Ep 144: Meta Update. 3 Key Areas of Focus for 2023

In this episode, I'm giving you a summary and some of my personal thoughts, from a fantastic article I read from Social Media Today (published Jan. 16. 2023)

The article was filled with so many great tips and updates that I want to share with you to help you get the most out of your marketing on Instagram & Facebook this year.

Inspire people to be creative.
Help people discover things they love.
Spark connections between people.

So what will be big in 2023? Here are some of my thoughts that you'll hear on the show:

• more original content being promoted
• more recommendations from the algorithm

And I'll also share ways to help you lean into these changes and grow your audience by:

• Building your brand presence
• Creating a posting schedule
• Beginning your content with a hook

We'll talk about this and more!

Pop in those pods now.

Articles Mentioned:

Doubling suggested posts
 
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/zuckerberg-says-that-meta-plans-to-double-the-amount-of-ai-recommended-cont/628312/

How IG recommendation works:

https://engineering.fb.com/2020/12/10/web/how-instagram-suggests-new-content/

Best tips for captions:

https://business.instagram.com/instagram-post-tips

Hashtags

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/planning-for-2023-instagram-posting-tips/640456/

Adam Mosseri Algo :
https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/shedding-more-light-on-how-instagram-works

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Transcript

Chelsea Peitz: 0:01

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about all things Instagram, a little bit of Facebook as well, so I might as well just say meta. But I came across this really great article that I felt was probably one of the better articles that I've read recently that takes into account a lot of announcements in the past year made both from Facebook side and Instagram side in regards to what the heck is going on with these platform. Are we going to see more suggested content? What about all the recommendations in my feed reels, hashtags, and everything in between? So I will put the link to this particular article in the show notes. It's from Social Media, uh Today, social Media Today, which is a great website, social media today.com. That's where I get all of my news. And this is an article published January 16th, 2023, called Planning. For 2023 Instagram posting tips and in. They talk about the, essentially the vision that Instagram has, and if you remember from, if you've been listening to the show for any amount of time, you remember this time last year, I did a similar episode because Instagram, Adam Moser, c e o, announced the vision of the year, and so they did the same thing. They are outlining three key areas of focus for 2023. So I'm going to give you these three areas and then I'm also going to give you my. Interpretation, I suppose my interpretation of, of what I think this means. Maybe predicting and assuming. So just know that I will read you the actual word for word information and then I will give you my personal view, which cannot be confirmed by Instagram. So the three key areas of focus for 2023. One, inspire people to be creative. Number two, help people discover things they love.. Number three, spark connections between people. Here's my interpretation, so inspire people to be creative. I feel that that's using music and making reels, and I also think that may be a nod to creating content that doesn't rely on trends, that also doesn't rely on music that is just you and you are creating it. It's a hundred percent original. They have talked about promoting original content in the past, so I think this is a nod to. Does it mean that if you use trends, you're not going to grow? No. I am a big believer that you are more than a trend and that your personal brand is unique. So that inspire people to be creative, I think is, is a nod to that area. Now the last two, I think kind of tie together, help people discover things they love well. I think this is directly related to the recommendation algorithm. Recently, mark Zuckerberg, uh, over at Facebook said that they're planning to double the amount of recommendation, double the amount of recommendation. So he did, they did an earnings call and on it he talked about AI and recommendation algorithm. So I'm gonna read a quote. It says right now about 15% of content in a person's Facebook. And a little more than that of their Instagram feed. So let's just say 20%, uh, roughly, uh, is recommend recommended by our AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don't follow. And we expect these numbers to more than double by the end of the year. So that means that you have way more opportunities for your content to be introduced to people who theoretically are interested in your. Topic. I think it's a great, uh, change the recommendation algorithm because now our content is going to go out to people who are actually interested. You might be saying, yeah, but I used to get like 300 views and now I get 30. Well, would you rather have 300 views of non-targeted people that are not interested in doing business with you, or would you rather have 30 views of highly targeted people who are actually interested? I would rather have the. So helping people discover things they love that I think is a nod to the recommendations. The next one is sparking connections between people. This also, I think, has to do with something. I believe it was Mark Zuckerberg that said they're looking at. Sharing, saving and dms as the way to determine what's actually content that people want to see and, and, and should they show that content More so with reels, at least on, um, reels on Facebook and Instagram. I'm saying reels like as they're all called the same thing, short form, vertical video, I should say reels on Instagram and Facebook. And then TikTok, obviously on TikTok. TikTok is showing watch time and retention. We don't have that. on Instagram. I have my own theories as to why We don't have that yet on Instagram. So what we can look at is shares and saves. And Instagram is looking at that. Is this something that somebody shared with a friend? Okay, well