It’s difficult to stay up to speed when the social media landscape is constantly shifting and shaping – we get it! That’s why we provide our partners with a This Week in Social Media (TWISM) e-newsletter. In our weekly newsletters, we share with our client partners the biggest news and insights from the social media world each week. Below, we’ve compiled eight of the best social media updates from our TWISM newsletters in our What’s New in Social Media: March 2019 Edition.
- Instagram’s Working on a New Way for Brands to Expand Influencer Campaigns: Instagram has announced that it’s working on a new ad format that will better enable brands and influencers to partner in a more financially beneficial and transparent way. Branded content ads will let brands sponsor posts created by publishers and then promote them as they would other ad efforts.
- Zuckerberg Outlines New Privacy Focus and Tools for Facebook’s Family of Apps: Is the future of Facebook privacy? That would appear to be the case going by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest blog post in which he outlines his plans to add in more privacy-aligned features, better connecting the trends of groups and messaging into the broader Facebook experience.
- Pinterest Adds a Series of New Updates to Make the App More of a Shopping Destination: Retailers can now add their entire catalog to Pinterest to create Product Pins as well as make shopping ads available through the self-serve ads manager tool. Users will start to see personalized items based on what they’re saving, shopping results at the top of a search page and a new section for retailers showcasing even more items from brands. In other words, Pinterest is becoming even more of a shopping destination.
- Bid Farewell to Facebook’s Relevance Score: Starting April 30, the social network is replacing the relevance score with three new diagnostics metrics:
- Quality ranking: How the ad’s perceived quality is compared with ads competing for the same audience.
- Engagement rate ranking: How the ad’s expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience.
- Conversion rate ranking: How the ad’s expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimization goal and competed for the same audience.
- Twitter Has Launched its New Beta Testing App with the First Round of Users: After calling for applicants to try out its beta testing app back in January, Twitter has now released its new ‘Twttr’ test app, which includes a completely new layout for tweet replies – and has immediately sparked mixed responses from users.
- Twitter Launches New Camera Tools to Increase Visual Focus: With pretty much every other social platform now jumping aboard the Stories train, it was really only a matter of time before Twitter took a step in that direction. And while it hasn’t gone ‘full Stories’, Twitter is rolling out a new camera tool which will enable users to capture Stories-like images, complete with overlays and searchable elements, which will open the door for more visual content options on the platform.
- Facebook’s Removing Ad Targeting Options in Certain Categories to Avoid Discrimination: Facebook announced that it will step up its efforts to limit discriminatory ad targeting by removing a range of specific ad targeting options to better ensure its systems are not used to limit audiences in an unfair manner. The changes have come about as a result of action taken against Facebook by National Fair Housing Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Communication Workers of America.
- Instagram Adds In-App Checkout As Part of Its Big Push into Shopping: With checkout, you can store your payment information with Instagram to make purchases more quickly. In return, Instagram is charging retailers a selling fee. More than 20 brands will use checkout to start. Items eligible for in-app checkout now have a big blue “Checkout on Instagram” button below them.
Stay tuned for next month’s updates!
