Social Media Notes
Here’s this week’s round-up of social media (& sometimes tech) news. Come back weekly for what I hope to be a fun & informative blog post on social stories that caught my eye throughout the week!
- The big Facebook news of the week was that the social network changed its News Feed (again), now putting posts from users’ friends and families above publishers and their news. They say: “Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down.” It’s a move that highlights how important it is for your business not to rely completely on social networks you have no control over – because they might make a change that screws you over (I’m curious to see how this new/old News Feed impacts media)
- Here’s an interesting read on how recipe videos have colonized your Facebook feed (seriously, I love Tasty…) I’m impressed with what Buzzfeed has done with its Facebook videos to date
- A real life, human team from Facebook instead of – gasp – an algorithm – will be curating recommended events for users based on where they live, in a new Facebook Events feature. Basically like a here’s what to do this weekend digest
- Have you chatted with any Facebook Messenger bots yet? (I haven’t). Apparently just 3 months after introducing the first bots, there are now 11,000 on the platform
- Pinterest really wants to businesses to use it so they’ve released a series of educational videos that outline how businesses can make the most of Pinterest marketing
- Pinterest has also launched a new shopping feature that lets users scan and shop products, along with buyable pins
- Twitch made watching people play video games live a thing, now it might make this a thing: ‘Social Eating’ streams – would you watch other people eat? lol
- This is a cool video that looks at how Snapchat’s funny Lenses work – using cool augmented reality technology called “Computer Vision.” (Did you know Computer Vision is also what enables you to deposit your cheques online? Something I only recently got a chance to do and was blown away by, lol)
- China is banning its news sites from using social media as a source. If this ban was imposed on Western news sites, I could see it having an impact given how popular and common curating social media posts into news articles are these days!
- Cool. Buzzfeed is launching a new ‘beat’ – dedicated to tackling the world of fake news
- Have you heard of the app musical.ly? I first heard of it at the SocialWest social media conference in Calgary a few weeks ago – it’s a lip syncing app that’s apparently it’s all the rage with “the youths” these days. If I’ve learned anything on the social space, it’s that once the youths determine an app is cool – it’s gonna be the next big thing. lol. Now apparently that’s a livestreaming app called live.ly – which is owned by the same folks as musical.ly!
- Here are some interesting stats showing how big brands are using Instagram and the success they’re seeing. Example: brands that ask questions in their posts see a 0.45% boost in engagement, however posts with an exclamation mark actually lowers engagement by 0.22%?
- Snapchat was charging a LOT for brands to buy national lenses and geofilters and other things but it looks like they may be starting to make ad prices more reasonable (if you still think in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is reasonable… ha)
- A new study finds that television newsroom social media practices/policies lag behind. 40% of newsroom directors in the study said they had no policies in place to verify information from social media, even though they use social media as a major source of news. As someone who worked in social media at newsrooms, these results sound about right to me. lol
- WhatsApp has launched desktop apps for Windows and Mac – making it easier for you to use the messaging app with more than 1 billion active users. I know when I started using iMessage on Mac it changed my daytime texting game!
- Here’s the week’s Cat Saturday photos! My favourites are 1, 3, 5, 16, and 18!
Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!
Linda
