social media news

Social Media News – 17 April 2016

Here’s my take on the latest social media news focussing on new developments on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

You can also watch the recording of THE #SocialToday SHOW below where I give you my take on the latest social media news. Feel free to ask me questions by posting in the Comments. Friend or follow me to receive notifications so you can watch live.

Facebook – Facebook held their F8 conference this week and there were a number of interesting announcements.

Bots are coming! Facebook is keen to develop Messenger as a stand-alone platform complete with a new bot store. This will enable businesses to build their own chat bots. Bots are automated response tools within Messenger which can handle customer service queries. Watch the video below for examples:

Messenger at F8 from Facebook on Vimeo.

A great new feature on Messenger is the ability to send files from Dropbox. If Dropbox is installed on your mobile device, select the three dots then Dropbox to attach a file.

Ads are also coming to Messenger but messages from businesses can only be sent if a person has already engaged with them. People will have the option to block a

Say goodbye to passwords! Facebook Accounts will enable people to log into apps with just a mobile phone number, extending the familiar ‘login with Facebook’ functionality. Apps that enable logins with Accounts will ask you for your phone number. Once you’ve entered it, Facebook sends you a 6 digit code to confirm the number belongs to you. Enter the code and you’re now logged into the app, with no password to remember. Cool eh?

Last year Facebook rolled out video profile images and Facebook has now made it easier for developers to add a button to their camera app to upload a 7 second video. Expect to see the buttons on Instagram and Vine soon.

Last week I wrote about no less than 7 new features for Facebook Live and at F8 there was another exciting announcement. Any desktop app or camera will shortly be able to stream to Facebook Live. At the conference Mark Zuckerberg looked up nervously from the stage as he was live streamed by a drone. The first main stream camera called Livestream Meevo is now available for pre-order.

Talking of Facebook Live, media partners such as Buzzfeed are being paid by Facebook to broadcast videos, presumably to raise awareness of the service. Buzzzfeed’s live video of an exploding watermelon had 700,000 viewers at one point.

Facebook is launching ‘quote sharing’. Rather than screenshot or copy and paste text into a Facebook post, you can simply highlight it and share it. Facebook will paste the text into a new post in block quote format, and include a full preview of the original article. Developers will have access to a ‘share quote’ button and the feature will be available on Amazon’s Kindle shortly.

The popular Save feature whereby you can save posts for reading at a later time has now been extended to the whole web. If you’d like people to save content to Facebook from your website, you can find out more in this video:


Twitter – I spotted today that Twitter are displaying ‘Your tweet activity’ on the right hand side of the homepage. Have you spotted this?

your tweet activity

Brands and businesses are increasing using Twitter for customer services following the axing of the 140 character limit on Direct Messages. Mystery shopper group BDRC Continental have announced a Top Ten and a Bottom Ten of UK companies using Twitter for customer services. The Top Ten is full of financial services companies with Nationwide @AskNationwide coming top. Retailers feature strongly among the worst brands for answering customer queries on Twitter. Fashion retailer French Connection @FCUK, which saw sales in 2015 fall 8% to £164.2m, comes bottom of the pile.

[RUMOUR] Twitter to launch fresh design for its Android App. A number of Twitter users have begun seeing a design that places Twitter’s four core areas (Feed, Moments, Notifications, and Direct Messages) as large tabs across the top of the screen. You can move between them either by tapping on the tab or by swiping side to side, making it much easier to navigate and explore than at present. The new design also makes useful areas like Highlights easier to access. Lets hope that Twitter rolls this out for all Android users.

Instagram – Instagram has expanded its Explore feature to include video channels. Soon you’ll find a personalized channel called ‘Videos You Might Like’ that curates videos from Instagram’s into a seamless viewing experience. As you scroll through the Explore grid, you’ll also see Featured channels with videos on specific topics.

Number of week – My number of the week is 39. The number of hours – 39 hours and 22 minutes to be precise – on average it takes French Connection to respond to customers on Twitter.

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