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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?
Twitter Recaps Tweets You Might Have Missed: Twitter introduced a new feature to your home feed—a recap of top tweets you might have missed from accounts you follow.
Facebook News Feed Flags Hoaxes: This “update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.”
Facebook Tests Voice-to-Text Messages in Messenger: Facebook is “starting to roll out a small test that helps people read the voice clips they receive instead of having to play them out loud.”
Tumblr Announces Creatrs Network: A “new initiative to empower emerging creatives.”
WhatsApp Arrives to Your Web Browser: Their “web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone.”
Other News Worth Noting:
Twitter Launches Digits Login for Web: “It’s a new way for you to enable phone-based login for your mobile apps’ websites.”
Cool Social Media Tools Worth Checking Out
QualityTime: This new app allows you to monitor and set limits on your social media usage on your mobile device.
Workestra: A free service that brings notifications from all of your favorite apps and services into one place.
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Weekly Tip: How to Add Featured Videos and Playlists to Facebook
Some Interesting Studies to Note
Digital, Social and Mobile in 2015: We Are Social’s new study reported a 20% increase in Internet users around the world since this same time last year. This represents half a billion new users in the last 12 months. Mobile social usage has also grown 23% in this same period, with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Viber achieving the top social media rankings in some of the world’s biggest economies.
Instagram Engagement Per Post Up 11% in Q4 2014: The latest study from Simply Measured monitored the Instagram usage of the Interbrand top 100 brands in the world and found 11% more engagement per post in Q4 2014 than in Q3 2014. The study also reports that 86% of top brands now have Instagram accounts, up from 71% last year.
Transforming Business Through Social Tools: A recent survey from McKinsey & Company confirms that the overall adoption of social technologies is maturing, but companies can do more to measure and capture social media’s benefits to their overall organization, particularly in unexpected areas such as R&D and demand planning. Seventy-two percent of the executives surveyed expect their organizations’ investments in social tools will increase over the next three years, up from 58% who said the same last year.
2015 Small Business Sales & Marketing Survey: Infusionsoft’s survey reveals that 62% of small businesses surveyed consider word-of-mouth and customer referrals to be their most effective marketing strategy. Other effective strategies include email (34%), networking (25%), social media (23%), SEM (14%) and content marketing (13%).
YouTube Tops US Buzz Rankings for 2014: According to data from YouGov’s recent study, YouTube (26.3%) was a close second place to Amazon (29.7%) when it comes to having a positive public perception among consumers. Despite being most improved year-over-year in the social media category, Facebook (10.9%) was outranked by Pinterest (13.6%). Both platforms fell far behind YouTube and Google (22.6%).
Content Marketing in the UK 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: A December survey from the Content Marketing Institute and the Direct Marketing Association UK found 96% of UK marketers surveyed prefer to use LinkedIn for content marketing over Twitter (89%) and Facebook (69%). The study also showed a shift in marketers’ goals and priorities toward engagement, leads and sales over brand awareness.
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