How Social News can Connect You to Your Audience in Innovative Ways

If you’re in our Slack channel you know we send bi-weekly social news out to keep our community up-to-date on all the latest news. What we also hope our audience gleans from these updates are innovative ways to connect and engage with their audience. 

Take this Instagram feature that may be coming to the platform soon - Music Notes. 

Instagram recently released the Notes feature for users to connect and conversate in an entirely different way with their friends. The platform is already finding new ways to expand upon this feature, such as allowing users to share music through a Music Note. 

So, how does knowing about this possible new Instagram feature help you engage with your audience? To start, it gives you time to imagine ways you could use this feature and create a brief plan on how you would implement it. 

Now, we aren’t saying you should put a lot of time into planning for a feature that isn’t live yet. But being aware of a possible new feature and how you would use it, gives you a huge advantage over others when/if that feature does go live. You could be among the first to jump in, utilize the feature, and not only show you’re a leader in the social media space but also engage and capture your audience in a new, fresh way before it becomes oversaturated. As an early-adopter, you’ll also be able to share your initial experience and insights with your audience to educate and connect with them.

Let’s look into how one could utilize the Music Note feature - 

Let’s roll back the clock to the summer. Stranger Things season 4 part 2 has just come out. Your whole team and pretty much everyone else has spent the evening binging the new episodes and have now turned to the internet to express their thoughts and opinions of the show. 

In this scenario, let’s pretend Instagram had already launched the Notes feature and was just coming out with the Music Note update. 

Your company uses the Music Note feature to share Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill song with your audience. You automatically have joined the conversation around Stranger Things, shown your audience you’re tapped into pop culture, and utilized a new Instagram feature in an innovative way. You’d start getting messages from your audience saying, “I love this song!”, “I wish they picked a different 80’s song”, etc. 

Your work is complete. 

Now not all new features have this much fun potential inherently tied to them, but as marketers, it sometimes is our job to find the fun and express it to our audience. I encourage you to stay up-to-date with social news and see what ways you can find the fun marketing potential in them.