Lately in Social Media: November 2018
“People who wait for changes to occur on the outside before they commit to making changes on the inside will never make any changes at all.”
When you read that quote, did you also think about how fittingly it applies to Facebook’s assumption that users wouldn’t mind external companies pillaging their opaquely-acquired data, instead of changing Facebook’s internal approach to protecting personal privacy? OMG me too, we’re totally on the same wavelength!
Speaking of social media, here’s what Facebook and the rest of the gang have been up to this November:
- Hopefully last week’s outage didn’t mess up your Black Friday ads…🙄
- Despite horrific headlines (like this one, and even this one), poor PR and high-profile coverage of the company’s unconvincingly lame deflections of blame, advertisers aren’t letting ethical quibbles hobble their ad spending on the platform.
- However, lawmakers might feel differently.
- Oh and did you catch this whopper of a headline yesterday? It’s going to be hard for Facebook to play dumb about how they planned to profit off user data now…
- Is everyone leaving?? With the recent resignation of WhatsApp chief business officer Neeraj Arora, and Pew survey results indicating that young users are deleting the app at high rates, it sure looks that way.
- In other Pew News: Are social media algorithms working, and what does that even mean?
- (In other news-news: Hopefully prioritizing local news organizations over fake news will help Facebook finally get this function right.)
- Before the polls opened on Election Day, Facebook boasted that it had blocked around 30 Facebook accounts and 85 Instagram accounts that were “engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Good job! Pardon me if I’m less interested in how much they’ve removed and more concerned about sheer volume of these “bad actors.”
- Since Facebook is struggling to make the right calls, maybe someone else should give it a try? Here’s an idea that just might help: Creating an independent oversight group to review content moderation appeals.
- I don’t want to be told how much time I’m spending on Facebook. But if you do, now you can.
- If you’re not compelled to watch Watch content, maybe you’ll enjoy participating in Watch Parties so you can comment your criticism while co-viewing with friends. If your brand can find a way to capitalize on this feature AND get views, we’d love to hear from you!
- This “coming soon” feature sounds like Gmail’s classic April Fools prank, but what if you could delete sent messages up to 10 minutes after sending them?
- Apparently Creators aren’t “making any meaningful revenue” from mid-roll ad breaks, and suffering long waits for approval.
- It’s year-end giving season, as Facebook reminds us that more than $1 billion has been donated through the Fundraisers feature and Donate button in the past three years.
- P.S. If you think Portal makes a blatant grab for your family’s data, get a load of this patent application.
- To improve accessibility for users with visual impairments, Instagram released two new options to provide users with alternative text descriptions of visual posts.
- Hallelujah for the latest policy change, which will remove fake activity such as likes, follows and comments from fake accounts that use third-party services to game up fake engagement. Bad news for influencers who falsified their following, but good news for the rest of us who aren’t benefitting from bot engagement.
- That nifty new profile layout should hypothetically reduce the perceived importance of follower counts…kinda like Twitter just did! Whatever, as long as they don’t touch our grids.
- With tighter content controls come longer ad approval wait times, apparently.
- No standalone app yet, but a recent update released a redesigned Shop tab for business pages, the ability to shop from a video, and a wish list feature to save favorite products.
- If you’re taking advantage of Instagram Stories ads, why not add Facebook Stories as a placement option while you’re at it?
- Psssst: Buffer’s Stories Creator looks like Canva for your vertical ads!
- School-specific Stories could either be a fun feature or heinous headache for higher education marketing.
- These near-daily data leaks got us like 🤦♀️🤷♀️
- P.S. What’s your activity level?
- In a (rare?) win for civility on the platform, Twitter has banned misgendering or “deadnaming” transgender individuals. That’s social media for you: forcing humans to recognize, isolate and ban our trash behavior, one highly specific act at a time.
- As Facebook struggles to verify political ads, Twitter takes a more effective approach by verifying advertisers by their Employer Identification Numbers.
- Searching just got a little simpler with the introduction of Sections to help you sift through results.
- Good riddance to bad bots, eh?
- P.S. Please, Dorsey: Just give the people what they want!
SNAPCHAT
- Your friendships are so special to Snapchat that they now have their own friendship profiles to corral all the media you’ve shared with each other into one place.
- More excitingly: Bitmoji merch!!
- And Spectacles, because apparently we aren’t done with those yet.
- P.S. Marketers seem to be steering clear of Snapchat. Where do you stand?
- How’s your completely-overhauled Campaign Manager experience so far?
- Last Friday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner released a report that concluded LinkedIn had used the email address of some 18 million people “in a way that was not transparent,” and it’s not clear how LinkedIn obtained those email addresses or related data in the first place. Get used to more headlines like these now that GDPR is enforceable.
- “No app is safe from the Stories plague” because now LinkedIn has Stories too, because this is the social platform where you want to show your most raw and authentic and unfiltered self, right? Best wishes using that Campus Playlist to land a job.
- What are your thoughts on the new Pages Experience? If it hasn’t hit your account yet, it should in the next few weeks. Look for a more convenient admin experience with easier-to-access features.
- Get more out of Sales Navigator with these alert features and other updates.
- P.S. How pro is your profile photo? Props to marketers for doing it best.
YOUTUBE
- In the past weeks viewers began seeing two ads in a row ahead of videos. This concept of “ad pods” groups similar ads together ahead of the video, and was developed in response to feedback that viewers prefer to be interrupted fewer times during the video itself.
- ShopStyle is helping influencers to better monetize their YouTube content with three new features to make videos more shoppable.
- More Pew News: Although one out of three parents who responded to a survey said their children watch YouTube regularly, two-thirds of those parents have encountered kid-unfriendly content.
- So you want more Stories? Have more Stories!!
- P.S. Or you can just enjoy some free (ad-supported) movies!
- Four ways to optimize your ad campaigns, just in time for holiday shopping season.
P.S. Here’s something you, a social media professional, probably didn’t know! Shocking, right?