With each passing quarter, new features are introduced to various social media platforms that allow brands to reach more consumers, create awareness, and drive meaningful engagement. By the end of August 2024, a number of key updates across major platforms have afforded new ways in which social media managers can make their strategies even better. Here’s a look at five crucial updates and their potential impact on brand strategies.
1. Instagram Carousels Expand: Add Up to 20 Frames in a Single Post
Instagram extended the capability of carousels to add up to 20 frames for a single post from the earlier restriction limit of 10. This means that brands can now develop more detailed storytelling, product showcases, and immersive visual experiences. With the expanded capability, brands can create carousels for mini-tutorials, step-by-step guides, or even longer product showcases that users can swipe through, thus encouraging users to commit to swiping through content for more views. More frames mean more opportunities for calls to action, driving conversions directly from your post.
2. Instagram Introduces Grid for 4:5 Ratio
Moving away from the traditional 1:1 aspect ratio, Instagram introduced a 4:5 aspect ratio grid that allows posts to take more vertical space on users’ feeds. This feature is particularly helpful for brands, as it gives them more room to capture users’ attention with eye-catching visual content. The 4:5 aspect ratio is ideal for portrait shots of images and videos, offering brands an opportunity to push their creative boundaries to the fullest and ensure that their posts get noticed in a competitive environment.
3. TikTok Adds the Ability to Use Custom Thumbnails for Clips
TikTok has added support for adding a custom thumbnail for video clips to help brands choose or create a thumbnail that best represents the content of a video clip. This greatly helps a brand in luring viewers, as an attention-grabbing thumbnail would make users click on a video clip. By choosing a visually appealing or interesting-looking thumbnail, brands can better click-through rates on their video clip by improving engagement and increasing views across the platform.
4. X Unveils Next-Generation Audience Analytics for Pro Users
X, formerly named Twitter, has given advanced audience analytics, which, from now on, will be available only for premium subscribers. Advanced audience insights give a big picture of the structure of the audience, like demographics and behaviors and engagement, which help brands create a fuller understanding of their followers by tailoring content to their interests. This knowledge allows them to ideate more targeted campaigns, refine content strategy, and guide them to improvement on the platform concerning reach and engagement.
5. Threads Introduces New Features: Drafts, Scheduling, and Insights
Threads, Instagram’s text-based social app, has continued to roll out a slew of new tools for the platform, including the ability to save drafts, schedule posts, and unlock insights into post performance. These features are all about better streamlining content planning and management for brands. Scheduling capability ensures that content is published at exactly the right moments when target audiences are most engaged, while insight provides key data about post effectiveness, thus enabling real-time changes in strategy.