Welcome to your weekly dose of social media updates in this jam-packed edition of Spark Bites by Spark Growth! This week, Facebook unleashed a barrage of announcements and updates at their F8 Conference. Don’t worry, though, we got you.
In this post, you’ll find all the most important announcements Facebook made (Spoiler: they’re trying to take on Tinder!), plus all the other latest social media updates that you missed this week. Read on to learn more:
- Pinterest is rolling out a new feature that filters hair and beauty search results by using skin tone so that users can more easily find what they’re looking for. The company also mentioned that this information won’t be stored or used for ad targeting.
- A new authorization process is now open for US advertisers to run political ads on Facebook. The three-step process is part of Facebook’s initiative to ensure transparency and authenticity in political ads, which was of course sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Cambridge Analytica, by the way, just announced their closure last Wednesday).
- Facebook has taken steps to ensure that flagged content does not get unrightfully taken down. Firstly, Facebook has published the internal guidelines they use to review content. Secondly, the company is also opening the right for users to appeal individual posts that have been taken down.
- Facebook’s annual(ish) F8 conference was this week, and boy, did they have a lot to say. For the sake of not keeping you all here reading until Monday, we’re going to do our best to summarize the most interesting updates succinctly and to learn more, you can just click on the source link!
- Ok, wait. We know we just said we would keep this short, but this is just wild. Lonely Facebook users are going to love this one.
The social media platform is going to launch a DATING app on their platform that is meant for MEANINGFUL relationships. Because we all know that our Facebook friends are known to be people we have meaningful relationships with. - Facebook will soon roll out a Clear History tool that allows users to clear their own browsing history and see all the apps that they’ve interacted with before.
- Messenger will be rolling out translations within the chat itself through its M Suggestions assistant. With how reliable automatic translation services are, we can’t see how this could possibly go wrong…
- Both Facebook and Instagram will soon allow third-party apps to share content to Stories. Jeez, kick Snapchat while it’s down, why don’t you?
- Facebook is testing ‘Watch Party’, which allows Group admins to pick a Facebook video and watch it with other Group members in real time.
- Facebook is testing a downvote button on some public Page comment sections. Before you get excited, the company specified, “We are not testing a dislike button.” You heard them. It’s a downvote button. It’s different.
- After accumulating more and more clutter on its interface over the years, Messenger will be redesigned to be simpler again.
- Ok, wait. We know we just said we would keep this short, but this is just wild. Lonely Facebook users are going to love this one.
- Instagram also got a couple of cool announcements at the F8 Conference.
- Instagram will soon support group video chats.
- It will also getting a redesigned Explore tab which sorts groups of photos and videos based on their topic. These topics are then displayed at the top of the page.
- The social media platform is also getting a new filter to protect users from bullying comments. This filter will automatically hide comments that attack a person’s appearance or character, as well as comments that threaten a person.
Snapchat
- Snapchat also has a lot of big changes coming! For one, they’re changing the name of ‘Promoted Stories’ to ‘Story Ads’. Ok, that admittedly doesn’t sound like big news, but we’re starting with the small fry first. These Story Ads are exclusive to the Discover feed in the app and they get set up very similarly to Snap Ads.
- The app is going to begin testing 6-second unskippable ‘Commercials’. By the way, that’s a proper noun, which we find hilarious. You think people are going to believe that you invented commercials, Snapchat? Your users aren’t THAT young. Anyway. Commercials will appear in some shows on Snapchat, but not in personal stories.
- Snapchat is getting a new redesign! Again!
Look, we get it. Whenever a social media platform gets a new makeover, there will always be at least a few grumpy users who are unhappy. But Snapchat seriously dropped the ball during last year’s redesign, which has been blamed for the company’s disappointing Q1 results. The new update will sort communication by recency and your friends’ Stories will be in the Discover section.
Phew, and that’s all for this week! Have a lovely weekend and we’ll see you all back here same time, same place, for next week’s social media updates.