Having good clear navigation on your website is important if you want people to buy from you.
Thankfully Instagram is going to remove the complexity of their navigation on the app, making it way more user-friendly.
Instagram boss, Adam Mosseri announced a simplified navigation in a video this week. The shop tab is getting axed and the create tab will move back to bottom centre of the navigation.
Although the shop tab is going you’ll still be able to shop from content on the site.
This is a good move, Instagram was beginning to drown in complexity.
As businesses, we should take a leaf out of Instagram’s book and look at the navigation on our own websites. Is it so confusing that people will leave before they find what they want?
📣 Navigation Update 📣
The navigation is changing in February to make it easier for people to create, be entertained and connect with friends over the things they love.https://t.co/9tR4kIH9d0 pic.twitter.com/DwinENhku7
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)
The End Of Meta Creator Studio
Facebook pages have got super confusing. There are classic pages, new page experience, business manager, business suite, creator studio and creator profiles.
It’s becoming a nightmare for marketers.
And now one of those things is going away. ‘Creator Studio’ which was a nice way to manage and report on content is getting shut down.
This is going to force a whole bunch of people into the new ‘Business Suite’ system which, last time I looked hadn’t been fully rolled out.
I anticipate a lot of angry marketers and social media managers.
Meta is shutting down Creator Studio
Its tools will be merged with Meta Business Suite pic.twitter.com/t87abfptGR
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra)
Twitter ‘For You’ feed
You can now swipe between the algorithmically ordered feed and the chronological feed on Twitter. This will make it easier for users to see their chronological feed whilst still offering an enticing main feed.
The name ‘For You’ is interesting. It’s a name that first appeared on TikTok. Is this an attempt from Twitter and Elon Musk to make Twitter a more familiar space for TikTok users?
Is it OK to change your USP?
Twitter is risking it. Always known as a micro-blogging platform, its short updates have always been what makes it easy to consume (and easy to create for).
But soon it’s going large. The character limit which is currently 280 characters will expand to 4,000.
And that’s not it, you’ll be able to style your text with italics, bold and underline.
You’ll need to expand the tweet to see longer posts but this still changes everything that Twitter is. Will it have a negative impact on the network?
Here’s what the options above might look like.
PS. Designs are early and basic. There’s a lot more we want to do with longer form content on Twitter. This is one way we’re thinking about a first step. Having said that, all feedback is welcome, so let us know what you think! pic.twitter.com/XOzR433w7R
— Andrea Conway (@ehikian)
We will also be adding simple formatting features like bold, underline & font size later this quarter.
The goal is to allow people to publish long-form natively on Twitter, rather than forcing them to use another website.
Twitter will continue to recommend brevity in tweets.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Meta Cracks Down On Advertising To Teens
When you market to younger people you have to act responsibly. It seems that Meta has suddenly realised this.
A new update to ads means you will no longer be able to target ads to teens based on gender or interests.
Now when you set up an ad to reach anyone under 18 the only targeting options available will be age and location. This will be great for local businesses and probably reassuring for parents.
Teens will also be given more control over what they see.
Meta Fined For Breach Of GDPR
Meta has been using personalisation in ads without proper user consent. That’s the judgement from the Irish
Data Privacy board (acting for the EU).
They have concluded that by including consent for adverting in the app terms of service, it was forcing users to opt-in.
What does this mean? It’s another nail in the coffin for personalised ads. As marketers, we’re going to have to look at different ways to reach our potential audiences and rely less on cookies and social media data.
9 Seconds Reading An Email
Email marketing is alive, but it’s getting harder to keep people reading. In 2018 the average time people spent reading an email was 13.4 seconds, now it’s just 9.
That’s according to a study from Litmus. And it gets worse… 30% of emails are looked at for less than 2 seconds.
That means we have our work cut out. Clearly, we should try writing shorter emails, cut the fluff and get to the point. If we manage to grab attention we can still make sales (I have first-hand experience with this).
This content was originally published here.