Social Media Industry Round-Up #107: Spilling The Tea About Reels, Google’s Latest AI Development & Instagram Sharing Extra Performance Insights

Every week, the team at The Social Shepherd puts together all the relevant industry updates in a round-up newsletter sent every Tuesday morning.

This way, we keep our team, clients and interested marketers up to date with what's going on in the social media industry :)

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Are Your Posts Aiding Your KPIs?

Buffer has analysed over 4.2 M Instagram posts and confirmed what we already knew: Reels aid with reach but not so much with engagement.

Reels get 36% more reach than carousels, as they have their own feed and the algorithm is more likely to show the content to non-followers. 

However, if what you want to increase is your engagement, then carousels are the way forward, as they get 12% more engagement than Reels. 

Tip: To get your static and carousel posts to also appear in the Reels feed, add music to the post and it will appear in both increasing your content’s exposure.

Our Advice: For most brands Instagram is both a community and discovery platform, your content output needs to reflect that and may flex month to month depending on your KPI’s and goals. 

The Watermark Dilemma.  

The Head of Instagram confirmed that users can add their own logos to Reels, without being penalised for using watermarks (for example, when a wedding photographer adds their logo to the end of a Reel). 

Users asked that on Mosseri’s latest Q&A, as Instagram announced in 2021 that they’d penalise any Reels with watermarks on them. However, they’ve now clarified that this only applies to watermarks from other social media platforms. 

Unsolicited Advice. 

Instagram is currently testing a new feature on the Reels feed which would show notes explaining why a Reel is performing. 

Is this really useful? Well, not really. Some of the examples provided so far haven’t been very insightful, including ‘Strong hook kept people watching’ and ‘Rising in popularity’. 

We think this is a nice initiative from Instagram to provide extra insight into why a specific piece of content is performing, but they need to work on the type of feedback provided to ensure it’ll be of value to marketers and creators.

Educational Content Is On The Rise!  

TikTok has announced that they’ll expand the STEM feed to all users (only for teens up to this point) in the US, UK and Ireland. 

The STEM feed is a feed dedicated to educational content, created initially to encourage young users to learn instead of doomscrolling on the app. TikTok said that, since launching this dedicated feed, the app has seen an 18% increase in STEM-related content. 

Labelling AI-Generated Content.  

Google has decided to open-source its SynthID watermarking tool to developers and businesses so they can easily identify content that’s been created using AI. 

This ‘watermark’ doesn’t compromise content quality, accuracy or text generation speed, but it’ll be useful to distinguish what content is original and which has been created with the help of AI.