that thing that got shared with a friend has some value, so let's show that. To more people. Also, I think collaborations a way to collaborate with people and to create reels where you're doing more collaborations and posts. So those are my personal opinions. On the three things, again, the three key areas of focus inspire people to be creative. I e use reels, Two, help people discover things they love, means they're gonna see a whole lot more recommendation and spark connections between people. Um, I hate to. Heavily weighted because then that opens up the whole Pandora's box of, uh, is a share more than a, like a blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, but I think that they're definitely gonna be looking at, you know, shares via dms and saves as well. So that's the the main goal for Instagram for this year. Scrolling through the rest of the article, which I highly recommend that you go and read this article because it's really chock full of goodies. They talk about the next step of building a brand presence, and Instagram offered three notes on how to effectively build your brand presence. Number one, have a clear. And it talks about setting marketing goals and smart goals, which you've seen that. S M A R T, all Capital Smart Marketing Goal. I would just say that is my and my idea, have a niche, have a focus, have a lane, because when somebody new. is coming to your profile and they don't know who you are because now remember it's going out to a bunch of people that don't know you, and they're like, oh, this is interesting. Let me go check out this person's profile, because that's what happens. You find something that's intriguing and you go and lurk on their profile because you wanna verify. You wanna see if this is really a person, you wanna see what they're all about. Maybe you wanna consume some of their other videos. So you go and you lurk, and if your videos don't clearly tell me who you are, what you do, and why I might be interested in following you. It's kind of all over the place, then I'm probably not gonna hit that follow button. Also, not that you have to make the same video, same content every time you make a video, but when you have the theme and a focus and a niche, it does help the algorithm understand what you're all about. So have a clear goal. Number two, establish a look and a voice. And this talked about building consistent visuals, messages across and logo colors, et cetera. Okay. Well, you know how I feel about focusing only on those things. Yes, absolutely. It's important. I myself did a complete rebrand, hired a company to do that. That that is important to find your vibe. A lot of us get trapped in that before we start making actual content. So I think also too, what this is a nod to in my mind is having your own style, having your own personality and perspective, and people knowing that when they see your content, they know what to expect. And we don't wanna get like ultimately too predictable. But there is something in saying, oh my gosh, I know who that's from. So establishing that look and voice. I think this also could be style. It could be the style in which you write your captions. The fact that I like to use a lot of emojis. I also have a favorite emoji that I use all the time, so that is all part of it. The last one is creating a posting schedule. Creating a posting schedule. And the good news is inside of Instagram now, you can schedule your posts, you can schedule your reels, so you can create your reels. You can just schedule'em directly, right within Instagram, which is awesome. I personally haven't tried that yet, but I just got it, I think last week. So those were the three tips they talked about there. Then they go into short form, vertical video, talk about TikTok and some of the new updates and, and a few of the other details. They didn't really say too much about reels other than, um, you know, if you're really stuck for ideas, you can go, uh, check out their templates. They're trying to get people to start using templates which are pre-made, pre-designed, uh, segments that are timed so that you can just upload your own videos. Just they're trying to make it easier for people to use reels because they want people to use reels. and so they just said, Hey, listen, please use it. And we're trying to make it as easy as possible. So the other thing I thought was really interesting in here is that it says videos up to 60 seconds long will now play in full IG stories. So I would get really frustrated when I would share a really fun reel to my story and it would cut it. So apparently that is not going to happen anymore. It's still happening for me at the reading of this article, so I'm, I'm hopeful. I'm excited about that. All right. Next section. Talked about captions and hashtags, and this is the part where I'm gonna do some of my interpretation. I'm gonna do some. Instagram speaking. Uh, okay. Captions. It says in terms of captions, Instagram offers these tips. Number one, lead with the most important information. I think this is a really solid strategy and not just for captions for anything. This is the hook. This is the hook of your video. It's the hook of your caption. It's getting to the point. It's having something interesting. It's having a question and using the word you. That is really, really, using a consistent and personal tone is the second one. Consistent personal tone. I like that they say personal, and this is what we were talking about a little bit earlier, where you're finding your own style and personality and voice. I like that they are, in my mind, this tells me we want you to be human. Talk to your friends, right? Like you talk. And that is difficult writing like you talk. Don't be afraid to embellish with some emojis and, and it doesn't have to be this perfect grammatical type of cap. The next one is keep the copy short and to the point. Okay. You know, we've talked about longer captions. I love longer captions. If you don't like longer captions, that's totally fine, but as long as you're getting the information out, because if I'm watching someone's real or I'm looking at their graphic and I want more detail, I'm gonna read the caption. So again, you don't have to write a lengthy cap. It