31 May April Showers Bring May Social Updates
Controversy around Facebook’s privacy data consumed the news in April but in May, new features and announcements brought less cloudy news and more updates to look out for.
Like: Facebook’s new rating system.
Social Media Today reported that Facebook will be testing a new rating system for brand pages. The new 10-star scoring method will factor in several different sources to come up with the final star rating including direct reviews to the page, message sentiment, recommendations from other people and response times. The idea is to make reviews more accurate and reduce the impact of false reviews.
No word when this is set to roll out but it does indicate that Facebook is focusing more on reviews, likely to compete with Yelp and Google. If you’re managing a brands account, you should consider bettering your response times and look for opportunities to increase your positive reviews.
Instagram to share time spent on the platform but do users REALLY want to know?
Kevin Systrom, CEO at Instagram confirmed they’re working on a tool to share with users the amount of time they spend on Instagram. They’re following the lead of Google, who unveiled a dashboard on the Android phone that tracks usage. This seems to be part of a movement from tech companies realizing the responsibility and impact they have on their users.
It will be interesting to see if users change their behavior after seeing the time spent on their devices. For social media marketers this update only fuels the necessity of creating quality and engaging content.
Facebook is still trying to make stories work.
In another move to try to get people to use Facebook Stories, Facebook is adding three new features including: the ability to add audio to a photo or still color background, an Archive feature to automatically save Stories and the ability to privately save content from the Facebook camera directly to Facebook instead of your phone.
We still don’t know how many people are using Facebook stories and by the looks of my own profile, only two people occasionally post but maybe these three updates will increase adoption.
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