Another week flies by and social networks continue their scurry to churn out meaningful updates in the new year. This edition of Spark Bites brings you some very impactful announcements from major social networks. Read on to find out more!
- Facebook has acquired Confirm.io, a software that facilitates easy verification of users’ identification documentation. This move is expected to make identity verification and account recovery a much smoother process on the social platform. We also expect that the acquisition will better equip Facebook to weed out fake news publishers – a battle that the social network is perpetually fighting.
- Facebook has decided to leverage crowdsourcing to help combat fake news. The social network has put in place a 2-question survey that will appear on the screens of randomly-selected users. The survey will determine if the user recognizes and trusts a list of websites/publishers. Although it’s a very short survey, it might give Facebook the data it needs to determine publisher legitimacy.
- Facebook also released a statement about how it will implement the results of the aforementioned trust-survey. Collective survey responses will determine a publisher’s credibility rating. Content from the publisher will then be ranked on the News Feed depending on its rating. The social network sure seems to have done a lot of brainstorming around fake news!
- Instagram is developing a feature that will display the number of profile visits a user has had in the last seven days. Test users are already seeing this feature at the top of their profile. This comes as yet another update in the flurry of improvements Instagram has been releasing over the last week. Check out our previous edition of Spark Bites to know more!
- Klear, a social analytics tool, reported that the number of influencer posts on Instagram stands at 1.5 million, which is nearly double that of 2016. These staggering growth numbers come as significant stats for businesses and marketers alike.
- After Instagram, it’s now Twitter’s turn to begin adapting Snapchat’s features. The social app is developing a camera-centered tool very much like Snapchat’s to make video-sharing easier. However, a timeline for its release has not been announced yet.
- Twitter is leveraging artificial intelligence to crop pictures to focus on the part that would most interest users. The social network’s goal was to “crop using saliency” to make content more appealing to users.
Snapchat
- Snapchat announced that it will now allow public Stories posted by users to be published on the web. Users will be able to externally share a link to their Stories through which non-users can access them on a desktop version at snapchat.com. This is a significant move by the social app aimed at salvaging audience growth efforts.
- In a strategic move, Snapchat announced that it will now proactively work with publishers and incorporate more ways to help them be successful on the app. Looks like the platform is trying to leverage the gaping hole that Facebook’s algorithm overhaul left behind in Publishers’ lives!
With that, we wrap up another week, folks! We hope these set of updates help you better strategize your social media content. We’ll be back next week with more exciting news. In the meantime, get in touch with us if you need expert social media advice!