At The Crocodile we’re excited and inspired by the complexity of the social media landscape. Whilst social media is easily accessible and cost-effective compared to traditional channels, its constantly evolving nature makes it one of the most time-intensive activities for brands to manage. To keep our clients and ourselves abreast of all the emerging trends and technologies, we bring you the @crocbites monthly social media roundup, with plenty for B2B marketers to sink their teeth into.
In its latest round of news feed updates, Facebook throws down the gauntlet to brands: create content that people interact with, or see reach and referral traffic dip.
You can now use Messenger for video calls. Add that to the new Businesses on Messenger feature (covered in our last social media roundup), which allows people to engage with brands directly in Messenger, and customer service via Facebook could have a fresh complexion.
Remember the halcyon days of asking someone to follow you back so you could DM them? Well, now you can DM anybody, making it easier for B2B brands to build personal connections with customers and prospects.
Got some bon mots to add to a retweet? It used to require a workaround that involved prefixing the comment with ‘LRT’ (last retweet), but that’s no longer necessary with Twitter’s welcome RT with comment feature.
In other news, Twitter has scooped up personalised marketing platform, TellApart. Twitter advertisers will soon be able to benefit from its cross-device retargeting capabilities.
April also saw Twitter launch Highlights, a simple summary of your Twitter timeline delivered via push notification.
YouTube
According to YouTube boss Susan Wokcicki, videos watched on the mobile app alone (that’s excluding desktop views) are reaching more people than any TV network.
Skippable pre-roll video ads via Google TrueView have been a feature on YouTube for five years now. To mark the milestone, YouTube goes back to 2010 to celebrate the top five trending ads that raised the bar.
Vine
Creating content with Vine? It’s now more shareable than ever thanks to a new share screen that introduces a number of improvements, including the ability to post to Tumblr.
It’s now quicker and easier for you (and visitors to your site) to Pin things with the Pinterest in-browser button.
Another recent update from the visual discovery platform is the launch of its Marketing Developer Partners programme to help improve the way the network works for brands. It’s designed to help businesses optimise and scale their marketing activity on the platform via new tools and services.
LinkedIn has teamed up with Marketo, connecting LinkedIn Lead Accelerator with the marketing automation provider’s Engagement Marketing Platform to create a cross-platform solution designed to help marketers engage with customers throughout the buying cycle.
Finally, your team can now skill-up through LinkedIn after the professional network announced its plan to purchase Lynda.com, a leading online learning company.
That’s it for this social media roundup – if you spot anything in May you think we should include next month, drop us a tweet via @crocbites.