Social Media - Why You Can’t Take A Holiday

This Monday upon returning from a week off there was a lot of news to share. The below is a list of the biggest announcements and a very good demonstration of why you just can’t take a holiday from social media.

Facebook Algorithm update: Facebook now take into account how long people spend viewing posts in their newsfeed. So make sure posts are engaging and people have a reason to stop and read/view the post.

Facebook author tags: Facebook have introduced author tags to encourage people to follow journalists.

Facebook ad tools updates: Facebook are rolling out updates their ad creation and reporting tools. This should make it little easier to create ads and report on them.

Facebook are testing out new newsfeed controls: Facebook are trailing new options to let people set the friends and pages they’d like to see more content from.

Facebook 2015 awards: Last week Facebook announced the winners of their awards. Have a look at them to get an idea of what works well on Facebook.

Sprout Social / Facebook page tagging: You can now tag Facebook pages when scheduling Facebook posts in Sprout. It works the same way as Twitter, simply put an @ and start typing the page name.

Twitter autoplay: Last week Twitter rolled out autoplay for native videos, gifs and vines. Start thinking about how you can use gifs on Twitter and if you have any videos under 30 seconds they should be uploaded as native Twitter videos.

Twitter pages and collections: Twitter are introducing new product and place pages, essentially they are a page featuring Tweets related to the product/place. These are currently being tested with select partners. In addition to pages there are also collections which are curated Tweets brought together by influencers.

In case you didn’t know Twitter’s CEO has stepped down, this along with the new features suggests Twitter is taking a new direction and we can expect to see more changes as they attempt to increase their user growth.

Google live trends: Google have launched real time search trends so you can see what is trending and dive into the data as it happens.

LinkedIn release new Pulse app: Building on the Pulse platform LinkedIn have released a new app to serve you relevant content, this gives even more reason to use Pulse for clients to establish themselves as influencers.

YouTube launch Newswire: YouTube have launched a new service called Newswire which is a curated feed of eyewitness videos from major events around the world.

And here’s a list of social media acronyms and what they mean.

While the above is certainly not an exhaustive list of all the social media news I could have missed, it should give you a very good idea of just why anyone working with social media can’t afford to take a holiday.

There is an old political idiom “A week is a long time in politics” well a day is a long time in social media and it is very easy to get left behind.