This month in social media: Everything you need to know from October - Fun stuff

Video adverts flock to Instagram, Google adds the ability to post Polls on Google+ while Facebook brings in a new ad unit which helps local businesses target people within a mile of their location. While Facebook’s organic impressions are down, there is a significant increase in video views and social shares, a new trend which is taking over YouTube’s fame.

This and more is waiting for you in our roundup curated from the most insightful social media news stories from October. Here is what’s new, and what you might have missed…

Google Analytics introduces Tag Manager

Google launched a new tool called ‘Tag Manager’ with the purpose of helping you add marketing and analytical codes (or tags) to your website and remove the need of relying on web developers. Google Tag Manager offers the ability to publish tracking scripts through a variety of templates for adding tags such as Analytics and AdWords, but also templates for non Google services such as AdRoll Remarketing or Click Tale.

This feature is designed to help you measure and record interactions which don’t cause a page load. Often links to PDF documents, mail links, links on smartphone or video don’t generate trackable action therefore they are much harder to track in Google Analytics, but thanks to Google’s Tag Manager you will be able to see and record their performance.

Adobe’s Facebook performance study

The latest report from Adobe highlights why is it important to keep an eye on Facebook’s organic reach, which keeps plummeting. The report reveals that changes to Facebook’s algorithm led to a 50% decrease in organic impressions, and 5% increase in paid impressions over the course of the year.

Post interactions are up for financial and retail companies and specifically the retail industry had the largest increase in the post interaction – 13%. Although for media, tech and travel brands the interaction appears to be down.

Instagram enters mobile video advertising

After six months of testing, Facebook-owned Instagram finally has launched 15-second video ads. Among brands that have jumped on this new offering are Channel 4, Rimmel, Cadbury, Disney, Lancome, Waitrose and others. The ads appear in the Instagram’s main feed and are identified with a sponsored label. They play automatically in users’ news feed, but are muted until a user taps the volume control.

Social media studies and trends

How valuable are Facebook fans? A study from YetiData and Collective Bias discovered that Facebook fans who interact with a brand page make for higher-paying consumers.

Study: Marketers increasingly opting for Facebook video over YouTube

Why has Facebook stolen 40% of YouTube’s traffic? As Business Insider reports, brands like John Lewis are uploading videos directly to Facebook instead of hosting their videos on YouTube and promoting links to them on Facebook. Reason: vidoes posted in this way silently auto-play on mobile easily getting the attention of Facebook users, while links to YouTube videos need to be clicked to reveal the content.

So far this new approach has been working very well for John Lewis as there was a significant increase in social sharing happening on Facebook in comparison to YouTube.

Report: Facebook and Pinterest are the king and queen of social referrals. If you are interested to find out more, this study reveals further data.

Interactive polls launched on Google+

Starting this month Google+ has added functionality for users to create and post polls on Google+. This feature is available to pages as well as to profile users, who can include photos, GIFs and links to Google image searches.

Back in 2012 similar service was being offered by Facebook, which sadly has been removed even so it was highly popular amongst brands and business owners. Google+ not only brings this feature back but also makes it more compatible with the expansion of new features like being able to add up to 5 images and 5 choices per poll, cropping images featured, sharing polls with a selected audience (private or public) and lastly an option to edit poll content after posting. This guide should explain Google+ polls further.

Facebook launches hyper-local ads

Facebook has closed the small business gap with the launch of ‘Local Awareness Ads’, a new ad unit which targets users by geographic location.

This new feature helps businesses to target anyone who lives or was recently within a specific proximity to their location (based on the GPS in their smartphone). As the ads can appear either on desktop or on mobile, they could become a great way of tapping into neighbourhoods and building brand awareness through directing clients towards their locations.

Facebook adds features for page admins

Now you can comment or like posts belonging to other Facebook pages as the page you manage, even if you are not a fan of these pages. If you remember these annoying moments when you couldn’t like or reply to something even on the page you manage, well this problem is gone now as the new functionality allows admins to easily switch between the pages they manage as well as interact with others.

Another new feature lets users view ‘Valuable’ or ‘Irrelevant’ fans who are following your page and save drafts of posts and backdate them. The ‘Save draft’ or ‘Backdate draft’ feature is part of the menu which you use to craft your updates.