Social Media News – Week of 4/27
It’s the last week of April. They say April showers bring May flowers, which may in fact be true, but we’ve found that April has also brought about a lot of changes for many social media platforms. To find out what’s changing at the end of this month, read on:
1. As we’ve discussed many times before, Facebook loves to take on other tech businesses. This week, the company is going after Skype. The powerhouse platform will soon be releasing Hello, a video-calling feature for their standalone Messenger app.
2. Have a budget of $2 million and want to advertise on Facebook? Yeah, us neither, but a market does in fact exist for this, or else Facebook wouldn’t be introducing its newest feature: Anthology. Anthology pairs brands with video publishers to help those brands increase their reach and engagement through video. Expect to start seeing a lot more sponsored, big-budget videos in your feed later this year.
3. Just when you’ve started getting used to Facebook, the company goes and makes major changes. This time, those changes will be occurring in user’s notification tabs. While previously, users received notifications when someone commented on their statuses, tagged them in a photo, or posted something relevant to the user, the new set of notifications will inform users of much more than this. New notifications will likely include trending news, information about local businesses, life events from friends, and more. Will this be information overload? Facebook doesn’t think so.
4. We have some bad news for brands: Facebook is changing the algorithm again. A post from the Facebook Newsroom titled, “News Feed FYI: Balancing Content from Friends and Pages” describes how this change will affect what users see in their newsfeed. Unfortunately, this algorithm change means that page posts will reach a smaller audience than before.
1. If you use Pinterest, you’ve probably noticed that your recommended pins have become more tailored to your interests. This is because Pinterest has introduced Smart Pinning, a new predictive board picker. Brands may benefit from this, as their Pinterest ads will likely start reaching very tailored audiences.
2. Speaking of brands on Pinterest, Pinterest just launched a new way for brands to buy and promote pins. This new feature will make it even easier for brands to promote posts to a specific audience. Considering the fact that Pinterest has at least 50 million active users, this is great news.
Twitter’s new Highlights feature is only available on Android devices for the time being.
1. If you’re like most normal people, you probably can’t keep up with everything that’s going on in your Twitter feed. Luckily, Twitter realizes that this is a problem for many users, so they are rolling out Highlights, a new feature that displays a twice-daily digest of curated tweets. Right now this feature is only available on Android devices, but we’re hoping that it will roll out to iOS and desktop soon.
1. Instagram has just introduced 3 new filters – Juno, Reyes, and Lark. In addition to this, the company has also introduced emoji hashtag capabilities. We’ll be on the lookout for Lark-filtered, ghost-hashtagged photos soon.
These are the last changes that have come about in April. However, May will bring about more updates, so keep in the loop by reading our weekly social media roundup!