All right, guys. 287. In this episode we're going to talk about the 3 things you need to know about social media in August of 2016 because today is August 5th, 2016, the very first Friday in August. There are some things happening.
I know that social media is one of those things that can feel incredibly difficult to keep up with. It can feel like it's changing all the time and there's new services and there's new opportunities from old services and there's new networks and there's new things on old networks. It can be really overwhelming, but not if you have a go to resource and that's why I built this show and that's why I built Hit the Mic Backstage, the membership community. It's so that you could have a resource.
In the spirit of that, we're going to be that resource today. We're going to talk about the 3 things I really want you to be paying attention to in August. Not all the things, just the 3 things that I'd like to see you paying attention to right now.
Let's get started with the biggest news right now that you're probably hearing about in all the places, Instagram stories.
There are a few schools of thought when it comes to Instagram stories. Some Snapchat lovers are quite angry about Instagram stories, saying that it's a total rip off. Some are saying, "I didn't really want to do Snapchat, but now I can get that same purpose happening in a network I'm already using." Then there's people like me who are like, "Awesome. Look how Snapchat is being taken seriously as a competitor and they're seeing that this is really working and so there's making other option to do it. That's really cool." I fall in that camp.
I think Instagram stories are very cool. I am still absolutely using Snapchat, of course it's only be a couple days. I don't see myself stopping using Snapchat because I do have different connections on Snapchat than I do on Instagram. However, much like we saw with something like a Meerkat and a Periscope, where Meerkat we had to build a new audience and that took a lot of effort, and where Periscope we already had our Twitter audience built in, or with Facebook Live where we already see we have our Facebook audience built in.
I think that Instagram is going to be a great option for those people who were not feeling Snapchat, were not wanting to go over there, were not wanting to build an audience some place else. I will absolutely still be using Snapchat because, again, I have an audience there, but for a lot of my clients that I've talked to already about this who are just starting to get into the idea of maybe doing Snapchat or who have started Snapchat very loosely in the last couple of days and they have really sold Instagram audiences already, I'm saying, "Hey. Let's use Instagram stories."
Again, I don't think that Instagram is going to be a Snapchat killer. I think that we've seen a lot of innovation coming out of Snapchat in the last honestly 8 months to a year. We've seen them make massive, massive changes to the user interface. We've seen them make massive, massive changes to things like how the service works, like introducing memories. I think we're going to see more of that innovation come as a response to this. We're seeing them partner with Bitmoji. I was thinking about it earlier, that's the one thing that I really miss in Instagram stories is I loved Bitmjoi integration. It's a really fun way to personalize a story with some fun gra
