Is Instagram Reels the New TikTok?
The Indian government banned TikTok along with 58 other Chinese apps a few days ago and suddenly Facebook announces its new Reel feature for Instagram!
What is Instagram Reels?
It is a feature that allows users to create short-form videos (up to 15 seconds long) set to music or other audio
📌You can find Instagram Reels in the explore Page
📌 Separate section for reels in the profile like IGTV
📌 Approx 15 sec duration video
📌 Indian users might get earlier access to Instagram Reels
📌 Instagram will then explore other markets with this feature
International brands boycotting Facebook
Hundreds of companies have started to halt advertising on Facebook and Instagram as part of month-long boycott which began on Wednesday 1st of July, according to the civil rights groups behind the protest.
The boycott is over the social network’s handling of hate speech and misinformation.
Based on market research, 3 of the 25 largest spenders on Facebook ads have publicly confirmed their plans to pause marketing on Facebook for the month of July.
Research revealed that these top 25 businesses account for an estimated $2 billion of Facebook ad spending, or nearly 3% of Facebook’s 2019 revenues.
Don't buy fake likes and comments for your social media page!
💡 Why pages with 20k+ likes don’t even have more than 2k+ likes?
💡 Is your DM spammed with Influencer accounts?
💡 Ever wondered why Accounts with more than 200k likes votes for your stories?
🔍 Well, these are the aftermath of users who try to artificially inflate their stats! Fake Likes and comments are all over the place and it’s beyond annoying!
💯 Facebook’s latest legal action is great! They will be taking down the Spam account, Fake likes, and comments!
👎🏼 This may help you short term but it’s always advisable to stay away from fake engagements! Create & Curate potential audiences with good strategy!
✔️ Stay away from the risk and start building your online presence authentically with Mirrors LLC for amazing social media strategies and campaigns!
Should You Use Instagram Stories for Your Business?
Instagram Stories have been around for a while now, and the effect of it is huge.. but businesses in Oman are not using it much as yet. The reason could be that it has left many brands, influencers, and content creators confused: should we be using Instagram Stories for business?
In our opinion, since Instagram in General and Stories, in particular, are huge in Oman Social Media, If you’re not using Instagram Stories for business, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. Not only are Instagram Stories fun and creative, but they’re one of the best ways to grow your engagement, build brand awareness, and even drive sales!
Social Media Marketing
Yes, you need Social Media Marketing.
It might be an obvious statement in a few years, but for now it is a period of transition, in which the old internet generation and new internet generation still discuss how were things before and how they are now. In fact, for renowned brands the Social Media marketing is growing with a little help of the struggles of the past.
The free access to promote the brands made those names reach every corner of the world, but also increased their efforts to renew their products/services constantly, considering that their competitors got the same benefits.
It isn’t only about the free accessibility, the reason to be on Social Media is that “everyone is there”, looking for something. You are able to target your audience, guide them to your website and boost your content among other tools available.
The Social Media channels aren’t only good for renowned brands, it can also be an effective tool for new companies, because of the interaction with the customers that can provide them with valuable information such as, what products they are buying, what are their hobbies, what kind of content they share etc. That allows the companies to customize their products and services to the trends, therefore gaining visibility in this new world.
Within the last 5 years people in Oman have been using Social Media for business matters as much as for their personal use.
Advertising Agencies had a sudden switch from their previous majority of press media jobs to Social Media due to the rapid growth of this market.
Instagram update will appear influencers in your feed even if you DON’T follow them
With the new Instagram update, influencers and will be forced to appear in your feed even if you don’t follow them. This is because Instagram is now updating so advertisers can pay them to promote their branded content.
