North News: April 9

• April 12, 2021
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Influencer Trend: Moving to Private and Paid Instagram Accounts

In an effort to have more control over their business, influencers have slowly started to diversify by launching Patreon-like paid Instagram accounts for dedicated fans.

If you don’t know what Patreon is, it’s a platform that allows fans to become active participants in creator’s work by offering them a monthly membership. It gives them access to exclusive content, community, and insight into their creative process. The goal of which is to allow creatives to build an independent career.

Similarly, influencers have started to create private accounts on IG, charging a fee for an annual membership to access the account for exclusive content. These accounts are created in addition to the creator’s free IG accounts as a value-add for sharing insights into skills they have, behind the scenes content or open up about personal details.

So what does this mean for brands?

Although this gives creators a way to monetize their work without relying on brand sponsored posts, brand partnerships will likely continue to be a part of the equation. Brands have a positive impact on an influencer’s credibility and clout, which is what keep audiences engaged and wanting more.

More reading here.

 

Instagram Guides

Instagram has launched a new format last year for sharing content : the Instagram Guides. Initially enabled for a select number of health and wellness advocates, this is now accessible to all users. This feature is a cross between Instagram carousels and blog posts and it’s opening up huge opportunities to create more story telling about a product or a service. We believe it will grow on popularity over the next months! There is 3 formats available for Instagram Guides, depending on what you want to highlight: products, locations or posts. Each format is designed to suit brand’s and creator’s needs. The guides are very accessible and can be easily shared to Instagram Stories. They are also featured in the Discovery page.

How can we implement Instagram Guides to our clients? Here’s a couple of examples. Instagram Guide enable you to create gift guides, as Mother’s Day is approaching, you can work with an influencer to share their Mother’s Day gift guides with products you want to put forward. Let’s see another example, if you are working with several influencers for a same campaign, you can gather their posts under a theme. For example cocktails recipes.  Another great utilisation of this feature could be by sharing a pledge, a brand story, or more details about a CSR initiative because you’ll be able to deep dive into a narrative in the Guide.

If you want to learn more about Instagram Guides, you can visit this link.

 

Reddit, TikTok and Snapchat Usage is On the Rise

The results of a new study conducted by Pew Research was released this week which sought to understand the social media habits of Americans throughout early 2021.

While the data is US focused, we can assume the trends we are seeing south of the border are similar to those of young Canadians.  Facebook’s usage share hasn’t changed since Pew’s last update but YouTube increased by 8%, while Reddit adoption has increased 7% among survey participants.  The survey also found that Snapchat and TikTok are very popular among younger user groups (not shocking!).

For our brands, it’s important to keep in mind making use of channels outside of Facebook/Instagram, especially when we are trying to reach a younger demographic.  While advertising capabilities on Reddit continue to expand, we should also keep this channel in mind when doing any social listening exercises as more increased conversations related to brands could be a growing trend in 2021.

 

 

Make it Accessible 

Auto-captions have been turned on for both Instagram Stories & TikTok. Adding captions is an important way to ensure everyone is able to consume content – from brands, influencers and otherwise. Don’t worry – if you mumble, you are able to edit the auto-captions to correct inaccuracies in the text.

Making brand content more accessible is critical in showing audiences of all kinds that the brand values them. Not only are captions critical for this, but is making sure each word in the  hashtag is capitalized #LikeThis (also called “CamelCase”…#TheMoreYouKnow). This allows hashtags to be read aloud properly by dictation/screen reading apps for those who are vision impaired. #becausenoonecanreadtheseproperlyregardlessofyourvisionabilities

Click these links to learn how to turn on TikTok captions, Instagram Story captions and more about making hashtags accessible.