Facebook Takes on Yelp With New Service: This Week in Social Media

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 Tests New Professional Services Feature: Facebook is “in the early stages of testing a way for people to easily find more Pages for the services they’re interested in.” Test the feature here.

Facebook Rolls Out Improved Video Publishing Tools: Facebook introduced “two new tools for embedding public videos and posts from Facebook: a new embedded video player API and support for the oEmbed standard.” Example here.

Facebook Introduces Live for Verified Pages: Facebook is “beginning to roll out the ability for verified Pages to share live video using Facebook for iOS.”

LinkedIn Offers New Insights on Job Postings: LinkedIn helps job-seekers with “new insights on LinkedIn job postings” such as your connections at the company, its history of hiring people like you and current employees with similar roles as the posted job.

Facebook Launches Instant Articles to Facebook for Android: “Everyone who uses the Facebook for Android app can now read thousands of Instant Articles every day in News Feed from publishers worldwide.”

Pinterest Narrows Support to Retail and Consumer Goods Ad Buyers: Pinterest is “focusing more on attracting dollars from retailers and consumer packaged-goods companies while de-emphasizing other marketing categories.”

Our Take on Top News This Week

In this blab from December 18, 2015, Michael Stelzner and guests discuss the top news in social media. Topics include Facebook Live and new features debuted this week (2:11), enhanced tools for embedding Facebook video (16:20), the new Professional Services feature being tested by Facebook (29:09) and changes to Pinterest's advertising focus (42:29). Subscribe to future shows here.

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The Social Media Marketing Tools Show

In this episode, tech and tools expert Steve Dotto explores How to Track Trending Topics and Influencers with BuzzSumo.

Simplify your social and build your business in just 10 minutes a week by subscribing to future shows here.

Other cool social media tools worth checking out

SocialRank for Teams: This new SocialRank feature allows you to manage your Twitter and Instagram audience as a team with unique email login and permissions for each member of your team.

Wipster: This new video review and approval platform allows producers, content creators and media teams to collaborate simply, quickly and elegantly to produce video content.

More News to Note

Facebook Introduces Transportation on Messenger: Facebook and Uber have partnered to test a new Messenger feature that allows users to “request a ride from a car service without ever needing to download an extra app or leave a conversation.”

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Facebook Messenger Rolls Out Photo Magic and New Ways to Customize Conversations: “Messenger is rolling out some new features to make it easy for you to surprise and delight those you love.”

Facebook Amends Real Name Policy: Facebook is testing new tools that “reduce the number of people who are asked to verify their name on Facebook when they are already using the name people know them by [and] make it easier for people to confirm their name if necessary.”

Pinterest Adds New Price Tracking Tool on Buyable Pins: Pinterest introduced “a new tool that helps Pinterest users monitor price drops on products they’ve pinned.”

Apple Closes Topsy: “Topsy, the Twitter and general social media analytics service quietly bought by Apple for more than $200 million two years ago, closed its doors today.”

We've searched our last tweet.

— Topsy (@Topsy) December 16, 2015

Upcoming Social Media News Worth Following

Facebook Discontinues Photo Syncing:  Starting January 10, 2016, Facebook will “discontinue support for photo syncing, and is instead asking users to download the Moments app through a pop-up notification that appears at the top of the News Feed.”

YouTube Disables Webcam Feature: Google will disable the ability to record a video from your computer webcam and upload it directly to YouTube on January 16, 2016, because this feature “is rarely used and is built on technology that is no longer supported.”

Some Interesting Studies

Cross-Channel Planning: Making Search Work Harder: Facebook Marketing Science conducted a meta-analysis of 23 conversion lift studies based on U.S. campaigns that ran from July through September 2015. The studies represented a wide variety of verticals including ecommerce, retail, automotive, travel, finance, education, technology and telecommunications. The findings report that nearly one-quarter of the campaign studies showed statistically significant gains in search referral as a direct result of Facebook paid media exposure traffic. The average lift in search traffic was 6.3% for mobile and 0.9% for desktop.

Gartner 2015-2016 Chief Marketing Officer Spend Survey: Gartner surveyed more than 330 U.S. and UK organizations on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents say that social media marketing (65%) and digital commerce (64%) are leading technology investment priorities for them. Sixty-one percent of marketers also see marketing analytics as an investment priority, followed by technology for improving customer experience (56%) and advertising operations (54%).

Pinterest Interaction Study Q3 2015: A new report from Quintly analyzed 3Q 2015 data from 220 Pinterest brand accounts to determine the most repinned content types. Thirty-five percent of all repins examined for this study were recipes, yet recipes only make up 9% of total pins. The second most popular repinned content is products (19%), followed by articles (16%). The report shows recipes receive 62 repins on average in 3Q 2015, compared with only 33 repins on average for products and 29 for articles within the same period.

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What do you think of Facebook's new local business search and reviews? Have you tried searching for a local business? Please share your comments below.