Social Media News: August 2018

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 are the highlights of what you should know:

Facebook Adds New Tools for Groups: Social Media Examiner has a nice breakdown of all the new tools Facebook rolled out for groups. If you're a group admin, you will definitely want to check this out!

Facebook Prevents 3rd Party Apps From Scheduling Posts to Facebook Profiles: Perhaps in an effort to increasingly get people to promote their businesses on their Facebook business pages instead of on their personal profiles, at the beginning of August Facebook stopped allowing 3rd party apps like Hootsuite, Buffer, Wordpress, and more to post to a user's Facebook personal profile. While some people will be happy that businesses are now being forced to stick to posting on their business pages, this is disappointing if you have something like a personal blog on Wordpress and were making use of the auto-post feature. This also feels like yet another way Facebook is forcing businesses to pay for ads on the platform...  

LinkedIn to Relaunch Groups: Perhaps because of the popularity they've seen Facebook groups enjoying, LinkedIn has decided to relaunch their group product in an effort to get people more interested in using and interacting with groups. Read more about what they're changing here.

Facebook Will Now Allow Advertisers to Place Ads into Stories: I'll admit, when I read this I was surprised to learn this wasn't already a thing. Instagram stories have had ads for awhile now so this seemed like a foregone conclusion. 

Snapchat Launches New Speech Recognition Lenses: Personally, I haven't used Snapchat in awhile. However I like to keep up on what their new innovations are...because you know it's going to bleed over onto other platforms (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) down the road. Their latest addition is speech recognition lenses. Right now the trigger words are: “hi,” “love,” “yes,” “no,” and “wow”.

Facebook Redesigns Business Pages: Lots of Facebook news this month! In August, Facebook also made changes to business pages, updating the layout on desktop and mobile, changing reviews to recommendations, and more. Check out Facebook's press release here. 

Facebook Buys Vidpresso: I'm normally not that interested in what company buys what, but I was intrigued when I saw that Facebook had purchased Vidpresso. I'm not familiar with Vidpresso, but after hearing what Vidpresso does it seems obvious what Facebook's next play is: to make video on the platform more interactive. Click here to read more about Vidpresso and what this deal entails. 

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