Social Media News: November 2017

If there's one thing that is constant about social media, it's that it is ever changing. Some of your favorite social media platforms rolled out big changes this month. Here's the highlights of what you should know:

-Twitter Expands Character Counts: After testing this feature earlier this year, Twitter officially expanded character counts for tweets to 280. This was met with mixed reviews, but I personally am loving it! Sometimes it's just too darn hard to fit what you want to say into 140 characters.

-Facebook Introduces Facebook Local: This has the potential to be really cool for local businesses if it catches on! It's basically an expanded way to see everything that's happening around you. You can not only view your own event invitations, but see what your friends are going to and browse types of events by categories. You can also view restaurants and other businesses in your area, which makes it seem like Facebook has set its sights on edging out Yelp. If you're a business that does a lot of events or serves people at your location, I would definitely recommend making sure your profile is up-to-date, completely filled out, and that you're getting those customer reviews. And of course, that you're creating events on Facebook!

-Twitter Expands Display Names: Along with expanding character counts for tweets, Twitter has also updated to allow you to have up to 50 characters (including emojis!) in your display name.

-Pinterest Introduces New Visual Search Tools: For non product-based businesses, I have seen Pinterest consistently be a good traffic referral source. But for a product-based business, Pinterest is a fantastic platform to get your products onto! Now with even more visual search tools available for the consumer, you will want to make sure you have your products on there to take advantage of the sales potential of the platform.

-Instagram Introduces Shoppable Posts: When I first spotted this while browsing Instagram, my first thought was "Game Changer". With the new shoppable posts, a user can click on a picture and links will pop up to the specific products you've tagged. From there they can click one of the links to be redirected to your website to purchase. And it's not just one item you can tag in a photo, you can tag multiple items! This is currently in a test program, but stay tuned to see how this rolls out. I can't imagine this feature will be shelved though, it's just too powerful!

What do you think of these changes? Which one are you most excited to try out? Let me know in the comments below!

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