Platform Five: This Week’s Most Important Social Media Changes and Updates
Each week on The Kamber Blog, we bring you a summary of the five most important social media changes from the past seven days.
We also scour the web for new social media tools that are worth having in your arsenal.
This week has seen a huge amount of change on the social media front, especially from YouTube who introduced a long overdue change to comments and Google who introduced a hashtag searching function that almost went unnoticed.
Let’s get stuck in!
This week’s five most important social media changes
- YouTube makes major changes to comments – a simultaneous virtual cheer took place earlier this week when YouTube, after years of requests from users, finally made changes to the way video comments can be moderated. YouTube has always been considered as one of the most toxic places on the social web when it came to user comments, but with the the introduction of profanity filters and supporting features, YouTube should be a nicer place to play from now on.
- Google integrates Google+ hashtag search into Google.com – Google very quietly announced that it will be bringing a new hashtag experience to Google Search. When you search on Google for a hashtag, say [#AmericasCup] or [#WaterfallWednesday], a set of relevant Google+ posts may appear to the right of regular results. You’ll also see links to search for these hashtags on other social sites. We truly are becoming a hashtag world.
- LinkedIn introduces sponsored jobs to the news feed – Until now, LinkedIn’s sponsored jobs were only featured in traditional ad-style boxes on the edges of the main LinkedIn page. This changes with the introduction of sponsored jobs within the LinkedIn feed, making these ‘ads’ a more integrated part of your day-to-day LinkedIn activity.
- Pinterest launches ‘article pins’ – Pinterest is already one of the world’s most powerful traffic drivers to e-commerce and online retail sites but this new feature from Pinterest will put a huge smile on the face of publishers all over the globe. Article pins will take content from news sites and carry the headline, author and story description directly on the pin. Say hello to more referral traffic!
- Facebook gives users the ability to edit status updates – Over the last few months, Facebook has been making it easier for people to edit particular types of Facebook activity (mainly comments and photo descriptions) but the most significant change has just been announced by the Company. Over the next few days, you’ll be able to edit status updates after you’ve published them which will help overcome those pesky typos but may also create some headaches around contentious updates. A major change worth keeping your eyes on.
Some bonus new social media tools and apps
- MIT launches YouTube exploration tool, What We Watch – The MIT Centre for Civic Media launched a new tool this week which provides users with a geographical exlporation of popular YouTube videos. It takes its data from the YouTube Trends Dashboard and lets you see which videos are gaining traction in specific countries around the world. Really neat!
- Crowdbabble adds Instagram analytics to real-time Facebook tracking product – Crowdbabble provides users with the ability to analyse Facebook activity as it happens (as opposed to the delays you often get from within Facebook’s proprietary reporting dashboard). This week, they’ve added Instagram analytics to their service which will help measure the success of activity on that platform.
That’s it from us for this week. Follow our Twitter account (@KamberCo) for regular updates of social media changes as they happen in real-time.