What’s New in Social Media This Week

A lot has happened in the world of social media this week. Here’s the latest:

Facebook expands Messenger service:

You can now access Facebook Messenger on a separate platform: Messenger.com. The website allows users to view conversations on a full screen, as well as enable notifications to your desktop or laptop. This move sets the stage for Facebook’s Messenger Platform and Business on Messenger initiatives announced in late March. On Messenger.com, users can do all of the same things they did in Messenger, including easily sharing GIFs, photos, videos, audio clips and more. Business for Messenger is still being tested, but will eventually allow businesses and customers to better communicate with one another. For example, a customer could easily check on the status of an order they’ve made online through the new Business for Messenger.

Facebook still remains most used social network among teens:

The Pew Research Center released a studying this week showing that Facebook is used by 71 percent of American teens, as well as the platform that 41 percent of teens say they use the most. This data contradicts what many people may have thought about young people straying away from the social network.

Twitter allows users to say more with new “quote tweet” feature:

Starting this week, Twitter users can now embed a tweet within their retweet, then add up to 116 characters of their own commentary. With the old “quote tweet” function, the quoted tweet would appear in the user’s tweet with quotation marks and quite commonly used up most of the character space. The new function is currently available only for Apple iOS and web users, and is reportedly coming to Android soon.

Twitter experiments with new search result design:

Have you noticed a difference in your Twitter search results? Mashable reported that Twitter is testing a new search design that allows users to filter results by account, popularity, photos, videos and more.

Instagram announces new notification options:

On Tuesday, Instagram announced the Color and Fade tools for editing photos. Users can now choose from eight different colors to add “flair” to their photo. The Fade edit tool softens the colors, letting you achieve more of a “quiet tone,” according to Instagram.

But what we find even more interesting is that users now have the option to receive notifications from accounts they already follow. Simply go to a user’s profile and hit the “…” in the top right corner to enable notifications. 

Tip for brands: Aside from creating and posting colorful photos, tell your followers to turn on notifications to stay updated on your posts! It’s common for a photo to get lost in the usually crowded users’ Instagram homepage. A study by Over-Graph from July 2014 showed Instagram’s lifespan to be about 21 hours, but this new notification feature could make that time longer.

LinkedIn buys lynda.com:

On Thursday, LinkedIn announced that it bought online education site lynda.com for $1.5 billion. Details of how the two sites will be integrated are still unclear, but Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content at LinkedIn, painted a picture of what this partnership could look like: Job seekers will have the ability to see the required skills for a job, then instantly take a course to help obtain those skills. Roslansky said that both lynda.com and LinkedIn’s users value job talent — “acquiring it, training it, or retaining it.”

YouTube announces ad-free subscription service:

This week, YouTube confirmed that they plan to offer a subscription service for ad-free streaming. The video sharing site sent its partners an email this week, informing them of the upcoming move. The cost of a subscription service is still unknown, but according to Bloomberg, it could become available as early as this year.