Are you focusing on promoting your brand through social media marketing this year? There are a lot of changes that has been rolled out on the major social media platforms. They can be either good or bad for the campaign that you already have in mind, but being aware of what changes are in place in social networking sites can help you design a great campaign that will send your message loud and clear to your target audience.
In order for you to keep up with the algorithm changes rolled out by almost all social media networks, and also to help you create the best posts, we have compiled the game-changers and some posting rules that you may need to refer to before you create and post your content.
No More Click baits and Engagement Baits
Facebook has engaged in a battle against junk news, and in doing so, the social media giant has down-ranked click baits in the newsfeed algorithm. In line with this, engagement baits that merely focus on tagging, sharing, and liking are also demoted.
What works, then? If you are gunning for virality, you can choose to aim for the emotions instead. This type of post trend is dubbed as emotion-bait, which allows engagement by incorporating strong elements of emotion into a highly-shareable type of content.
Facebook Videos
Videos are still one of the best ways to get engagement in Facebook, and it is noticeable that the most engaging videos are becoming longer. This means that you can enjoy more room in storytelling.
Facebook live videos can also go a long way when it comes to enjoying organic reach – they immediately spark conversations among your followers. In fact, Facebook live videos get 6 times more interaction than most regular videos.
Metrics and Algorithm changes
The only page posts that are counted as an organic reach are posts that appear on the user’s screen. If you are running a page, you will need to ensure that people are sharing your content in order for Facebook to know that your posts are indeed making an impact.
Image sizes
Your photos do the job of capturing the audience’s attention even before they read anything that you have written on your post. Ensuring that you have uploaded your image according to Facebook’s image size guidelines will assure you that your audience will not get turned off by an awkwardly-cropped image on their news feeds.
- Profile Picture: 170 x 170 pixels
Important note: Profile pictures will appear as square when you view your profile, but they will be cropped and appear as a circle when they appear on ads or posts.
- Cover Photo: 851 x 315 pixels
Important note: When viewed on a desktop, your cover photo will be displayed at 820 x 312 pixels. On mobile, this image will be displayed as 640 x 360 pixels. If you want your images to load fast, you would want to keep your image files under 100 Kb.
- Shared images: 1200 x 630 pixels
Instagram has been one of the best platforms that offer leverage to brands when it comes to boosting their engagement and making their content go viral. Here are some Instagram features that you can tap to boost your content engagement:
Hashtags
Instagram is now allowing its users to follow hashtags, which can give you leverage when marketing any type of content.
Stories
Instagram Stories is one of the hottest features that users are currently enjoying – 200 million users are actively using this feature, which makes it even more popular than SnapChat. If users missed a Live Story, they can access it through Instagram’s archives.
Videos
If you are gunning for engagement through videos, then Instagram has become a better place for your content. Instagram now allows longer videos on their platform with the roll out of the full-fledge support for videos.
Influencers
Sponsored posts are making a huge rally for brands – they can drive more than 19 million engagements in a week. Pairing up with a good influencer can be a good strategy in order for you to pique a new set of audience’s interest.
Images
Since images make up most of what people see in Instagram, you will need to make sure that all your images are square: Instagram is keen on maintaining an aspect ratio of 1:1. For image sizing, take note of the following:
- Profile picture: 110 x 110 pixels
- Image thumbnails: 161 x 161 pixels
Twitter remains to be the social media platform that allows people to share content for less and without forcing users to follow an account in order to start communicating. For this reason, this platform remains to be one of the greatest tools that you can use for customer service on top of traditional channels. It is also the best way for you to discover topics that attract the most conversations, which will allow you to be up-to-date with the latest trends.
It is notable that users are already able to use up to 280 characters for their tweets and hashtags, which gives you more room to tell your story and create a personalized voice. Tweets can also be accompanied with photos and videos.
Images
- Profile picture: 400 x 400 pixels
Your profile photo will be displayed along with your tweet and on the Who to Follow box. This immediately serves as a face on every conversation that you start or you reply to. Take note that your profile picture will also be cropped into a circle, so make sure that there are no important elements cropped out after your upload.
- Header photo: 1500 x 500 pixels
This photo dominates your page, which allows you to put in as much elements as possible to display your branding. Keep in mind that the maximum file size allowable for the image upload is 5MB – make sure that you optimize this image as much as possible.
- In-stream photo: 440 x 220 pixels
The dimensions mentioned above is the minimum recommended size, but it would be best to use that size in order to make your image optimized for all types of screen.
Pinterest is one of the platforms that you should tap when you want to drive traffic to your website – this website gets 2 billion searches every month and is responsible for generating 5% of the traffic for brands that use it. If you play your Pinterest cards right, you can have a great amount of traffic that is actually ready to buy from you.
The Smart Feed
The Smart Feed, or the algorithm implemented in Pinterest, is the one that determines what users will see on their screen. This allows users to see a good mix of what they want to see. This means that if you tag your pins right, then they are likely to appear on your target audience’s feed.
Images
Pinterest has gone through some changes when it comes to how pins appear on the board. In the past, pins will appear with a width of 736 pixels. Now, pins are to have a 2:3 aspect ratio – if you have a tall image, then it will look cropped on the board. Don’t worry, users can see them fully once clicked.
What sizing would work best then? You can use these dimensions as a guide:
- Profile picture: minimum of 180 x 180 pixels
- Board cover: minimum of 340 x 340 pixels. Take note that board covers are going to be square. Should you wish to have a larger cover, you can go up to 600 x 600 pixels
- Portraits: you can use any 4:5 ratio, but 600 x 750 pixels work best.
- Infographics: you can make sure of any image that has 1:2.6 ratio, but you can go as large as 600 x 1560 pixels without your pin getting cropped.