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May 2017

25 May
8

Twitter is First to Support Emoji 5.0 and Provide Users with Newest Emoji

In Social Media, Social Media News Brief, Social Networking | No comment

emojiPeople going logging onto Twitter will find some great new emoji now that Twitter has added support for Emoji 5.0 to their platform. By adding support for these, Twitter gave its users access to a wide selection of brand new emoji including many that allow for different skin tones or even different genders. The update also included many highly anticipated emoji that people are already beginning to use on Twitter.

 

When Emoji 5.0 was released just a week ago, most people expected that the new emoji would not be usable anywhere for a long while. Twitter proved these people wrong by quickly adding support for the new emoji and allowing users to begin using these different types of emoji this week. Twitter users are now able to use 69 unique emoji that are brand new as well as many duplicates that feature different skin tone variations. Already many people have been having fun using all the different emoji that are available.

 

There has been some initial disappointment so far since these different types of emoji are not currently usable anywhere other than within a web browser. Various operating systems and applications need to be updated to add support for the brand new emoji as well before users will be able to view these emoji and start using them from their iOS or Android devices. Some sources believe that updates will be coming soon, so it is possible that Twitter users won’t have to wait long before they start seeing these emoji on their phones.

 

The new emoji include a wide range of highly anticipated emoji including “star struck”, “woman with headscarf”, “face with monocle”, and more. Users will also be able to finally use flag emoji for England, Scotland, and Wales. There are also going to be some mythical creature emoji including merpeople, vampires, fairies, and zombies.  Once the emoji are more widely supported, users of Twitter are likely to start seeing more and more of these being used within tweets.

18 May
7

Facebook Makes Further Steps to Shut Down Clickbait

In Social Media, Social Media News Brief, Social Networking | No comment

clickbaitIn a continuation of their battle against misinformation and misleading news, Facebook has announced further updates that target clickbait specifically. They have been working to create a tool that can identify clickbait based on specific articles and posts rather than certain sites that often create clickbait type articles. An initial update was focused on just illuminating repeat offenders or websites that put out a lot of clickbait type articles, while this is focused more on individual posts and their headlines.

 

The new tool that Facebook will be using is going to be focused on the headline of an article and whether or not this headline is hiding key information to inspire people to click it or exaggerating certain information for the purpose of clicks. Posts that are found to have some key identifiers that make their headlines likely to be clickbait, will be pushed down in the news feed so that viewers are a lot less likely to run into them and click on them. This is good news for Facebook users that commonly are attracted and disappointed by these different types of posts.

 

Facebook’s anti-clickbait tool has been trained to focus on specific signals that generally show that a page is clickbait. They focus on which words often are seen in clickbait headlines and not in reputable news articles. The tools have been extended to recognize clickbait headlines even when articles are not in English. This is going to be a process that is automated throughout Facebook to match different phrases with clickbait criteria that has been previously identified.

 

Ever since the US presidential election, Facebook has been working to clean up its platform to make sure that it can eliminate misinformation and sensationalized headlines. The new update is yet another one targeted at eliminating misleading news and preventing the spread of this throughout the platform.

11 May
6

Facebook Takes Steps to Limit Links to Low Quality Web Pages

In Social Media, Social Media News Brief, Social Networking | No comment

pop up adsA recent string of updates to Facebook have all focused on increasing the quality of the content which is shown on Facebook while getting rid of misinformation. Facebook’s newest update focuses more specifically on identifying links to low quality web pages that will provide a poor user experience. Posts that have links like this will be pushed further down the new feed so that users will be less likely to click on them.

 

Facebook’s strike against websites like this has come about after seeing how many users were disappointed or annoyed when they clicked on links on their news feed which then led them to a website filled with more ads and pop ups than actual content. As a result, Facebook has been working to protect their platform and their users by using tools that will prevent these links from showing up as high in a news feed.

 

To identify these different sites, Facebook says that it looked at hundreds of thousands of web pages that had poor quality landing pages to determine what these kinds of websites had in common. They were then able to train an artificial intelligence program to identify these sites. The goal is to limit poor quality ad filled sites from getting traffic from Facebook and to save users from following links to these sites.

 

If Facebook is able to limit links to poor quality and click bait news sites, they’ll be able to create a social media platform that is free from many of the things that routinely annoy users. Their actions to restrict these kinds of links from showing up high in the news feed will likely cause websites linked to Facebook that are higher quality to have a slight increase in traffic while ones that are low quality will experience a drop off in traffic.

04 May
5

Small Businesses Can Reach More Customers With a Quality Social Media Campaign

In Social Networking | No comment

social media marketingWhile social media has been around for a long while now, many small business owners still aren’t using social media to the fullest potential. Many of these business owners just aren’t on social media or are using social media in a way that doesn’t help with gaining customers or sales. It is important that all business owners use a quality social media campaign to connect with customers and advertise their business.

 

Some business owners have already discovered the ways that social media can help their business, but a recent survey found that nearly half of small businesses don’t have any formal social marketing strategy that they are using. A big part of this is that many business owners aren’t sure how to use social media to their benefit. Others are overlooking important new tools. For example, Instagram is becoming a much more valuable marketing tool, but only one in three small businesses polled were even using the site.

 

Of course, just getting your business on social media isn’t enough. Business owners need to make sure that they are able to use the different social media sites in a way that is actually good for their business. Too many business owners find that they are able to increase sales in the short term using social media marketing and then start to think that the more posts they put in the more sales they’ll see. Unfortunately, this can lead to the marketing soon becoming annoying to those following social media accounts, which can negate any benefit the social media marketing might have had.

 

Another common mistake is business owners not updating their strategies to branch out to new social networks or new features of the social networks that are available. With live video becoming popular on the various social platforms, business owners may want to begin using this feature and others like it to promote their business. As with anything that is part of social media marketing, quality content is important so focusing on creating content that is engaging, interesting, and entertaining for those following a business can be key to making social media marketing count.

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