With the competing demands on your time as a business owner, we know it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes going on in digital. We caught up with social media consultant, trainer and Twitter wall/event manager at Social Progress, Janet Bebb, to find out what developments in social media she thinks you need to know about.
Social Progress delivers social media account management and training, so naturally, it’s important that they keep up-to-date on the latest developments.
“We interact with Facebook quite a bit and visited at the beginning of March. We were also invited this time last year and the year before, so we get direct updates from them that we can impart to our clients”, Janet explains.
Instagram is the one to watch
“Instagram is growing exponentially – much faster than Facebook ever did”, Janet says. “This makes sense as we’re all much more experienced with social media and we understand it more now.”
There’s good reason to pay attention to Instagram. The platform boasts over 500 million accounts that are active every day and 80% of accounts follow a business.
“If you’re not on Instagram you’re missing out. Facebook have told us Instagram will become bigger than Facebook”, Janet advises.
Video content continues to dominate engagement
“Video is key to engagement and again you’re missing out if you’re not using this post type”, Janet says. “Videos receive five times more engagement than pictures.”
Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2019 report revealed that ‘87% of people would like to see more video from brands in 2019’.
“By 2020, Facebook say 85% of content will be some form of moving content”, Janet adds.
Paid subscription Facebook groups
Facebook are currently testing out monetising their Facebook Groups. Only available to select accounts currently, Janet is a member of a Facebook Group looking at subscription-based groups.
“These groups will allow account owners to charge a subscription for users to access the group and its premium content”, Janet explains. “Then Facebook will take a cut of the subscription fees from group owners”.
There’s no word yet on when this service will become available to everyone, but as it has been in testing since summer 2018, so it’s likely we’ll see a steady increase over 2019 as it rolls out.
Twitter lost its way?
“Twitter is one of my favourite platforms and we get a lot of engagement from it”, says Janet. “However, it seems to have lost its way a bit. Although it is still the go-to place for breaking news, in terms of Joe Public’s engagement, the other platforms are stronger. I feel that they need to get a handle on it and get people to fall back in love with it again.”
Janet explains that the team use Twitter mainly for events. “We engage using event hashtags in the run up to events and while at the events themselves”, Janet explains.
She continues: “We developed ‘Big Screen Social’ a few years back and use it at events to pull through hashtags. It displays a nice visual flipboard and it does encourage people to use Twitter at events.”
Janet Bebb is one of only twenty four Accredited Facebook #SheMeansBusiness Trainers in the UK. She is a social media consultant, trainer and Twitter wall/event manager for Social Progress in Yorkshire. The company specialises in social media account management, training and consulting.
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