Social Media News – Week of 10/27

Facebook just launched “Rooms,” a new anonymous message board app. This allows users to anonymously create message boards, or “rooms” about a topic that they’re interested in. People can share photos, text, and videos, much like on other social media platforms, but this time the platform is entirely anonymous. While we aren’t exactly sure how this platform can be used for marketing, we do know that it’s a great place to listen in and see if and how people are talking about your brand.

For all you social media marketers out there, Facebook has just made it easier for you to toggle back and forth between your pages. See something in your feed that you want to comment on as one of the pages you manage? You now have the easy option of switching between accounts right in the comment section so that you don’t have to manually switch from one account to another by restarting your whole feed. This will make it a lot easier to interact with your audience and other brands on Facebook.

Facebook has just recently rolled out a mobile feature that will allow for you to choose the order in which you upload photos from your phone. It also allows you to rearrange these photos once uploaded, add captions, and preview how this will be displayed to users. While this is a small change, it can have a strong impact on how you tell visual stories on this platform.

Twitter recently launched Audio Cards, a new feature that I touched upon in last week’s social media news post. This week, they’ve slowly begun to roll out a new feature: it doesn’t seem to have a name yet, but it works just like audio cards, but with video. This allows for a user to play a video in their feed, and then continue scrolling through their feed while the video remains docked and playing at the bottom of their Twitter feed. This isn’t available to the public yet, but once it is rolled out for Twitter’s entire user base, this could be a great way to reach your audiences with quick and informative videos.

If you’re a developer, get excited for something new coming to Twitter called Fabric. This new software development kit has made it easier for developers to track things on the platform such as tweet embeds, advertisements, and many other features. Fabric also rolled out something called “Digits” that allows for developers to create a new sign-in service that allows people to login with their phone number and a special code instead of the traditional email/username and password combo. While this may not affect things for traditional and most digital strategists, this could open up a whole new bevvy of options for developers.

It seems that video capabilities are all the rage in this week’s social media news! Tumblr has just introduced improvements on how to view videos as well. If you’ve ever scrolled through a Tumblr feed, you know how annoying it is to get stuck on a video, watching through the whole thing, without being able to scroll through your feed and take in other information at the same time. Remember pop-up videos, the classic VH1 music video feature? Well – it’s kind of like that. You now have the option to “pop out” the video that you’re watching so that it remains on the side of your feed as you scroll through, allowing for you to look at other posts while still watching the video. This is great news for social media marketers who use Tumblr. Videos are now going to be more successful than ever on this platform, so start uploading!

Unless you’re a musician or a music marketer, you can probably ignore this one. But if you are, you’re in luck! Pandora has recently introduced analytics for music. This means that you can see how many people listened to your song, what other songs they liked, and what songs they didn’t like as well. These analytics get more in depth, and are definitely worth checking out if you market music.

I know, I know, Gmail isn’t a social networking platform. But if you use Gmail at all (which you more than likely do), Inbox is ready to make your life a whole lot easier. This app goes through and sorts your emails to get an easier overview of what you need to do. The app also allows you to add reminders, put a snooze on an email (so that you receive again at the time of your choosing), and all this sorting makes it for you to see all of the highlights of your email instantly. Right now the app is in invite-only mode, but once it becomes widely available to the public, this will be a great way to stay on top of everything going on in your inbox.

Social media makes its mark as a consistently shape-shifting medium. Keep up with all of the most recent social media news by revisiting our blog to read the latest in social media in our weekly social media news posts!