Another month goes by, and more updates are added to our favorite social platforms. We are here to make sure you stay up to date on all the new features so that your business can excel and stay current on social media!
- Facebook has been upping their Messenger game, and now have announced a new plugin feature that will add Facebook Messenger to your business’s website! While on your website, customers will be able to send you a direct message that will show up in you Messenger mailbox. Currently, the feature is in closed beta, but we are really excited for this feature to be released to the public!
- Creators, rejoice! Facebook has launched their new Creator app that is intended to help build communities around influencer’s video content. Within the app, creators can customize their live videos with stickers, have a unified mailbox, have access to stories, and access analytics. The Creator app is a centralized place for all of you content creators out there! Read more here!
- Facebook has launched collaborative Stories for groups and events. This is a great feature for businesses to utilize! During an event, all team members and guests can post to a collaborative story, making the story more dynamic for viewers. Group Stories are moderated by Admins.
- It has finally happened! Instagram now lets you add any photos to your Story, not just photos taken within the last 24 hours! This has been a highly requested feature by users, and Instagram finally delivered.
- Instagram has added some updates to their direct messaging feature. You can now “remix” photos sent to you be friends by adding text, stickers, or drawings, which allows messaging to be more interactive! Also, you are now able to replay photo messages instead of them expiring after the first opening.
- Remember last month when IG added shared Live Stories? They have updated the feature so that you can request to be part of someone live stream. This could be an interesting tool for businesses to utilize by letting customers join their live stream to ask questions, making for a really personal Q & A session!
- LinkedIn has launched a new feature called Career Device. If you live in the US, UK, or India, you now have access to free career advice from industry experts. In a Tinder-like swiping method, you can scroll through different career experts. Once you find a match, you can message back and forth with your new mentor!
- After much testing, Twitter has officially expanded its tweet character count to 280 characters. The goal of this update was to support languages that found it difficult to express a single thought in the constrained original 140 character count. However, this change was received with a ton of backlash from many Twitter users, claiming the more characters would make Twitter less readable from the longer tweets. What is your opinion? Let us know in the comments!
- Twitter Lite: Twitter is expanding their presence internationally. They have rolled out a “Lite” version of the app that allows for the platform to load quicker in weak connections and use less data. Similar to Facebook’s Lite version, this will allow more access to Twitter in developing countries.
- Who else prides themselves on their Pinterest Board organization? Pinterest has released board sections, which lets you create separate sections within bigger boards. Essentially, boards within boards.
- Pinterest has launched a feature called Pincodes. This feature has been tested with Pinterest’s partner stores, like Nordstrom, where shoppers access the camera feature in the app to scan a code that pulls up an Under $100 Gift Guide board. You can also use Pincodes to follow friends without searching their username (similar to Snapchats code scan feature). Simply tap your profile picture to pull up your code and have a friend scan your code with their camera.
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- YouTube: Everyone is jumping on the Stories wagon! YouTube has released their new version called Reels. Unlike Instagram, Reels will not be at the top of the app. They will live within users profiles and won’t expire after 24 hours. Reels has only been released to creators with over 10,000 subscribers and is still waiting on feedback from creators before it will be fully released.
- Snapchat: Determined to keep competing with Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat has added some major changes to their platform. Their new algorithm strives to “separate the social from the media”. Rather than sorting content by popularity like Facebook does, or by reverse chronological order like Snapchat has been, they will sort content by what users watch the most. You can now find your friends messages and Stories to the left in the order of most interaction, and you can find all the media content to the right.
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