Social Snapshot
Over the last few months, the social media has gone through more changes than an adolescent teenager. There’s been so much happening that you’d be forgiven for having missed a couple, but don’t worry – we’ve got your back with this friendly little rundown of all the goings on in the social sphere.
Facebook has well and truly channeled its inner Cher this year, they’re have been facelifts a plenty and the big stuff is yet to come.
See it first
It wasn’t an algorithm change but Facebook has given its users another weapon in the fight against bland content. The ‘see first’ option allows users to select the pages they love and see their content more often. The new function is likely to result in a drop in reach for posts that are entertaining without being memorable.
A new measurement for CPC advertising
Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising measurements won’t always factor in traditional engagement metrics such as ‘likes’ or ‘comments’. Instead, posts can be tracked by ‘clicks’ to external links. The shift should make running referral campaigns easier but could make engagement campaigns slightly more difficult.
Buy direct from Facebook
Following in the footsteps of pretty much every other social media platform, Facebook has also announced that it will be introducing a ‘buy now’ button for businesses to utilise.
New look logo
Behold, the revamped Facebook word mark, can you spot the difference? Facebook’s creative director, Josh Higgins, has said the new logo was designed to have a friendly look and feel. It’s a minor change but one that comes at an interesting time as Facebook moves to introduce a number of other business-focused changes. See if you can spot the difference.
Twitter has also gone through substantial change as it pushes to overcome stalling growth.
New CEO
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has stepped up as interim CEO after Dick Costolo stood down in early July. There has been no announcement on when a new permanent CEO will be named.
User growth be stalling
Twitter’s user growth had stalled and with under a quarter of the monthly users of Facebook, there are some big hurdles ahead for our favourite attention challenged little brother.
Longer DM’s are a thing now
The 140-character limit always seemed unnecessary and annoying and now it’s gone. The ability to send longer messages may help users form more personal bonds and see the platform appeal to a slightly broader audience.
While you were away
A handy addition to Twitter has been the ‘while you were away’ feature. It’s Twitter’s way of highlighting content that it thinks is of interest without filtering the newsfeeds altogether. The result is that good content on Twitter is likely to reach more people than ever before.
Project Lightning
It’s still finding its feet, but project lightning feels like an exciting, user-focused innovation. The feature will capitalise on the real beauty of Twitter, the ability to follow live events and share the experience. Lightningwill see a team of editors curating different media types in real time into one single stream essentially offering an improved version of the ‘top tweets’ function. These streams will be available to people who don’t have a Twitter account and can even be embedded into websites.
A new filter
Sick of struggling to work out if a news story is real or not? Google has your back. Youtube Newswire will curate verified eyewitness news and make it easier to distinguish actual news from satire.
Where the + at?
Gandalf, Neo, Google +, all things that we once thought were dead only to realise that they had survived to fight another day. We don’t want to be in the long list of people who have wrongly declared Google + dead, but it is definitely breaking up with Google’s main brand. Google + accounts are no longer a requirement for Youtube, Google + photos has been replaced with the stand-alone Google photo, the + image has been removed from Google notifications and Google + content no longer ranks in search results. All of this means fewer incentives to use the platform and in all likelihood a shrinking of their already small user base.
InstaAds are coming
Instagram has previously trialed advertising with an exclusive group of partners and it seems to have worked. Now they are announcing that they will allow more businesses to use the click-to-buy ad platform. Details are still scarce but it’s safe to say the ads are coming.
Like Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest has announced it will give users the opportunity to buy direct with buyable pins.
