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Platform 5: This week’s most important social media changes (edition 69)

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This week’s 5 most important social media changes

What’s changed in the last seven days? What does it mean?

Facebook improves 360 video and introduces autoplay, Snapchat has a major update, Pinterest video advertisements and Twitter releases Instant Unlock Cards.

Let’s take a look at these changes in more detail.

Facebook to improve 360 video stabilisation

Facebook looks to build on their 360-video format by testing newly built image stabilisation technology aimed at making the video content smoother. This means that 360 videos filmed for Facebook will be optimised to eliminate footage that ends up shaky. The system will be rolled out across Facebook and eventually the Oculus VR platform.

Read more about 360 video here.

Snapchat receives major update with new features

A major Snapchat update includes new custom geofilters, a new discovery option and an update to the captions feature. Caption text can now be made bold, italicised or underlined and can also be animated by pinning them to objects in the video. Previously this was only restricted to emoji. The feature war with Instagram continues.

Read about the Snapchat update here.

Facebook adding autoplay for audio

Facebook is looking at adding including an autoplay feature to sound along with video in your news feed. There are two ways audio autoplay will function; the first being completely automatic as you scroll to video content and the second will be similar to Instagram in that tapping the video content will activate the audio. The option can be turned off in the handset settings.

Read about Facebook audio autoplay here.

Twitter Instant Unlock Cards released to all users

Twitter recently opened their ‘Instant Unlock Cards’ features to all users. The Cards provide a way for users to ‘unlock’ more information in tweets by performing an action, such as replying with a hashtag or sharing the content. Pre-launch users found that it earned them an average media rate of 34%. Whether or not this will be successful across the board remains to be seen.

Read about Instant Unlock Cards here.

Pinterest introduces video advertisements

Popular image bookmarking platform Pinterest has started offering marketers video advertisements. Advertisers in the US and UK can purchase promoted video ads that will run in users’ feeds but can also appear in search results and other areas of the app. Users that go to Pinterest to learn more about products they may want to purchase will be given the option to learn more about it while staying within the platform.

Read about Pinterest video advertisements here.

Follow us on Twitter for news of these social media and content marketing changes as they happen.

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