There’s so much change in the social media and digital marketing sphere everyday. It’s similar to the ebbs and flows of our stock market. Share prices go up, share prices go down. New features get launched, more regulations are put into place. Like the stock market, changes in the digital industry are telling of current cultural and societal shifts. As social media users become more aware of their rights to privacy, social media platforms roll out stricter policies. There is almost always a pattern of cause and effect present, especially in the most recent social media news.
A lot happens in a day, much less a week or a month, so we’re here to provide a quick rundown of the most noteworthy social media news stories swirling around currently.
Facebook is testing a Do Not Disturb feature
Quite simply, this feature that is currently in the testing phase would allow users to easily control when they receive notifications from Facebook. By just clicking the Do Not Disturb button, users would be able to mute notifications until they go in and manually turn the switch off. Notifications would still be updated in the same place, just without the push notifications and alerts.
Twitter suspends more than 70 million accounts
Twitter has been busy. Since May of this year, the social media platform has deleted more than 70 million fake and suspicious accounts. In an effort to keep fake news from spreading, Twitter has more than doubled the rate at which accounts are suspended since October of 2017. Several news sources reported that this move could cause Twitter to see a decline in monthly users, but so far it hasn’t seemed to have a notable impact in active daily users.
Facebook continues to deal with data sharing issues
Facebook revealed that it has been sharing user data with 52 hardware and software companies ( think Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon). The social media giant is claiming that these agreements are far different from what happened with Cambridge Analytica. The company has stated that, “We engaged companies to build integrations for a variety of devices, operating systems and other products where we and our partners wanted to offer people a way to receive Facebook or Facebook experiences. These integrations were built by our partners, for our users, but approved by Facebook.” So, we’ll see how this continues to play out.
Instagram is launching Mute and You’re All Caught Up features
Instagram has been on a roll lately. At the end of May, the app introduced the Mute feature, which they say is the new way to personalize your feed. It allows you to hides posts in your feed from certain accounts that you choose, without having to unfollow. That might be considered relatively old news by now, but it didn’t get much attention at it’s launch, so we thought we would include it.
Image via Instagram
But for Instagram’s July news, the new You’re All Caught Up feature was just launched, notifying users when they have seen every post from the past two days. Users will be able to see posts that they have already scrolled through or posts that are older than two days below the “You’re All Caught Up” message. In a feed that seems endless, we think that this is a perfectly good reminder that it’s okay to stop the scrolling for a bit.
Image via Instagram
We’re just halfway through July and things aren’t slowing down anytime soon. While these are just news headlines to some, this is our job, this is what we do. New features, new regulations and new rules all affect the way your businesses or brand should manage its digital presence. That’s what we’re here for. We stay on the pulse of change in our industry and we will take your company forward with us.
