Instagram Direct: 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?

Instagram Introduces Instagram Direct: Instagram Direct gives you “a new way to send photo and video messages to friends.”

Twitter Enables Photos With Direct Messages: With Twitter’s latest iOS and Android app updates, you can now “send and receive photos via direct messages and swipe back and forth between timelines.”

You can now share and view photos via direct message (DM) on your Twitter mobile phone app.

Twitter Introduces Broad Match for Keyword Targeting for Ads: Twitter advertisers can use the new broad match, sentiment filtering and negative keyword match feature “to support the increasingly sophisticated needs around keyword targeting.”

For example, a coffee shop that wants to reach coffee enthusiasts can run a campaign targeting the broad match keywords “love coffee.”

Facebook Rolls Out Full Availability of New Like and Share Buttons: After testing, Facebook rolled out the new Like button and extended it to the Follow and Like Box plugins as well.

In early tests over the past month after launching the new Like and Share buttons, Facebook has “seen more than a 5% lift in likes and shares across the web.”

Google Is Testing +Post Ads: “+Post ads allow a brand to take a piece of their public Google+ content, like a photo, video or even a hangout, and with a few clicks, turn it into a display ad that can run across the more than 2 million sites in the Google Display Network.” This new feature is currently only offered to a select group of partners.

Your LinkedIn Inbox Gets a New Look: LinkedIn “started to roll out a new, freshly redesigned and easier to navigate inbox experience to help you better manage and build your professional relationships on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn’s new inbox gives you a “cleaner and more streamlined design with larger pictures to make it easier to follow and manage your professional conversations.”

Foursquare No Longer Allows Private Check-ins on iOS7: In the latest iOS7 app update, Foursquare decided to remove the ability to privately check in. Private check-ins are still available on other platforms.

Here’s a cool social media tool worth noting:

Circle: An app to show you local news and events from helpful and positive people who are near you right now.

Use Circle to find out what’s happening near you.

Weekly Marketing Tip

Here we bring you weekly marketing tips from Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner:

How to Use Video on Sales Pages

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author of Platform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author of Launch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

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