It’s Friday, meaning it’s time for another edition of Spark Bites, your one-stop shop for the latest social media updates! This week, all the social networks are trying to save us from ourselves.
They’ve introduced “Take a Break” reminders and tools that allow users to see how much time they’ve spent on social media. To find out more, read on:
Ooh boy. Just when everyone was starting to forget the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook is facing yet another privacy scandal this week. An investigation by New Scientist found that the intimate data of 3 million users was left exposed online for over four years. Yikes. (Does this mean more Zuckerberg memes though?)
14 months after its first launch, Facebook Stories finally announced this week that they have 150 million daily active users. Not only that, Facebook Stories started testing ads in the US, Mexico, and Brazil. Better watch out, Snapchat! If you get overthrown by Facebook Stories, of all things, that’ll truly be a fate worse than Vine.
Instagram released a new social media update that lets users share someone else’s post to their own story in the form of a sticker. For the sake of privacy, users can only reshare from public Instagram accounts and public profile users can opt out of the feature.
Some code digging reveals that Instagram is working on a “Usage Insights” feature which will show users how much time they spend on the app. It’s a great idea but honestly, we’re a little scared to see this number…
Better dust off that LinkedIn profile that you haven’t touched in six months! The social networking site is releasing a new “How You Match” feature for job seekers and companies. Job seekers viewing job posts on LinkedIn will see a real-time analysis, based on the user’s profile, that shows them which job requirements they meet and which ones they’re missing. The same feature is available for job management pages so that they can more easily filter the most qualified candidates.
LinkedIn announced that its Sales Navigator is GDPR-ready, among other updates to the tool. Sales Navigator was updated with a new lead page, new mobile account pages, and more integrations with new marketing platforms.
You ever really like Twitter but just get annoyed with all the trolls?
Twitter recently tested a new filter intended to hide trolling behavior on the social network. Rather than deleting content exhibiting “disruptive behavior,” Twitter will simply filter this content.
Google made some important announcements for Adwords recently. For one, parallel tracking will soon become mandatory on October 30th. With parallel tracking, the landing page loads faster because all the advertiser’s tracking functionalities load at the same time as the landing page, and not one after the other. Makes sense to us. Who doesn’t want faster loading times? Google is also starting to warn advertisers who are using HTTP landing pages (as opposed to HTTPS), in preparation for Chrome marking all HTTP pages as “not secure” this July.
YouTube
YouTube is launching a new music streaming service next week called YouTube Music. We probably could have guessed that. This service will be trying to compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, with a free ad-supported version and a paid $9.99 per month version.
Like Instagram, YouTube is also rolling out a “time watched profile” feature that tells users how much time they’re spending watching videos. This feature will display the user’s daily watch time, their average watch time per day, yesterday’s watch time, and their watch time over the past week. Again, we’re betting that it’s not a number we’re going to be particularly proud of.
…And once you use that feature and realize that you spend way too much of your lifetime watching other people’s lives, YouTube’s new feature “Take a Break” suddenly seems a lot more useful. This feature allows viewers to set a timer that, as the name suggests, reminds them to take a break after a certain number of minutes.
And now you’re all ready to use the newest features on all your social media apps. Those are all the social media updates we’ve got for you all this week, so have a great weekend!