Social Media Training for Marketers

Along with merging the Messenger version and Facebook version of the sharing style originally created by Snapchat, Facebook will also now allow Groups to post inside Stories, and will also gradually bring the tool to Facebook Lite.

Messenger will still have a place to share Stories, but those posts will also be part of Facebook Stories and vice versa, instead of requiring users to post content separately to each. That means Messenger users will also notice that the feature is no longer called Day, but will share the name of Facebook Stories.

Stories that are viewed in one app will be marked as already viewed in the other app. The change, Facebook says, is designed to simplify Stories.

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.”

post with more engagement is likely going to rank higher on your Instagram feed. The types of engagement that the Instagram algorithm considers can include likes, comments, video views, shares (via direct message), saves, story views, and live video views.

An Instagram spokesperson told Business Insider that ranking of Instagram posts will not be a popularity contest. Posts with less engagement but which are more relevant to you can still appear right at the top of your feed.

This implies that content from your “best friends” likely ranks higher on your feed.

The company, part of Google, says it's expanding its Custom Affinity Audience offering so advertisers can target users who search for ski resorts on Google Maps or download a ski resort app, for example, and serve them with ads for winter-related gear. It also provides targeting based on real-life locations that users may have visited.

Meanwhile, YouTube says its new Director Mix software can create hundreds or thousands of different video from a single asset.

Marketers who leverage Director Mix must provide YouTube with all the building blocks of video, including voiceovers, background and copy. YouTube says it will then create "hundreds or thousands of versions to match your audience segments."

Try Mute, a way to quickly mute 100 words from Twitter as chosen by the wisdom of people on the internet — aka crowdsourced.

Twitter has long supported muting words, but Mute makes it easy to really get into the feature. Its Mute.life website lists 100 keywords that have been added and then voted on by visitors to form a ranked list. By installing a bookmark in your (Google Chrome) browser, Mute can be used to automatically add those top 100 words into your muted word list for Twitter.

U.S. truth-in-advertising enforcers have sent letters to supermodel Naomi Campbell, actresses Lindsay Lohan and Vanessa Hudgens and other celebrities asking whether they have paid deals to endorse products on the photo-sharing app Instagram.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc, has seen a sharp increase in recent years in promotions of products and services by famous people, often without disclosures of whether there was an endorsement deal. Celebrities have talked up clothing brands, food, alcohol, spa treatments and a wide array of other items.

In May, the agency released dozens of letters it had sent to companies and stars giving them notice that they must tell fans about compensation for promotions on social media.

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. 

"Facebook is establishing itself as a destination for premium video content, and demonstrating a willingness to pay significant amounts of money for that content. Facebook can likely drive revenue growth to offset content costs, albeit at lower margins than what the company currently generates," analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "However, because of measurement issues the company has faced in the past (and possibly a new one identified by a trade publication in Australia and replicated by us within the United States), we think the primary winner of Facebook's expansion in video will be third party measurement firms," he added.

Facebook apologized for overstating video viewership times in September last year. The company said a metric for average user time spent on videos was artificially inflated.

The firm's analyst cites Australian trade publication AdNews, which revealed last week "Facebook's claims to reach 1.7mm more 16-39 year-olds in Australia than exist in the country according to its census bureau."

The increasingly technical nature of marketing means the marketing department has a closer relationship with IT than either is comfortable with.

We have found that aligning our organization along DevOps principles helps eliminate that friction. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that is focused on building and operating high velocity organizations. The movement started in the software industry, but it’s more concerned with people and structure than with technology.

One key aspect of DevOps is the relationship between accountability and empowerment. The DevOps philosophy says that those who are most accountable for a specific change should be empowered to make that change themselves.