Welcome back to your weekly edition of Spark Bites by Spark Growth! We’ve got a lot of updates to social media platforms this past week, particularly from Facebook, who’s still reeling from their recent scandal. This post also has news on a couple huge new features coming to Pinterest and Snapchat, both of which will be particularly relevant to users who have friends! Hopefully that’s all of you! Without further ado, here is this week’s most important social media news:
- Pinterest just became the hero of a lot of social media fans. The company is introducing a new feed which only shows pins from the people and boards you’ve chosen to follow and—get this—in CHRONOLOGICAL order.
Whaat. They will still be keeping the algorithm-based feed as it is, but the new feed will be available in a separate tab called Following. It’s a compromise between the demands from users for chronological feeds (Instagram disappointed everyone a couple weeks ago by announcing that they had no plans to reinstate the chronological feed) and the fact that algorithmically-placed pins tend to get higher engagement. Go, Pinterest!
- We have some bad news and good news for brands who are tracking organic post reach on Facebook. The bad news is that your organic reach numbers are going down, if they haven’t already. But wait! Don’t freak out! The good news is that Facebook is just changing what is considered to be organic post reach. Before, it counted anything that entered the newsfeed at all, regardless of whether or not any user actually viewed it. Now, page posts will only be considered to have reached a user if the post actually enters a user’s screen (which is how promoted post reach was being calculated).
- The social networking platform has updated their split-testing feature for advertisements, a feature that was launched back in October to A/B test various ad formats, visuals, headlines, and calls to action. Here are some of the updates coming to the feature:
- Now, the A/B ad-testing option is also available in the Quick Creation flow. It was previously only available in the Facebook Ads Manager’s Guided Creation workflow.
- The feature has now been optimized for engagement marketing, making it easier to run a split test on ads optimized for post engagement, Page likes, and event responses.
- Facebook has added a new reporting dashboard to track standard KPIs—such as CPM, CPC, and CTR—for split tests on the ads.
- Now you can duplicate your split test with the same split test settings, making it easier to keep previous templates for new tests.
- The company is rolling out a News Feed assessment feature to everyone in the US. This feature provides background information about the articles they see in News Feed. It will also allow readers to see other recent stories by the publisher of the article they are reading, and will show if any of the reader’s friends have shared the article.
- Facebook revealed that they believe that the data of up to 87 million people was improperly shared in the Cambridge Analytica data breach, which was way more than was previously disclosed. The social network continues to address the recent scandal with several upcoming changes. (Check out our previous blog posts if you missed what’s been going on with the social media giant recently.) Here are a few of the biggest ones:
- App access to the use of the Groups API and the Pages API will need to be approved by Facebook.
- Facebook will no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status, custom friends lists, education history, and work history, among others.
- The company is disabling the ability to enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them.
- The full list of changes can be found here.
- Huge news for businesses on LinkedIn! The social network recently introduced video ads in the newsfeed and videos for Company Pages. Businesses will be able to take advantage of creating video content for their campaigns to stand out from the crowd. Just make sure you’re uploading content that helps to execute your digital strategy. It’s a more professional audience on LinkedIn than you’d find on the rest of the internet, after all.
Snapchat
- The photo-based app is rolling out a new group video chat feature. With this update, up to 16 people can be on video during one call, or up to 32 people if using the voice-only feature. I mean, good luck getting that many friends available for a call at the same time, but hey, at least you have the option to do so!
- Snapchat has GIFs once more! Last week, Instagram restored the option to put GIF stickers in its stories, which was removed temporarily following some racist GIFs getting posted on both Snapchat and Instagram. Snapchat has announced plans to also restore GIF stickers after Giphy, the company overseeing their GIF library, upped their moderation.
- In the social media world, companies are constantly pointing fingers at one another to accuse them of copying their latest feature. The latest copycat claim comes from BlackBerry, which is suing Snapchat for allegedly using its patented messaging technology within the app.
Lastly, many of you have likely already heard of the recent tragic incident at YouTube headquarters. This past Tuesday, YouTube experienced a workplace shooting, leaving three victims injured and the shooter dead. Our thoughts are with all those who were affected by this horrible incident.
Spark Bites will return next week with more social media news.