In social media news this month, Instagram introduces a voice messaging feature to the app, Facebook begins creation of a tool that will predict users’ next steps and Twitter brings back the return to the chronological feed.
Instagram Gives Users a Voice
Just in time for Christmas, Instagram introduced voice messaging to the app this month, with the ability to record a message and send it through the Direct messaging feature. We wonder how many users used the new feature to wish their loved ones a happy Christmas. They can be up to one minute long, giving the users time to say what they want. To send a voice message through the Direct feature, a user simply has to hold down the new microphone icon in the chat and let go when they’ve finished talking – the message is then sent to the other user. The messages do not disappear like Instagram stories and stay permanently like a normal Direct message until the user decides to delete them.
Facebook Wants to Predict Your Next Step
Also, this month Facebook has been working on updates to its location features. The social media site has been looking into ways of using your old location data to try to predict where your next step will be. Facebook hopes that a tool will be able to guess where your future locations will be – this would be a huge step in marketing. The tool would be of great use to those that advertise on their platform, as brands can target their audience’s next step and advertises events and sales to people who may be in the city on that day – the options start to become endless.
Users could also then predict where their friends will be, where the liveliest spot is that night or where to go on holiday that year.
Rearrange Your Own Twitter
Twitter has honoured its promise to give some users a chronological timeline, by testing a new feature on their home screen. This feature has appeared for some users an as asterisk at the top right of their Twitter home page. When clicked, a pop up appears, and the user can switch between seeing the latest tweets at the top of their feed or pick to see top tweets instead. The test was only carried out for iOS users and it’s not be confirmed when it will be rolled out to the rest of Twitter.
