Andrew Sirianni

When the Internet moves, the Internet moves fast. When it comes to Social Media, updates to platforms happen quickly and quietly and therefore they are very easy to miss. In the last few weeks there have been a lot of changes to your social media accounts that can benefit your business; here is a round-up of what's been going on.

Facebook

Moving non-promoted posts out of newsfeed

Currently Facebook is trialling moving almost all non-promoted posts to a secondary feed, meaning that your news feed as you currently know it would only be for content from friends and ads. Whilst this probably won't be a huge deal for big publishers, small publishers that rely on social networks for their audience are going to see problems. Trial users are seeing 60% to 80% drops in traffic.

No more Dark Posts

Dark Posts are ads that target a specific set of people, are visible to that audience but don't appear on a brands page. Now, Facebook is bringing dark posts into the light. They will be visible to everyone. To do this, there will be a “view ads” button on every page that shows what ads that page is operating. The point of this move is to bring transparency.

Messenger Live Chat Service

Under Messenger 2.2, businesses can now use Messenger Live Chat on their own websites. The great part of this feature is that you can switch back and forth between messenger and your website without losing any of the conversation.

Paywall

Facebook is testing Paywall options for Instant Articles. Currently, two models are being tested: The first is that everyone gets 10 free stories a month and the second is that publishers can choose which articles to lock. Currently this feature is only available on Android as Apple has problems with the sign up flow which impacts on their revenue.

Twitter

280 Character Limit

Since Twitter's launch, the character limit has remained a very constant 140 characters. Now, 280 has become the new standard for all users. While you might be concerned that your feed will fill up with 280 character tweets, when testing occurred only 5% of tweets were longer than 140 characters.

Instagram

Comment Filters

Instagram Comment Filters have been around for sometime. However, now you can choose who comments on your posts, block certain individuals from commenting on your posts use offensive-language blocking filters in multiple language. If you're a business with a large follower base, your posts are likely to receive a large range of responses. While some of the ones you may wish to block might not be negative, they may not be consistent with your brand values or tone and so auto hiding them might be better for you.

Polling Stickers

While often used as a fun novelty by most, the new polling stickers that are available in stories provide a great way for you to get some insight from your audience about what they are interested or what they think of your brand. It's a fast and simple way of conducting basic market research, and a great way to boost engagement.

Stories

The 24 hour limit on content that can be added to stories. Importantly though don't confuse with the time limit that exists, stories will still expire after 24 hours. What this change means is that you can upload content beyond anything captured/created in the last 24 hours. Given that previously you could only upload content to stories that was made in the last 24 hours, it presents a significantly bigger opportunities for brands to use stories to make their investment worthwhile.

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