It’s that time of the month again where Giraffe brings you the latest goings-on within the social media news landscape. Read on to find out the latest developments and changes from your favourite platforms.
With 2021 well underway it’s easy to miss the latest updates in the world of social media news. Fear not as Giraffe Social Media has you covered for the latest developments and inspiration to keep your social media marketing and strategy game strong all year long.
Facebook to Reduce Political Content in News Feeds.
Facebook has announced a new test to reduce political content across news feeds, this is in response to concerns over the impact of divisive political debates that have historically taken place on the platform. According to Facebook, they will test several approaches including temporarily reducing political content for a small percentage of users in Brazil, Indonesia, Canada and the US.
Facebook went on to say that one of their biggest topics for feedback was their community wanting a reduction in political content taking over their experience of the service. Its aim for the year is building healthy communities, bringing people closer together and improving the user experience of their platform.
Until now Facebook has always allowed divisive political content because of the amount of engagement it generates. Newsfeed algorithms reward interaction meaning until now divisive argumentative content effectively gained more reach due to its emotive context that would drive more interactions.
Facebook wants active engagement on the platform but this recent announcement is clearly a reaction to a loss in daily interactions from users who are fed up with political debates filling their news feed rather than engaging content they want to interact with. Clearly, Facebook has realised overall platform engagement is more important than political content, that, whilst engaging is at the expense of overall usage.
Instagram Launching Multi-Participant Live-Streams.
In other social media news, Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri has recently revealed that the platform will soon launch multi-participant Instagram Live video chats in the coming weeks. You can watch the reveal here, The announcement was made on talkshow A Little Late With Lilly Singh.
According to Mosseri, Instagram has been hard a work on live groups to give users the ability to go live with more than one other person, in cat it was revealed that up to four people will be able to go live simultaneously together. For clarity, this will mean one live stream can contain the host, plus three other participants.
Instagram has been testing this feature in India since December as reported by The India Express, live-streaming has been on the rise in India and Instagram has been looking to fill the space left by TikTok after it’s ban in the country. Making it the perfect place to test the feature before a global rollout.
Live streaming in 2020 saw a huge rise due to the pandemic as people sought to stay connected through lockdown measures and it can be assumed that Instagram would probably have like to have this feature rolled out sooner. However, it now looks like the full rollout is coming very soon and will provide yet another way for brands and influencers to engage and connect with their audiences on the platform. Expect an official announcement from Instagram soon!
Twitter Launches Voice Recordings in DM’s
It’s official! Twitter has launched a full test of voice clips within direct messaging. You can find the announcement here, via Twitter’s official India account. Currently, the feature is being tested exclusively in India, Brazil and Japan.
Users will now be able to record audio clips which can then be sent as a message, It functions in much the same way as Instagram’s current implementation, with clips being sent in line with existing chat messages within the thread. This is an extension of the audio recording option Twitter added to regular tweets previously, although, after the initial hype behind this from celebrities and high profile users, it seems to have died off somewhat.
However audio clips for direct messages could open the platform up to a plethora of new users, such as vision-impaired users, who have previously struggled with the platform as a whole and can be seen as an accessibility feature as well as a convenient way to send others long-form content. This is unsurprising as Twitter has been working to improve accessibility across the platform.
This could also be an opportunity for brands to reach. more users with fun or informational audio clips that could be used to reply and respond to customer queries and requests, personalising the experience for each interaction than ever before. Only time will tell how brands really utilise this feature. Currently, audio clips are limited to a maximum of 140 seconds, with no word if this duration will be increased in a future update.
That wraps up the latest social media updates for this month, we will be back with more next month! Keeping you ahead of the social media curve one word at a time! Keep it dialled and stay tuned!
