This week’s Marketing Monday Q&A focuses on social media, covering topics like email’s potentially numbered days, Twitter character limits, and Facebook’s unpopular “new” feature.
The beauty of Slack is that it can be used in many different settings, and in many different ways. It is, however, more of a collaboration and messaging platform than a social network.
Email is the default for standard communication, which will make it difficult for anything to kill it off. Businesses, corporations and individuals use email to formally communicate. Emails have an official capacity to them and are even enforceable by law.
Slack isn’t like that. Slack is an open standard format which allows people to collaborate in a community. It’s more like text messaging than email.
BUT you can leverage it to take control over your inbox and rid us of the dreaded “reply all.”
For example, at Illumine8, we have created different channels for internal use where we discuss ideas, collaborate on different projects, and send the occasional meme.
This allows us to communicate about important internal matters quickly and efficiently, without cluttering up everyone’s inbox. Most of our internal communication happens on Slack, and we save email for client communications and more official business.
Slack is a nice addition to keep communication separate and collaborative at the same time. It works well with email, but will not take its place.
As the water cooler of the internet, Twitter is one of the first places people go to express themselves, look for news, rant or follow their favorite celebrities. Not allowing for long-form posting was something that made Twitter unique among all the other social media platforms.
Twitter announced in late September that it had begun testing 280-character tweets, which is double the previous character limit it had always been known for. The platform made this change in the hopes that it would encourage more people to tweet and be expressive over the platform.
Certain languages, called “languages impacted by cramming,” need more characters to express the same thoughts as other languages without editing on Twitter. The doubled character limit could allow for richer thoughts and conversations on the platform, or it could just lead to longer rants.
One thing’s for sure, your newsfeed will start getting longer which could be a pro or a con, depending on how much time you have.
It would seem that people would flock to Facebook Stories because of the success of Snapchat and Instagram Stories. However, there hasn’t been a lot of adoption with this.
Look at the audience demographics of the people on Facebook. Platforms with disappearing stories, like Snapchat and Instagram skew to a younger audience while Facebook skews to a slightly older demographic. The people who have been embracing “pictorial text messaging” technology aren’t really on Facebook. At the same time, older demographics may not be using social media on their phones, but rather on their desktop computers or traditional devices.
Facebook will soon be rolling out these features to Pages, which may push more people to try it out. This could allow brands to utilize stories for video and have their content at the very top of customers’ Newsfeeds.
The cross-posting capabilities which allow you to post to both Facebook and Instagram Stories, may also encourage more use of this feature, but only time will tell.
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