Here are our top five stories from the past month in the ever-changing world of social media:
The past month has been a flood of announcements from Instagram. Some were welcome, others were met with resistance.
Everyone’s favorite photo-sharing app announced they’re going the way of Facebook’s news feed, replacing chronological order for an algorithm “to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.” Matt wrote a great piece on what exactly this Instagram change means. Over 300k people have signed this petition to keep things the way they are, and agencies report that Instagram is already telling them organic reach is dead and that they should be boosting everything.
Another big announcement this month revealed two big updates to video on Instagram: users will now have the ability to share up to 60 second videos (rolling out gradually) and they’ll also be able to create videos out of multiple clips from your camera roll on iOS (available now).
Following February’s welcome custom geofilter announcement, Snapchat released a massive update last week to the app’s chat experience, making it a one-stop shop for multimedia messaging between users. Updates include the ability to record and send audio or video “notes” to friends, initiate audio and video calls, send stickers, multiple photos (fully customizable with Snapchat’s drawing, text and filter tools), send photos while on a Snapchat call and toggle all of these things more easily on the fly. The company also made some other small tweaks to their privacy policy and Snapchat stories. Instead of choosing stories to watch individually, Snapchat will now play through to the next story.
With these updates, TechCrunch makes the case that “Snapchat is the closest thing to a direct window from your friends’ lives into yours. That’s going to make it very hard for competitors to dig underneath and offer any advancement significant enough to pull people away.”
According to Pinterest, one of the main reasons people use their site “is to find ideas they’re excited to try for the first time.” For the DIY lover, they’ve introduced a new “How To” Pin format that pulls in a snapshot of the steps right below the Pin image. This is a great new content piece for brands to use to engage the DIY community with recipes, crafts and more.
It’s hard to believe, but Twitter has been with the world for 10 years as of last March 21, and to celebrate, it turned into a #TwitterLove fest for the day, with everyone celebrating what they love about the platform (both sincerely and ironically).
Twitter also made a small but important update to their apps last week by allowing users to assign photo descriptions (or alt text) that make visuals more accessible to the visually impaired.
When the Paris attacks happened in November 2015, Facebook made it easy for users to show their solidarity by placing the French colors over their profile photo. The Verge reports that Facebook is building a tool that allows page admins to create their own overlays, so users can show support to countries, sports teams, causes and more.
The Last Word
Google is Building a Periscope Competitor – Live streams are coming to YouTube.
Bern and Ted’s Excellent Ad Venture – Brands don’t like Facebook Canvas ads, but these guys do.
Instagram’s Web Version Gets Notifications Tab – A nice update to Instagram in your browser.
Agency Recruiting With Snapchat Geofilters – This sounds familiar.
Twitter Just Made Ad Conversions on Your Website Easier – Paid social managers are ecstatic about this one.
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