Nothing deters social networks — not even the holiday season. Some of them continue to upgrade their technology and features, while others make bloopers worth marveling at. Check out the latest in the world of social media in this new edition of Spark Bites!
- Facebook launched a Messenger plug-in that can be integrated into third-party websites. This means that businesses are able to not only chat with customers, but also continue the conversation after the customer leaves their website. Another advantage is the whopping reach of the app and the ease of access across all web and mobile devices. That’s another feather in the social network’s already feathery cap.
- Clearly under pressure to solve the problem of fake news, Facebook made a misguided trial attempt, wherein it promoted comments containing the word “fake.” As a result, for every feed from popular news pages, the first visible comment had the word “fake” in it. This automation, of course, did not differentiate between feeds reporting incorrect news from those reporting legitimately. The trial received widespread criticism and the social network ended it in a hurry.
- After introducing the paid posts identifier tool back in June, Instagram is now rolling out the feature to all accounts that access its insights’ data. The tool, which tags posts as “Paid partnership with” a business, will now flag paid posts that do not have the identifier and will prompt social influencers to amend it.
- A year after it launched its bookmark feature, Instagram is currently testing an upgrade that allows users to view their saved posts on web browsers. As a part of the test phase, the feature has been rolled out selectively instead of globally.
- In a social faux pas, Twitter blocked the word “bisexual” from search results on its platform. As a result, users who searched for the term were prohibited from viewing content associated with the term. The social network later issued an apology and claimed that the word was added to its list of explicit terms due to a “technical error.”
- In a chuckle-worthy last act of defiance, a rogue Twitter employee deactivated Donald Trump’s account on their last day of work. Clearly, he/she wanted to go out with a bang. Although the account was reactivated within 11 minutes, Twitter stated that the incident was investigated, and preventative measures were established for the future.
Snapchat
- Snapchat was down for nearly 4 hours on November 6 2017, which is equivalent to a month in social media-time. Disgruntled users took to Twitter to voice their complaints. Snapchat did not respond immediately but eventually stated that they’re working on a fix. The incident doesn’t bode well for the app’s popularity, as it follows two other instances of technical issues in October.
- In a historic move, Pinterest launched search advertising on its Ad Manager. This will allow partner businesses to target users based on searches. An additional advantage the platform offers advertisers is the “Taste Graph” feature, which enables auto-targeting based on relevant user-searches. The launch, in its test phase, is currently available only to marketing partners. We must say, Pinterest has been implementing commendable improvements lately.
- LinkedIn is giving automation a whole new meaning. It launched a new feature called “Smart Replies,” which can carry your side of the conversation in the chat tool. Through machine learning, the feature can reply on your behalf if you aren’t able to give your full attention to the chat. Although it can’t carry out a full-fledged conversation, it definitely is a level up from the standard template replies we’re all used to.
That’s it for this week but we’ll be back soon with another illuminative edition of Spark Bites! We personally love to learn about the latest social news and updates — it gets us excited about the new possibilities in the world of digital marketing. Check out our work so far and contact us to learn more.