Tag Archives: Social Media Today

Is Facebook really losing touch with the youth? Over the past few years, several reports have suggested that Facebook is losing ground to Instagram, Snapchat, and more recently TikTok, as the place where younger audiences are spending their time, but two new studies have shown that The Social Network still holds significant sway, and still keeps Millennials and Gen Zers coming back to the platform daily. The first report comes from Ofcom in the UK, which recently surveyed more than 2,300 British parents and children aged 5-15 years in regards to their online activity, with a focus on social media use. Their results showed that 69% of older teens (12-15 years) […]

Looking to make better use of Twitter for your business in 2020? Twitter’s popularity has seemingly taken a hit in recent times, with user growth slowing, but in contrast to this, Twitter’s active engagement has been on the rise, and it remains a significantly influential platform for sparking trends and driving conversations. There are also plenty of opportunities for brand discovery and engagement. These days, people expect brands to have a Twitter presence, and they often expect to be able to use those brand handles for customer queries – where they can get answers faster than most other means. It may not be the central focus of your digital marketing […]

After working on its manipulated media policy over the last few months, Twitter has this week unveiled its official rule against the posting of deceptive manipulated content, while it’s also launching a new tag for detected edited material. As per Twitter, it’s new, official rule on manipulated media usage is: “You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm. In addition, we may label Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide context.” Twitter showcased its new label in a separate announcement tweet: We know that some Tweets include manipulated photos or videos that can cause people […]

A quick one to note: PSA: You can now reply to your friends’ stories using @GIPHY GIFs! Update your app to try it. — Instagram (@instagram) February 4, 2020 It’s a minor update, in relative terms, but now you can reply to a friend’s story with your favorite GIPHY GIFs. To apply a GIF, you can run a search by keyword in the reply text box – social media expert Matt Navarra posted this video of the process in action (via user @thebkh): So that’s a thing – you now have yet another way to engage with Stories in a way that won’t become tiresome or overbearing, especially when the […]

Back in 2018, reports suggested that Snapchat could end up running out of money, as its growth rates slowed, and its infrastructure costs continued to rise. That’s because under Snap’s deals with Google and Amazon Web Services, Snap needs to pre-contract its cloud-computing costs based on growth estimates. And because fewer new users were signing up, Snap would eventually end up paying for storage it didn’t need. Luckily, Snap was able to re-negotiate its cloud-computing costs last year – but even so, with slowing growth rates, costs continue to mount. Add to that a $100 million legal settlement with shareholders, and Snap’s outgoings have again become a concern, which is […]

If nothing else, TikTok is certainly sparking a lot of debate, and angst, within social media marketing circles. The short-form video app, which saw a huge rise in 2019, is now looking to solidify its offerings, and maximize its ad potential – though it still seems to have a way to go before it establishes itself as a mainstay in the social media platform race. That’s somewhat reflected in the latest news about the app – first off, TikTok is reportedly looking to update its profile design, switching to a more Instagram-style format. The new layout was shared by New York Times journalist Taylor Lorenz on Twitter, and clearly, there […]

Facebook has this week launched a new ‘one-time notification’ API for businesses on Messenger, which will enable brands to get in back contact with potential customers with updates relevant to their interests. As explained by Facebook: “In December, we announced our plans to introduce [a new] API to support valuable use cases like price drop alerts, back in stock alerts, and other important follow-ups that people have requested notifications for. The way the API works is simple: Businesses can send a message to the user asking if they want to be notified on a topic. If the user asks to be notified, the business receives a token and can use this token […]

Is Facebook’s Messenger Kids app a good or bad thing for society more broadly? While many still hold reservations about the company’s child-friendly variation, which is designed for users under the age of 13, given the significant role that social media now plays in the modern interactive process, it does make some sense that we should look to educate our kids early in order to ensure that they’re aware of how social platforms work, how their personal data is used, and the dangers of online interactions. But there obviously needs to be strict controls over such – which is why this week, Facebook is rolling out a new series of updates […]

It still has a tough road ahead, and initial hype is not a definitive marker for future success. But according to these stats from app analytics provider Sensor Tower, Byte, the second-coming of Vine, is off to a pretty good start. As you can see here, Byte reached 1.3 million downloads in its first week, surpassing Vine’s performance in the same time period after launch. And while the comparison is not exactly fair – Byte has the advantage of building off of Vine’s popularity, and there are more social media and app users now than there were back in 2013 – it’s still a pretty good performance measure for the […]