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Social Media News

Social Media News Roundup: May ’18 Week 3

In social media news this week, Facebook makes updates to its Stories feature, Instagram enables users the ability to share other people’s posts (kind of), Twitter battles the bullies and Instagram’s ads get a useful update.
Use Your Voice…Literally

Facebook has been working hard again this week and has introduced a voice clips feature, which is being used to post voice notes to your Stories. Users can attach voice memos to photos and upload to the Stories feature, like you would a stand-alone image or video clip.

Share Someone Else’s Holiday Photos

The busy bees at Facebook have also been working on features for Instagram. One new feature for the social, sharing site has been the ability to share other people’s posts. However, it’s not exactly what it says on the tin as users can only share the image to the Instagram Stories feature in the form of a sticker. This means it’s not really like sharing the original post as other people cannot comment or interact as they could a normal image on their feed. It does, however, encompass the tools to add text and other stickers and displays the user’s name who originally posted the image with it. So, don’t worry, you’ll still take the credit for your holiday snapshot of the sunset on the beach in Bali.

Twitter Versus the World

With Twitter’s battle against hate crime finally causing some damage to the world of trolls and digital bullies, the social media site has decided to do even more to aid in the fight of online abuse. Twitter has been working on an algorithm that can identify hecklers and negative comments from users and stop their tweets from being seen by other users or at least, try to stop the response being on most individuals’ timelines. The algorithm marks the derogatory tweets and the user so their tweets are less likely to show up. Twitter – 1; haters – 0.

Original Ads

Although it may seem like a small victory to some, for advertisers the news that organic posts on Instagram can now be made into ads is a big thing! Although the Instagram advertisements will only work when using one image or video, it still will save brands a lot more time when boosting their posts. It has to be done through Ads Manager and you have the ability to start from the beginning and build your ad with the exact targets you have in mind. Business accounts will be able to view the success of their advertisements through metrics too.