does say, get to the point So we've had two bullets there that say, get to the point, lead with the most important information and get to the point. And then lastly, encourage action with simple direct text. That's called a Call to action friends. And it should be on everything you do from your email signature to your newsletters, to your Instagram bio, to your captions, to your. Essentially getting to the point and encouraging people to take an action, whether it's leave me a comment, share this out, tag a friend. So I think that's one of the things that it took me a long while to learn was to remember to do my calls to action. Okay. Lastly, the roundup on hashtags. I love, this is my favorite part of the article because in IT social media today talks about. The controversy of what Instagram said, three to five highly relevant hashtags, and everyone's like, oh, hashtags are dead. Now they have the recommendation algorithm. Who cares about hashtags? Why would you even use 20? Nothing more than 10. First of all, nobody knows. We don't have a menu from Instagram that they've said this is exactly how it works. What they did say was a post that said three to five highly relevant hashtags, but it didn't say. It didn't say why it said this is, this is what we recommend. Now in this article, I love how the author Andrew Hutchinson puts it. It says Instagram, I'm quoting. Instagram recommends adding three to five highly relevant hashtags. Now, highly relevant hashtags are, in my mind, hashtags that describe the topic and describe words that people would type in to search for that topic. So three to five highly relevant hashtags to reach the right communi. So in my mind that says like, okay, I wanna use these really relevant hashtags so that Instagram's computer knows what this is about. And they're also looking at the caption words. They're also listening to what you're saying in the video, and they're saying, Hmm, what is this about? What is this person normally talk about? Okay, well let's serve it up according to that. So it goes on and says, though, some research has shown that adding up to 30 can have significant reach and engagement benefit. There's no definitive answer. So one talks about three to five relevant hashtags to make sure it gets sorted and served to the right communities and up to 30 for significant reach and engagement, more engagement benefits. So I mean, I, I don't see why you wouldn't do three to five highly relevant and more and I'm still doing more, and I am still seeing results. Uh, but it goes on to say there's no definitive answer. But if you have a collection of 30 relevant hashtags that could drive results. Oh, I love that. So the debate will continue on. I'm sure. Lastly, they quote, uh, key posting notes from, uh, meta and Instagram and essentially how. Instagram suggests new content and there is an article that you can find on engineering dot fb for facebook.com. I know they have all these blogs that nobody knows about. That's where we get all this information, but they have these, like, they're not hidden, but who's gonna go to engineering.fb.com Anyway, engineering. Facebook's engineering blog posted on December 10th, 2020. So this is a couple years ago. So this is how they've, this is how long they've been talking. right? How Instagram suggests new content and it goes into how they design it, and it's, it's pretty techy. It's a little techy. Uh, designing a constrained exploration system. that's the title. I love it. So essentially it's, it's talking about, you know, who you're engaging with, of course, and what accounts you're following. and kind of goes through what is it looking for? Well, it's trying to recommend content that's similar to people and accounts that you're following, so you could. Do some research and see what other brands or people in your industry are doing well or posting to kind of see what specific elements that you could align. We don't want to copy them, but just to give you some research. Now, in this article, it talks about freshness, quote unquote, is important with an Instagram's algorithmic approach, which means that you need to be posting regularly to ensure that you're maximizing your opportunities. I disagree. I disagree. I think consistency and, and regularly or frequently or freshness because the recommendation algorithm is about relevancy, not recency. And I personally think it's moving from quantity to quality because when I go to YouTube and I look for something very specific, it's gonna show me the best videos and that best video might be from five years ago, and I don't care if it's from five years ago, as long as the information isn't dependent on it being brand new. Obviously, if I'm looking at algorithmic information for Instagram, well five years ago it was different, but it's searching for the most relevant content. In some cases, the most relevant content is. The most recent, like the algorithm in this case, cause we don't wanna read articles from five years ago. But if you're making evergreen content, it doesn't necessarily have to depend on freshness. And so you will grow and get more reach and exposure if you're posting more often. But at what expense? If you're burning out and you hate it, you're not gonna wanna do it. So I would say stay consistent because the algorithm is ranking you against. And your activity and not you against all the other people. They're getting ranked against themselves as well. So as long as you're consistent, you're not all over the board. That's the best way that I have seen for people to, to grow steady. So I will again put this link to the article, really helpful website. Highly recommend it. I'll put that link to the article and inside of the article, they also link to all of the Instagram and. Blogs and so thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the gram or the recommendation algorithm, you can find me at Chelsea dot PIs on Instagram. Feel free to send me a dm. There's a whole bunch of free downloads and freebies about reels. I have an Instagram course that's totally free there, and I also have my newest real estate school, which is all about Instagram reels for real estate and mortgage. So thanks for listening. Till next time, we'll see you then.