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The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.

Now using the Twitter iPhone or Android app, users can tag up to 10 people in an image in a tweet. An important part of this feature is that tagging people doesn’t affect your character count — tweeters will still have 140 characters to play around with.

Users can now share up to four photos in a single tweet that automatically arrange themselves in a grid. Users can just tap to get a preview and can then  slide through to the full images.

Starting today, users will be able to add music stickers to their Facebook Stories. You can search for songs, pick out the part you want to share, and add the sticker with the artist and song name. It works exactly the same way as it does on Instagram Stories, which introduced the feature in June.

Facebook is also expanding Lip Sync Live, its TikTok competitor (RIP Musical.ly), to Pages, so creators and artists can “connect with their fans.” It’ll most likely be useful for artists in promoting their singles, as Jess Glynne recently did. Lip Sync Live is also adding onscreen lyrics, creating a more karaoke-like experience.

Three main factors determine what you see in your Instagram feed:Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you, determined by past behavior on similar content and potentially machine vision analyzing the actual content of the post.Recency: How recently the post was shared, with prioritization for timely posts over weeks-old ones.Relationship: How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as by commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.

eyond those core factors, three additional signals that influence rankings are:Frequency: How often you open Instagram, as it will try to show you the best posts since your last visit.Following: If you follow a lot of people, Instagram will be picking from a wider breadth of authors so you might see less of any specific person.Usage: How long you spend on Instagram determines if you’re just seeing the best posts during short sessions, or it’s digging deeper into its catalog if you spend more total time browsing.

Instagram is not at this time considering an option to see the old reverse chronological feed because it doesn’t want to add more complexity (users might forget what feed they’re set to), but it is listening to users who dislike the algorithm.Instagram does not hide posts in the feed, and you’ll see everything posted by everyone you follow if you keep scrolling.Feed ranking does not favor the photo or video format universally, but people’s feeds are tuned based on what kind of content they engage with, so if you never stop to watch videos you might see fewer of them.Instagram’s feed doesn’t favor users who use Stories, Live, or other special features of the app.Instagram doesn’t downrank users for posting too frequently or for other specific behaviors, but it might swap in other content in between someone’s if they rapid-fire separate posts.Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.Shadowbanning is not a real thing, and Instagram says it doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other actions.

updates involve changes to live video broadcasting, Facebook’s Watch Party and Creator Studio, and they include enhancements to tools, expanded feature sets and improved analytics, among other things.

The highlights include better ways to prep for and simulcast live broadcasts, ways to take better advantage of Watch Party events, new metrics to track video performance and a much-anticipated option to schedule Instagram/IGTV content for up to six months in advance.

Google said it has redesigned its privacy and security dashboard "from the ground up" to better integrate it into other privacy controls and to make it more touchscreen-friendly.

More than 150 million people have used the My Activity feature to track down old links and videos, and "tens of millions" have used the Privacy Checkup tool to change their preferences. The "Takeout" feature lets your export your data out of Google, and has been used to export one exabyte of data since its creation in 2011. 

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

Before now brands and publishers have participated in Groups through the personal accounts of people in their companies.

In the past year, as Facebook has tried to fix the platform, it prioritized Groups as a constructive activity on the social network, connecting people on the service in positive ways. Facebook shows more messages from Groups in the News Feed, too, so they have a better chance at reaching people.

David: AMP has become a major component of Google’s push to become the presentation layer of the internet (h/t Cindy Krum, Mobile Moxie) and complements the moves they’ve made with featured snippets and Knowledge Panels.

I’ve always seen Knowledge Panels partly as a consumer-focused solution to the experience of the average SMB website and average enterprise store locator — both are overwhelmingly crappy.  

in accepting either AMP or Instant Articles, publishers relinquish their most critical asset, subscribers, to the duopoly.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”