New Instagram Features: Smash or Pass [Episode 102]

Hello, my friends. Today's going to be a super short episode. I'm going to do a little, like, pass or smash or I don't know yet on some newer Instagram features. Yeah, like, is it worth it? Because Instagram likes to come out with new stuff all the time. And sometimes it's like, okay, this is cool. And I'm like, okay, this, I might want to actually teach people about this.

And then other times I just like to sit on these new features for a while because sometimes they're just beta testing them and then they ended up taking them away and yeah, it's just like not worth it. So like I said, today's going to be a super short episode and let's dive into it.

Hey, welcome to holistic marketing simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions. And you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hang out while we chat all things easy in your marketing and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please. Hey, I'm Dr. Abbey, chiropractor in Apple Valley, California, and I listen to the holistic marketing simplified podcast.

Trust me, you'll love it too. Okay. Thanks. First off, one of the newer Instagram features that I actually really like, and that is the ability to, it reminds me of like a status update. It's when you go to, so if you were like to go to my profile, I would have my little story bubble and then right above my story bubble, there'd be like a little dot, almost like a, like a thought cloud.

And that's where you can put in almost like a status. Let me check these character limits for you because you want it to be short. Okay, so I just tested it. And the two places you can see these little status updates from are, like I said, if you just navigate directly to somebody's profile, you can see it above their story.

Or, the better place to see them, in my opinion, is if you go to your DM inbox. If someone has one of these statuses, you'll see them right across the top of the screen. The reason I love this as a newer feature is because not many people are using it right now. And if you have a status update, then you're going to go to the very top, like the very front.

of someone's DM inbox. So if you're a visual person, this is going to make a lot more sense if you can just like literally open up your phone and look at your DMs and look across the top, you should have at least some people you're following. That have these little status updates above their profile photo.

Now I'm calling it a status update. I don't know what the official like Instagram term is for it, but it reminds me of like old school, like my space or like, Hey, I am like a way messages or you remember when we used to do like really dumb Facebook, if you're like my age before Facebook even had the ability to upload photos and we'd have these like really dumb status updates is kind of what it reminds me of.

But I like it because you can use it in a couple different ways. Right now, I, at the time I'm recording this, so when this comes out, the giveaway will be closed. But at the time I'm recording this, I have a 500 like Molly Bucks giveaway going in celebration of my hundredth episode of this podcast and of six years in business.

So I have mine as just 500 giveaway comment celebrate because it's really easy for people to DM you from those status updates. They can literally just tap on the text box. It will take them, it'll say like reply to blah, blah, blah. And it'll like, they're essentially replying to your status update. So not many people are using this feature right now.

So of all the people I'm following, I only have 15 people with status updates right now. So again, it just takes you to be like the top of their DM inbox. You could use it for something time sensitive, like, you know, three appointments open today or office closed for snow or like little things like that, or like register for register for my workshop or whatever.

For like breastfeeding workshop, February 17th, something like that, just like keep it really short. I just looked at the character limits and it's around 15 characters that show when you're looking at it from the profile view. And it's a little over 35 characters that show when you're, uh, breastfeeding.

looking at it from the DM inbox view. It can be a little longer than that. I'm not sure the exact full character limit, but if it's any longer than that, it's going to get cut off and you're just going to get those like ellipses dots and people aren't going to actually see the full thing. So I think it's better to keep it to where they can actually see the full thing.

Another way you can use it is like literally just as a status update. Like the other night I put like blue monopoly hot chocolate in a fire or something like that. So it's like, you know, that gives people another way, like just a reason to connect and reason to message you. So, um, another way I've seen people use it is for like new posts about migraines or something like that.

Yeah. I told you that I did mine as 500 giveaway comment celebrate. And if you're wondering what I mean on like the comment thing, that's because I have a mini chat trigger set up that anytime someone comments the word celebrate on any of my posts or even if they just DM it to me, then they'll get entered into my giveaway that way.

So like if you have a free download or something like that, you could be like comment, you know, guide to get my free pregnancy back pain, whatever, you know, however you'd want to fit it in. Should I do an episode on mini chat? Does that sound, would that be something y'all would be interested in? If yes, I don't really know how I do it as a podcast because it's just like hard to show you without actually showing you the tech tutorial.

If you're a holistic marketing hub student, I have a full mini chat tutorial inside the hub that shows you how to set one up from scratch, but I don't know how I would cover that on a podcast. But anyway, let me know if you want to know more about mini chat and if you're a hub student, go watch your tutorial.

So yeah, so that's a yes. I love that feature. Like I said, I should have before I hit record actually researched what Instagram actually calls this official feature. But if you don't see what I'm talking about, DM me and I'll send you a screenshot. I did have somebody, this was over a month ago now, but tell me that they didn't have this feature yet.

So Sometimes Instagram rolls out features in waves. So you may, you might not have it, but I think, I think most people do. Let me know if you don't. So the next feature I was going to cover was this thing where you could leave a note on someone's reel. It would literally just say like, leave a note, but this is exactly why I don't talk about new features until.

They've been around a while because it looks like it's already gone. It's not even a feature anymore. Which is good because I didn't really think that it had much value. Anyway, so we're not even gonna talk about that. I did just see while we're talking about Instagram updates, I saw that they might be doing away with story highlights.

I have no idea if that's true or not. Stay tuned. I'll let you know. So another new Instagram feature, and this is the last one that I'm going to talk about today, is the ability to trial a reel before it gets posted to your followers. So I am on the fence on this one for a couple of reasons. At the time I'm recording this, we have not yet tried, I have not tried this yet personally on my own account, and we have not tried it yet for any clients.

