the retailers in their building to identify which retailers they should partner with on social media who get high levels of engagement. Similarly, we’ve seen event brands and publishers track performance of sponsors to assist in partnership negotiations.

Interesting use case!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Product Hunt was an early driver of our success. This one listing drove thousands of users to our site in a matter of days and still drives traffic to this day. I remember the listing went live in the middle of the night too — I didn’t get much sleep that night 🙂

In the early days we also spent time at trade shows and spoke at industry events. We worked hard to get Social Status on the minds of marketers and advertisers. These days we publish industry reports like ourFacebook Retail Industry Report.

We find the best growth opportunities come when you provide value up front.

That’s a great tip!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We didn’t iterate fast enough in the early days and we’re only now really finding our rhythm with the platform and our reports offering in market. Building a social analytics product is in many ways like building a business on quicksand. The social landscape is in constant flux and continually evolving making it especially difficult for the incumbents to keep up. We continually optimize for where the greatest user demand exists and what needs marketers have for analysis of social performance and reporting.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

We’ve integrated with a semantic analysis partner which has enabled us to extract entities from social content such as people, places and organizations as well as themes and topics. Originally we planned to only integrate sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, negative) but there has been great feedback from users across full semantic analysis of post data.

Before we end, what are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• Slack is our internal communications hub. We are a distributed team so being able to split conversations out to channels and have bots notify us of any significant activity is vital to maintaining a high level of internal communication.
• Intercom is our user-facing communications hub. It’s great because we can deliver messages to users in-app and by email based on events and behavior.
• Zapier automates all the things. We have over 30 different zaps firing events into Slack and other apps. I love the power of Zapier and the endless possibilities to connect all our tools together.
• Trello is our team collaboration tool. We plan, run workflow and manage delivery through Trello. It’s simple, intuitive yet powerful.
• Mouseflow gives us qualitative user feedback. It’s perhaps our most insightful tool for really understanding what users do in-app. Everytime I use Mouseflow I feel like I’m getting closer to our users. But not in a weird way ;).
• Statbot gives us user stats and vitals. They were the 1st to market with Intercom reporting.
• Stripe handles our payments. Stripe removed the hassle of dealing with banks, we were up and running in no time.
• Xero handles our cashmoney. I really don’t know how we managed our finances before Xero.
• Google Analytics reports our website performance. I like GA’s dashboards and the way they’ve continually innovated such a huge powerful piece of software.
• Social Status reports our social performance (dog fooding all the way). A little bit biased here but there’s no better way to view our social media ROI.

The post Siftery Talks Automating Your Social Media Reporting with Social Status appeared first on Social Status.

Twitter announced last week that it would be giving a small group of users the ability to tweet in 280 characters – double the standard 140 characters that we have grown used to.

Why the change?

The 280 character tweet limit is currently in testing in every language except Japanese, Chinese and Korean. The thought behind this is that these languages are able to effectively communicate/express more in fewer characters.

Example: The same Tweet in different languages – Image Courtesy: Twitter

The change comes as new data shows that only a small percentage of tweets sent in Japanese (0.4%) actually use the whole 140 characters, compared to 9% of all tweets sent in English.

Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome! – Aliza Rosen, Product Manager @ Twitter

Twitter’s monthly active users have remained stagnant for 2 consecutive quarters at 328 million, and there lies the problem.

Twitter’s ability to secure advertising dollars depends on the platform’s ability to continuously grow, hence the addition of 140 extra characters – Twitter’s growth strategy.

And much like previous product updates, Twitter users have taken to the platform to voice their dislike/concerns over the potential character change.

Flash poll: What do you think of Twitter’s plan to experiment with a 280 character limit? https://t.co/j7xAFXaC7Z

— WIRED (@WIRED) September 26, 2017

What does this all mean for marketers?

Now, it’s easy as marketers to jump at the opportunity to use 280 characters. I get it… sometimes it is really hard to write clear brand messaging in 140 characters.

But I warn you – approach with care.

There is a reason that the Twitter community instantly voiced their dislike over the character changes. Let’s discuss;

Twitter is about brevity. It’s the core of the platform – it highlights only the most important things, forcing people people to get to the point of what it is they’re trying to say.

140 characters vs. 280 characters – Image Courtesy: Twitter

Doubling the character limit seems to go against that core philosophy. Twitter users have become comfortable with the 140 character limit over 11 years since it was introduced – it’s what they expect. When they look and see a long post, they’ll automatically assume its 1) someone on a rant or 2) an ad, and ultimately ignore it.

The main objective for Twitter with this move is to increase the amount of platform users globally, and the number of tweets per user.

This is a double-edged sword for marketers.

On one hand, more users means a larger audience base = potential customers. However, more users (who don’t have the 140 character discipline that Twitter alumni do) means more long-format style tweets = flooding.

