Welcome to this week’s episode of Social Chatter where we cover the latest social media news from this past week.
Each episode of Social Chatter is available as a blog post or video.
Let’s see what’s cooking in social media this week with your host, Christian Karasiewicz and special guest, Nick Rishwain!
Watch This Week’s Social Media Updates
LinkedIn Now Supports Hashtags (Sort of)
This week, LinkedIn announced a new content search feature.
With this new search feature, “members can now search for any topic and find relevant articles published on LinkedIn, either by third-parties, or shared by other members in their feed.”
When using the LinkedIn mobile app, if you include a hashtag in your post, “it will be automatically available publicly, or if you want it to be only visible to your connections you can easily change your sharing settings.”
Here is what LinkedIn hashtags look like in the app.
You can also search for hashtags as well to see all public posts that use a specific hashtag.
To read more about LinkedIn hashtag support, go here.
Hopefully this will expand so that desktop users can also take advantage of hashtags on LinkedIn.
Snapchat Ends Local Stories, Favors Live Events
In Snapchat news, they are ending local stories.
Local stories were snaps from a certain location that could only be viewed by people around that area.
They were a way to encourage people to open Snapchat to see if there was any new content near them.
While they are abandoning local stories, they are making a shift towards live events.
As we know it, live video is huge across every major social media channel. You have Facebook Live, Periscope and now presumably, Snapchat.
Over the next few months, it should be interesting watching as live video begins to take on more of a mainstream approach.
If you’re a business, one thing you can do to get ahead is to begin experimenting with each of the live video platforms to see which one your audience is using.
I would also recommend investing in live video tools so that you are comfortable with filming your own videos. Remember, each of the tools can work across each of the major social media channels and help make your videos look and sound the best for your audience.
New Twitter Direct Message Features
This week, Twitter rolled out new features for direct messages.
When using the Twitter mobile app, you can get a read receipt to show you when someone has read your direct message.
You can also see a typing indicator to show you when someone is responding to your direct message.
Lastly, when a website link is shared, you will see a web link preview.
Here is a short video on how these new features work when sending Twitter direct messages.
As a business owner, if you use direct messages to communicate with clients, you can now see when your messages are being read and take action immediately, knowing that someone is on the other end instead of waiting around, wondering if they read your message or not.
Facebook Forcing Advertisers to Speed Up Their Sites
One last piece of social media news this week is about Facebook.
As a way to encourage users to speed up their website, Facebook is looking to “introduce new technology that will “pre-fetch” mobile web links provided by advertisers and if the resulting website takes too long to load or isn’t mobile-optimized, may prevent ads from showing.”
If Facebook Ads are an important way you generate leads for your business, it is time you look into optimizing your website.
Otherwise, you might not be able to have your ads show up to customers if the links you share take too long to load.
A good way to fix this issue is to Facebook Instant Articles, a topic I spoke about in early 2016.
If you need help setting up instant articles, you can sign-up here.
While this seems like a bold move to penalize sites that have slow load times, it makes sense if they want to make all of the content that is shared on Facebook accessible to everyone, regardless of where they are throughout the world or what their Internet connection speed is.
Tools
In addition to sharing the latest in social media news from this past week, we also highlighted some great tools and apps to check out.
New Hootsuite Plans
The first tool we wanted to share this week is Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard.
It is great for managing hashtags on Twitter, keeping up with Facebook Groups that you manage and it can even be used to schedule Instagram posts.
Previously, they charged just $8.99 per month to do all of that and more, but you only had free, pro and enterprise options.
For most users, they fell in-between the plans that were offered.
This week, they announced new plans that should make it easier to pick the one that fits your business.
2016 Hootsuite plans
- Free
- Professional
- Team
- Business
- Enterprise
Here is a snapshot of what the new Hootsuite plans look like.
This is great news if you manage a lot of social media channels. You have options, lots of them!
If you’re still logging in and out of social media accounts that you manage, it’s time to look at using a complete social media dashboard.
Not only can Hootsuite help save you time, but you won’t have to share login credentials and passwords anymore either.
If you would like to try out the new Hootsuite plans, the professional and team plans include a 30-day trial to get you started.
Try HootsuiteMedia Sonar
The next tool we wanted to share with you is called Media Sonar.
Media Sonar is “a tool for enhanced capabilities for monitoring location-based social conversations.”
They provide the ability to analyze and capture relevant data for efficient and actionable intelligence.
Typically, if you want to monitor a lot of social media conversations, it can be difficult to get the data. Most of the time, you can get access to part of the data or you have to go through every Facebook post manually.
With Twitter, you can follow along using a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite; however, you can’t catch everything to help you make real-time decisions.
With Media Sonar, you can get a deeper understanding of what is going on around you on social media to make quick decisions.
Right now, this tool is extremely useful for law enforcement or Lawyers who need to make decisions using the data they gather from social media, while being able to back up their decision.
Try Media SonarStrobe for Facebook Messenger
The last tool we wanted to share this week is a free app from Facebook called Strobe for Messenger.
Strobe for Messenger (iOS) is an app specially for Facebook Messenger that you can use to create an animated GIF that can be shared on Messenger.
While you would primarily use this app with friends, it could be very useful if you’re a Facebook Page and want to make conversations more exciting with customers.
Overall, this is just one of many Facebook Messenger tips and tricks you can use to get more out of Messenger.
Download Strobe for MessengerWrap-up
That’s it for this week’s episode of Social Chatter.
Be sure to tune-in to our next episode on Social Chatter to find out what’s new in social media!
If you have any questions about anything mentioned this week, share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below.
