Social Media News – Week of 11/17

Facebook is known for trying to corner markets dominated by other social media platforms. They did this with Slingshot, their version of Snapchat. To go after Vine, they introduced videos on Instagram. Recently they released Rooms, an anonymous chat app that takes on similar apps such as Whisper or Yik Yak. Now Facebook’s at it again with Facebook at Work, which appears to be their attempt at something similar to LinkedIn. Right now the app is in a developmental phase, but we’ll be sure to have all of the latest updates on this program once it’s introduced.

If your business uses Facebook as a way to reach your audience, prepare to watch your organic reach plummet. In a recent blog post, Facebook noted that in January of 2015 they will begin decreasing the organic reach for posts that they claim are overly promotional. This includes: “1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app; 2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context; 3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads.” These are broadly defined post traits, but the real message to take away from this is that if you’re trying to advertise on Facebook, Facebook wants you to pay for ads. We’ll be keeping a close eye on organic reach once this policy goes into effect in January and you should be too.

One could argue that the most difficult part of using Twitter is the initial phase of setting up an account. It’s hard to find people to follow, and often people will create an account just to abandon it after realizing the work that is involved with creating an interesting news feed. Twitter plans to solve this with a new feature called Instant Timeline. This feature will allow new users to enter their interests and the platform will then create a timeline tailored to what it believes the user want to see. This is great for businesses who are hesitant to start using Twitter because of the work involved initially. Now we just need to find out how to get our account featured on those Instant Timeline lists!

The time to share good content on Twitter is now. Soon, Twitter will roll out a feature called Timeline Highlights that allows users who aren’t frequent visitors to see which tweets were the most popular while they were gone. If your business frequently shares good content, there’s a strong possibility that your tweets could be displayed in these lists!

Twitter may own Vine but that doesn’t mean they’ve reached the final frontier of video. In 2015, Twitter plans to allow users to record, edit, and share videos all within the native Twitter application. While we’ll have to wait to see how this will work, we think that this will be great for the social media manager on the go; an increased video capability is always a good thing.

Think you’ve got your Pinterest strategy figured out? Think again. While this platform previously attracted a mostly female user base, men are now the fastest growing user base on the platform. If you’re using Pinterest for your business, it’s time to tweak your tactics to make your profile more male-friendly.

Snapchat’s bizarre new ad

If you opened the Snapchat application in the past few days it’s very likely that you saw their bizarre ad promoting their newest feature: Snapchat Snapcash. As of right now, we don’t see this being useful for businesses. However, we don’t think this is worth dismissing entirely considering that Snapchat has recently begun capitalizing on advertisements. Maybe Snapchat Snapcash could become the future of deals and discounts – only time will tell with this one.

Google+ recently made a slight change to their platform that social media marketers everywhere are praising. They moved the “mentions” section from the notification button to the top of your stream. While this change is small, this makes it much easier for businesses to see what mentions they have received now that these mentions are no longer cluttered amongst messages, +1s, and other interactions.

Social media is a huge aspect of digital marketing, so staying in the loop with these platforms is essential. Keep up with all of the latest and greatest news by visiting our blog (or social media platforms!) each week for our social media roundup!