BREAKING: Instagram Tests ‘Notes’ Tab in DM’s

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying the sunshine this week and staying safe in the heat. If you’re ready to up your social media game this week then join me for our “How To Use Social Media To Market Your Business” webinar this Thursday at 2pm. Grab your FREE ticket here. Let’s get into this week's round-up. 👇

1. Twitter Gives Users the Capacity to 'Unmention' Themselves

The people asked, Twitter provided. Twitter now allows all users to 'unmention' themselves from a Twitter discussion, allowing users to disable their profile links within conversations in which they no longer wish to participate. By unmentioning yourself from a chat your username is untagged from the original tweet and replies, users won’t be able to mention you again within the same reply chain and you’ll no longer be notified about updates from the thread. Some have argued that this update will allow users to avoid criticism for ignorant comments, but personally I think it’s an amazing way to give users more control of their feeds. With Twitter previously being a breeding-ground for trolling, it’s a great win for prominent figures with large followings.

2. Instagram Tests 'Notes' in Direct Messages

No shame from Instagram with this one. The copy and paste from Twitter is blatant.  Instagram has introduced the ‘Notes’ feature into direct messages. As you can see in this example, posted by Owen Williams, Instagram Notes are 60-character comments that you can publish at the top of your inbox for all of your followers to see. Instagram is clearly looking for new ways to boost engagement and spark conversations but it’s hard to see the real value here. Time will tell. 

3. TikTok Launches New Tools to Help Protect Users

In its mission to protect young and vulnerable users, TikTok is adding even more tools and options to limit unwanted exposure in the app. In a bid to counteract various allegations, TikTok has launched a new way for users to automatically filter out videos that include words or hashtags that they don't want to see in their feed. The effort is definitely there but the tool still needs a lot of work. The system doesn’t detect the actual content, just what people have manually entered in their description notes, therefore some users may still see unwanted content. It’ll be intriguing to see if these new tools serve to persuade regulatory bodies that TikTok is doing all necessary to keep its young audience protected.

4. Twitter Continue Pushing Spaces

Twitter is rather intent on pushing users to use their Spaces feature, which it apparently believes is a significant route for improving engagement and interaction in the app. So far it’s difficult to comment on how effective Spaces have been in this effect. Following the addition of new Spaces buttons within the tweet composer and retweet flow, it is now testing a far more blatant prompt to get users to start a space, with a new message at the bottom of the tweet reply composer now being visible to some users. It’s hard to not see this as Twitter scraping the barrel slightly due to Spaces not being as successful as firstly anticipated. Either way, the platform is committed to seeing Spaces take off. 

5. Meta May Soon Allow Users to Have Various Facebook Profiles Linked to a Master Account

Despite having roughly 2.93 billion monthly active users currently, many people consider Facebook a dying platform. Facebook is usually miles behind other platforms when it comes to new, exciting updates. For the first time in what seems like forever, they may be leading the pack with this one. The issue that has arisen with Facebook in recent years is that users tend to have tons of friends, ranging from their Grandma to their long-lost school friends. Many users struggle with posting content that is suitable for such a wide audience. But what if you could have various Facebook identities, with separate profiles to interact with different elements of the platform? Separate platforms for elements such as family, friends and work is what Facebook’s currently experimenting with, with users being allowed to create up to 5 separate profiles all tied back to one master account. It’s a great idea from Facebook but is it too little too late for the platform?

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