You made it! You’re one of the lucky ones to have survived this week’s Instagram outage. Now that everything seems to be back in working order, let us all just take a moment to breathe in a sigh of relief before we continue on with the social updates.
Facebook:
- In a step against Fake News, FB is testing a different version of its Related Articles widget. Now the platform will show Related Articles including third-party fact checkers before you read an article about a topic that many people are discussing.
Instagram:
- There’s now an app that auto generates your Instagram caption. Thanks to Rubric, millennials will no longer have to struggle with selfie-induced writer’s block.
Snapchat:
- The New York Times announced that it’s joining Snapchat Discover. The paper’s “daily edition” on the platform will include a handful of The NYT’s stories, distilled down to the quick, more consumable format, and will heavily focus on photos, video and other visual content. It even includes a mini-crossword puzzle!
LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn reaches 500 million members, and adds ‘Matched Audiences’ to their ad retargeting, with three options available to help better-focus your LinkedIn ad efforts:
- Website retargeting – Enables advertisers to create audiences based on website visitors in order to retarget them on LinkedIn (similar to retargeting available on most other social platforms)
- Account targeting – You’ll be able to upload a list of company names which LinkedIn can then match against its database to help you reach people working for specific organizations with your ads (this option has been available through LinkedIn’s sales team for some time, but is now being made available via their self-serve platform)
- Contact targeting – Enables targeting by e-mail addresses, which you can upload from your own database, or connect directly via Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, or LiveRamp
Google:
- Google has released new search quality rater guidelines and ranking changes to help demote low-quality content and surface more authoritative pages.
Pinterest:
- Pinterest is retiring the “Like” button on pins, and will move all users’ existing Likes to a secret board called “Your Pinterest Likes.” The change was spurred by the realization that users were often confused by the difference between the Save and Like options.
YouTube:
- YouTube is introducing its first class of Creators for Change. This is a new program aimed at sponsoring creators with ideas to help counter xenophobia, extremism, and hate with stories promoting positive change. The program is kicking off with 27 creators from around the world who are working on social activations to make an impact — from a new web series on topics like race, religion, and sexual orientation, to a 10-city workshop series for high school and university students dedicated to creating positive content.
Email Marketing:
- A recent report collected data on both brand and agency marketing professionals and their 2017 email marketing goals. The results:
- Marketers at companies are saying that one of their biggest priorities is personalization and automated campaigns, whereas marketers at agencies are focussing in on behavioral response marketing and personalization.
We’ll let this info sit with you for another week. Until next time!