Welcome to another edition of Spark Bites, your one-stop shop for weekly social media updates! There were a lot of big updates across the board this week: Snapchat introduced a new way to look silly while having fun, while YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter worked to combat hate speech on their respective platforms. Here are all the details for this week’s social media updates:
- A few days ago, the social networking giant announced their plan to make its advertising more “safe and civil”. To this end, Facebook will soon be prompting advertisers with reminders about Facebook’s anti-discrimination rules before they start a campaign. Facebook has also limited their exclusion targeting options, mostly for topics like race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
- Facebook is taking more steps towards promoting Watch and helping video creators. In an effort to promote Watch, Facebook will soon be running preview trailers in some users’ feeds for Facebook’s Watch shows. These new trailers will work like video ads that can send viewers to Watch to watch the full episode. Facebook also has a new feature that will automatically determine the best places in a video for a mid-roll ad. We love this idea, because it means that dialogue won’t get cut off by ads in the middle
of a sentence! - This past Tuesday, Facebook released a rulebook to clarify what exactly people can post on the social networking site. This document, about 8,000 words long, is much more detailed than previous community standards guidelines and elaborates on the specific rules of a variety of categories, such as drug use, sex work, and bullying, among others. This update is likely meant to address the common criticism that Facebook fails to sufficiently censor hate speech and terrorism on their platform.
- Get ready to have to tap through much longer stories on your Instagram feed! Instagram is making it easier for users to upload media to their story even after the moment has passed. Users can now upload multiple photos and videos all at once to their story, making it easier to bulk upload any media that was taken earlier in the day. Not only that, when you upload media to your story, the location sticker will automatically suggest places close to where the photo or video was originally taken.
- Instagram recently released a new tool that will let you download your own data, allowing users to export their photos, videos, archived Stories, profile, info, comments, and non-ephemeral messages. This tool is being launched in order to comply with the recent data portability rule in the EU’s GDPR privacy law. Now, if you really wanted to, you could take your data and leave for another photo-sharing social network. But let’s be real, you’d probably just come back to Instagram anyway once you realized that there are few photo-sharing social network options out there that aren’t a suspiciously misspelled ‘Instagramm’.
- Twitter announced this week that they revoked the API access for 142,000 apps, which accounted for about 130 million tweets. This is to show that they are indeed making progress in their fight against spam, bots, and harassment… Although in the report they’re all just referred to as “low-quality” tweets, which in our opinion is a term that can be applied to about 90% of the tweets we’re seeing in our feed. (Is your brand making some major mistakes on Twitter? Get in touch with us!)
Snapchat
- Selfies are getting an upgrade! Snapchat is making people who take selfies in public look even dumber with its cool new feature: Snappables, which are AR games that use a user’s touch, motion, and facial expressions to control them. You can even play multiplayer games with your friends! New Snappables will be released each week and some will stay permanently, depending on their popularity. You can find these games with your other Lenses in the app.
YouTube
- YouTube is introducing some features that will allow parents to finally have more control over what their kids watch on YouTube’s ‘Kids’ app. Parents will soon be able to choose which channels their kid can watch from a list of ‘trusted’ channels. If they turn off the search feature, the app will only recommend content from those trusted channels. Later this year, the app will give parents the option to choose every individual video that their child is allowed to watch.
- Pinterest just released a slew of updates to its platform that most users will barely notice.
However, for some people these updates will be hugely crucial, as the app is introducing a slew of new features and changes to make it more accessible to visually impaired people. This is an important move for a platform that markets itself as a visual search engine. Here are a few of the new features:- Pinterest’s color palette has become more readable for people with sensitivity to bright colors, as well as people with low vision.
- Screen reader support will be improved, and iOS’ VoiceOver and Android’s TalkBack will work much better with the app now.
- Users can now adjust their text to make it easier to see by bolding it or customizing the size to their needs.
Well, sad to end this so soon, but those are all the social media updates and news we have for you this week! Have a great weekend and we’ll see you back here next Friday for the next edition of Spark Bites.