Welcome to our first article of what’s hot in digital marketing. This month we will check together the latest news about popular social media networks and trends in social media marketing.

Some key trends that seem to capture the business world of social media are the “Buy” CTA buttons, the customized content for mobile and innovative types of ads such as video ads on Instagram and Twitter cards.

Facebook: Animated GIFs, Instant Articles and Saved Replies

Facebook now displays GIFs in its posts on desktop and mobile devices – an image file format that supports static and animated images, moving photos or short videos. Till now, animated GIFs are not available for Pages. Meanwhile, Facebook has also introduced Instant Articles, providing an easy and fast way to read content that can be found in Facebook’s mobile app. Instant Articles will first be implemented on Facebook for IPhone with limited stories available from select publishers such as The New York Times and the National Geographic. Instant Articles will let stories load more than 10 times faster than standard mobile web articles. Facebook also tests “Saved Replies”, which is a simple tool that improves the online customer service by letting the Page Admin create replies- templates and save them for later use.

Google+: Local pages & Collections

Google + continues to play a significant role on the search performance of online businesses as it gives users the opportunity to instantly find comprehensive information of a location, business or place through Google+ pages. Google+ recently also introduced a new feature allowing users to filter their feeds by specific topics known as Google+ Collections. Google+ Collections can be chosen as private or sharable and are available on the web and on Android devices.

Instagram: Ads for all businesses & Carousel Ads

Instagram now offers its Advertising Platform to all businesses, enabling more targeting choices with more call to action ads. Instagram also integrated carousel ads and gave advertisers the ability to present multiple images for people to swipe through. Carousel ads let advertisers include links within posts but are still only available in the U.S. market.

Pinterest: Guides Search, Buy Button & Cinematic Pins

Pinterest search is getting better now with Guided Search that allows you to filter search results by gender. Pinterest also announced the “buy” button, coming first to iOS, helping users make purchases from inside the app. Not to mention that Pinterest now allows businesses to target audiences with a new animated type of Promoted Pin, the video ads called Cinematic Pins.Cinematic Pins run in motion as the user scrolls, but the motion stops when the scrolling stops.

Twitter: Bing Partnership & Audience Insights

Twitter now is partnering with Bing to give users the chance to view tweets in multiple languages. Twitter also introduced audience insights, a new tool to help advertisers better understand key audiences on Twitter. Twitter-specific information can be accessed within the U.S. market but plans to spread in other markets as well over the next few months.

Snapchat & Reddit: 2 new social media networks that are becoming popular

Snapchat and Reddit seem to have captured the digital world in the latest months. Snapchat is a social media network which helps users send photos and videos that disappear after being viewed. It is a mobile and instant messaging based network. Snapchat is more popular to teenagers and it seems to be one of the most growing apps. On the other hand, Reddit has also a strong community and is a network which resembles the traditional message board style and displays submitted links with content that is voted up or down by users.

Optimize your online presence by picking the channel that works best for your business and your audience, focus your attention on creating high quality and engaged content for this channel and don’t forget to constantly monitor the news and the trends that come up every day.

Stay tuned for more trends and news on other digital media practices. 

References:

• marketingland.com
• adweek.com
• mobilemarketingmagazine.com.