No “Out of Office” messages for Facebook or Snapchat this summer. They’ve been busy! Here are all the platform changes, feature updates, launches and policy announcements that you may have missed this month.
- Facebook rolls out Cover Videos for Pages, an upgrade from the static image Cover Photos we’ve had for years. Facebook recommends your cover videos should be between 20 and 90 seconds.
- Facebook tweaks its algorithm to punish users that post more than 50 times per day, after coming to the conclusion that these uber-posters are often sharing posts that are spam or false news. This applies to users (profiles) only, not Pages.
- Snapchat Paperclip breaks the social media “fourth wall,” allowing users to open links (although via an internal Snapchat browser).
- Instagram expands functionalities in Stories, offering the option of replying to friends with videos and photos from within a Story.
- Facebook launches “Find Wi-Fi,” a service that searches for wifi signals to allow mobile users access to connections without relying on a 3G or telecom network. This is part of Facebook’s effort to expand into lower income countries.
- Facebook promises more transparency features for advertisers, including a new metric that tracks ad conversions to site traffic, and a metric that shows if a user who engages with an ad had previous interactions with the Page.
- Snapchat’s new feature Backdrops are a step forward in augmented reality, letting you cut out an object from a Snap and put in a colorful or dynamic pattern or scene behind it.
- Snapchat Voice Filters are another new feature for the platform, letting you remix the sound of voices in Snaps. Tapping a speaker icon at the bottom of the Snap screen allows you to select from a range of voices.
- Facebook is rumored to be developing a Houseparty app clone named Bonfire, which will be a group video chat service.
- Facebook Messenger starts testing ads within its home tab.
- Instagram rolls out new commenting filters, allowing moderators to block offensive comments and add a spam filter in nine languages.
- LinkedIn now supports native videos on its mobile app, which will play automatically with the sound-off. The maximum time for these (horizontal or vertical) videos is 10 minutes. Unlike other social platforms, LinkedIn is also giving publishers information about their viewers, such as the companies where top viewers work and their job titles.
- Snapchat releases Snap Publisher, an ad-creation tool that converts horizontal videos and sites into vertical ads.
- Snapchat continues its feature-palooza: Multi-Snap allows users to record up to six consecutive 10-second Snaps at once.
- Twitter is shutting down SnappyTV, a video-editing tool that allows TV networks and other publishers to cut and share TV clips on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. In its place, Twitter plans to offer new video-editing software as part of the Twitter Media Studio.
- Nielsen has begun counting viewership on new streaming TV services offered by Hulu and YouTube toward the official ratings for shows.
- Twitter adds links, trends and accounts to its Notifications tab, aiming to be more helpful for users to discover other content that is interesting to them.
- Instagram opens up its API to insights and comment moderation features that were previously available only for the Instagram Business profiles.
- Facebook launches a new tool for publishers using Instant Articles to measure how their articles perform compared to the mobile web articles.
