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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?
Instagram Adds Post Notifications: Instagram introduced a new feature that allows you to receive push notifications “when your favorite accounts post a photo or video.”
Facebook Launches Web Version of Messenger: Facebook introduced “a dedicated desktop experience with the launch of Messenger.com.”
Twitter Introduces Tailored Trends on Mobile: Twitter has made “some updates to the trends experience on mobile to make them more informative and easier to find.”
Twitter Launches Retweet with Comment Feature: “‘Retweet with Comment' allows users to embed a tweet in their own tweets, which lets them get around Twitter's 140-character limit when they write their own commentary.”
Instagram Adds Two New Creative Tools—Color and Fade: “Use the Color tool to tint the highlights or shadows in your photo… The Fade tool allows you to bring a quiet tone to your photos by softening colors.”
Vine Update for Windows Phones: The latest version of Vine for the Windows phone “introduces a bunch of features” like new camera tools, messages and feed activity.
Other social media news worth following:
YouTube Confirms Plans for an Ads-Free, Subscription-Based Service: In an email to its partners, YouTube details plans to “offer consumers the choice to pay for an ‘ads-free' version of YouTube for a monthly fee.”
LinkedIn Acquires Online Education Platform lynda.com: LinkedIn believes this partnership will “make it even easier for professionals around the world to accelerate their careers and realize their potential through the learning and development of new skills.”
Here are a couple of cool social media tools worth checking out:
Spider: A powerful, real-time social listening tool for Twitter.
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Dashlane Inbox Scan: A new tool “which will automatically search your email inbox for vulnerable information, including passwords you've shared.”
Weekly Video Tip:
How to Customize the Web Address for Your Facebook Group Page Â
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Some interesting studies to note:
The 2014 Social Commerce Breakdown: Ecommerce marketing platform AddShoppers analyzed data from over 10,000 merchants, 1.69 billion page views and 304 million unique shoppers for 2014. Based on the activity tracked, AddShoppers found that Facebook accounts for the bulk of all social shares at 73.68%. Ecommerce site content shared by shoppers worldwide via Facebook received an average of 1.10 clicks in 2014, making it the top traffic driver among all social sources as well. StumbleUpon (0.98), Twitter (0.97) and Wanelo (0.94) followed, but no other site broke 0.90 clicks.
The State of Video Ads: Mixpo surveyed 125 U.S. agency, brand and publisher executives running social ad campaigns on which social video advertising metrics they tracked most. The findings show that advertisers are more interested in tracking engagement with interactive elements (47%) and shares (43%) than views (34%) and CTR (30%). The survey also found that while more advertisers ran video ad campaigns on YouTube (77.8%) than on Facebook (63%) last year, this year more plan to run a campaign on Facebook (87%) than on YouTube (81.5%).
Social Login Trends for Q1 2015: Janrain's latest report, Social Login Trends Across the Web: Q1 2015, reveals that Facebook dominates social login trends, capturing a 45% share of all social logins. After leading the B2B vertical with a 35% share of social logins in Q4 2014, LinkedIn logins decreased by 10% in Q1 2015. Google+ also saw a decrease from last quarter, with a total share of 37%.
How Often Companies Should Blog: HubSpot pulled blogging data from over 13,500 customers to study how number of blog posts published per month and in total affect traffic and leads. As expected, both B2C and B2B companies that published more frequently (16+ blog posts per month) got almost 3.5 times more web traffic than companies that only published 0 – 4 per month. When the data was segmented by company size, it shows that companies of all sizes had the most significant jump in traffic and return on leads when they published more than 11 blog posts per month.
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