Platform Five: This Week’s Important Social Media Changes and Updates
What changed? And, why are these changes important?
We’re back with another edition of Platform Five – our weekly recap of important social media changes and the latest social media tools making an impact.
It is no secret that the changes that occur on the major platforms spread like wildfire, so this post aims to highlight the changes and updates that weren’t so widely covered in the last seven days.
Platform Five also tries to uncover and share useful social media tools that you may not have spotted during the busy working week.
This week’s edition includes a new tool from YouTube that can help channel operators analyse audiences in greater detail, the increasing popularity of Google Chrome desktop apps and a mysterious change to Google Image search results.
We’ve also uncovered a tool that is SO GOOD it has to sit above the top five. ShareTally.co is the best site we’ve ever seen for getting a complete picture of social shares for any URL. Try it, now!
This week’s five ‘must know’ social media changes and updates
1.Learn more about your YouTube viewers and subscribers with Audience Analyser – YouTube had a very busy September introducing EIGHT new features and updates for users and channel operators. The most interesting one is a ‘Top Fans’ feature which can tell you more about your most engaged viewers, start conversations with them and even share exclusive content. At this stage, you need a minimum of 5,000 subscribers to access this feature but if popular it is expected to roll out to all users in the future.
2. Google Chrome desktop apps begin to take off – Google recently launched a series of apps that run offline and outside the browser as part of a concerted effort to take on Microsoft’s grip on the desktop. There are only a handful of apps available at the moment but watch this development closely and take some of the offline apps for a spin.
3. Google adds ‘authorship’ to image search – As Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable explained, this update is a little confusing. Essentially, this update ads a ‘by Author Name’ underneath image source URL (see below). However, the name doesn’t relate to the person who took / ‘owns’ the photo, but rather the author that used the image in a post. What does it mean? Google authorship is high on the list of priorities at Google and it will continue to evolve and impact search results.
4. Facebook rolling out updates to page insights – Starting on October 8, the new page insights will allow you to monitor what’s working and what isn’t, and understand more about the people who like your page and engage with your posts. In theory, this should make content planning easier and may eventually replace third party tools which provide insights of this nature. A selection of users spotted a notification from Facebook this week which communicated this update.
5. Social bookmarking just got a helluva lot easier thank to saved.io – This is really neat way of bookmarking the web pages you want to save for later. Simply add ‘saved.io’ in front of any URL and it will save it to a bookmarks page. For example, saved.io/PRdaily.com will send PRdaily.com to your saved.io folder. Handy.
Recapping some other news you might have missed…
The two updates that generated the most buzz this week were:
Facebook’s Graph Search gets a face lift – This update is part of the evolution of Graph Search which makes it easier to find content shared with them from people in their networks. For example, you can now search for ‘posts about NBA Basketball by my friends’. The main impact from a business perspective is that content may be discovered and engaged with beyond the standard news feed ‘window’.
Google launches digital analytics academy – Google’s widely-used analytics product continues to change at a rapid pace (and not necessarily to the delight of all users). In response, Google has launched a new education hub for people to access free online video courses about digital analytics and Google Analytics. The course overview video is available here.
If you want to keep up with these changes and updates as they happen, follow us on Twitter @KamberCo.