We are about to try it for some of our clients. I initially was like, no way, because the last thing I want all of you doing, like, I know that for most of you, your main pain point is just struggling to post consistently on any way, whether it's from just like a time standpoint or a confidence standpoint or whatever the reason may be.

It's struggling to post consistently. So the last damn thing I want you doing is trialing a reel. There's a feature right before you hit post and you can toggle it on. It says trial, where it will only send the reel to people who aren't following you to like, I guess, like test it out. Right. And so I was like, gosh, this is the last thing I want my people doing.

They're having a hard, hard enough time just posting consistently anyway. Right. So I don't want you trialing something and going, Oh, that didn't perform well. So now I'm not going to post it. Like, no, I just want you posting. Progress over perfection. We're just going to send it right like we're not going to wait for it to be perfect But I had a friend send me a reel of a girl who's using it in a different way And it actually piqued my interest.

So this gal said what she's been doing is she's just been taking any reels of hers That either went viral or which if you think about viral viral just means performed better Than majority of your other reels like there's there's no like number that means it went viral It just means like if you normally get 300 views and you had something get 3 000 views Well, that's viral for you.

That's 10 times the the amount of views that you normally would have gotten right? so what she said she was doing is she was Just reposting Like the same exact reel That any time she had a real go viral and she was using it that trial feature to just have that viral real go to new like non followers.

Which is smart because for the people who are concerned about like, like we repost content for clients all the time. So even if, even if you've gone viral and before this was a feature, like a new feature, we would repost something for a client at least like three to six months later, like sometimes even sooner.

So I don't want you overthinking this, like, well, how long should I wait? Whatever. But I do think it's actually a good idea. So this is my, like, wait and see one. You can certainly try it. I will tell you how to repost it. Next, but we have a couple of clients who have gone viral. And so what we're going to do is just try those viral reels and try, send it, um, toggle on that trial feature to where it will just send it to, um, non followers.

However, my big caveat here is almost all of our Instagram management clients, except for two. No, except for three. Draw a local audience only. So the thing I want to avoid and the thing I'm curious about and I want to test about, test, and I will report back to you, is whether or not, like, I want to make sure for the ones who draw a local audience only, That we're, like, maximizing putting the location, like, keywords over the video, making the keywords sure the keywords are in the caption itself, so that it's not shown to people who couldn't potentially even become patients or clients of theirs.

So that's like I said, that's one thing I want to be mindful of. Um, I'm also going to test it on my own account as well. And so I'll just let you know how it works out and report back. I will say we did have one of our clients who went viral. She is, she is a chiropractor, but she also does functional medicine and she sees people virtually via telemed as well.

And she's a metabolic detox and lymph, um, lymphatic drainage specialist. And she went crazy viral on a video talking about breast thermography. Well, the problem is she doesn't offer breast thermography in her office. So it just, yeah, she went viral and it got her a bunch of followers, but it led to a bunch of people being like, well, where do I get breast thermography?

So, I'm just, I was talking to my team this morning and I'm like, let me watch it again and just like figure out how maybe we can, because we have reposted it for her again since and it went viral again. So I'm like, I know that it's like a tested video that people want to hear, but I might just play around with the keywords and things on the video to make sure that it's actually driving traffic.

To convert to actually be a potential telemedicine patient of hers and not just like, Oh, this is cool information. So how you actually would repost that to me, the easiest way is anytime I post a reel for myself, I save the original video to my camera roll and just have an iPhone album called reels. I usually save the video without the text on it.

And then I also save a version of the video with the text on it. But another thing you can do is if you haven't done that, or if you're Like, obviously, I'm not, I'm not a type A personality. So there are so many reels that I've saved and then I didn't put in the folder and then, like, God knows where they are on my camera roll.

I have used a website, or we use this for our clients all the time too, a website called Snap Insta. So S N A P, Snap Insta. You can do it on your phone or on desktop. And all you do is you take the URL from your reel and put it into Snap Insta. And it'll download it for you. Because if you just go right to the Reels interface and tap the little three dots and hit save and save it to your camera that way, it's going to have a little Instagram watermark on it.

And that shows people that this is a recycled video, whereas, I mean, I'm not saying that's terrible. If that's the easy button for you and that's the way you want to do it, great. I have heard, I've never tested this myself, that if it has a watermark on it, it's not shown to as many people because they know it's like recycled content.

So like I said, we just use that Snap Insta. If you don't know how to grab the URL from your video, all you do is, um, if you're on Instagram. com desktop, you just literally grab the URL from the URL bar and you can put copy and paste it in that way. If you're on the app, you'll just hit the little share icon, the little paper airplane button underneath your wheel and just hit copy link.

And then you'll just. Just paste that into Snap Insta and it'll download the video for you without a watermark. So okay, there are the new ish Instagram features. I'm laughing so hard that I was planning on talking about the leave a note thing that's like already gone. Tell me if you still have it. I don't.

Again, this is why I don't like rush to say. That's why I'm not the type of account that's going to be like, here's the newest Instagram feature you need to know about. I'm just trying to help you all get some solid foundations and just get out there and be posting consistently. So, okay. I hope you have a fantastic day.

If you have any questions and you need like screenshots to see what I'm talking about, please DM me. I can't wait to hear from you. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified. And hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast.

Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly A.

Cahill. C A H I L L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.