What’s Happening in Social Media

From algorithms to privacy – and everything in between – the social media landscape is continuously changing. And keeping up with the latest can be tough. To help ease the burden, we’ve created a monthly recap of the most significant social media updates: This Month in Social Media.

To kick things off, here are the top 5 stories in social media from August 2019.

  • Facebook’s New Off-Site Activity Tool Likely To Impact Marketers The tool shows users a summary of information other apps & websites have sent to Facebook. Users can clear said info and can also prevent any future data from being used for ad targeting. The new tool will be rolled out gradually over the coming months, starting with Ireland, South Korea, and Spain.
  • Facebook Publishes New Report on the Benefits of Combining Facebook and Outdoor Advertising The report found that 38% of adults in the US say they’ve visited a Facebook Page or posted on Facebook after seeing an OOH ad, and 25% have posted to Instagram. 
  • Twitter Debuts 6-Second Video Bidding Unit to Encourage More Short-Form Ads The new ad-bidding unit lets advertisers run video ads at 16 second or less, and only charges them after the video is watched for six seconds with 50% of pixels in view. Twitter hopes the new bid type encourages advertisers to create more short-form video ads.
  • Instagram’s Latest Assault on Snapchat is a Messaging App Called Threads The app, which is designed for sharing with your “close friends” list on Instagram, is now being tested internally at Facebook. Threads could represent another effort by Facebook to reduce rival Snapchat’s popularity. This comes after reports earlier this year said that the Snapchat user spends more time inside the app than the average Instagram user does.
  • Facebook is Removing its Group Chats Feature to Limit Spammers When launched, group chats were able to host up to 250 group members who were not necessarily connected as friends, but were connected through a group. Any member of any group in these chats has the capacity to spam these threads with their messaging, which would send a prompt to both Facebook and Messenger for each chat member. This change will not impact group chats in Messenger with your friends – only chats in your Facebook Group. 

Be sure to check back later this month for September’s edition of This Month in Social Media.