Instagram is having this update so that advertisers can promote their content and products to the users feed and will be displayed in both the users posts and stories as shown above. Previously, influencers had to use hashtags to ensure that they were being paid by their sponsorship, and they were of course many ways to do this but this was one of the known methods of doing this. With this new update, Instagram wants this content to be specialized so it can be easier for both the influencer and the sponsor to push their way through out to most users as possible. What has been causing the huge fuss about this new update is that if users only follow friends and family, influencers can still be able to appear on your feed even if you don’t follow these users. For instance, a brand could pay to show you a sponsored post by Will Smith for instance whether you follow him or not and whether the users account is private or not. This could be a huge win situation for Omani influencers and company corporates in Oman to have their awareness be spread to a much broader audience, but can be quite bothersome for users who choose to keep their circle limited to just family and friends. As Instagram explained in a post announcing the new format, “With branded content ads, businesses have an opportunity to tell their brand stories through creators’ voices, reach new audiences and measure impact. Using the tools available on the Facebook ads platform, businesses can reach targeted audiences beyond the people who follow the brand and creator accounts. And by running ads, they’ll have access to measurement and can optimize and test their campaigns against their set goals for more effective marketing campaigns.”
Protecting Facebook Live from Abuse and threats
Facebook has been currently working on improving their security with their Facebook Live feature from all kinds of threats and abuse that could be infiltrated to the platform. Facebook states that the main use of the Live is to spread positivity, such of it could consist of broadcasting events that are happening, sharing moments or even raising awareness for a cause but Live can be abused and Facebook wants to take steps further to limit that abuse.
Live specifically tends to be the most challenging to regulate because the moments are being captured at that very moment and tackling certain threats would require further technical innovation to stay ahead. Facebook has invested $7.5 million with three universities in new research partnerships to help design and improve image and video analysis technology. Some of their new research would consist of
- Detect manipulated media across images, video, and audio, and
- Distinguish between unwitting posters and adversaries who intentionally manipulate videos and photographs.
Alongside, Facebook is strictly tightening its rules and regulations specific to Live. By doing so, it will be applying a “one strike” policy where if anyone violates its serious policies will be restricted from using Live for a period of time which could consist of up to 30 days starting on their first offense. On the other hand, taking these actions further would help take current technology to the next step to ensure the safety of its people and the prevention of any future threats and negativity, which is what current platforms, is in need of. Facebook would be one of the first platforms out there that would be working further ahead with this and this would be a benefit for many companies and influencers out there that would want to use the Live feature with great and improved security.
Currently, Instagram is the most used platform with their live feature here in Oman due to its reliability, but Facebook could be taking one step further with protection and security, which Instagram could greatly benefit from. Companies, influencers and other individuals here in Oman could take Facebook Live as a consideration as a starting alternate to broaden their perspectives, awareness, and options to what other platforms could offer and could help companies out there widen their range and target new audiences!
How not to get scammed with fake social media influencers/accounts?
How not to get scammed with fake social media influencers/accounts?
Fake social media accounts and influencers are increasing in numbers and for companies, it’s very difficult to identify who’s fake and who’s genuine. These fake accounts and influencers could cost brands a lot of money.
How to avoid getting scammed?
It’s very important for brands to discover how to always pair up with the right influencers and generate great results from marketing campaigns.
Who are the fake social media influencers?
These people or accounts build a large following base by buying followers from different sources. Buying followers is actually not hard and also, it’s cheaper than you might think. For example, you can use websites like BuzzDayz to buy 15,000 Instagram followers for $55 with minimum efforts.
Using such services, someone could become a micro fake Instagram influencer or to create an account with 40,000 followers and 300 likes for each first ten posts for just around $140.
During the last couple of years, this trend has increased in Oman. Even some marketing companies are fooling brands with fake followers and likes. We’ve come across a few of these kinds of influencers and accounts in Oman digital space but if you know the tricks it’s not that difficult to identify them either.
7 ways for you to spot fake influencers or fake profiles:
- Monitor the engagement ratio in relation to the followers
- Check if the influencer is posting consistently
- Monitor whether the followers grow over time
- Check the influencer's strength of interests
- Check if their Instagram profile is a Business profile
- See if they engage in conversations with their followers
- Do a Google research about the influencer.
Having mentioned all of those, Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to promote or launch your business on social media space.
So let’s stop fake social media influencers ruin your marketing goals and by following simple steps like above we can make Oman social media marketing and advertising space a fraud-free place.
Al Aktham Restaurant Launches the first-ever Meter Grill Platter in Oman