I just saw a 20-tweet thread where each tweet used 280 characters. pic.twitter.com/RBGUuqqw0x

— D.B.Anderson ???? (@DBAnderson1) October 5, 2017

The 280-character tweets will likely dilute Twitter as a receptive marketing platform for consumers engaging with brands. Some of the most successful brands on Twitter, including Wendy’s, JetBlue and DiGiorno Pizza, have gotten to the peaks of brand engagement because of the discipline and rigor it takes to fit a message into 140 characters” – Rachel Spiegelman, CEO of Pitch

A polluted newsfeed will result in lower brand retention, ad recall, engagement and ultimately force long-time users off the platform.

On the plus side, Customer Service Managers rejoice! Hannah Redmond, Group Director of Strategy and Innovation at The Marketing Arm says the 280 characters will allow companies to better service their customers on Twitter.

This allows brands to better solve a problem or provide more information in response to customer inquiries or customer service complaints right there in the native platform, rather than directing them to a phone number or microsite

The post Why Marketer’s Should Be Cautious of Twitter’s New 280 Characters Limit appeared first on Social Status.

And it’s not the first time the social platform has seen such growth, doubling from 500,000 advertisers to 1 million advertisers in the space of 6 months almost a year ago (a result of the integration between Facebook and Instagram advertising).

With a total community size of 800 million (500 million of them using the platform every day), it is no wonder advertisers have flocked to spend their dollars on the highly popular platform.

And it seems Instagram is catching up with its parent company, Facebook, who claim to have 5 million advertisers spending their money on the platform as of April this year.

People are spending more time than ever on the platform producing and exploring content, especially mobile video – Instagram

While the integration between Facebook and Instagram advertising has certainly played a part in Instagram’s advertiser growth, video has played the biggest role. Instagram reports that people are spending 80% more time watching videos on Instagram than they were a year ago.

250 million people are watching and creating stories every day, and businesses are no different, with more than 50% of them creating at least one story in the last month.

Instagram plans to ride this growth wave, introducing a number of features and Facebook integrations for their stories, “giving advertisers more flexibility”.

Facebook’s Canvas Integration

Instagram allows advertisers to take advantage of Facebook’s full screen Canvas format inside of Instagram Stories.

The intention is to allow advertisers to capture their audiences attention with a short, video or jingle, and lead them somewhere where they can learn more about the product or service on offer.

Store Existing Creative Content Permanently in Power Editor and Ads Manager

Instagram is extending its creative tool suite by implementing a new uploading feature.

This feature will allow advertisers to re-purpose existing creative content, by storing it permanently within the Power Editor and Ads Manager for future use.

This feature is intended to increase the amount of organic content created within Instagram and have advertisers take full advantage of Instagram’s camera features; face filters, boomerangs, and drawing tools.

Placement Optimisation

The Facebook Marketing Science Team have been researching cross-platform campaigns and spend, trying to establish a way for cost effective campaign success.

Placement optimisation leverages off Facebook’s ad delivery system to dynamically seek out the lowest cost per outcome at any given point in time wherever it’s available, whether it be on Facebook or Instagram. As a result, running ads across multiple placements should provide lower cost per outcome than advertising on a single platform or even trying to manually allocate budgets across platforms

In the coming weeks, Instagram will be rolling out the ability for advertisers to automatically add Instagram Stories to Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network campaigns through placement optimisation.

With its continued Advertiser growth, Instagram is expected to generate $1.5 billion in mobile advertising sales this year and $5 billion in 2018 [Omni Core Agency]

The post Instagram Announce More Flexibility for the 2M Advertisers Using the Platform Every Month appeared first on Social Status.

Pinterest had previously only displayed 400 interests to advertisers looking to use their paid ad targeting – clearly amping up their monetisation efforts and investing heavily into making the platform a solid choice for companies looking to spend their advertising dollars.

We built the Pinterest Taste Graph on the world’s largest collection of human-curated links – over 100 billion Pins – and the trillions of interactions people have with them every week. Whenever someone searches with us or saves a Pin, we refine our understanding of what they’re into

The introduction of new visual search functionalities such as ‘Interesting Ideas’, ‘Shop The Look’ and ‘Lens’ has attributed to an increase in 40% more mobile text searches and 60% more visual searches on the platform since last year.

Pinterest is sitting on a gold mine of people’s tastes, preferences and interests, and have finally started to curate it in a way that enables marketers to better reach their customers in very specific ways.

By understanding people’s evolving tastes, preferences and interests, the Pinterest Taste Graph connects millions of people on Pinterest to hundreds of billions of fresh ideas that are just right for them

Some examples of these new categories include: underwater photography, sustainable architecture and vegetarian barbecue.

