Social Media Round Up Weekly Stories
September 26, 2019
Featured
Web Design
Social Media
Snapchat
Fun
Facebook Facing Potential AntiTrust Lawsuits
Facebook competitors like Snap, Inc. whose only company is Snapchat have been talking to the Federal Trade Commission. Snap, Inc. is claiming that Facebook tried to thwart competition from the rival social media company including telling popular social media influencers to not use Snapchat. Snap’s legal team has been compiling a dossier called “Project Voldemort” about Facebook’s anti-competitive tactics, the Wall Street Journal report said — citing people familiar with the project.
Facebook has long been accused of stifling growth in their sector by either forcing competitors out of business or buying them out. According to Bloomberg, ‘The FTC began its investigation of Facebook after striking an agreement in May with the Justice Department to divide four of the biggest tech companies between them. Under that deal, the FTC got jurisdiction over Facebook and Amazon. While the Justice Department’s antitrust division took Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc.” Facebook continues to fight fires on all fronts but it looks like business as usual for the social media giant.
Four Bold Social Media Predictions For 2020
The world of social media is constantly evolving and it’s difficult to stay ahead of all the new updates. Forbe, however, has taken the time to make some pretty serious predictions for the future of social media in the next coming year.
1). Instagram will officially remove likes.
Instagram has already been testing the removal of likes in a number of different countries and many predict that it will be coming to the United States very soon. However Forbes predicts that the ”mental health” reasoning behind the move is more of a PR spin. They predict the real reason behind this move is that Instagram is not seeing a return in influencer marketing and paid posts on the platform. By hiding this information Instagram is taking back the power.
2). Google will incorporate social into search.
Over the last couple of years, Google has been trying to break into the social media realm. As we all know, Google+ did not perform as well as they hoped. That is why Forbes predicts that Google will move to incorporate existing social platforms into their search algorithm.
3). Niche social platforms expand
As time has progressed more social media platforms have been deemed important and incorporated into marketing strategies. This is largely due to the increase in international internet accessibility and user generated content search. Forbes predicts that this type of growth will continue in 2020.
4). Social sharing tools will become free or more valuable
We mentioned before that Forbes believes Google will continue to get involved with existing social media platforms. One way Fobes thinks they will do this is by creating their own social scheduling tool.
Twitter Provides Option to Hide Replies to Users in the US and Japan
According to Twitters official page you will now be able to directly hide replies from your tweet responses. After testing it out in Canada and Japan it is now available to all in the United States as well. It can be a very valuable tool to use if people are harassing or trolling individuals in your replies.
While running the trial in Canada, Twitter found that, “people mostly hide replies that they think are irrelevant, abusive or unintelligible. Those who used the tool thought it was a helpful way to control what they saw, similar to when keywords are muted.”
Second, they found that, “people were more likely to reconsider their interactions when their tweet was hidden: 27% of people who had their tweets hidden said they would reconsider how they interact with others in the future.”
Facebook Adds New Video Publishing Tools, Including Live Rehearsals and Watch Party Replays
In a presentation to the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) last week, Facebook announced the launch a new range of video features and tools. The updates announced primarily relate to Facebook Live, Watch Parties and Creator Studio.
In regards to Facebook Live, Facebook is rolling out Live rehearsals, which will provide an option for users to broadcast their Live videos to Page admins and editors only. This will help publishers test out their content ideas before sharing them to a larger audience. Facebook also shared that they will incorporate a new trimming option to Facebook Live. Facebook’s trimming option will allow publishers to cut off the beginning and end parts of their Live broadcast replays.
A new simulcast option has also been an added feature to Facebook Live. The simulcast feature will enable users to “broadcast simultaneously to more than one online streaming service” via the Live API. This addition will make it a lot easier to share content to more people, which will hopefully grow your audience.
Over the years, Facebook has made it a point to grow their watch parties feature. According to the social media platform, people are 8 times more likely to comment on videos in a Watch Party than if they were to watch the video outside of one. With this statistic in mind, Facebook is adding a scheduling, replay and brand tagging option to Watch Parties. All in hopes to make the feature more prominent on the platform.
Last but not least, Facebook is adding a new visualization to its loyalty insights which will show you which of your videos are driving returning viewers. And Creator Studio will now also support 13 new languages for auto-captioning, adding to the four languages (English, French, Portuguese and Spanish) already available.
