It’s Friday and summer is coming to an end. Welcome to this week’s social media brief. This week, we have stories about Instagram scheduling, Facebook live events, and Snapchat’s growth. Plus, next Monday on the Ask Darrel Podcast we’ll talk about best practices for Instagram.
Welcome to the Hootsuite Dashboard, Instagram!
What this means for your church: If you hear the sound of people cheering and screaming, it could be your church’s communications team. Why? Instagram finally integrates with Hootsuite in a way that will let you schedule your posts much like Facebook and Twitter. This also means that you should be able manage multiple Instagram accounts on your iPhone!
Facebook’s new live events feature hopes to take on Snapchat
What this means for your church: We’re witnessing the beginning of a war amongst social networks to own the live event space. Snapchat continues to dominate in the area and that’s why I think Facebook is attempting to get a piece of this space before they’re shut out. Either way, churches are being given multiple tool sets to help their engage their audience.
Facebook has a ‘view’ problem, which is good news for YouTube
What this means for your church: It looks like Facebook may soon be able to claim that they have the most viewers. However, YouTube points out that they have the most engaged users in terms of time watching content. It makes sense, you go to YouTube to watch content, you go to Facebook to catch up with your friends. Both are important aspects of digital consumption. You’re church can’t ignore either platform.
Snapchat’s news experiment is working—for now
What this means for your church: Snapchat is learning that you can’t just partner with old media (Warner Bros) and hope it all works out. Instead, they’re going to need to partner with sites like Buzzfeed that are geared for younger audiences. Snapchat continues to innovate in terms of how to reach a younger audience. As much as I know that churches shy away from this platform, I think this platform it moving into a “must-do” category for churches.
Surfacing the E-fluencers: Measuring the Influence of Your Nonprofit’s Network
What this means for your church: Check out this new tool that works with Excel to help measure your church’s social media effectiveness. While I haven’t tried it yet, the concept sounds really cool and I think it may be worth a look. Now I just have to find a Windows computer…. (it only works on a PC).