It has been a busy year for Pinterest, with a host of feature rollouts in their attempts to directly compete with the bigger social platforms and differentiate themselves from the others.

And it’s a great tactic for them, signing up a host of retailers whose products can be bought directly inside of Pinterest, a way to better monetise the platform and incentivise advertisers.

The main differentiator for advertisers wanting to use the Taste Graph, is that the content shown to users will not be overly dependant on the amount of money spent on the advertising, rather the quality of the match with the end users interests and preferences.

This means;

• ads will be better-targeted resulting in a better user experience as opposed to the inconvenience of being bombarded with ads irrelevant to your personal interests/tastes
• smaller companies will have a better chance at quality ad targeting, especially going up against big budget advertisers, due to the sophistication of targeting

The post Pinterest Introduce Taste Graph & Enhanced Targeting for Marketers appeared first on Social Status.

Much of our recent growth comes from international markets, where word is spreading fast about Pinterest’s unique blend of utility and inspiration. For example, we’ve seen 3x year over year growth in Germany and Brazil and 2x year over year growth in France and Japan – Pinterest 

Image Courtesy Pinterest

With a steady influx of new engaged and active users to the platform coming from international markets, Pinterest has had a busy year ensuring that their product offering stays unique, pushing for visual search functionalities as its core product.

And securing $150 million in a new round of funding this year at a $12.3b valuation has ensured that their primary focus has been on just that.

Let’s take a look at some of the new bells and whistles Pinterest has rolled out over this past year.

Interesting Ideas, Shop The Look & Lens(Beta) – February 2017

Interesting Ideas

This feature saw Pinterest introduce the ‘Ideas’ circle on the bottom right hand of all images. Clicking this circle unlocks other related and interesting pins, inline, instantly reshaping your feed around things that interest you.

Shop The Look 

The ‘Shop The Look’ feature is an extension from the 2015 feature that allowed users to pinpoint different items inside of a Pin.

This feature introduced the ability for users to tap on the circles (as shown below) and track down and purchase products all inside of the Pinterest platform.

Lens (Beta)

This was the first time Pinterest had announced its “experimental technology” as a beta to users.

Rather than using text to search, this feature allowed users to use their cameras inside of Pinterest to search for things that interested them.

Just point lens at a pair of shoes, then tap to see related styles or even ideas for what else to wear them with. Or try it on a table to find similar designs, and even other furniture from the same era. You can also use Lens with food. Just point it at broccoli or a pomegranate to see what recipes come up.

Ditching the ‘Like’ Button for the ‘Save’ Button – April 2017

Pinterest finally decided to ditch the ‘Like’ button, realising that their users were confused often left asking “but what’s the difference between the Save and Like button?”

They assured their users that they wouldn’t trash all of the pins they had previously liked, moving them to a new board in their collections called ‘Your Pinterest Likes’.

Pinterest’s chief motivation for doing this was to gain insight into how they could better curate content for users based on their ‘Saved’ pins.

Recipe Filters – May 2017

Pinterest has always been a place where it’s users went to for recipe inspiration, and with this knowledge, Pinterest launched it’s ‘Food Filters’ in May.

The filters allowed users to search for specific recipes and filter them based on dietary requirements, time to cook, ingredients etc.

Lens Gets a Makeover – June 2017

Pinterest announced in June that they had doubled the amount of categories that Lens had been trained to recognise from Fashion, to Home Decor to Food.

The Beta testing showed Pinterest that users liked to wait until later in the day to Lens photos, not always wanting to do it in that very moment.

As a result, Pinterest made it possible to view your camera roll while inside the Lens camera, also adding pinch to zoom and new focus features for a better user experience.

Search and Lens Move Front & Centre & Updates to the Home Feed Algorithm – July 2017

Search Bar & Lens Move to Home Feed

Thanks to our visual discovery features, monthly visual searches have increased nearly 60% over last year. And our search returns 20 percent more Pins, with nearly four billion ideas getting served up each and every day – Pinterest

Becoming an increasingly popular feature with users, Pinterest decided to move the Lens and search bar to the home feed – the search bar had previously been accessed by navigating to the ‘Explore Tab’.

Updated Home Feed Algorithm 

Due to the amount of new ‘live’ information being provided from Pinterest’s ‘Lens’ feature, Pinterest worked behind the scenes to make changes to what Pins appear on our Home Feed.

The changes meant that the Home Feed would instantly update based on Lens searches and Saved pins. Pinterest also stated that they had worked to “zap repeated Pins” saying that they had managed to eliminate almost every exact duplicate to make the Pinterest experience “easier to find what you’re looking for”.

The post A 2017 Timeline of Pinterest’s Feature Rollout – It’s Been A Busy Year! appeared first on Social Status.