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Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.
To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What's New This Week
Facebook Prioritizes Facebook Live Videos in News Feed: Facebook announced that it is “making a small update to News Feed so that Facebook Live Videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when those videos are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live.”
LinkedIn Introduces Account Targeting: LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Account Targeting, “a new way to run effective account-based marketing campaigns on [the LinkedIn] platform.”
Facebook Rolls Out New Video Tool to Showcase Businesses: Facebook launched Your Business Story, “a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world.” Facebook also shared that “three million businesses actively advertise on Facebook.” These advertisers are “from all over the world, with more than 70% from outside of the US.”
Facebook Updates Tips for Using Messaging for Your Page: Facebook offers page admins “recommendations on using messaging for Pages most effectively.”
Twitter Rolls Out New Features for Twitter Ads API: Twitter now offers a “more mature and stable Ads API with major technical enhancements including versioning, improved analytics, and developer sandbox capabilities.” Twitter also welcomed three new official partners building into its open API platform: Nanigans, Comprendi, and Gupta Media.
Today marks the 3rd year of our Ads API! Read about our newest partners and the innovative tools in our ecosystem: https://t.co/1xQp57tMU7
— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) March 1, 2016
Facebook Moments App Now Supports Video: Facebook Moments app “hit 400M photos shared – 100M of which [were] from the past month alone” and now allows “users to share videos alongside photos.”
Instagram Blocks Deeplinks to Snapchat and Telegram Profiles: Instagram has “removed the ability to include ‘add me' links on Instagram profile pages” that go to personal Snapchat or Telegram accounts. However, Instagram confirms that “other types of links are still allowed.”
Disqus to Launch Reveal Ads: “Reveal is an all-in-one, quality, below-the-fold monetization solution for publishers that use Disqus. Publishers select the ad types that work best for their site and earn revenue when their audience engages with those ads.”
Our Take on Top News This Week
In this blab from March 4, 2016, Michael Stelzner and guests discuss the top news in social media. Topics include Google AMPÂ (1:51) and Facebook Live Video news feed placement (25:30). Subscribe to future shows here.
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More News to Note
Facebook Is Letting Publishers Use Instant Articles to Collect Email Newsletter Signups: To help publishers build a direct relationship with their readers, Facebook is working with select publishers to “test newsletter sign-up messages at the bottom of their Instant Articles.”
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Meerkat Is Ditching the Livestream – And Chasing a Video Social Network Instead: Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin says, “One-to-many [broadcasting] is not more than a feature on top of a platform, and if we want to be independent we have to change the course.”
Vimeo Redesigns App for iOS: Vimeo's updated iOS app “makes finding, sharing and discovering videos more intuitive than ever.” The new design includes a “beautiful new player,” a “100% human curation team” that organizes videos into categories and subcategories, and “more info about what you're watching.”
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Blab Rolls Out New Way to Find Your Friends on Blab: “It's called On Blab, and it's going to make finding your friends much easier.”
YouTube Introduces New Programs Championing Female Voices on YouTube: “The first is a new, year-long partnership with the United Nations that appoints top YouTube female creators as the very first Change Ambassadors for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Action campaign. The second is a global production program across the YouTube Spaces that puts women both in front of and behind the camera.”
WhatsApp Enables File Sharing on Mobile: “WhatsApp has made it possible for the first time for users to share documents as part of a new update for iOS and Android.”
Some Interesting Studies to Note:
2016 NICE-BCG CX Survey: According to a new study by NICE and BCG, consumers are frustrated with the long wait times (33%), limited functionality (32%), and inability to address complex tasks (30%), among other things, when using social media to resolve customer service issues. The survey results show that speaking with a live rep over the phone (82%) or using an interactive voice response system (60%) is widely preferred by consumers than social media (28%) or online forums (29%) when it comes to resolving customer care issues.
The Reach, Engagement, and ROI of Content Marketing vs. Native Advertising: Using survey responses from over 30 different content marketing agencies and cost data from nearly 600 digital publishers, Fractl and Moz examined the effectiveness of content marketing versus native advertising. The research findings show that content marketing has a better overall return on investment. However, marketers tend to approach each tactic with different goals, metrics, and expectations and the study examines each of these factors in depth.
Facebook Engagement Insights: BuzzSumo analyzed over 1 billion posts published in January 2016 from 3 million Facebook brand pages. The key findings show the best day and time to post on Facebook and also determined which types of posts, descriptions, and links are most likely to garner the highest engagement.
Emoji Marketing Is Growing Fast: Socialbakers examined the top 500 brands on Facebook and Twitter and compared the use of emojis in their social media posts in Q4 2014 versus Q4 2015. In Q4 2014, 28% of Facebook's top brand pages used emojis in their posts. By Q4 2015, this figure jumped to 40%. Similarly, 45% of Twitter's top profiles tweeted out emojis in Q4 last year, compared to 59% in Q4 2015.
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What do you think of Facebook Live Video? Will you check out LinkedIn's new targeting feature? Please share your comments below.
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