Oh my, it’s been quite a week in social media! Some big announcements, and some little details that will help with your online marketing. The main news comes from Facebook, but we’ve rounded up a couple of updates from SnapChat and Twitter this week too. Enjoy!
Facebook
“Facebook used to be this one blue app on your phone, and now Facebook is a family of apps.”
So said Mark Zuckerberg at the recent F8 conference, marking a significant shift for the organisation away from being just one platform into being a related “clan of experiences”. Okay, so no big surprises there – we already knew Facebook owned Instagram and WhatsApp – but they’ve used the shift to roll out a totally new desktop version of Messenger with an invitation to brands to start using it as a direct customer relation tool and means of getting messages direct to consumers. If you’re a B2C provider, stay tuned – the Messenger Platform will offer third-party apps for creating and sharing content, and new ways to communicate for businesses. BIG potential!
Twitter made a welcome update to their retweet function, by launching its “retweet with comment” feature, allowing users to feature other tweets in their own posts without using up any of their 140 characters.
You use it by clicking on the retweet button, and choosing the “quote tweet” option from the pop-up. That will then slide the tweet into the post as a “card”, showing a small version of it in the stream and using up much less of the valuable 140 characters. (Users will have 116 characters left to fill in, since the quoted tweet still takes up some space.) We’ve been using it already – have you? Sometimes the little details make a big difference – especially when you’ve only got 140 characters to play with!
Snap Chat
Snapchat upset a lot of people earlier in the year when it pulled its popular ‘best friends’ feature, which showed the people you snapped with the most. However, it’s now launching a range of emoji characters to replace it that will indicate your friendship status instead. Added to that, they’ve also introduced a new low-light camera function to help with pics taken in darker settings. Win win!
Kate Tyler
Kate Tyler is the founder of Shake Social and our long time social media expert. A regular speaker at events, Kate offers consultancy and training on a range of digital marketing topics, in particular safeguarding and using social media in an educational setting.