Social Media News – Week of 11/24
If your business is using social media (and it should be!) then it goes without saying that you need to stay on top of the latest changes to all of the platforms you’re using. Last week, Twitter and Facebook faced some major changes that will definitely affect your social strategy, so be sure that you’re informed about these (our most recent social media roundup covers the changes here). This week, things have calmed down a bit, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s changed! We’ve got the scoop on the latest updates to your favorite platforms here:
The new Facebook Groups app
Facebook loves to remind people of all of the individual services they offer; in their latest social showcase move Facebook has released a standalone app for their “Groups” feature. After the hubbub that surrounded the separation of the messenger functionality from the original Facebook app into a standalone app we aren’t sure why Facebook would make this move again. As of right now you can still access Groups through the original app, but we are unsure if this will last long. Will this affect your digital strategy? Probably not (unless your business frequently posts in groups), but it’s something to keep an eye on.
Feeling nostalgic? If so, great! If not, get ready for 8 years to come rushing back to you at once, because you can now search the entire history of Twitter! This is a great way to monitor your mentions throughout the years. If you’re a social media manager, business owner, or just curious patron, you can now find out what people have been saying through the years!
Remember when Twitter discontinued the ability to share URLS through DMs? That is now officially over. It appears the social network realized that users weren’t just using this feature for spam, but were genuinely using it for communication purposes. The feature was just reintroduced which is great for any business using social media, for now communicating privately through the app just got much easier.
Snapchat
Snapchat is the new kid on the block when it comes to social media marketing. The platform rolled out its first ad earlier this fall and recently were in talks to add a new form of advertising as well (which we discussed in a previous post here). Well, it didn’t take long for that to come to fruition, because Snapchat used the AMA’s to introduce those ads during live events. If you checked story section of Snapchat this weekend you’d find a live stream of the AMA’s brought to you by no other than Samsung Galaxy. So far Snapchat has only allowed some of the larger players to share ads on their service, but we’re interested to see how this continues to work out.
This week was quieter than usual when it came to social media changes, but that doesn’t mean that these changes aren’t important. Twitter has continuously been introducing changes and tweaking the way you can use their platform, Facebook is trying out new things, and Snapchat is on the rise. If you want to know what’s next for these platforms and more, be sure to check back in for each of our social media roundups!