Welcome to one of our biggest blogs yet. This week we take a look at all things Facebook Groups, LinkedIn’s Document Ads, adding music to our Instagram bios and the departure of Instant News articles on Facebook. That and a whole lot (and I do mean a lot) more. Let’s dive in.

The New Tools for your Facebook

Here’s what’s changing in your Facebook Groups:

• Reels are being added to Groups
• Users can update their about me profile in their specific groups and indicate if they’re open to receiving messages
• Facebook Group event chats
• Rewards and badges can be gifted to contributors
• Group admins can take action on flagged content sent to FB that doesn’t violate guidelines.
• View-only chats
• New ‘Socialiser’ community role. You can assign roles to certain members to action engagement such as ice breaking, celebrating members, sparking conversation. You can choose their label and choose their role description.

LinkedIn Celebrates National Disability Employment Awareness Month

This month is National Disability Employment Awareness Month and LinkedIn has made some great changes to celebrate the occasion. Firstly, auto-captions for video content where users can’t hear or need to watch videos in a sound-off environment. LinkedIn Learning is also introducing courses on accessibility in the workplace and finally, high contrast for video viewing for low vision or users with visual disabilities.

Facebook Is Retiring Instant Articles

Meta has announced that it is putting to bed Instant Articles as less than 3% of users worldwide use Facebook for News reading. Meta is realigning its business model to prioritise video content which makes up more than 50% of time spent on Facebook. The changes will come into effect in April 2023.

Document Ads

Why should you use LinkedIn Document Ads? First up, you can use Document Ads for engagement, lead generation or brand awareness. Tack on a Lead Gen Form to collect high-quality leads too. Next up, you create ads to complement your objectives. Some examples could be customer testimonials, case studies, eBooks or just a simple pamphlet. Then you sit back and measure the interest by the engagement of downloads you receive and the percentage of the document that was read.

Google Search Engine Update!

Google is adding brand names and favicons to search engine results on mobiles. This will help users gauge the website they click on before they tap. The favicon (the website logo next to URL on Google) is also getting enlargened. It is also switching the label “ads” to “sponsored” for paid suggested posts.

Music For Your Insta Bio

Instagram is flirting with the idea of giving users a song to add to their profile. Users will be able to pick ONE song for their profile. No idea if this will get past the beta phase or if the song will autoplay when you visit the account but it would be a fun addition if they were to take it on board.

IG Testing In-App Post-Scheduling

In its Beta phase, some users see the option to schedule Reels and Posts in IG, as opposed to Creator Studio. IG stories still need to be done live but it is a welcome update we hope to see rolled out soon.

TikTok’s NEW Ad Format

In the US, TikTok has introduced a new ad format called Showtimes that will allow studios to play full film trailers with a ‘Get Showtimes’ button surfacing afterwards. Users can volunteer their postcode to see nearby theatre dates and times. It is also changing rules on pay per view, now a user needs to interact or watch the ad for at least 6 seconds for the brand to be charged. We hope to see this call to action button become available worldwide and for smaller businesses too.

Thank you for coming along with us. It was a big week with some really exciting insights for your Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google and Instagram. As always flick us a message if you have any questions or enquiries. Until next time.

XOXO OMD SQUAD

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