Social Media - Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

It’s an onerous task but to help you, we’ve picked out some edited highlights you should at least be aware of.

Twitter
What do you see when you open Twitter? Until a year ago, the answer was straightforward: With minor exceptions, you’d see every tweet from every person you followed, in chronological order, with the most recent at the top.

But is this about to change? Word leaked a while ago that Twitter was planning to introduce an ‘algorithmic timeline’. It means that tweets will no longer appear in the order they were posted. Instead, a complex, opaque software program will decide which tweets you see when you open the app.

This follows hot on the heels of its introduction of live 360 video late last year.

Facebook
At the centre of Facebook’s goal with News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. With this objective in mind it has recently announced two updates to better rank posts in your feed.

Firstly, incorporating new signals to better identify and rank authentic content, and secondly, a new way to predict and rank in real-time when posts might be more relevant to you.

And while we’re talking algorithm changes, Facebook will also be prioritising Reactions over Likes, when ranking stories on News Feed.

YouTube
If you’ve found yourself frustrated by the accuracy of YouTube's auto captions, then this recent announcement from them will be music to your ears as it means a 50 percent leap in accuracy for automatic captions in English.

LinkedIn
Anyone who has been on LinkedIn recently will have been exposed to its re-design. Receiving a mixed reception, it’s been introduced to offer a cleaner writing experience and improve how long-form articles show up to relevant and target audiences across LinkedIn.

Additionally, LinkedIn has introduced some added functionality giving you the option to enable or disable comments on your articles. While this new feature is currently only available for long-form articles, it will soon add the option to turn off comments on all of your LinkedIn posts.

Pinterest
Pinterest has launched a series of new visual discovery tools giving you a way to discover ideas without having to find the right words to describe them first. It’s called Lens and it lets you use the camera in your Pinterest app to discover ideas inspired by objects you see out in the real world.

WhatsApp
To coincide with its birthday, WhatsApp has evolved its original ‘text only’ status feature, reinventing it so it allows you to share photos and videos with your friends and contacts on WhatsApp in an easy and secure way.

With these platforms playing an increasingly pivotal role in your communications strategy, having an agency with its finger on the pulse is essential.