Welcome to another helping of social media updates in this week’s Spark Bites by Spark Growth! This week, social networks are upping their comment section game to make everything a little less chaotic for everyone.
Facebook:
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There’s a reason they didn’t call it Fakebook. In a new update, the social network will punish site links that use fake play buttons to disguise themselves as videos. Links that display a fake play button in the preview image will now rank lower in the News Feed.
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Facebook wants to make the comment section into more of a conversation. As of August 15th, comments under a post will now take the form of Messenger-esque speech bubbles. Additionally, instead of being prompted to “write a comment,” you will now be encouraged to “write a reply.”
Instagram:
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Finally—Instagram also updates their comment section by adding comment threads. This makes it easier to see a whole conversation at once, cleans up the comment section, and is, in our opinion, a great idea. Thank you, Insta! We will consider forgiving you for having a hand in killing Vine.
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This next update is actually a pretty original idea, which is relatively rare when it comes to social media platforms these days. Instagram is introducing an option to reply with a photo or video to specific photos, videos and re-shared posts in your private messages. The cool part is that your reply automatically includes a sticker of what you’re replying to. Take a reply selfie of yourself with the sticker picture on top of your eye! Or your mouth! Or your nose! The possibilities are endless!
LinkedIn:
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Lights, LinkedIn, Action! You can now record videos in the LinkedIn mobile app. This will make it easier to immediately upload videos recorded from your phone that you want to share with your LinkedIn contacts. You probably want to be careful of what videos you’re posting to LinkedIn though.
Snapchat:
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Snapchat is testing a cool new feature called Crowd Surf. Using artificial intelligence, the feature will combine all the short video clips that users are taking at various concerts, and string them into one continuous music video from multiple angles. Pretty cool!
Google:
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Google Docs, Sheets and Slides just implemented some pretty useful updates. Here are some of the highlights:
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You can add custom names to different versions of your document to make it easier to track all the changes.
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You can accept or reject all edit suggestions at once, for those times when you either fully trust or don’t trust your editor’s opinion at all.
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It’s becoming easier to use Docs from Android, iPhone or iPad devices. And, you can now turn on “suggestion mode” on these devices.
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Pinterest:
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Get ready for a simple but significant social media update for Pinterest! The image-based app finally allows users to zoom in on pictures. Users can simply pinch their fingers over an image to zoom in or out. Definitely an improvement over the previous method of holding the phone to your nose and squinting really hard.
Those are all the social media updates we have for today! And if you missed our last issue of Spark Bites, don’t beat yourself up about it…
You can read it right here! Have a great week, everyone.