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Digital Marketing Round Up January 2023
Happy New Year! We hope you’ve had a great holiday season.
Now, let’s start 2023 with the latest news from the digital world! This month’s blog includes updates from Instagram, Google, WordPress and more.
Keep reading to stay in the loop:
Is Authenticity Going To Be The Biggest Social Trend For 2023?
With the rise of platforms like BeReal and people stepping away from the preppy nature of Instagram, we might see authenticity as a huge factor in our 2023 strategies.
BeReal, the app that notifies you to share a candid photo within a 2-minute window every day, has seen immense growth in 2022 (315% usage increase, to be exact!). And this growth is understandable, with other platforms such as Instagram becoming increasingly staged and unrealistic, people like to see the authentic site of social media.
The same goes for TikTok, which surpassed 1.8 billion users in 2022, where the most popular content continues being videos recorded on regular phones, in a non-staged environment – no lights, no fancy edits, etc.
An example of a current TikTok influencer is GK Barry, or Grace, who was a uni student and Costa coffee worker when she began recording videos from her room. Her candid, unfiltered style of comedy has gained a whopping 2.8 million followers and has given her the opportunity to partner with global brands such as Spotify, Amazon Prime and Sports Direct.
With all of this in mind, it’s safe to say that the “fake”, over-edited content on social is dying out. Make sure to account for that when planning your 2023 content calendar by creating more genuine content – content that your audience can relate to on a personal level.
Instagram Updates for the Start of 2023
Mark Zuckerberg has announced some exciting changes and new features for Instagram to boost collaboration and communication, fresh and ready for the new year. It appears that Instagram wants to develop itself as a multi-functional platform that merges all the best features from across the social media sphere. It will be interesting to witness how this approach lands with Instagram users as there has been some ongoing push-back against its departure from being an image-based platform.
Communicate with ‘Notes’
Instagram continues to evolve past its image-based beginnings. With the ongoing exodus from Twitter, there is an opportunity to develop more text-based communication styles across other social platforms. Instagram will release a new feature which allows users to send up to 60 characters of written content to a select group of followers. Notes will arrive through direct messaging and will remain available for 24 hours, so it will create possibilities for exclusive and direct content for community building and engagement.
Collaborate with Group Profiles & Collections
Stay in touch and collaborate with friends, family or colleagues in the new Instagram group profiles and saved post collections. This can be a way to promote community & connection through a continuous group feed. Share & save posts to be viewed by group members and promote online collaboration across the platform.
Another Clone of BeReal with Candid Stories
BeReal has seen great success across a varied audience for its simplistic and authentic approach. Other social platforms are duplicating the ‘instant selfie’ feature to try and jump on the bandwagon. For Instagram, Candid Stories have been available since August, but they are generating further promotion to boost engagement with this feature.
Instagram Audience Targeting For Facebook and Instagram Ads
Meta is rolling out a feature that will allow advertisers to run ads targeting their Instagram followers on both Facebook and Instagram.
This might sound like something you were already allowed to do and it’s probably because you can already run ads on Instagram through Facebook Ads Manager. The difference with this new feature is that previously advertisers were only allowed to use Facebook’s audience targeting options, but there was no way of targeting your audience based on how they were engaging with your brand on Instagram.
Soon, you’ll be able to create an Instagram Custom Audience, and here are some examples of the targeting options you’ll have available when you’re creating this audience group to use for your campaigns;
– People who follow this professional account
– Anyone who visited this professional account’s profile
– People who sent a message to this professional account
– People who engaged with any post or ad
There will be more options like these ones available when the update gets rolled out.
We can’t wait to get our hands on this and create ads that are even more targeted. If you’re like us, keep an eye on your Ads Manager account for the next few weeks.
Google’s Link Spam Update
Google’s new algorithm update ‘December 2022 Link Spam Update’ is now being rolled out and might have an impact on your rankings by the time you come back to work from your Christmas break.
Google’s ‘SpamBrain’ can now identify sites buying links or sites that are being used to pass outgoing links. This means any unnatural links you have going to your website, will not be credited anymore and if you have loads of these, your rankings will definitely take a hit in the new year.
The first thing to do when you’re back on January 3rd should be to have a look at your rankings and perform a backlink audit on your website.
Check out the information on Google’s spam policies here.
Built-in Landing Page Report To Be Rolled Out In Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Built-in landing page reports with custom metrics will be added to GA4. This new functionality will automatically generate insights straight on the homepage, making it simpler to find actionable data to maximise conversions.
Before this feature, which is being made available to users gradually, landing page reports had to be manually created. This was an unintuitive process, which required several clicks.
You can find the landing page report in the Engagement section of the left navigation in your GA4 dashboard.
The default, automated report includes metrics for Views, New Users, Average Engagement Time per Session, Conversions, and Total Revenue. However, these fields can be changed and customized to individual needs.
WordPress Announced A Security Release To Fix More Than A Dozen Vulnerabilities Of Varying Severity, Affecting All Versions Prior To 6.0.3
WordPress recommends that all users update their websites immediately after vulnerabilities were uncovered.
There were several types of vulnerabilities affecting WordPress, including Cross Site Scripting, often referred to as XSS (An attacker can send a malicious script to a user who visits the site).
Another vulnerability found was Stored XSS. This is considered to be worse than a regular XSS attack. The malicious script is stored on the website itself and is executed when a logged-in user visits the website. Cross-Site Request Forgery (forces users to execute unwanted actions) was also detected.
All versions since WordPress 3.7 have been updated to remedy these vulnerabilities. As this is a security release, we recommend that you upgrade your sites immediately.
Join Us On A Free Webinar To Kickstart Your Year!
Teaching an old dog new tricks, education and learning don’t stop when you leave school. We here at SocialB have seen a growth in the need for recruitment through social media to attract new employees, students, and parents alike within the education field.
It is never too early to begin thinking about your recruitment online and to think about training those who run your socials on social media policies. Social Media Policies are integral, especially when children are involved, and anyone who is to post or be posted on your socials need to be aware of this factor. Having a secure social media policy in place and more frequent screening of social medias have been put in place this year with a focus on safeguarding children.
Join us at the end of January on our free webinar where we will discuss social media policies and recruitment for your educational institution.
