Social Media News Week of 11/30
Here are the highlights of some the new features and launches in the social media world recently. Some are highly anticipated, while others are new features users never thought they needed. Read on to see what’s new out there now!
Snapchat:
1. Launch of Story Explorer. This new feature allows users to view specific stories from different points of view. Users can swipe up when an “explore” tab is present and view that story from different angles. Currently these feature is present for the live New York and Los Angeles stories, but Snapchat is looking to expand this feature. If this feature can be expanded, it could be a huge tool for companies that have live events that can be explored in real-time as means of promotion and engagement.
Twitter:
1. More choices to native polls. When Twitter’s native polls were launched, they only allowed two options for users to choose from. With this new launch, poll-makers can choose up to 4 options for users to answer. This opens up the engagement opportunities for companies to get more specific information from users. Let’s see what companies do with this new expansion!
1. Displaying less caption text. Instagram is now limiting the amount of text that shows in a caption to a certain amount and offering the option to see more if users are interested. This may not seem like a huge change, but changes how important the text users sees first is now. Before users could see the whole captions, so creators could take as much time as they wanted to make their point. Now, in order to engage users into clicking more, the initial text that shows in captions must grab the user’s attention right away. As a user though, this declutters the news feed tremendously and the focus is back on the images, not the 20 hashtags people are using.
2. The possibility of account switching is on it’s way, finally! One of the most requested features by users of Instagram is the ability to switch accounts without having to log out and log into a different account. Looks like Android users in the beta testing group can do just that. Users can add accounts from one account and then have access to multiple accounts without having to log in and out of different accounts. This is huge for people who have personal and business accounts that they switch between. Let’s see when this goes mainstream and when iOS users get to use this much-anticipated feature.
Extra:
1. Zoomph can track emojies. Zoomph, a social analytics platform, has created an Emojis Report feature. This is the first of its kind, but is definitely needed in the emoji-heavy communication style of people these days. this feature allows a brand to find all the emojis associated with its name and then shows them as an “emoji cloud”. This will allow brands to see what emojis are associated with them, and thus what emotions and values users correlate with them.